Do humans want to know their future?
Yes, people are
interested in knowing their future.
We want to know the
future in terms of…
- what the
weather will be tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after…?
- whether our new
product is likely to be a success in the market or not?
- whether our
large investment will be go up or go down in value?
- what numbers
will win next week’s lottery?
- whether or not
we will survive the fatal disease we have contracted (with
certainty, not a probability)?
- can modern
medicine prevent or cure the fatal disease I have contracted?
- can we humans live
forever?
- do humans avert
their own extinction?
- what is the
human-experience after death (assuming our quest for human-generated
eternal life fails)?
Can humans know their future?
The future
remains uncertain. No matter how good our prediction skills, the
future is uncertain, both empirically and logically.
Empirically, even if
we have “big data”, massive computing capacity, and fantastic
skills, the weather tomorrow may be as predicted, but it may not.
There is no certainty about what the future holds, and complexity and chaos theory ensures that it remains so.
Logically, even if
the world is a series of causes and effects, there is no logic that
permits us to say that many previous contingent events will occur
again in the future (see Hume). Sure, the sun has ‘risen’ every day for
thousands of millennia, but it does not logically follow that it will
do so tomorrow.
Even with
“more data” and more skills, some of these questions about the
future, especially the ones further down the list above, are likely
to always remain beyond us.
What is the
human-experience after death? Who knows? It has not stopped many
people developing stories of what they think, even believe, or perhaps wish will
happen after death. But the truth is we do not know. And even more, that we are
unlikely to ever know.
Do humans avert
their own extinction? We might desperately wish it to be so,
but humanity does or does not survive remains in the future, and is unlikely to
be known. The problem is open-ended for even if humanity survives
the current apocalyptic scenarios, the possibility of extinction in some other, currently unseen and perhaps unknown apocalyptic
scenario remains.
Can we live forever?
It hasn’t happened yet although it is clear that human life has
been massively extended beyond the standard “three score years and ten”.
Can a human live forever? Perhaps, but perhaps not. Even if we do manage to insert
our mental selves into a machine, what happens if the world ends and the machine stops?
So many unknowns.
But there are also some confusions that get tangled with the idea of prediction.
The first is confusing possibility with prediction. It is possible that there is life after death, that humans escape extinction and that people get to live forever (or at least 200 years or more). So, yes, these outcomes might be possible, but that is not a prediction. The other outcome is also possible!
Which leads to the related issue of confusing guesses with predictions. Guessing that a tossed coin will come up heads is a guess, not a prediction. If the coin does come up heads, then it was a lucky guess, not a
correct prediction.
Predicting the
future is already an uncertain game, but it seems certain that
uncertainty will always plague questions about particular futures such
as the human experience after death, whether humans avoid extinction,
and whether humans can live forever.
My prediction is that we will only ever be able to predict the future imperfectly.
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"The history of predicting the future" (Rees 2021, Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/history-predicting-future/
"Humans are bad at predicting futures that don't benefit them" (Beaton 2017, The Atlantic)
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/humans-are-bad-at-predicting-futures-that-dont-benefit-them/544709/