Future in an Uncanny Valley

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If you take away consciousness and life (and you
can only do this through artificial abstraction, since
the material world, once again, may necessarily
imply the presence of consciousness and life), you
will indeed get a universe whose successive states
are theoretically calculable in advance, like juxtaposed
images on a film reel before it unwinds.
But in that case, what good is the unwinding?
Why does reality deploy itself this way? Why
couldn’t it decline to be deployed? What good is
time? (I’m talking about real, concrete time, and
not this abstract time that is only a fourth dimension
of space.)
Such was the long-ago starting point for my
reflections. Some fifty years ago, I was very keen
on Spencer’s philosophy. One fine day I realized
that time had no purpose, that it did nothing. Now,
whatever does nothing is nothing. And yet, I said
to myself, time is something. Therefore it does
something. But just what can it do? Basic common
sense answers: Time is what prevents everything
from being given all at once. It holds back, or rather,
it is identical to holding back. It must therefore be
development. Wouldn’t it then be the vehicle of
creation and choice? Would time’s existence not
prove that things are undetermined? Would time
not be this very indeterminacy?
If this opinion is not shared by most philosophers,
it’s because human intelligence is made precisely
to take things the other way round. I say intelligence,
not thought, not mind. For besides intelligence,
each of us has the immediate perception our
own activity and of the conditions under which we
exercise it. Call it however you like; it is the feeling
we have of being creators of our intentions, of our
decisions, of our acts, and thereby of our habits,
of our character, of ourselves.