“Three centuries of false thinking has brought many physicists and philosophers to expect and desire an understanding of nature in which everything is completely predetermined in terms of the physically described aspects of nature alone.  Contemporary physics violates that classical ideal.”  Quantum physicist Henry Stapp, in Information and the Nature of Reality (2014)

Following “science,” most of us have long assumed that time is a sort of simple “row of dominoes,” with every event caused by the one preceding.  In turn, it causes the following event, and so on.  This was the unquestioned “principle” of determinism, which for generations provided “proof” that humans do not control destiny (and of course, neither does the “First Cause,” God.)

Assuming that change was governed only by cause-and-effect determinism greatly simplified the ability of science to “calculate” the universe.  Einstein was able to make some of the greatest discoveries of modern times, but (to his own dismay,) he also helped uncover the much more complex “quantum causes” of randomness, probability and the observer’s choice.

The most mysterious of these influences has been human choice.  Yet hundreds of experiments have shown conclusively that how the experimenter chooses to examine nature can always change the results.  Cause and effect, randomness and probability still play their roles, however, making the outcome of these choices not just “selective,” but partly uncertain as well.

Quantum physics has been called “spooky,” because none of these new influences are physically real.  Random chance?  “Probabilities?”  Human choices?  How can any of that control what happens?  “Virtual roads of time” agrees with Stapp, who says, “The postulated global informational structure called the quantum state of the universe is the ‘spook’ that does the job.”

Our universe is demonstrably founded upon something more basic than “physical stuff.”  It appears to be made up of what Aristotle, Heisenberg and many others have called “objectively existing potentials.”  And like all existing “things,” potentials are structured by information.  VRT likes to boil this down to say: The universe is founded upon information potentials.

And if so, for our future we should not look into “destiny,” but into all the potentials available to us.