The problem with determinism is that it’s based on the narrative flow of life. That the point of the present flows past to future. The reality is that change turns future to past. Potential, actual, residual. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
We are mobile organisms, so we evolved this sequential perception, as a function of navigating out environment. Then we built civilization out of the collective knowledge of narrating our stories to one another. Thus narrative seems fundamental, but time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, etc. We could use ideal gas laws to correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but no one calls them the 5th and 6th dimensions of space, as they are only foundational to our environment, bodily functions and emotions, not our thought processing.
As you state, there is only the present and it’s basically a lot of energy, constantly changing form. Its future configurations haven’t been computed yet, because the input into them hasn’t arrived at the event of computation and determination. Much of this input is traveling at the speed of light, so there is no way to know it beforehand.
There is no physical future, as that is just potential configurations of this manifest energy, so it is contradictory to assume it is already computed, before it is computed. Yes, the computations of the present do determine, but then they become past. Which is not physically real either, as the past is effectively consumed by the present, in order to inform and provide input. Aka, causality and conservation of energy.
We evolved this conscious perception and judgement, in order to make decisions. That much happens faster than our thought process is simply due to much of reality occurring at the speed of light and so our instinctive reactions precede conscious decision making. It is the function of this executive thought process to learn and take to heart the lessons learned, in order that our reactions will be better informed the next time. It’s called feedback.
Reality is a tapestry being woven of strands pulled from what had already been woven. Cyles and feedback.
As Alan Watts put it; “The wake doesn’t steer the boat, the boat creates the wake.”
The patterns emerge from the process, not the other way around.
