The Illusion of Time

The Future is, essentially an illusion, it is inaccessible and unknowable to a being in the present, while we often presume that we can, at least partially, understand what the future holds, this is m

necessarily impossible. Simply due to the fact that the future is impossible to reach, no experiments can be conducted, and therefore no meaningful conclusions can be formed. To predict the future, we humans instead must use causality in the present, this however, hinges upon the fact that our conception of cause and effect holds true at any future point, which is, of course, impossible to prove definitively.

While this may be true, it does not negate the importance which humanity's perception of time holds for our survival. Evolutionarily speaking, it is necessary for species to have an understanding of the passage of time, in order to take actions in the present which benefit a future instance of the individual, or it's species at large. In many ways, the passage of time is the fundamental reason for our existence, organisms have evolved to continue their own, and their fellow beings existence at any cost.

That being said, as individuals, should time be a motivator of our actions? It seems obvious to us today that we should take actions now to improve our lives in the future. This, however, assumes, that are future selves are intrinsically the same being as our present self. It is a fact that, at a certain point in the future,  the physical constituents of your brain will have completely decayed, and been replaced with new cells. No part of what makes you conscious will remain at this point, and therefore, it could be argued that this is a different being which exists in the place which you once did. The question then becomes, should our  actions in the present account for the life of this future self, for its happiness? 

Our society at large must also deal with the questions of how to address the future and its citizens. At its most basic level, the aim of human collectives is to manage the resources we produce for the common good of its members. However, should we include future individuals in the allocation of resources? Is it correct to undertake a project which few members of a society will live to see completed, while using their resources to complete it?  The difficulty with this question is the aforementioned unknowability of the future. It is impossible to confirm that future citizens will want, or benefit from, the use of these resources, or even to know if these future individuals will exist. By putting more pressure on the very real individuals of the present, in order to benefit a hypothetical future, these recourses are necessarily being gambled away. There is no correct answer to this question, it is both a broad philosophical question about how to approach time as we perceive it, and a very practical economic one.

To conclude, time is fundamentally an illusion, an unknowable yet omnipresent part of our existence. A core question therefore, is how we approach future events in our reasoning and our actions. How we perceive time and our control over future events is a central aspect of our being.