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This paper deals with the basic philosophical issue with regard to the relationship between the past-future direction (direction of life) and the earlier-later direction (direction of entropy increase). Our freedom to create the future situation according to our value is guaranteed by the biunity of finality-causality. This implies that our creative freedom depends on science being capable of giving law-like predictive probabilities. Law-like prediction is possible, but prediction is factually impossible. All actual predictions depend on factual guesses. Law-like prediction is "successful" and "effective", because the entropy of our environment is increasing. This means that man can create order and organization in his world precisely because the entropy of his physical world is increasing, representing a tendency toward disorder and disorganization. The entropy-increase is neither law-like nor factlike, but necessary. In an entropy-decreasing environment which may be partially realized in living matter, the situation will be the opposite. In such a special portion of the world, science has to be retrodictive, and under certain conditions teleological. This reflection reveals the profound reason why science has to be causal in our usual environment, a thesis taken for granted without explanation by philosophers. At the end, we shall discuss the problem of "becoming" from our point of view. A new geometrical conceptual aid is introduced to make it easier to visualize the true meaning of becoming which is lost in the usual four-dimensional space-time.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-65387-2_12

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