Foreseeing And Changing The Future
Regrets aren't good feelings. We always wish that we could see the future. That way, we could prevent regrets. However, do you know that we already can see the future, in some sense? In fact, it lies down to what causes the future to happen that allows us to foresee it.
For example, in the past, people could predict rain coming when they see dark sky. Nowadays, with big data (on meteorology), we could predict weather for the next few days, with relative accuracy. To define future, it's the will of decision that shapes the future. Hence, in order to see the future, what we actually want is to gather information about the "will of decision" that allows us to make that prediction. For example, the cloud decide it'll gather enough rain in few hours, and the wind decide to blow in a specific direction. Using these information, we could predict where the rain will fall.
And it's not just rain. If we know what other people think and the decisions they are to make, we could predict their upcoming course of action. Of course, we don't always know what others are thinking. In some cases though, like fighting, people could sense what moves their opponents will make based on the starting move, or a sudden jerk in hand/legs in a certain direction. Mostly these are train via experiences. Though, we do know what we are thinking, to a certain extent, so we could predict what futures we are shaping ourselves.
And what does it means by changing the future? It means, by disturbing the course of actions that someone are to take. For example, in games, if your opponent are to make a move attacking you, you could set up a barrier/shield to block that attack, nullifying it. Otherwise, you could "daze" your opponent (if it has the function to do so) to stop your opponent right on track. In real life, it's the same thing. Knowing what people think, you could try to convince them to change their course of action, hence changing the future; or you could take actions to prevent their course of action to result in a certain result that you wouldn't like to see, bending it to your will of what futures you want to see. Similarly, if the sky is going to rain and you don't want it to rain, you could fire missiles to bomb the clouds, disturbing its formation before it reaches its final destination. That's changing the future.
In conclusion, foreseeing (predicting) the future and changing the future is nothing more than gathering enough data to extrapolate, and taking actions to change the current course of actions. The difficulty doesn't come with changing an action, at least its usually not the most difficult part; but collecting data is. No one is going to tell you what they decide to do next all the time, our thoughts are shared with each other neither. Moreover, our prediction from other people's facial expression, body language, and what they show are only a prediction, which usually we add our own experiences trying to interpret what they're going to do, and when our experiences doesn't sync with their experiences, our predictions might well go wrong (badly). That's why there are lots of regrets out there!
