> why can't you remember the future the way you remember the past
Memory of a finite brain isn't -- and cannot be -- a perfect record, so to some extent human memory retrodicts personally experienced past events extrapolatively. That human memory is better than human prediction of future events might not be closely coupled to cosmic thermodynamics.
For example, our ancestors with good memories producing more viable offspring than their contemporaries with poor memories but better predictive skills. You might not want to play certain competitive sports against the better predictors but worse rememberers, since they are likely to know where to be to catch the ball or whatnot; but you also might not want to eat the food they prepare because they don't reliably remember crucial food-safety practice.
The relative entropy inside the braincase of a living Australopithecus or H. erectus versus inside a living modern human's braincase has little to do with the change in total entropy of the universe over the past couple million years. It is perfectly plausible under modern physics that humans a couple million years in the future may end up with simpler and smaller brains, rather than larger or more complex ones. And the improving scientific knowledge of the evolutionary changes in human skull dimensions was not helpful in resolving the 20th century question of whether the universe was collapsing, expanding, or static.
Finally we aren't very good at communicating with the other intelligent species on our planet. Maybe orcas or octopuses have terrific memory and don't feel a significant difference between remembering a recent previous hunt and predicting the one they are just about to embark upon. It'd be fun to find out that our distinction between memory and prediction is just another part of human vestigiality, like our inability to produce L-ascorbic acid internally. Colloquially, maybe "future memory" was one of the things that were too metabolically expensive for our starving distant ancestors to live with, and so it fell off like tails.
Memory of a finite brain isn't -- and cannot be -- a perfect record, so to some extent human memory retrodicts personally experienced past events extrapolatively. That human memory is better than human prediction of future events might not be closely coupled to cosmic thermodynamics.
For example, our ancestors with good memories producing more viable offspring than their contemporaries with poor memories but better predictive skills. You might not want to play certain competitive sports against the better predictors but worse rememberers, since they are likely to know where to be to catch the ball or whatnot; but you also might not want to eat the food they prepare because they don't reliably remember crucial food-safety practice.
The relative entropy inside the braincase of a living Australopithecus or H. erectus versus inside a living modern human's braincase has little to do with the change in total entropy of the universe over the past couple million years. It is perfectly plausible under modern physics that humans a couple million years in the future may end up with simpler and smaller brains, rather than larger or more complex ones. And the improving scientific knowledge of the evolutionary changes in human skull dimensions was not helpful in resolving the 20th century question of whether the universe was collapsing, expanding, or static.
Finally we aren't very good at communicating with the other intelligent species on our planet. Maybe orcas or octopuses have terrific memory and don't feel a significant difference between remembering a recent previous hunt and predicting the one they are just about to embark upon. It'd be fun to find out that our distinction between memory and prediction is just another part of human vestigiality, like our inability to produce L-ascorbic acid internally. Colloquially, maybe "future memory" was one of the things that were too metabolically expensive for our starving distant ancestors to live with, and so it fell off like tails.