cars i'm destined to own

There are some who say the world is determined, in which case the future is as fixed as the past. According to some, time is another dimension in the cosmos (in addition to the three spatial dimensions).

Physicists say you can picture this model of the cosmos by imagining the cosmos as a loaf of bread, with each slice being a bit of time in addition to the three dimensional things that occur during that slice.

We live inside a slice, which we experience as now. We are continually moving forward through adjacent slices, all the while experiencing the movement as the flow of time. From our perspective within a particular slice, the slices behind us are remembered as the past, and the slices in front of us are full of open possibilities.

From outside the loaf, however, each slice appears to be just another location in cosmos. Slices at one end or the other, or in the middle, are all equally real and equally fixed – they do not depend on anyone’s experience to bring them into reality.

If you could look at yourself from outside the loaf, you would see yourself as moving through a “worm hole” through the loaf. At one end of the hole you were born, at the other end you die, and in between you take up space in the loaf and do things.

Our experience of now is like a phonograph needle on a record. The recording is fixed, but the needle is where the action is. But it is possible to replay the record, but so far as we know, not the cosmos. So it’s not exactly the same. But it is a nice physical image.

Another difference between a recording and the cosmos is someone created the recording and did so with definite purposes. Absent a creator God, that’s not the case for us. Our lives are more like the trajectory of a bit that gets hurled after an explosion. The trajectory is fixed, but no one actually planned it.

Our worm hole is fixed, so there is a date, time, and means of death that already exist, albeit in a different part of the cosmos than the one we currently occupy. Same is true of every other fact about our future.

Even if determinism is true, is it really the case that our future is just as real as the present or the past even though it hasn’t happened yet? Our intuition is that the passage of time converts possibilities to fixed events, and that fixed events are real in a way that the future (which is viewed as a range of possibilities) is not.

If by real, one means that the item currently has spatial coordinates in three dimensional cosmos, it would seem that the future is not real. (On this view, though, the past isn’t real either, though we tend to think that the past as fixed in a way the future isn’t.)

If by real, one means it has coordinates in the 4 dimensional space/time cosmos (where time is not defined by our now, but rather is simply another coordinate in the cosmos), then the answer is yes it is just as real as items that our now or our past.