The Present Is Pregnant with the Future

And the past can be read in the present. According to Kurt Gödel:

In the letter from 6 October 1961, Gödel expounds his position: ‘The idea that everything in the world has meaning is, by the way, the exact analogue of the principle that everything has a cause on which the whole of science is based.’ Gödel – just like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, whom he idolised – believed that everything in the world has a reason for its being so and not otherwise (in philosophical jargon: it accords with the principle of sufficient reason). As Leibniz puts it poetically in his Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason (1714): ‘[T]he present is pregnant with the future; the future can be read in the past; the distant is expressed in the proximate.’ When seeking meaning, we find that the world is legible to us. And when paying attention, we find patterns of regularity that allow us to predict the future. For Gödel, reason was evident in the world because this order is discoverable.

 

                                                        From:

Alexander T. Englert (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ). "We'll Meet Again: The intrepid logician Kurt Gödel believed in the afterlife. In four heartfelt letters to his mother he explained why." Aeon 2 Jan. 2024.*

         https://aeon.co/essays/kurt-godel-his-mother-and-the-argument-for-life-after-death

         2023

 

This brings to mind T,S, Eliot, who must also have read Leibniz:

 

Time present and time past 

Are both perhaps present in time future, 

And time future contained in time past. 

If all time is eternally present 

All time is unredeemable. 

What might have been is an abstraction 

Remaining a perpetual possibility 

Only in a world of speculation. 

What might have been and what has been 

Point to one end, which is always present. 

(T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton", Four Quartets)

 

 

 

 

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