Is the Future a Foggy Street?

The real question might be "Is there such a thing as the future?" Relativity is a cool brain bend of a thing. The equations that have been tested and proved as "accurate" for our universe don't have any problems with the "past" and the "future" all happening simultaneously with what we observe as the "present". That the "present" is a thing that is observable is what life is, the mystery of it all anyway, why we observe the flow of life in one direction. The fact the the "present" is relative only to the person experiencing it is the first step to seeing that it's all weird and the connections are deeper and more dimensional than we conceived.

The metaphor of the future and a foggy street--one direction ahead with a limited visibility, the direction behind's visibility being clear in the immediacy but blurrier and blurrier as you get farther away, was floating around my head on January 1st, 2012.

I was somehow scheduled to be off work in the hour before our California clock was to ring in the New Year. I raced home, snatched up Corrie and we went to a local dive to obtain some libations in a social setting.



Afterwards we decided to enjoy the fog which had descended the previous evening and only lasted those two nights. But that second night, being New Year's Eve/Day, inspired us to take a walk to the beach.



Once there we traveled out onto a man-made breaker that separates a water parking lot and the sandy beach proper. The paved over breaker almost reaches one of our few oil-islands. Then very end wasn't visible until you were almost on top of it.



It was out on this paved breaker that I was thinking about metaphors.

Is the future a foggy street? Can you see pretty clearly what the immediate future will be, but down the way, it's a little murky?

That seems like a reasonable conclusion, like a well formed metaphor, practically perfect in an annoying way.

Can that metaphor work if we accept the conceit from physics that the "present" is just our observation of the Ganzebilde, the totality of all that was, is, and will be, having "occurred" simultaneously and now exists like a loaf of bread.

And how does this effect our human notions of free will?

Now, I'm no determinist, in fact, I spent a few solid months trying to work out a consistent existentionalist ethics scheme, but it almost seems like if "time" is our observation of the Ganzebilde, and that that physics is correct, then it almost has to follow that everything we'll do in our life has already been done by us.

Like I said, I'm no determinist, and I think that it's pretty obvious that one would have to believe in free will to be inspired to do Great Things. It makes sense that the people who did Great Things in history (or are doing them right "now" in their own time, if all "time" is happening simultaneously) would have to have been inspired to do those Great Things, and that this inspiration would have to come from their belief that they could do things.

None of this diminishes the foggy street metaphor. Despite whatever current scientific dogma controls the parameters of the discussion, the experience of the molecular ocean of deoxyribonucleic acid-controlled matter is still a murky one-dimensional thing.

"Time" goes "forward". As of now, we can only effect our own bubble relative to other bubbles, and even then, it's not more than a few milliseconds. The "future" is certainly a foggy street.