Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘How we experience suspense is wholly idiosyncratic: some people are simply more susceptible to it than others. I imagine that there is a smattering of souls in this world who are naturally incurious about the future; others have spent years trying to master the impulse to peer around the corner of the present, apprenticing themselves to one of the religious or philosophical traditions that encourage us to stay focussed on the here and now. That is surely sage advice, since thinking about the future can involve expending enormous amounts of energy on phantoms, but, for most of us, it is extremely difficult to follow. You can chalk that up to evolutionary exigency, because the act of prediction has always been central to our survival. No wonder we spend so much time speculating about what will happen next; we are built to be, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett once put it, “anticipation machines.”…

One tricky fact about real-life suspense: when we are thinking about our own future—as opposed to reading a novel—most of us assume that we have some say over what happens next. Whether that is actually the case is one of humanity’s oldest open questions. Is there an author of our existence, divine or otherwise, who has programmed the whole show? Are our lives determined down to the last detail by natural laws or an all-powerful God, or do we have a measure of free will—some way of wriggling out of our mortal constraints to change the course of private or collective history?

Experientially, most of us feel the sway of both possibilities. In countless ways, our lives seem, for good or ill, ours to manage; in countless other ways, including those related to many of the things that matter most, they feel maddeningly out of our hands. The only thing we know for certain is that, if the universe really is deterministic, its gears or gods are hidden from us. We are not like Laplace’s demon, possessing perfect knowledge of the present state of every atom in existence and therefore able to see how all subsequent events will unfold. For that matter, even if we did possess such knowledge, it might not make a difference. Plenty of contemporary physicists think that the universe is indeterminate—that even an intellect gigantic enough to comprehend all the causes in the cosmos would not be able to correctly infer the effects and thereby foretell the future.’ (from the New Yorker)