This is why I believe the future already exists (Sabine Hossenfelder)

SABINE HOSSENFELDER
https://youtu.be/um6BmPo5PZc

VIDEO EXCERPTS: If science has taught us one thing, it's that our perception of reality can be extremely misleading. The earth isn't flat. Solids don't fill space and no one looks like they do on Instagram. That the future somehow different from the past is another such quirk of human perception that doesn't correspond to reality. At least that's what I think. And today I want to explain why.

In a nutshell, the reason is that Einstein's theory of general relativity tells us that the future, present, and past are really all the same thing. They belong together to one common entity, spacetime, which just is. It doesn't come into being. It's there, has always been there, and will always been there in its entirety. In Einstein's theory, you can't separate the past from the present and the future. It's not logically possible. And this theory is experimentally very well confirmed.

This is why I think we can't just discard this consequence. It's like insisting that the earth is flat because we can't see the curve, instead of denying it because it doesn't agree with our personal experience.

We should be trying to understand what it means. This is an argument in three steps.

The first step is the question of what we mean when we say that something exists...

[...] The second step is then to factor in Einstein's relativity.,,,

[...] now let's look at step three...

[...] But there could be an observer at any distance from you. Each of whom has their own now. None of those nows is any better than any other. So this means every moment your past, present or future is now for someone somewhere. If you take these three steps together, then you arrive at the following conclusion.

Once you identify that what exists with a present moment, then Einstein's theory forces you to accept that all moments exist in the same way. This perplexing consequence of Einstein's relativity has been dubbed the block universe by physicists. In this block universe, the past still exists and the future already exists.

[...] In case you think this sounds pretty crazy, it's actually a standard argument that physics professors throw at undergrad students and then just let the students cope with the consequences because how do we make sense of this? What does it mean that the past, present, and future all exist the same way? Yes, I've spent three decades trying to wrap my head around this.

I think that for one thing it means that our past selves still exist the same way as this present self. It's just that our past selves are all disconnected from each other. They can't communicate. And our future selves also already exist. But doesn't this also mean that we can't change anything about the future? Depends on what you mean by change.

The future will be whatever is the consequence of today. But these consequences depend on what you and the matter around you do. This means that the future does depend on what you will do. It depends on what information you take away from this video and how this affects your thoughts and your actions.

The opposite is also the case by the way. The present depends on the future in the same way that the future depends on the present. It's just that we don't think about it this way. Einstein's theories really are strange, and I don't think we've yet entirely appreciated how strange they are.

[...] You see, so far what I told you was all Einsteinian physics, which doesn't know anything about quantum physics. If you take into account quantum physics, the argument becomes more complicated...

[...] Once you've measured the particle, you can't say exactly what the wave function was. You can only say it was more likely to have been this instead of that. And this sort of indeterminism is entirely compatible with the block universe. It's not deterministic, okay? But it still doesn't tell you which moment is now. To put this differently, there's no such thing as a now in the mathematics of quantum physics. Not unless you actually change something about the maths.

This is why I think the block universe is how nature really works and that our perception of the present moment being somehow special is just false. Like the idea that the earth is flat...

This is why I believe the future already exists ... https://youtu.be/um6BmPo5PZc
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/um6BmPo5PZc

We just have them in the wrong order. All events observed were in your future, when the light from the event reached your eyes it became a past event. The moment future changes to past is the now. The order is future, now, past. The future is a past event.

Sabine Wrote:You see, so far what I told you was all Einsteinian physics,

Not in any way I'm aware of.
Imagine three children on a bridge over a river. They each have a stick and bet a dollar their stick will be first to cross a line somewhere downriver. They throw the sticks in and run to the finish line to wait for the sticks to arrive.
Questions arise..
Can they get to the finish line fast enough .. see the result and run back to the point BEFORE they threw the sticks in .. to report an event that hasn't happened yet?
Does the 'crossing the finish line' event even exist before the sticks are thrown in .. I don't think so.

Causal Set Theory seems to be the best candidate for Einstein's relativity with a growing block, where the future does not already exist.

The situation gets slightly more complicated if there's a wormhole at the finish line - linking any point in time and space to any other. In this case the finish line to a point on the bridge before the sticks are thrown into the river. After observing the result the three worm back to the bridge to advise their earlier selves about the result .. and notice there are 6 children on the bridge. The wormhole game turns out to be more fun than the original and they make several thousand copies of themselves.

(Apr 28, 2026 11:30 PM)confused2 Wrote:

Sabine Wrote:You see, so far what I told you was all Einsteinian physics,

Not in any way I'm aware of.
Imagine three children on a bridge over a river. They each have a stick and bet a dollar their stick will be first to cross a line somewhere downriver. They throw the sticks in and run to the finish line to wait for the sticks to arrive.
Questions arise..
Can they get to the finish line fast enough .. see the result and run back to the point BEFORE they threw the sticks in .. to report an event that hasn't happened yet?
Does the 'crossing the finish line' event even exist before the sticks are thrown in .. I don't think so.

We can always take the idealist stance that experience (in the context of experimental results) merely lawfully behaves as if various ontological inferences from theoretical frameworks (like evolution, the Big Bang, spacetime, atomic theory, etc) were the case. Along the lines of Berkeley's immaterialism, where the world is actually a generated reality of regulated and inter-coordinated sensory data fed to lesser observers from the Chief Mind. Rendering physics purely useful and predictive (instrumentalism) -- not truly pointing to anything existential or meta-phenomenal as scientific realists may contend. The realm in a computer game may also reliably behave as if it has more complicated depth and extension of being than what is displayed on the monitor screen.

Hermann Helmholtz: Even if we take the idealistic position, we can hardly talk about the lawful regularity of our sensations other than by saying: "Perceptions occur as if the things of the material world referred to in the realistic hypothesis actually did exist." We cannot eliminate the "as if" construction completely, however, for we cannot consider the realistic interpretation to be more than an exceedingly useful and practical hypothesis. We cannot assert that it is necessarily true, for opposed to it there is always the possibility of other irrefutable idealistic hypotheses. [...] What we unquestionably can find as a fact, without any hypothetical element whatsoever, is the lawful regularity of phenomena. --The Facts of Perception

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Hermann Weyl: "The objective world simply IS, it does not HAPPEN. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line [worldline] of my body, does a certain section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time." --Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science

Paul Davies: "Peter Lynds's reasonable and widely accepted assertion that the flow of time is an illusion (25 October, p 33) does not imply that time itself is an illusion. It is perfectly meaningful to state that two events may be separated by a certain duration, while denying that time mysteriously flows from one event to the other. Crick compares our perception of time to that of space. Quite right. Space does not flow either, but it's still 'there'." --New Scientist, 6 December 2003, Sec. Letters

Robert Geroch: "There is no dynamics within space-time itself: nothing ever moves therein; nothing happens; nothing changes. [...] In particular, one does not think of particles as 'moving through' space-time, or as 'following along' their world-lines. Rather, particles are just 'in' space-time, once and for all, and the world-line represents, all at once the complete life history of the particle." --General Relativity from A to B

Brain neurons subtract images, use differences (direction of time): "Our brain is permanently looking into the future" - This study illustrates how activities of visual neurons are influenced by past events. "The neurons build up a short-term memory that incorporates constant input," explains Dirk Jancke. However, if something changes abruptly in the perceived image, the brain generates a kind of error message on the basis of the past images. Those signals do not reflect the current input, but the way the current input deviates from the expectations. Researchers have hitherto postulated that this so-called predictive coding only takes place in higher brain areas. "We demonstrated that the principle applies for earlier phases of cortical processing, too," concludes Jancke. "Our brain is permanently looking into the future and comparing current input with the expectations that arose based on past situations."

H.G. Wells (1895): “Clearly,” the Time Traveller proceeded, “any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and—Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives." --The Time Machine

Paul Halpern: Other late-19th-century mathematicians began to imagine the fourth dimension as something far more familiar: the passage of time. The pages of Nature and other scientific journals featured speculations about a four-dimensional amalgam of the three-dimensions of space along with an additional dimension of time. These notions eventually received a concrete mathematical treatment in Einstein's general theory of relativity, which enabled physicists to reclaim higher dimensions from the spiritualists. Long before then, though, they left their own imprint on popular culture. H G Wells took note of the idea of a temporal fourth dimension when setting the stage for the Time Traveller's journey in his novella The Time Machine.

I go to the website. I find the link to this discussion. i click on knowing that whatever was put there to see is future viewing for me despite others having seen it. Viewing the future event makes it now, then fades into the past. I can only conclude a future event occurred, putting it there prior to my viewing it, at least in this instance.

(Today 12:02 AM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: I go to the website. I find the link to this discussion. i click on knowing that whatever was put there to see is future viewing for me despite others having seen it. Viewing the future event makes it now, then fades into the past. I can only conclude a future event occurred, putting it there prior to my viewing it, at least in this instance.

What is your future event was put there in the past .. so you're just seeing an event that occurred in he past but later than people who saw it sooner. Maybe