Past Reality

How much of what we experience everyday of our lives is actually real and how much is an illusion created by our own minds is heavily debated. The debates about epistemology have been raging for hundreds if not thousands of years. The skeptics will makes claims about our grounds for any belief in truth or knowledge, the idealists will claim everything is internal to your mind, the realists will accept that there is independence between experience and that which is experienced. All very interesting in its own right but, as usual with these debates, what is this to do with anything?

Lets simplify the world. Lets work with the assumption that everything is either past, present or future (there are other models). We can accept that what is past is not real, that the record and consequences of past actions is merely stored in our minds in the form of a model of the world. As we go through life the model of the world in our head is adapted. We cannot go back, we cannot alter the past. We experience a continuum of cause and effect (or constant change).

All we have is the present and depending on where your views sit, some expectation of controlling the direction of our futures (again, determinism, free will etc could be debated here but for simplicity lets assume we have non deterministic futures and free will).

The issue at hand is how we make our decisions about current and future actions is actually flawed and leads to a lot of trouble. What do I mean by this? It is how we look at the time line. If we consider that each moment of the 'present' is the only time we actually exist in. We do not yet exist in the future, the past does not exist. So we could easily argue that we only exist in the present with the model of the world in our mind as it is as a snapshot of everything we have learned and experienced in previous 'present moments'.

Here is the crux of the matter. Imagine we remove all memory and previous state. We have all the skills we have today (rules etc) but none of the memories. Imagine that you simply existed now. Look at your life, what you have and think what would you do next? The old cliche that today is the first day of the rest of your life is just about sums it up. Again, so what?

The point I am getting to is that we do not think in this way. Our decisions and actions are based upon a trailing set of past experiences. Do a thought experiment. Imagine you popped into existence this moment. Let me demonstrate. I exist now. I live in a nice flat, I appear to have a reasonable amount of money in the bank, I have a nice wife, some good possessions and a contract for the next 6 months and a relatively healthy business. Things look pretty good if I had just popped into existence and had been given this life.

But, I also know that on the whole, this is not how I think. I base my decisions for the future not on what I see around me now but on what has gone on before to a huge extent. I am concerned that my business will not recover the money invested in the past, I am worried about my wife and whether the 10 years of training will pay off and many more things. But this money, this investment in time and money does not exist. It is in the past and the past, we have agreed, is not real.

In other words, we make decisions about our future, not on the present which is real but on the past which is not real. If I think 'real' I will look at my business and how to grow it based upon where it is today and make the right decisions. If I base my decisions on recovery of money previously spent I am bound to make riskier decisions to recover this lost money.

We all understand cause and effect but we build models of effects in our world view which are not required. We struggle to differentiate real from unreal. This leads to poor decision making and in many cases unhappiness and stress.

I am not suggesting that we should not learn from the past or that past deeds should be ignored (locking up killers is one example and a complex debate of punishment vs threat of reoffending) but we should think about the decisions we make at work and plan the future from where we are now and not, as is often the case, where we wished we were if only... Continually evaluating the now and how we reach our goals from here in the most optimum way is a far more effective strategy to get us to where we want to be.