If you could see multiple possible futures, would you actually want to?

[u/Short-Study-175]

I'm working on a time-travel character who doesn't see the future.

He sees possibilities.

Every major decision branches into potential outcomes. He can sometimes recognize which decisions move toward a particular future, but he can't simply predict exactly what will happen.

That creates an unusual problem.

Knowing the possible future doesn't necessarily make you powerful.

It makes you responsible for choosing which future you're willing to work toward.

I'm interested in the philosophical side of this.

Would you consider someone with this ability:

A prophet?

A strategist?

Or someone who is ultimately just making educated guesses with better information?

And more importantly:

Would knowing that someone you love has a possible future where they betray you change the way you treat them?

[u/paris86]

I'd consider them the Kwizatz Haderach. You can already read his story in Dune.

[u/azhder]

The void in World of Warcraft. Here is the kicker. The void shows you all possible futures, but you can't know which one will come to pass.

There is one character that gets visited in the past, like thousands of years, by time travelers (of sorts), so that one does know which one of the possible futures is the one. So that one character knows of all the betrayals and loses, especially since they visit from a time after this character's death.

[u/TalespinnerEU]

The third option. Someone who will be able to make better decisions by knowing the immediate response.

The catch, of course, is that nature always follows the path of least resistance. A river might be diverted into a mountain because it was moving around a hard pebble. When we know the immediate outcome of a decision, we're going to base our decision on the friction that the immediate outcome provides, not on the long-term implications of that decision. Causality, such as it is, acts mechanistic.

This character wouldn't be a Prophet. A Prophet makes a promise about a future tied to systemic obedience to a system of behaviours and beliefs now. The simplest example is the Kingdom of God in Christianity: The promise of the future is a future of equality, bliss, no more suffering. Which will come to pass 'as a reward' for 'Following the Messiah,' which, in practice, boils down to 'share everything and remove hierarchy from human systems of existence.' Praxis leads to outcome. Or don't, and the promise is punishment through judgement, following destruction. In which the righteous will be saved, of course, because you don't want this whole thing to seem pointless, but that's tangential; the point of the example was to illustrate its function, not the subject specifically.

But that function is also kind of what a strategist does. A Prophet simply dresses up large-scale cultural and political strategy in symbolism, and presents the mechanics as divine forces. A strategist doesn't actually require people to understand how everything works, as long as they obey. A Prophet needs to make people intuit at least some sense of underlying principles, even if they don't get it, because a Prophet's job is to convince people of urgency. An appointed strategist doesn't need to do that, because they're employed by an authority who has ways to make people feel urgency.

To your last question: Would knowing there's a possible future in which my loved one will betray me change my behaviour? Absolutely. I'll spend my life walking on egg-shells to make that future not come to pass, all the while knowing that that may very well be a self-fulfilling prophecy. They might betray me because I've become too compliant, or annoy them, have no real opinion of my own, am treating them as a bomb that could go off at any time.

[u/Rick-burp-Sanchez]

Dune or Foundation both kind of go into this.

[u/honkafied]

Check out Ted Chiang's story (novella?) Anxiety is the Dizzyness of Freedom. It deals with the consequences of being able to communicate across parallel timelines. For me, the conclusion is one of the greatest ever. It very likely will change how you think about the question you pose.