Issue 125 by kulewy531

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Issue 125
The past is no predictor of the future

Predicting the future is one of human beings’ ultimate dreams. For human to fulfill the object, only the past experience might be helpful, which accumulates steadily as time passes by. Up to now, human beings have yet been able to predict the future. Probably, the object will never be within human beings’ ability to reach. But the past, to some extent, might provide guidance to make good choice.

The guidance given by the past varied considerably according to the nature of the event. In objective world, especially in the field of physics and chemistry, what might happen next strictly conforms to basic laws which might be obtained from the past data. The theory of relativity which is capable of interpreting and predicting of most physical phenomenon is a good example. According to the theory, the movement of objects can be calculated once given the past condition of it. With help of the theory, the origin of the universe and the future of it can be learnt. Admittedly, at present, there is still much to explore, but judging from the trend that the development of science is accelerating in the past two hundreds of years, people can gradually learn those laws which are sufficient to predict the movement of objects.

On the other hand, when it comes to the movement of human society, experience’s conductive power decreases, since there are never such methods for us to quantify human behavior and then come up with mathematical equations to describe them. Instead, for an individual, when he is to make choices, he will introduce their subjective judgments, which differ from person to person, to link the past and the future together. Hence, the predictable power weakens in events connected to human beings.

When it comes to discussion of the subjective judgments of human beings, the question of to what extent these judgments are influenced by the past arises. On the one hand, our ability to judge is formed and shaped by the education, which teaches not only specific knowledge but also patterns of thinking such as logic. Without the training of his teachers, Newton would not be able to discover the force of gravity. However, on the other hand, men’s thought also has its own independence. It is undeniable that human beings unlike other animals have the tendency to create whatever the condition is. And creation, which pushes the human society forward, is unpredictable. No one in the 18th century could have image that during the next century Internet would connect the world together and the atomic weapons would destroy a city in few minutes. These kinds of unpredictable inventions due to the unpredictable nature of creation make the prediction concerning with human society quite impossible.

Learning from the history, it is obvious that the future is the combination of the past and human’s creation. In those fields on which human exert little impacts, the future depends almost exclusively on the past, while in other fields the future is decided not only but the past but also on human’s creation.