MoonageDaydream,
I agree with you about the things you doubt. I think that having definite faith in ideas that aren't actually quite right has drawbacks, and its better to leave some things open, even while we try to figure out how to make the concrete descriptions more accurate.
I used to think of multiple paths as being sort of like sci-fi parallel universes. It never quite made sense though, because I don't think there are multiple concurrent versions of myself. Now I'm thinking about it in another way that I know isn't correct either, but I think it is closer. The multiple paths are all present in the same reality. To use a really bad analogy, if you listen to a musical note, there isn't just one frequency in it, there are a lot of harmonics that combine to make the note. We think of it as being a particular note, but there's more depth to it than that, otherwise every instrument would sound like a whistle. Now image you could separate all the component frequencies, rearrange them, and put them back together in a different way so that it was actually a different note. I think we're doing something like that when we 'change' the path we're on. It is possible because everything in the new path was also in the old path, but somehow oriented in a different direction. So for the purposes of understanding our 'choice', we live in just one world, but it has a lot more depth to it than is commonly recognized. Premonitions are possible because the future is completely determined by the present, for the current 'orientation'. But there's freedom because the 'orientation' can change. In this idea, there are not any random events in the future, there are only what appear to be random events because we're not thinking in a way that sees the whole present, and because there's freedom in the 'orientation'.
An angel of fate, so to speak, sees the future as part of the present, and does not have to extrapolate from a mental caricature of the present in order to guess the future. It sees it directly. But it sees it as some kind of superposition of many of the possible orientations, and it can prune the possible outcomes by limiting the multiplicity of 'orientations' to a narrower range. There's a tradeoff between the richness or depth of the present and being able to control or 'know' the future, and those have to be balanced. When I'm thinking in a way that produces accurate premonitions, maybe I'm not reaching outside of the present so much as I'm focusing on the present in a different way. That different focus, which is largely subconscious, involves feeling the 'future' states that are in the present one, and forming picture and sound metaphors to describe those feelings. There's a pretty close resemblance between those metaphors and the corresponding future events, but it isn't exact, because they're metaphors, and because the steering of the fuzzy 'orientation' isn't precisely determined.
To the extent that there's any truth to what I'm saying, I guess there must be a spatial analogue to this also, where far away objects and events are also dimly represented in the local aether, so to speak. So telepathetic empathy works in pretty much the same way as precognition or choice.
I realize it must be pretty hard to follow what I'm trying to say here, because of the strange way I'm using words, but hopefully it makes as least some vague sense.
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