Rethinking the Future’s Openness and Randomness

This paper explores the openness of the future by prioritizing lived experience over traditional ontological frameworks like eternalism or presentism. Rejecting the “branching roads” model as a misguided spatialization of time, the author argues that objective temporality is best understood through the phenomenal character of hope and the sentiment of randomness. Central to this investigation is the concept of abstract hope, an unstructured faith that manifests the future’s genuine openness in reality. The author further redefines randomness as “unfixable unaccountable unpredictability” (UUU). Rather than viewing randomness as the source of openness, this paper posits that our understanding of random events—including quantum phenomena—is grounded in the experiential origin of acting without bias, where an agent makes a choice despite having no determining factors. Ultimately, this paper contends that hope and unbiased action are not merely psychological states but register objective features of the world. By treating the future as truly open, the author defends a form of realism where human decisions and random occurrences actively shape reality rather than serving as mere epiphenomena of a predetermined causal chain.