Time-reversed version: what’s the longest horizon, looking *backwards*, that we’d think had insight into our needs today, could have reasonably anticipated then and, through planning, enabled us to achieve them? https://twitter.com/SimonDeDeo/status/1315044861268156416

The obvious horizon is the Enlightenment—but there is plenty of foresight from before the 18th Century. The Magna Carta survived in (admittedly minor) legal force until the 1960s, IIRC. Obvious respect for “in perpetuity” declarations...

Indeed, horizons become finite only when you expect great change—either for theological reasons (Christian second coming, etc) or for scientific eschatologies (singularities, prediction horizons, etc).

If time is cyclical, rather than progressive, discounting the future makes no sense—the future simply is the present, you are your children, and one can’t value the same thing at two different rates.

One can value the future as much as the present and still act in a shortsighted manner for epistemic reasons: I don’t know if my house will last twenty years, so I care less about repairing it.

But the source of the discount is uncertainty, not time: the facts one knows matter no matter how distant they may be, and there are far future events that matter more than near-to-hand uncertainties.

Oddly, it is then easier for the pre-scientific mind to plan for great gulfs of time. If one is certain that there will always be people, one cares for the sapling that will shade them in a hundred years.

The scientific mind, assured of progress, has a new possibility: the future can be valued differently simply because it is different. Those people are not us!

In the Star Trek vision, we value the future more—better (as some of the Rationalists suggest) to suffer now to bring the glorious AGI to life seconds sooner. It’s also Pol Pot’s vision, and Stalin’s.

The libertarian inclines the other way: the future must fend for itself. We know best how to satisfy our own needs, and ought not to be paternalistic even to our future selves. No welfare state for the t+1, a land forbidden from fulfilling contracts backwards in time.

Charles Taylor writes extensively about the “disenchantment” of the world in the emergence of the secular age. But perhaps it’s better to say we displaced it: the angels and demons now live in the future, not the present.

There is, perhaps a third way—neither cyclic nor fantastical—that one sees almost like the green flash at sunset, in the mysticism of popular writers like Herman Hesse, or John Cowper Powys.

It’s perhaps a trace of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return: a sense of development that includes, paradoxically, a feeling that it has all happened before. You see it in Kubrick’s star child at the end of 2001.

Perhaps also in Tolkien: a belief (happy or melancholic, depending) that the future will be both different and identical. I can’t tell if it’s a doggerel idea, an illegitimate and essentially sentimental compromise, or if it’s a real position.

For some it’s a sentimental transference: from the cycle of the birth and death of the body to the birth and death of empires. On a large enough scale, it looks the same to them.

More interesting, in the writers above, is a view of time that has room for both surprise and return; where there’s just a touch of deja vu in the (religious or secular) revelation.

Perhaps it’s just the negative capability of the poet: Kubrick (unlike Arthur C. Clarke) didn’t have to settle the question.