Daniel,
One of the most effective and fundamental ways to affect the future is paradigm shift. To change how people think. To break open the box of their subconscious assumptions.
If you’ve read much of what I’ve been writing on medium, you may have come across what is my most basic argument with humanity’s perception; That we see time in reverse.
As mobile organisms, we have a sequential thought process and experience reality as this past to future series of perceptions. Which even physics codifies as measures of duration, between such events and treats as a linear dimension.
The evident reality to those of us in a less structured existence, is that it is change turning future to past. Potential, actual, residual. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is this present state, as events coalesce and dissolve. It’s the face of the clock going counterclockwise.
The dimensional view of time needs the 2nd law of thermodynamics to even explain why it’s asymmetric, but the order of the system is not what’s being measured. Action is and action is inertial. The earth turns one direction, not either.
Different clocks can run at different rates, because they are separate actions. Think metabolism, or frequencies.
There can be no physical dimension of time, because of the 1st law of thermodynamics, the conservation of energy. Meaning that it is always and only present. The past is effectively consumed by the present, in order to inform it, aka, causality.
The present is not a dimensionless point between past and future, but the configuration of this energy.
As Alan Watts put it; “The wake doesn’t steer the boat, the boat creates the wake.”
Of the various effects this has on cultural assumptions, determinism is refuted, as well as free will. For one thing, what are we supposed to be free of? Cause? Then we would be equally free of effect, ie, consequence.
The assumption of determinism is that one event follows inexorably from the previous, yet in this sea of energy, much information is traveling at the speed of light and therefore cannot be known beforehand. So if the input cannot be known, neither can the output, no matter how absolute the laws governing the resulting computation of inputs.
It is this present state, where the computations, making the determination, occur. It is the function of our thought process to be part of that selection process.
Not that we consciously respond to every input, as many come at us at the speed of light, so our automatic responses are much faster than conscious consideration, but the mind is the executive function. Its purpose is to sort through the information and distill out the useful lessons, so that our future responses are better informed.
The effect is that we can better understand the feedback between the processes driving reality, as well as our organic impulses, and the patterns and thoughts that coalesce out of them. Thus better able to understand the difference between grooves and ruts. To use our minds to fully comprehend our situation and not simply adopt the nearest ideology.
Examples of this relationship between patterns and processes, is that in a factory, the product/pattern, goes start to finish, while the production line/process goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product. As with life, individuals go birth to death, while the species goes onto the next generation, shedding the old. Consciousness goes one thought to the next, as these thoughts come and go. Basically opposite directions of time and the resulting feedback, as the patterns affect the direction of the process.
Given that we are getting much closer to the limits of this planet, our future does need a more feedback oriented philosophy, than this quest for reductionist, ideals driven orthodoxies, that result from polarized debate.
