We think of fate as an outdated superstition. In a secular world the future is ours to make. Yet our discourse about the future seems to be littered with inevitabilities: we are routinely informed that technological progress, war, AI, collapse, utopia and dystopia are inevitable. What is fate but the inevitable? On the more idiosyncratic fringes of AI discourse things get even weirder: we find self fulfilling prophecies, hyperstition, retrocausality and embedded agents as time travellers. I will argue that these are both manifestations of the same attitude to the future which I am dubbing neo-fatalism. I will try to explain what neo-fatalism is, how it operates both practically and metaphysically, and why understanding it is important for navigating discussions about the future.
Neo-fatalism is characterised by fate that is contingent, emergent and immanent. It operates through self fulfilling prophecies, and it implies a metaphysics of time in which the future and the present are in constant interaction. The use of the prefix ‘neo’ is not intended to assert that this attitude is necessarily new. There are certainly echoes of it in classical stories of self fulfilling prophecy such as Oedipus Rex, or in the famous Weberian Calvinist doctrine of predetermination. However it draws a contrast with the classical understanding of fatalism as resignation to a prewritten destiny that is transcendent and inevitable.
Fate and contingency
But how can a future be destiny if it is contingent? Fundamentally this happens when the destiny of a system does not come from any creator or telos, but rather emerges from the behaviour of the system itself. This is a common phenomenon in complex systems theory, where systems may converge towards a stable attractor state, but this outcome cannot be predicted before actually running the system. We will look at what convergence, and attractor states look like from the outside, and then use an idea from second order cybernetics to see why these might feel like destiny from the point of view of someone within the systems in which they are occurring.
If we flip a coin enough times we will expect the proportion of heads to converge towards ½. This kind of convergence does indeed produce destiny, since we can know something about the outcome of events before they have even happened. But is that destiny contingent? In some sense it is since it is not logically necessary: at any given point in any given sequence of tosses another proportion is possible no matter how unlikely. Nevertheless even if we have seen billions of tosses all land heads, if we know the coin is fair we can be almost sure that our fifty fifty distribution will still emerge in the future eventually. Furthermore it could reasonably be said that producing a fifty fifty distribution really is the telos of flipping a fair coin, so perhaps we are still operating in the domain of ‘classical’ fate. To find a truly contingent convergence we will turn to another example: Polya’s urn.
Imagine an urn with one red ball and one blue. Every turn a ball is drawn from the urn, and then replaced along with a second ball of the same colour. As the number of balls in the urn increases, the proportion of red balls will converge towards some value p. But surprisingly on any given run of this experiment, p is equally likely to be any number between 0 and 1. After a thousand turns we can already be almost certain about what the proportion will look like a million turns later. At this point the fate of p is effectively sealed, yet it is an entirely contingent product of the random events that have happened so far. The urn had no fixed destiny at the start of the process, but as events ran their course a fate gradually emerged.
Something similar is seen in complex dynamical systems, systems in which many parts interact over time. The system may eventually converge towards a stable attractor state, however it may be impossible to know this state at the beginning. Nevertheless there will be a point where the system has already entered the attractor basin of this state, and the outcome of the system has been sealed by the events that have happened so far.
Von Forester’s conjecture
To better understand why it makes sense to think about this kind of convergence as fate, we need to think about what it would feel like to be an agent within such a system. To do this it will be helpful to consider an idea from second order cybernetics, the subfield of cybernetics which aims to study systems from a perspective situated within the system itself. Some systems are not affected by the observations we make about them, for example a thermostat only cares about the temperature and not what you say about it, so it can safely be studied from an ‘objective’ or external perspective. However other systems, especially social ones, are affected by the observer and the observations they make. For example a famous economist publicly predicting that a particular stock will go up may cause it to do so. When this relationship between observer and system is extended over time, it becomes a feedback loop since the system affects what observations will be made and the observations affect the behaviour of the system. In order to properly take into account this feedback loop the second order cyberneticists argued that the proper object of study should not simply be the system being observed, but rather the larger system that includes both the system and the observer doing the studying. In other words the studying must be done from a situated perspective within the system being studied.
At a conference in 1976 Heinz Von Foerster, the leading pioneer of this approach, made the following conjecture (which has since been made into a theorem in certain formal settings):
“Individuals are linked to one another, on the one hand, and they are linked to the totality, on the other. The links between individuals can be more or less “rigid” - the technical term I employ is “trivial”. By definition the more trivial they are, the less information knowledge about the behaviour of one individual brings to an observer who already knows about the behaviour of the others. I conjecture the following relation: the more trivial the relations between individuals, the more the behaviour of the overall system will appear to the individuals within it to possess a dynamic of its own, which escapes their control.”
What’s counter intuitive about this is that the systems that are more intelligible to the observer are actually less intelligible to their participants and vice versa.
Consider a bunch of people walking around in the same space pursuing their own goals, and only paying attention to each other to avoid colliding. To an external observer trying to predict what will happen this is basically just chaos since each individual’s behaviour is mostly independent of the rest. But for the people in the area it is a very easy place to navigate, you basically just go where you want with some minimum effort not to walk into people. You could even fairly easily figure out how to achieve some more complex goal like herding people out of a particular part of the area.
On the other hand, imagine if each person in the area is taking part in some strange dance, where their direction is determined by the movement of the people they see in front of them. The external observer might be able to detect high level emergent behaviours of the group, or even calculate from the beginning where everyone will end up. But for the individual, whose path will be affected in all kinds of ways by people not even in their line of sight, it may feel like their goals are perpetually thwarted by a system outside of their own (or anyone else’s) control.
Understanding this principle is crucial because it explains how a system of agents each acting freely can find themselves confronted by a seemingly inevitable fate that emerges from their collective behaviour. It also explains why we are living in a golden age for neo-fatalist phenomena. As technology, bureaucracy, markets and globalization all increase the number and ‘rigidity’ of relationships we have with other agents, the outcomes of these relationships become less and less intelligible.
Self fulfilling prophecies
The difference between classical and neo fatalism is not merely a conceptual one, it is also one of praxis. While the classical fatalist can only resign themself to destiny, if the neo fatalist can harness the dynamics of the systems around them then they can steer and even forge destiny themselves. The primary tool for doing this is the self fulfilling prophecy. Here I want to present two different (but ultimately related) ways of thinking about how self fulfilling prophecies operate.
Self fulfilling prophecies as fixed points
In a 1954 article, Simon asks the question of whether accurate political polling can be possible in a world where polling itself affects people’s voting intentions, due to bandwagon or underdog effects (where voters change their intentions based on who they think will win). Pre-figuring the later work of the second order cyberneticists he shows that pollsters can, at least in theory, solve this problem by taking into account their own effects.
Simon presents a simple model where we take I to be the proportion of voters who intend to vote for one of two candidates before any poll is published (for simplicity it is assumed that this number will remain the same up to the election if the poll is not published), P is the proportion that the poll predicts to vote for the candidate and V is the proportion that actually do after the poll is published. A naive approach to polling would simply ask a representative sample of voters their intentions and then publish it. This is a perfectly valid approach for approximating I, but the problem for pollsters is that ultimately their accuracy will be judged by how well they predicted the actual election result V. So if polls do indeed affect voter intentions then this approach will lead pollsters to make themselves wrong.
It’s clear that to accurately predict V the pollsters will need to take into account the effect that their prediction has on the electorate. This presents a practical problem of how the pollsters can know what this effect will be, but it also presents a theoretical problem: Is it even possible? If every adjustment the pollsters can make to account for their effect on the voters itself has an effect on the voters, then like a dog chasing its own tail they might be caught in a cycle where no matter how sophisticated their predictions they are always destined to make themselves wrong. The core of Simon’s article is to argue that (under some reasonable simplifying assumptions) thanks to Brouwer’s fixed point theorem there will always be some possible value of P such that the resulting value of V will be equal to it. If the pollsters can figure out what this value is then they can in effect publish a prediction that makes itself accurate.
An interesting further detail here is that there may be multiple such fixed points, in which case the pollsters effectively have the power to choose which of them to make true. Furthermore, while there must be at least one that does not alter the expected result of the election, there can be others that do if the effects of polls on voters are large enough.
Much like Simon’s pollsters the neo-fatalist would-be-prophet (hereafter neo-prophet) must attempt to choose a fixed point in the relationship between predictions made and actual outcomes. However, while pollsters in real life should expect their effect on the electorate to be extremely small, the neo-prophet can attempt to maximise their effect on the future by picking a prediction that actually motivates people to take relevant actions. For a prophecy to be self fulfilling usually needs to meet a few basic criteria:
Plausible: can people believe in it?
Desirable: do people want to believe in it?
Memetic: does the belief spread well?
Motivating: do people who believe in it actually take actions to make it come true?
Achievable: do the actions believers take actually lead to the prophecy coming true?
The goal of the neo prophet is thus to change society by making and spreading a prophecy that has all these properties. This might seem like a lot to ask for but there is a reason it is doable:
Not only are these factors highly correlated with each other (more desirable outcomes tend to be more motivating, achievable outcomes tend to be more plausible, motivated believers can spread the word etc.) but they are all in positive feedback loops with respect to the number of people who already believe in it at a given time. So the more people believe in it; the more plausible, desirable, memetic, motivating and achievable it gets; and the more it gets each of those things the more likely new people are to believe in it. This positive feedback loop is the core driver that allows self fulfilling prophecies to make themselves true.
Self fulling prophecies as Schelling points
Another way to think about self fulfilling prophecies is as tools for and products of decentralised coordination. While we tend to think of collective agency in terms of organisations with dedicated command and control structures, it can emerge from something as simple as a shared belief.
Schelling points are choices people make when attempting to coordinate without communication. The classic example is two people who must meet each other in New York City but have not agreed upon any particular place or time in advance. When people are asked where/when they would go the most common answer is “the information booth at Grand Central Station at noon”. People who pick this point will be able to successfully meet each other despite not communicating at all, they go to Grand Central simply because it intuitively seems right and they hope that the other person will reason in the same way as they will. This mechanism is especially active in environments such as markets, where agents are constantly trying to imitate or predict each other’s behaviour. For example a widespread belief that some stock will do well is sufficient for many to buy it, thus driving its value up. But this can operate in far more complex ways.
When it becomes commonly believed that some large-scale technological change will occur, the market will very quickly start putting together all the pieces required to bring it about. The belief in an oncoming technological revolution drives students to choose to study relevant skills, entrepreneurs to build relevant businesses, governments to invest in relevant infrastructure. Each group simply treats the oncoming change as given and focuses on their own role contributing to and benefiting from it, but the effect is sophisticated coordination with multiple interdependent systems arising as if by some deliberate plan.
While the fixed point framing helps to understand the potential agency of a prophet as someone who deliberately forges the future he wants to bring about, the Schelling point framing can help us see how self fulfilling prophecies can be purely emergent. Nick Land and the CCRU used the term hyperstition to describe ideas bringing themselves into reality, technologies emerging from the future via science fiction. Even without any initial associated prediction, the mere idea of a technology can have the memetic properties to spread and the appeal to drive people towards trying to bring it about. Technological and scientific development are driven by backward chaining as well as forwards, people work towards specific futures that they want and expect to bring about. But most scientists are not great visionaries, they are not picking their from the set of all possible futures, but the much smaller set of futures that are already present and popular within their culture. What’s more, progress is path dependent, so these cultural memes of possible technological futures can permanently shape what technology does end up looking like.
Metaphysical muddles
Normal discussions about the future tend to treat it either as something already fixed but not known (e.g. “who will win the game tomorrow?”) or as something yet to be decided (“What shall I have for dinner this evening?”). But the neo-fatalist future does not fit well into either of these models, nor does the inclusion of probabilities do anything to help the matter. Instead of the future being either fixed or open, it seems to be part of a dynamic system of interaction with the present. This interaction arises because agency is time travel in the sense that agents look into the future in order to choose their actions in the present, and becomes a feedback loop because those actions affect the future in turn. Once we start thinking about this interaction between the present and the future, we see that self fulfilling prophecies are just one example of how this dynamic can play out. There can also be self negating prophecies, either outright preventing the event predicted or indefinitely postponing it (French philosopher Jean Pierre Dupuy explores how these might be leveraged deliberately to avert catastrophes in his book Enlightened Doomsaying: How to think about catastrophe which inspired parts of this post), or perpetual instability where no fixed point is ever found. This interaction is also where all the outlandish (no pun intended) claims about retrocausality start to come in. Anyone who is uncomfortable with this kind of metaphysical language can note that what is actually interacting with the present is the perception of the future rather than the future itself (I leave it as an exercise to philosophers to decide which is the referent of the word ‘future’).
Whether you find this way of talking about time and causation convincing or not, it can serve a useful purpose for avoiding certain traps. Those who would use self fulfilling prophecy to shape the course of events exploit the inadequacy of our conception of the future to hide their values, interests and goals in the neutral and ‘objective’ language of prediction. Conversely those who sincerely believe themselves to be in the business of prediction may find themselves shaping the future unwittingly. If your beliefs about the outcome of an event influence the outcome of the event then what does it mean to be truth-seeking? Believing in a future means consenting to it.
Avoiding the inevitable
A common feature of self fulfilling prophecy is the assertion of inevitability. Once something is taken to be inevitable then no one will bother trying to prevent it. And if we take seriously my idea of contingent fate then maybe sometimes outcomes really are inevitable? But it is worth remembering that this inevitability is immanent to the system it arises from. In other words it is an inevitable consequence of the continuation of the logic of the system itself. Trying to prevent the outcome from within can be a bit like panicking in quicksand, sinking deeper with every desperate motion. The only way to change destiny is to do something that defies the logic.
We think of fate as an outdated superstition. In a secular world the future is ours to make. Yet our discourse about the future seems to be littered with inevitabilities: we are routinely informed that technological progress, war, AI, collapse, utopia and dystopia are inevitable. What is fate but the inevitable? On the more idiosyncratic fringes of AI discourse things get even weirder: we find self fulfilling prophecies, hyperstition, retrocausality and embedded agents as time travellers. I will argue that these are both manifestations of the same attitude to the future which I am dubbing neo-fatalism. I will try to explain what neo-fatalism is, how it operates both practically and metaphysically, and why understanding it is important for navigating discussions about the future.
Neo-fatalism is characterised by fate that is contingent, emergent and immanent. It operates through self fulfilling prophecies, and it implies a metaphysics of time in which the future and the present are in constant interaction. The use of the prefix ‘neo’ is not intended to assert that this attitude is necessarily new. There are certainly echoes of it in classical stories of self fulfilling prophecy such as Oedipus Rex, or in the famous Weberian Calvinist doctrine of predetermination. However it draws a contrast with the classical understanding of fatalism as resignation to a prewritten destiny that is transcendent and inevitable.
Fate and contingency
But how can a future be destiny if it is contingent? Fundamentally this happens when the destiny of a system does not come from any creator or telos, but rather emerges from the behaviour of the system itself. This is a common phenomenon in complex systems theory, where systems may converge towards a stable attractor state, but this outcome cannot be predicted before actually running the system. We will look at what convergence, and attractor states look like from the outside, and then use an idea from second order cybernetics to see why these might feel like destiny from the point of view of someone within the systems in which they are occurring.
If we flip a coin enough times we will expect the proportion of heads to converge towards ½. This kind of convergence does indeed produce destiny, since we can know something about the outcome of events before they have even happened. But is that destiny contingent? In some sense it is since it is not logically necessary: at any given point in any given sequence of tosses another proportion is possible no matter how unlikely. Nevertheless even if we have seen billions of tosses all land heads, if we know the coin is fair we can be almost sure that our fifty fifty distribution will still emerge in the future eventually. Furthermore it could reasonably be said that producing a fifty fifty distribution really is the telos of flipping a fair coin, so perhaps we are still operating in the domain of ‘classical’ fate. To find a truly contingent convergence we will turn to another example: Polya’s urn.
Imagine an urn with one red ball and one blue. Every turn a ball is drawn from the urn, and then replaced along with a second ball of the same colour. As the number of balls in the urn increases, the proportion of red balls will converge towards some value p. But surprisingly on any given run of this experiment, p is equally likely to be any number between 0 and 1. After a thousand turns we can already be almost certain about what the proportion will look like a million turns later. At this point the fate of p is effectively sealed, yet it is an entirely contingent product of the random events that have happened so far. The urn had no fixed destiny at the start of the process, but as events ran their course a fate gradually emerged.
Something similar is seen in complex dynamical systems, systems in which many parts interact over time. The system may eventually converge towards a stable attractor state, however it may be impossible to know this state at the beginning. Nevertheless there will be a point where the system has already entered the attractor basin of this state, and the outcome of the system has been sealed by the events that have happened so far.
Von Forester’s conjecture
To better understand why it makes sense to think about this kind of convergence as fate, we need to think about what it would feel like to be an agent within such a system. To do this it will be helpful to consider an idea from second order cybernetics, the subfield of cybernetics which aims to study systems from a perspective situated within the system itself. Some systems are not affected by the observations we make about them, for example a thermostat only cares about the temperature and not what you say about it, so it can safely be studied from an ‘objective’ or external perspective. However other systems, especially social ones, are affected by the observer and the observations they make. For example a famous economist publicly predicting that a particular stock will go up may cause it to do so. When this relationship between observer and system is extended over time, it becomes a feedback loop since the system affects what observations will be made and the observations affect the behaviour of the system. In order to properly take into account this feedback loop the second order cyberneticists argued that the proper object of study should not simply be the system being observed, but rather the larger system that includes both the system and the observer doing the studying. In other words the studying must be done from a situated perspective within the system being studied.
At a conference in 1976 Heinz Von Foerster, the leading pioneer of this approach, made the following conjecture (which has since been made into a theorem in certain formal settings):
What’s counter intuitive about this is that the systems that are more intelligible to the observer are actually less intelligible to their participants and vice versa.
Consider a bunch of people walking around in the same space pursuing their own goals, and only paying attention to each other to avoid colliding. To an external observer trying to predict what will happen this is basically just chaos since each individual’s behaviour is mostly independent of the rest. But for the people in the area it is a very easy place to navigate, you basically just go where you want with some minimum effort not to walk into people. You could even fairly easily figure out how to achieve some more complex goal like herding people out of a particular part of the area.
On the other hand, imagine if each person in the area is taking part in some strange dance, where their direction is determined by the movement of the people they see in front of them. The external observer might be able to detect high level emergent behaviours of the group, or even calculate from the beginning where everyone will end up. But for the individual, whose path will be affected in all kinds of ways by people not even in their line of sight, it may feel like their goals are perpetually thwarted by a system outside of their own (or anyone else’s) control.
Understanding this principle is crucial because it explains how a system of agents each acting freely can find themselves confronted by a seemingly inevitable fate that emerges from their collective behaviour. It also explains why we are living in a golden age for neo-fatalist phenomena. As technology, bureaucracy, markets and globalization all increase the number and ‘rigidity’ of relationships we have with other agents, the outcomes of these relationships become less and less intelligible.
Self fulfilling prophecies
The difference between classical and neo fatalism is not merely a conceptual one, it is also one of praxis. While the classical fatalist can only resign themself to destiny, if the neo fatalist can harness the dynamics of the systems around them then they can steer and even forge destiny themselves. The primary tool for doing this is the self fulfilling prophecy. Here I want to present two different (but ultimately related) ways of thinking about how self fulfilling prophecies operate.
Self fulfilling prophecies as fixed points
In a 1954 article, Simon asks the question of whether accurate political polling can be possible in a world where polling itself affects people’s voting intentions, due to bandwagon or underdog effects (where voters change their intentions based on who they think will win). Pre-figuring the later work of the second order cyberneticists he shows that pollsters can, at least in theory, solve this problem by taking into account their own effects.
Simon presents a simple model where we take I to be the proportion of voters who intend to vote for one of two candidates before any poll is published (for simplicity it is assumed that this number will remain the same up to the election if the poll is not published), P is the proportion that the poll predicts to vote for the candidate and V is the proportion that actually do after the poll is published. A naive approach to polling would simply ask a representative sample of voters their intentions and then publish it. This is a perfectly valid approach for approximating I, but the problem for pollsters is that ultimately their accuracy will be judged by how well they predicted the actual election result V. So if polls do indeed affect voter intentions then this approach will lead pollsters to make themselves wrong.
It’s clear that to accurately predict V the pollsters will need to take into account the effect that their prediction has on the electorate. This presents a practical problem of how the pollsters can know what this effect will be, but it also presents a theoretical problem: Is it even possible? If every adjustment the pollsters can make to account for their effect on the voters itself has an effect on the voters, then like a dog chasing its own tail they might be caught in a cycle where no matter how sophisticated their predictions they are always destined to make themselves wrong. The core of Simon’s article is to argue that (under some reasonable simplifying assumptions) thanks to Brouwer’s fixed point theorem there will always be some possible value of P such that the resulting value of V will be equal to it. If the pollsters can figure out what this value is then they can in effect publish a prediction that makes itself accurate.
An interesting further detail here is that there may be multiple such fixed points, in which case the pollsters effectively have the power to choose which of them to make true. Furthermore, while there must be at least one that does not alter the expected result of the election, there can be others that do if the effects of polls on voters are large enough.
Much like Simon’s pollsters the neo-fatalist would-be-prophet (hereafter neo-prophet) must attempt to choose a fixed point in the relationship between predictions made and actual outcomes. However, while pollsters in real life should expect their effect on the electorate to be extremely small, the neo-prophet can attempt to maximise their effect on the future by picking a prediction that actually motivates people to take relevant actions. For a prophecy to be self fulfilling usually needs to meet a few basic criteria:
The goal of the neo prophet is thus to change society by making and spreading a prophecy that has all these properties. This might seem like a lot to ask for but there is a reason it is doable:
Not only are these factors highly correlated with each other (more desirable outcomes tend to be more motivating, achievable outcomes tend to be more plausible, motivated believers can spread the word etc.) but they are all in positive feedback loops with respect to the number of people who already believe in it at a given time. So the more people believe in it; the more plausible, desirable, memetic, motivating and achievable it gets; and the more it gets each of those things the more likely new people are to believe in it. This positive feedback loop is the core driver that allows self fulfilling prophecies to make themselves true.
Self fulling prophecies as Schelling points
Another way to think about self fulfilling prophecies is as tools for and products of decentralised coordination. While we tend to think of collective agency in terms of organisations with dedicated command and control structures, it can emerge from something as simple as a shared belief.
Schelling points are choices people make when attempting to coordinate without communication. The classic example is two people who must meet each other in New York City but have not agreed upon any particular place or time in advance. When people are asked where/when they would go the most common answer is “the information booth at Grand Central Station at noon”. People who pick this point will be able to successfully meet each other despite not communicating at all, they go to Grand Central simply because it intuitively seems right and they hope that the other person will reason in the same way as they will. This mechanism is especially active in environments such as markets, where agents are constantly trying to imitate or predict each other’s behaviour. For example a widespread belief that some stock will do well is sufficient for many to buy it, thus driving its value up. But this can operate in far more complex ways.
When it becomes commonly believed that some large-scale technological change will occur, the market will very quickly start putting together all the pieces required to bring it about. The belief in an oncoming technological revolution drives students to choose to study relevant skills, entrepreneurs to build relevant businesses, governments to invest in relevant infrastructure. Each group simply treats the oncoming change as given and focuses on their own role contributing to and benefiting from it, but the effect is sophisticated coordination with multiple interdependent systems arising as if by some deliberate plan.
While the fixed point framing helps to understand the potential agency of a prophet as someone who deliberately forges the future he wants to bring about, the Schelling point framing can help us see how self fulfilling prophecies can be purely emergent. Nick Land and the CCRU used the term hyperstition to describe ideas bringing themselves into reality, technologies emerging from the future via science fiction. Even without any initial associated prediction, the mere idea of a technology can have the memetic properties to spread and the appeal to drive people towards trying to bring it about. Technological and scientific development are driven by backward chaining as well as forwards, people work towards specific futures that they want and expect to bring about. But most scientists are not great visionaries, they are not picking their from the set of all possible futures, but the much smaller set of futures that are already present and popular within their culture. What’s more, progress is path dependent, so these cultural memes of possible technological futures can permanently shape what technology does end up looking like.
Metaphysical muddles
Normal discussions about the future tend to treat it either as something already fixed but not known (e.g. “who will win the game tomorrow?”) or as something yet to be decided (“What shall I have for dinner this evening?”). But the neo-fatalist future does not fit well into either of these models, nor does the inclusion of probabilities do anything to help the matter. Instead of the future being either fixed or open, it seems to be part of a dynamic system of interaction with the present. This interaction arises because agency is time travel in the sense that agents look into the future in order to choose their actions in the present, and becomes a feedback loop because those actions affect the future in turn. Once we start thinking about this interaction between the present and the future, we see that self fulfilling prophecies are just one example of how this dynamic can play out. There can also be self negating prophecies, either outright preventing the event predicted or indefinitely postponing it (French philosopher Jean Pierre Dupuy explores how these might be leveraged deliberately to avert catastrophes in his book Enlightened Doomsaying: How to think about catastrophe which inspired parts of this post), or perpetual instability where no fixed point is ever found. This interaction is also where all the outlandish (no pun intended) claims about retrocausality start to come in. Anyone who is uncomfortable with this kind of metaphysical language can note that what is actually interacting with the present is the perception of the future rather than the future itself (I leave it as an exercise to philosophers to decide which is the referent of the word ‘future’).
Whether you find this way of talking about time and causation convincing or not, it can serve a useful purpose for avoiding certain traps. Those who would use self fulfilling prophecy to shape the course of events exploit the inadequacy of our conception of the future to hide their values, interests and goals in the neutral and ‘objective’ language of prediction. Conversely those who sincerely believe themselves to be in the business of prediction may find themselves shaping the future unwittingly. If your beliefs about the outcome of an event influence the outcome of the event then what does it mean to be truth-seeking? Believing in a future means consenting to it.
Avoiding the inevitable
A common feature of self fulfilling prophecy is the assertion of inevitability. Once something is taken to be inevitable then no one will bother trying to prevent it. And if we take seriously my idea of contingent fate then maybe sometimes outcomes really are inevitable? But it is worth remembering that this inevitability is immanent to the system it arises from. In other words it is an inevitable consequence of the continuation of the logic of the system itself. Trying to prevent the outcome from within can be a bit like panicking in quicksand, sinking deeper with every desperate motion. The only way to change destiny is to do something that defies the logic.