What is the future?

What is time?

In Book 11 of his Confessiones, Augustine of Hippo wrote:

❝ What is time? Who can easily and briefly explain it? Who can even comprehend it in thought or put the answer into words? Yet is it not true that in conversation we refer to nothing more familiarly or knowingly than time? And surely we understand it when we speak of it; we understand it also when we hear another speak of it.

❝ What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know. ❞

Later, he clarifies:

❝ Perhaps it might be said rightly that there are three times: a time present of things past; a time present of things present; and a time present of things future . . . The time present of things past is memory; the time present of things present is direct experience; the time present of things future is expectation. ❞

While these observations seem trite to us today, 1600 years after Augustine wrote them, they are not; they are as profound today as they were then. They remind us that anything that we are not experiencing in the present depends on memory, and memory is flawed. Similarly, anything we anticipate in the future is expectation; it can never be certain.

This insight has particular power when combined with the very astute point of italian statistician and mathematician Bruno de Fenetti who observed:

❝ Probability does not exist in the world of hard fact but only in the realm of human reasoning. ❞

Events are binary: they happen (facts) or they do not (counter-factuals). However, that is often hot now we perceive reality or how we view, in the ‘time present’ thngs that are passed. Hannah Arendt stated:

❝ It is true that in retrospect—that is, in historical perspective—every sequence of events looks as though it could not have happened otherwise, but this is an optical, or, rather, an existential, illusion: nothing could ever happen if reality did not kill, by definition, all the other potentialities originally inherent in any given situation. ❞

Combine these ideas and we face a very real ontological dilemma: