The future is liquid, changeable, you can go where you want. Once it's the past it's fixed and you can never revisit. I'd be a lot more scared of not having those choices in the future than erasing all the choices I remember having made in the past.
Edit- I totally understand what you mean though. In terms of existing in different times and spaces and all that stuff. It's just the way people normally think when they go through their day to day business can't be like that or no-one would get anything done.
(, Tue 9 Jun 2009, 21:59, archived)
this was a boring conversation anyway
(, Tue 9 Jun 2009, 22:02, archived)
but the apparent liquidity of the future is only an illusion produced by the fact that we only remember the past and have no knowledge of the future. If there's a reason for everything, then it was all defined from the beginning to the end.
(, Tue 9 Jun 2009, 22:04, archived)
:)
(, Tue 9 Jun 2009, 22:08, archived)
It's largely what drives scientific enquiry. It certainly drives mine.
I don't subscribe to the idea that things happen by chance. I'm not talking about some mystical force of "fate" here, just basic logical necessity. Any wave equation in maths or physics, for instance, has its entire time evolution determined and fixed uniquely from its initial conditions. Quantum mechanics comes in and makes a bit of a mess of that, but even still. I can't think of anything that's ever happened in my life that could logically have happened any differently. People sometimes ask the hypothetical "if you were young again, would you make different choices?" and the answer's no, because I'd still have the same knowledge the second time round as the first.
(, Tue 9 Jun 2009, 22:13, archived)