An Ontology of the Future

 1. The Future doesn’t exist

The future doesn’t exist, but it surely will. Our predictions of the future are related to our careful study of yesterday’s data. The future is little more than a past that hasn’t happened yet. It unfolds from the past. The now is a temporary state created by your mind to remain attentive. In this essay, the now is irrelevant. Only the future has import here. And to understand it at all, we must dredge through the past. 

2.

The now is relevant only insofar as it demarcates past from future. The now is a past passing out of being while the future is now yet to be. Instead of “existing” the future “exists” as disarticulated abstractions forming potentialities that are “collapsed back” into seed form. For an example, Jones is a person, but is a person Jones? Potentially. We only know that the person could be Jones. Once we have a complete set of all the potential people a person could be, we have a general sense of the possible future. 

3.

What can be known exists in knowledge. Therefore, it is the past. It is also limited. You can never dredge new knowledge just from what is known. To venture beyond what is known is to commit to the future. To know is to become stagnant. The truth has killed more dreams than God. 

4. Ontological guessing

An ontology of the future would consist of this metric:

[impossible/certain]

[unlikely/likely]

[formally undecidable/50-50]

Once you step out of time and into the realm of potentials, you need composite objects (like Coins) that have a front and a back or are, defined by their contradiction like Heraclitus’s nature. 

4. 

Many futures compete to come into being. Not all of them will. However, the competition among futures follows the same trajectory as evolutionary selection (which is not entirely reducible to natural selection). At some point, humanity surpassed natural selection and suddenly, we started making decisions based on aesthetics.

The futures competing to come into being are yours and mine. Our futures fight against other futures in a competitive matrix of American cancel energy. Very few futures bubble beyond the surface in the cosmic froth that kills them. 

5.

We should be more intentional about nurturing the futures of our fellow humans, less willing to cancel futures, and respect the role aesthetics plays in evolution.