The Future Is Full: How Quantum Coherence Might Explain the Flow of Time

What if the future isn’t empty, but full of unrealized potential waiting to be born into the present?

That’s the question I found myself returning to, over and over, while reading about quantum coherence and decoherence. As a software engineer and organizational thinker with a deep interest in quantum physics, I’ve come to believe we’re looking at time all wrong.

We tend to consider the future a tabula rasa — a blank page — open, indeterminate, not-yet-written. Yet quantum mechanics might be saying something else: that the future is pre-existent, not as determinate outcomes, but as full waves of possibility — quantum coherent states that develop unseen beneath the surface of classical experience, waiting to find their moment to decohere and become reality.

This is the foundation of what I call Distributed Quantum Temporalism — a metaphysical framework proposing that coherence is the future, decoherence is the present, and the classical world is the past. And once you start thinking this way, the implications are profound — not just for physics, but for how we understand causality, consciousness, and even free will.

From Quantum Fog to Classical Facts

At the quantum level, things aren’t solid objects in fixed locations, but rather superpositions — mists of possibility that only “collapse” into definiteness when they encounter an environment (or an observer). Such a collapse, decoherence, takes the flowy vagueness of quantum mechanics and hardens it into the sharp, definite world that greets us when we wake up every morning.

But here’s the twist: before decoherence, these particles are said to be in a coherent state. They aren’t disorganized — they’re exquisitely ordered, evolving according to the Schrödinger equation, bound together in what physicists call entanglement and interference.

And that coherent state? It isn’t from our classical past. It’s what hasn’t occurred yet.

Coherence as the Ontological Future

In this model, a quantum system in coherence represents not just uncertainty but pre-being. It holds the structured potential for outcomes that haven’t yet registered in our timeline. Once decoherence occurs, a vote is cast. One outcome is realized. That bit of the universe joins the classical ledger — the chronological blockchain of spacetime. Just like a block added to a distributed ledger, this outcome is cryptographically “sealed” by the laws of physics: immutable, time-stamped, and shared across the fabric of reality. Coherence is the realm of potential. Decoherence is the moment of consensus. The classical world is the record.

That is, coherence isn’t the past or the present, but the future. Not philosophically, but ontologically. If this framing is accepted, then our current reality is literally formed by decoherence events, which are the votes by which potential becomes actual.

Time, accordingly, is not a river that flows from the future to the past. It’s a boundary moving through a pre-temporal landscape, one that fixes reality one decoherence interval at a time.

But Where Do These Coherent States Come From?

If classical matter will not easily return to coherence, yet the universe still shows us decoherent events — then where are all these coherent quantum states coming from?

Coherence always fills the universe. The future is whole. These coherent states need not always be continuously created from scratch; they preexist within the quantum fabric. They always exist until an interaction (a photon, a brain, a black hole) collapses them to common experience.

This turns traditional time on its head. The past is determined, the present is choice, and the future is a wave function.

Why This Matters: Physics, Mind, and Meaning

If this model holds any reality, then it not only impacts physicists, but it raises questions about how we perceive human experience. Our decisions, our own sense of perception, even consciousness itself might belong to this large-scale decoherence process. We do not simply move through time, rather, we help define it.

This perspective does not deny science. It leans into science — into quantum field theory, into decoherence models, and information theory. But then it makes us think bigger, to take a possibility that reality might come about by an ongoing act of measurement, where every moment becomes a vote and the ballot is infinite.

In a world like that, the future isn’t empty. It’s waiting.

The essay draws on my wider work, Distributed Quantum Temporalism, an architecture that interlinks quantum mechanics, metaphysics, and systems thinking. I invite debate and challenge by physicists, philosophers, and other explorers into the unknown.