[Nebulous Neura]

You have stated "By that I mean that we can only observe the past, because we can see only what has happened, but we can have certain expectations about future events. "

In recent experiements using MRI and other tools to study an active brain, it has become a little more clear how this works. Your eyes see light reflected from objects almost instantaneously. However, there is a slight delay before the areas of the brain that process information become stimulated. Your brain and nervous system respond to the visual stimulus based on the current state your system is in. This acquired state is effected by past experiences and chemical reactions that are occurring at that instant in time within your body. The body and nervous system are never completely still. From the time you are conceived, your system is in motion. In the very next instatnt of time your system will be in a new state never to return to exactly the same state it was in at some instant in the past. You may have responded slightly differently to the stimulous if it had happened one fraction of a second before or after. There are so many factors that impact stimulous / response in humans that it is almost impossible to represent mathematically. I said almost because I believe that one day we will be able to derive the formulae that predict a particular human's response to given stimuli based on the state their system is in at that instant.

In John McCrone's book, "Going Inside - A tour round a single moment of consciousness", the process used by our brains to process an instant of time is explained far better than I can do it justice. If we understand an instant, we can better understand how we "think" throughout our lifetime.

Life is a one-way journey into the future, experienced one instant at a time. What you were before, you will never be again.