What If Our Future Is Already Determined?
By: The Franc Blanc
Tags: Universe, Cosmos, Philosophy, Mind

Image by Fabrizio Verrecchia on Unsplash

Anybody we regularly use YouTube will surely attest to the unspoken fact that there are very few rabbit holes like the YouTube recommendations. You start with something particular and 20 minutes later you will find yourselves in a completely different territory. Something like this also happened with me a few days ago. I started with something normal but a few minutes later I saw a very intriguing title in the recommendations: Laplace’s Demon

I thought it sound cool and decided to check what it was and what I found was worth the time. Laplace’s Demon is not a literal demon like what we see in mythologies but it is a theory. It says that if you know everything about everything, you will be able to predict its future.

Sounds very simple but once you start wrapping your mind around it, you will see how scary it can get. Let’s try to do this.

Suppose we have a perfect clock, perfect means it is error-free. Now, if I tell you that it is currently showing 1:00 and ask you to predict the position of the hour and minute hand after exactly 2 hours, will you be able to do that?

Of course, we can. We know that the time after 2 hours will be 3:00 and the minute hand will be at 12 and the hour hand at 3. Now, let’s think about how we can do that. First, the current position of the hour and the minute hand is a must and second, we have to know about the entire internal mechanics of the clock. But wait, we didn’t know that, right?

We didn’t know about its mechanics but we know about the result of all those movements. We know that in one hour, the hour hand will move clockwise by 5 minutes and the minute hand will complete one full circle. This is how we can literally predict the future of the clock hands.

Now, what if we spread this model to the entire universe? Sounds overwhelming at first but let’s try to grasp it.

Suppose there is someone (Laplace’s Demon) sitting on the top of the universe, and he knows everything about everything and everyone in the universe. He knows the entire mechanics of the whole universe, from the movement of quarks and atoms, to how an ant is going to behave and how someone in London drives his car; everything and everyone there is to know. Still, sounds overwhelming? Try to imagine it in terms of our previous clock story. The demon now represents us and the whole universe is his clock. Got it?

Now, we don’t have to worry about if that demon exists or not, that is not our objective. We just want to know if there is something like the future or if everything is already determined.

As far as I can see and think, our demon will not face any problem in predicting everything, like we do not have any problem in predicting the position of the clock’s hands. Now, throw the demon out of the picture. We don’t care about it. But does it make any difference?

It doesn’t make any difference if someone is watching the universe from above or not. Because if the universe is predictable, it doesn’t matter if there is an observer or not.

I hope you are getting what I am talking about. As far as I can think from sitting in my room on a tiny planet of a tiny star of an average galaxy of a seemingly infinite universe, the future is already out there, we just don’t know it yet. What a scary thing to think about.

The only way this theory is going to be wrong is when there is some error in the universe, something which introduces unpredictability. It means that if we are somehow able to put it in a time loop and give it some input, it will spit out different outputs every single time. I don’t know of any such thing; maybe something in the quarks or something in the black hole.

But if there isn’t something like that and everything is perfect in the universe, what are we doing and what are we working for? After all, everything is already written.