Digression

I was talking about the concept of Determinism with some people, and one of them sought to prove that Determinism was impossible through a simple thought experiment. I won't go into the whole thing here, but the initial premise was that in a Deterministic universe, with the right information one could predict what they were going to do the next day.

And I thought about that. And I wondered if perhaps the common way of thinking about it was incorrect. If, as in a deterministic universe, the state of things at some point in the future were predetermined by the state of the universe in the past and natural laws, would, if one had enough information to predict up to a certain point, the future still seem like the future?

In other words, if I had the raw data and the computational horsepower to consistently predict what would happen a week in advance, would speaking of next Tuesday feel like talking about the future, or like recalling the past? Would I say "This is going to happen next Tuesday?" Or would it feel more accurate to say "This happened next Tuesday?" Is understanding the inner workings of a deterministic universe a matter of moving one's temporal point of view to the point where uncertainty reigns? And if so, would a being that understood how it all worked effectively experience everything as a memory? Quite some time ago, I was discussing matters of religion with a co-worker and he used a similar concept to describe his understanding of God. He posited that God effectively sat at the end of time, and so everything was in the past. Prophecies were simply a matter of God traveling back in time, as it were, to relate memories of events that were still in the future of the particular prophet.

I suppose that like a lot of philosophical thought, it's of limited, if any, utility. But it's interesting to ponder.