Enlightened Doomsaying

Abstract

One of the most daunting obstacles to the prevention of catastrophes is our perception of time or, as Jean-Pierre Dupuy calls it, the standard “metaphysics” of time. As long as the future is seen as a virtual realm admitting of multiple possibilities, we will never come to a focused and serious strategy of collective action appropriate to the threats we face. That is why we have to change our concept of future. Dupuy proposes a new metaphysics of time he calls projected time. According to this, we should not imagine time to be a kind of decision tree but a temporal loop. In this way, our viewpoint can be the time after the catastrophe has already taken place. Looking back from future to present our question inevitably will be: “What could we have done to prevent this situation?”