The Parsimony of Future Prediction

Organisms that waste energy are at a disadvantage to similarly equipped ones that do not. Under the stress of competition they will lose out. The human brain is costly in terms of energy consumption. An important brain function is partitioning energy use according to the value of a task. Avoiding life threats is a high value task that intensely engages a number of brain regions. Humans can afford this energy drain because it gives them a survival advantage over organisms that cannot anticipate threats or make plans to avoid them.

Many physicists, Julian Barbour in particular, assert organisms have no control over their futures because there is no "future" in the sense that the passage of time is an illusion. His book "The End of Time" and his recent winning essay for The Foundational Questions Institute,"The Nature of Time," assert that biologists and psychologists need to investigate the origins of this illusion.

Yet if organisms invest valuable energy on nervous systems that sense the environment in order to make behavioral adjustments; how could this investment payoff if time does not pass?

Next we will have to examine the "timeless" physicists' opinions on mechanisms of evolution!