Knowing the Future February 27, 2010
Posted by Michael in Acausal efficacy, Cybernetics, Epistemology.add a comment
For the last several weeks I’ve been working on something that started as a post, grew steadily into an essay and is now threatening to approach a monograph level of voluminosity. The paper describes a cybernetic model of mental causation which elides the whole problem by shifting it to pure physics and the multiverse — a scope that contains all possible worlds including the one we inhabit. I sketch out in the paper a description which is causal at the level of the multiverse but acausal from the point of view of the realized universe. Not just acausal — acausally efficacious. I won’t repeat here the argument I make for acausal efficacy. But I do want to note where this mulitversally causal/universally acausal process gets its power: knowledge of the future.
By “knowledge of the future” I don’t mean by powers of prognostication or parapsychology; I mean knowledge that is earned (via evolution) or learned. Nor do I mean knowledge of the exact future that will happen; I mean knowledge of various futures that may happen, depending on one’s choices. Nor, finally, need this knowledge be perfect; just somewhat better than random. The point is that if one can make choices, and can make better-than-random predictions about the possible outcomes of the choices, then one is in a position to extract value from something that in conventional terms doesn’t physically exist — the difference between what is and what might have been.
