Predestination, Premonition, and Fate If We Live in a Simulation

Do you believe in fate, seeing the future, or ancient prophecies? How do you justify such beliefs and explain foresight? Is time travel possible?

I’ve spoken to many who believe in fate. They are certain that their destiny is set in stone. Their future has already been written. Are you one of them? 

I never believed in the human ability for premonition, prophecies, fortunetelling, or the idea of having a fixed fate. None of that made any sense to me. If time is linear, like a dimension, and runs only in one direction, then nothing in the future has already happened. Therefore, no one could possibly know what the future holds. Anything is possible as nothing has already happened, and we are the masters of our destiny.

Today, I want to play the devil’s advocate and speculate about how fate, a knowable and fixed future, and premonition could theoretically be possible. Why? Because believing that we know everything is a clear sign of stupidity, and because why not?

As always, we will focus on the perspective that we are all living in a simulation but will entertain various possible versions and forms of this simulation. We’ll also have to analyze time and what it would have to be like to make these things possible.

Can we predict any person’s future?

Psychoanalysis

We can try, and with some skill and luck, we might be right on some of our predictions. We are all creatures of habits and victims of our own beliefs, situations, and character. With some added bravado, we could also question our free will since so many of our perspectives, decisions, and reactions are guided by forces written into our psyche. Forces we can learn to read, based on a person’s early life and some cleverly designed questions. 

I firmly believe this is why most fortune tellers seem so accurate. They’re good at reading people, and those visiting tend to be gullible and eager to prove they made the right decision. 

Number one, then, is the ability to examine a person, their life, and beliefs and predict where they will lead. This method can be reasonably accurate; no magic is needed.

Self-fulfilling prophecy

In a simulation, we’re the running force of pretty much everything, but even if that weren’t the case, what we believe still drives our behavior. When a fortune teller a person trusts tells them some version of the future, they tend to believe their “prophecy” wholeheartedly. They will look for signs that it is right and unknowingly make continuous decisions to steer their lives in the prophesied direction. 

In a mind-made simulation or anything resembling the Law of Attraction, for example, our beliefs determine everything. When someone foretells our future, and we believe them, the whole universe proverbially conspires to make it so.

The two above explanations are the most widely understood ones, aren’t they? Now, let’s step into a different perspective and play with less accepted ideas.

The grand architect

It doesn't matter whether that’s God, the universe, the Matrix's architect, or the simulation's programmer. They are just names for the same type of entity, one that rules all, knows all, is all, and makes everything happen. 

If our world is a simulation with a grand architect who has designed levels, quests, and our lives, we’re merely playing the game he designed. This game of life, even if it’s of an open word variety, is still structured to lead us to some predictable end. We encounter struggles, enemies, friends, and lessons and move along the storyline that was designed for us. 

We can’t deviate outside specific parameters, but other than that, from our perspective, we get to make all the decisions along the journey. We don’t see that the world only allows us to choose from a certain number of options and that our choices are invariably limited. 

No matter our choices and actions, the end of the story has been written, and there is nothing we can do about it.

For those who believe in God and his Biblical prophecies (or Korans), this is a version of reality they operate with. Someone out there governs everything, and we, in our smallness, have limited influence and power over their lives. God is in control, so there is nothing to worry about, for he is all-powerful.

While I don’t buy this version, I get the appeal. It’s safe, as someone is always watching over us and making sure we don’t screw things up. It’s the equivalent of a child relying on their parent or employees, free of worries, to do their part in the larger organization for which they don’t have to understand or take responsibility. I will admit that it sounds like a blissful life, as it was in childhood for most of us.

Fate could then be real in such a simulation simply because we are playing a role we were assigned at or before birth and can’t deviate too much from the path. How would it foretell the future, though? You do remember all those prophecies of end times, revelation, and so forth, right? This brings us to the idea of time.

What is time, anyway?

Linear time

Most of us experience time as linear. We move from point A to point B in one direction only. We can measure time, and it’s definitely a scarce asset for us all. 

According to this simple yet overwhelmingly accepted view, the future does not yet exist, and the past, while it existed as now, is long gone—nothing but memories and traces left behind. If we subscribe to such an understanding of time, fate, and premonitions, seeing the future isn’t possible, much less time travel. 

• Fate would mean that our future is sealed and determined, which means it is known. But this cannot be in linear time. No one can see the future, as it doesn’t exist.

• Seeing the future is also impossible for the very same reason. The future hasn’t happened yet and, therefore, doesn’t exist.

Oddly enough, most people who believe in fate and the ability to see the future also subscribe to this model of time in our universe, failing to see the fundamental contradiction.

Cyclical time

Cyclical time is a concept in which time is viewed as repeating cycles rather than a linear progression from past to future, like seasons or orbits. The main idea is that these larger and smaller time cycles continually repeat. Like days and years with seasons and parts of days, whole centuries or millions of years long cycles could be playing out in repetition.

This idea would fit nicely with a simulation theory of a game-like design. You are born, play your role, and die. Rense and repeat, but maybe with the addition of having a connection to previous lives (reincarnation, karma) or choice (simulation as a game you enter willingly).

If time is indeed cyclical, then those living outside it or with access to information outside this cycle could perhaps see the future or at least some approximation of what will occur, as it has happened infinite times before. 

It’s not an unfathomable idea, and since everything is cyclical in the universe, it could be a logical conclusion. Also, it enforces the gaming aspect of this simulation we call life. It’s not some spontaneous, random, chaotic mess but a well-designed storyline with some limited options. 

Both premonition and fate would be enabled, with some magical access to information about the cycles. Cycles could be days, years, millennia, lifetimes, civilizational growth and decline, etc.

Time as a dimension

Time as a dimension is a fundamental concept in physics, particularly in the theory of relativity. Warning: You’ll struggle to understand the theory of relativity unless you completely abandon what you believe to be reality. 

Albert Einstein treated time as the fourth dimension, alongside the three spatial dimensions,  which are length, width, and height. Together, these four dimensions form what is known as spacetime.

• Special relativity showed that time and space are intertwined. Events that occur simultaneously in one frame of reference may occur at different times in another frame, moving relative to the first. 

• General relativity further developed this idea by describing gravity not as a force but as a curvature of spacetime caused by mass and energy, impacting time itself.

What does all this mumbo-jumbo mean?

In this four-dimensional model, any event in the universe can be described using four coordinates: three for space (x, y, z) and one for time (t). Objects move through this spacetime continuum, and their motion through time is as fundamental as their motion through space. Is your brain hurting yet? Let’s look at a practical example to scramble it completely.

First, we need to understand that time is not absolute but relative to your perspective. As objects move faster (rockets hurdling through space) or are in stronger gravitational fields (planets, black holes), time appears to slow down for them relative to an observer in a different frame. This is known as time dilation.

Let’s take an example to illustrate this point.

• If Marge was traveling to Mars on a rocket with a speed of 0.5 of the speed of light (ignore that being impossible for now), the trip would take 25 minutes from our perspective as observers on Earth. But for her, it would only take 21 minutes. Yes, the watch on her wrist would show the difference.

• If she prolonged her trip to Alpha Centauri and sped up to 0.8 of the speed of light, the roundtrip would take almost 11 years from our perspective on Earth but only 6.5 years for Alice. We would effectively be nearly five years older than her, even if we were the same age before.

• Something even more dramatic happens when we send Marge near the event horizon of a black hole. While we would experience one year, Marge would experience only about 3.65 days. If you're intrigued by the concept, you should watch this insanely good movie, Interstellar.

What does all this have to do with seeing the future or fate?

Well, since science tells us that time is a dimension relevant to the observer, it opens up an infinite spectrum of possibilities regarding seeing the future, for example. In theory, it enables time travel through obscenely high speeds. How this helps your local fortune teller, I do not know. All I know is that time is weird.

Fourth-dimensional living

We’ve now established the possibility that time is a dimension that would make it possible for someone or something to live outside this dimension. 

Just like we can see and interact with 2-dimensional images, for example, but as 3-dimensional people, we have access to a lot more information. Someone stuck on a 2-dimensional plane would be limited to only seeing length and width, for example, while we also see depth. 

Theoretically, it would be possible for someone to have access to information beyond the 3-dimensional limitations we experience and see things along the time axis as well. What does this mean?

It means the unfathomable: time is not linear, but instead, all of time exists at the same time. Past, present, and future all exist as dimensions. Creations are complete if you like Biblical references. 

In a simulation, game characters can live their lives along a timeline. As outside observers (not trapped in the simulation or game), we can observe or enter their timeline at any point in time. We can see their entire lives and that of their whole world at the same time. 

To be precise, if everything has already happened from a four-dimensional perspective, then premonition would simply mean accessing this information.

What does that mean for our choices and free will?

Nothing good, I’m afraid. If everything in the future has already happened, then it’s a done deal. If time is just a dimension, it doesn’t necessarily mean our fate is sealed. However, we are now venturing into the world of quantum physics and parallel universes with infinite possibilities, all existing simultaneously for each of us. Let’s not go there tonight. 

Long story short.

• If this simulation we live in was designed as a game with a storyline, optional quests, and an ending in mind, then our choices within the simulation are limited, and certain parts are predetermined. I do not follow this line of thinking, though, and believe that we live in a mind-made simulation where we determine things as we go along. 

• If time is linear, and it runs in one direction, from A to B, as we perceive it, then fate and seeing the future aren’t possible. The closest we can get is psychology and our beliefs forming our choices and behaviour, which make them predictable, but that’s not seeing the future, nor is our fate sealed, only probable.

• With an alternate view of time, such as cyclical time or time as a dimension combined with the theory of relativity, we can see that information regarding our lives could theoretically be available to someone living outside our limitations, in the 4-dimensional universe, for example, or with access to a time machine. By the way, scientists are theorizing a few more dimensions, so it only gets weirder, I’m afraid. 

• We only have free will in the absolute sense if there is no fate. Even a cyclical nature of time would be a problem, but even more so dimensional. Time, then, simply cannot be as we experience it. There is only ever now, and the past isn’t real, nor is the future. It’s just a dimension on which a now exists, but …

• Such a unicorn existence is only possible in a universe of infinite timelines, parallel universes, and quantum realities. But then, in that world, nothing is real, and nothing is even remotely the way we experience it. Even if we could see the future, there’s no way to tell if it’s our future (our universe, timeline) or one of a billion versions of other parallel options. 

• Time travel would then also mean that we’re not changing time, only jumping realities and parallel universes along the dimension of time. All those grandfather paradoxes are a joke. You can have all the fun changing anything in the past, but it will never change your current reality, as with any new change, another timeline/parallel universe opens up.

Even shorter?

No, no one can see the future, but they can predict it if they have the skills. Your fate may be set in motion in a particular direction, determined mostly by where you were born, when, and to whom, but you can still deviate at will. 

Whether you are able to break out of your patterns and execute actual free will is a good question, though. For another time, perhaps.

As it stands, the odds are that your time is better spent deciding what kind of a future you want to have and working toward achieving that vision. Leave the fortune-telling to old gypsies and naive ladies with too much money. Be the master of your destiny, not the pawn in someone else game.

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