Is this a certainty? I thought it was an open question whether quantum effects are at play in the brain, and those have a counterintuitive relationship with time (to vastly dumb things down in a way my grug mind can comprehend).
I think it's more that there isn't yet evidence against it. In other words, we're not sure or not if the brain has some kind of special sauce that doesn't just reduce to linear algebra.
"I think it's more that there isn't yet evidence against it."
We don't? AFAIK we have no proof of anyone being able to see into the future. Now maybe there are other manifestations of this, but I know of no test today that even hints at it.
What's obtuse about it? It's honestly a very straightforward statement. Every thing we think or say is a function of past events. We don't incorporate future events into what we think or say. Even speculation or imagination of future events occurred in the past (that is the act of imagining it occurred in the past).
It's really a super simple concept -- maybe it's so simple that it seems obtuse.
Because the other poster's point wasn't that it was a 'past event.' The point was that it's just predicting based upon the previous token. It's disingenuous to mix the two concepts up.