Where'd the Future Go?
Boy, that lightcone's looking real dim
1.
I took a long shower in the dark just before writing this.
I don’t get to do it all that often—inexplicably, a skylight sits in the roof of my bathroom, so true darkness can only be achieved late at night. Luckily, we have a snow day, so I could stay up late to shower.
While I showered, I tried to picture my future.
Rather, I tried to picture an array of my possible futures. What would it look like if I went to Yale? What about Michigan? MSU? What if I got that scholarship? What if I didn’t? What job will I have in five years’ time? In ten?
I’ve been doing this a lot over the past few weeks. Ever since my applications came back with such unexpectedly positive results, I’ve been scrambling to make up for the thought I should’ve been doing when I applied. Scrambling to get a grasp of the life paths I could take, and which ones seem best.
I’ve tried to look as much as twenty years into the future and as little as six months. No matter how I try to trick myself into conjuring up an image—any image at all—I get bupkis.
This is extremely abnormal.
I’ve said it before: I’m a thoughtful guy. When I try to look into my future, some sort of picture comes up. It’s usually a pretty inaccurate one, sure. But at least it gives me a feel for what to expect.
At the end of sophomore year, I chose to take Economics for the rest of high school instead of Global Politics or History. For one reason or another, I started questioning that choice early the next year. And when I made the decision to switch, I based it, more or less, on daydreams. On the vision I had of ‘Ari suffering in Economics’ compared with ‘Ari having a much better time in GloPo.’
As it turned out, the picture I had of myself having a great time in GloPo was wildly inaccurate. But at least I had the picture. My future was tangible, accessible, influential to my thinking.
Why isn’t it anymore?
2.
Let’s start with the normal and probably true explanations.
For one, I could just be a little depressed.
From some tiny sample-size study I found (this comes from the background section, though, it’s just summarizing lots of past research):
States of mind related to depression are characteri[z]ed by a reduced motivation to act in relation to the future and generali[z]ed negative expectations of future events [23–26]. Depressed individuals have reduced feelings of control over their future, and also report a lack of motivation and confidence to make decisions in pursuit of their desired future goals [27].
This doesn’t map perfectly onto the experience I’ve been having, but it sure seems related. Generally, we feel more control over things that we know about. If I have “reduced feelings of control over” my future due to depressive symptoms, maybe my brain’s done a bit of backchaining to reduced knowledge of my future as well. This sounds a bit strange, but it’s exactly the sort of thing that happens with depression.
So, maybe depressive symptoms explain why I’ve been unable to picture my future… for the past two days. In the weeks before my current melancholic spell, I’ve actually felt a lot less depressed than I have for most of the rest of my life. School has been virtually stress-free.1 Most of my social life has been mostly fine. I’ve been writing more often and less poorly than usual.
But I still haven’t been able to picture my future. What gives?
Maybe this is just a particularly difficult part of my future to picture. The transition from high school to college is also the transition from childhood to adulthood, living at home to living away, and so on. It’s a lot of change!
And it could be expecting too much from my poor brain to serve up as high-resolution a daydream as I’d had over a class selection. There are too many factors, and rather than do endless fiddling with them, my mind just shuts down.
This is a plausible theory for most people in my situation.
However, I’m not like other girls so unprepared for the shift!
I was in a real-life college class on a real-life college campus not three months ago, and it was weird at first, and then I adapted. And I lived in a real-life dorm on a real-life college campus all last summer—it was weird at first, and then I adapted. And I spent a week and a half on a trip to Israel, far from my parents, all the way back in sophomore year.
I’ve checked all the boxes of the college experience, albeit independently: when I took a college class, I was a commuter living at home; when I lived on campus, I wasn’t a student and I was living about ten minutes from home; when I was in Israel, I wasn’t in any classes or any dorms.
Is it actually so much to ask my mind to stitch these experiences together roughly? I don’t think it is. All the pieces are swirling around in my memory, but nothing is resolving them into a single picture.
3.
So then. Maybe, perhaps, in a limited sense, to an extent, there’s some sort of strangeness going on here.
What if I’ve been in a sort of a (light) transcendental meditative state?
I’ve never meditated on a regular basis, and I’m not particularly good at keeping my mind either extremely focused or extremely relaxed. But, recently, I haven’t minded the occasional bout of quasi-meditation at all. Sitting in silence and being bored has a sort of pleasantness to it that it didn’t for most of my life.
It seems like truely transcendent states are much more dramatic than whatever I’ve got going on. But the stripping away of the future and hyper-focus on the present seems like an important aspect. And I’ve got that in spades.
Perhaps my past has also stripped away a little bit. I mentioned in passing, a couple days ago, that I couldn’t remember many specific internal experiences from recent years. Only so much of that can be explained as normal forgetfulness—how much of it is evidence of a light jhana?
Oh, but that’s silly.
I can remember lots of stories from last year just fine, and a few from as long ago as first or second grade. I remember details—how I felt, what was said, and so on. I can still live in the past with the best of them.
And how presumptuous to think I could achieve any sort of jhana without effort! People dedicate their entire lives! They become monks, ascetics, and still fail! No, I’m not a magical secret meditative master.
4.
But I could be a seer.
Maybe the flashes of my future I’ve had in the past were real and true, in some sense, and for whatever reason, the future from here is much cloudier. Have I lost the gift? Or are exogenous factors at play?
First, let’s understand how this could be true even if I’ve had the experience of predicting incorrectly in the past.
Modal realism claims that possible worlds—the bedrock theoretical construct of modal logic—actually do exist. Then, maybe, sorta, I could have a vision of a possible world that doesn’t come to pass, and we would still consider that vision to be “true”—after all, it corresponds to an actual existing world.
Of course, there are seemingly a plethora of possible worlds to choose from—why wouldn’t I still be having visions from one of them or another? Why can’t I see the future anymore?
Let’s pause, and talk for a moment about anthropics.
This is a newer, more skeptical field of philosophy, which tries to say lots of things about reality based on the one thing you absolutely know to be true: that you exist.
The most probably-right version of this reasoning, it looks like, so far, kind of, is called the self-indication assumption (SIA):
All other things equal, an observer should reason as if they are randomly selected from the set of all possible observers.
If I’m just some random member of the set of all observers, I should expect my existence to be more likely the more observers exist. Then, we can reason from the fact of my existence that possible worlds with lots of observers are more likely to exist than those with few.
I absolutely, unequivocally refuse to go into a full defense of this, mostly because
has already done it well many times, but also because we really must be moving on. Let’s just take SIA to be true for now.On SIA, we should expect worlds where human civilization continues to exist for a long time to be more likely than worlds where it doesn’t. In worlds where we go extinct, there are less people, so the “set of all possible observers” has a smaller cardinality, so your existence is less likely. So, by the fact of your existence, you can reason that we more likely live in a world where humanity doesn’t go extinct.
What would it mean not to go extinct? Avoiding a singularity in the short-term probably wouldn’t hurt.
Interestingly, over the past few years, and especially over the past few weeks, AI is getting closer to generality very fast. Time for our world to avert the singularity seems to be running out.
On SIA, though, we should very strongly expect something to happen that stops the singularity. We should be expecting increasingly strange happenings that all seem mysteriously coordinated toward slowing AI down.
As a crazy example off the top of my head, maybe we would expect something like the world’s number one manufacturer of vital AI compute hardware to be primarily located on a tiny island locked in a massive and intractable historical conflict with its much larger neighbor.
Or, and again, I’m spitballing, we might expect the most business-friendly country in the world, home of Silicon Valley and basically all the leading AI firms, to elect a deranged, illiberal, nativist authoritarian who threatens to deport talented foreign engineers and to cause mass flight among well-educated Americans in general.
These sorts of highly-improbable features of the world would make the singularity a lot less likely, so we should regard them as a lot less improbable on SIA.
As the window for averting an extinction event tightens, other extremely improbable features could become exponentially more likely, as possible worlds begin dropping like flies. Our future will be locked into a very specific path one insane news cycle at a time.
And any 17-year-old seers who are nervous about their college choices will have a much harder time finding a possible world to prophesy about.
5.
Ok, you caught me, I’m not a seer. I just wanted to talk about anthropics.
What’s interesting, though, is how much the idea had purchase over me as I wrote the section above. How easy it was for me to slip into magical thinking, especially in a way that flattered myself.
has a great piece exploring this tendency and others:
(I’ll give broad strokes, but you really should read that essay in full.)
Basically, teenagers tend to exhibit a lot of pre-schizophrenic symptoms—for example, more than half engage in “magical ideation” at least occasionally.
This doesn’t mean that we’re all gonna grow up to be schizophrenics—just that it’s a wacky age at which to have a brain. Everything’s always gonna be a bit off, usually in the direction of inventing crazy explanations for normal phenomena.
I probably can’t see the future so well these days because I’m not getting enough sleep, or because I have a bit of good ol’ fashioned repression going on. Nothing more to it.
On the other hand, maybe the world’s about to go batshit crazy, and also I’m a wizard!
I assign these possibilities fairly equal odds.
Lukethoughts
(And now the section that I’d intended to be for comic relief, but is quickly becoming necessary as a sanity-refresher. Just three thoughts from Lucas today.)
“I need to be a professional how I met your mother trivia warrior because it is insane how good I am at it.” (Ed. note: He really is unbelievably good.)
“Docuseries have to be top 10 best forms of content in existence.” (Ed. note: Couldn’t agree more, especially when they’re made by Jon Bois. I just finished the 7-installment Dorktown series on the Falcons, and am nearly done with Bois’ Pretty Good three-parter on the Reform Party. Incredible stuff.)
“Deontology and Consequentialism direct to natural selection and I can explain it through the play of Waiting for Godot.” (Ed. note: You’re forgiven for being confused; what he’s saying actually makes no sense. I fully know the context, and assure you: it makes no sense at all.)
Right as I typed this sentence, I realized I’d forgotten to turn in a Spanish assignment due one minute earlier. Ah, c’est la vie. I mean, así es la vida.