What does 'the future' mean to you, regardless of age?
This is a rambling three part topic about a general question to the reader and a meta-question about philosophers idea about the future, and finally for the wiser readers whether if you have been surprised or disappointed in your vision about the future?
It seems that every person wonders about the future. I mean how couldn't they? That's the only thing worth striving for and adapting towards-the future, that is. What it holds for us and our place in it. What new technology will bring about new change, increases in productivity, bountifulness, discoveries in medicine, physics, and such.
Personally, as a believer in technology and progress I am anticipating a future that most tech giants are pointing towards, more or less. One where machines have become more efficient than humans in resource allocation, meaning that for the most part every task done on the market will be done more efficiently and effectively than humans could do in comparison with artificial intelligence. How far am I projecting into the future to this situation. I don't know; but, at least within my lifetime.
Now, I wonder what some of the wiser fellow's that grace this forum have to say about 'the Future'? How many of you knew in your hearts that the Soviet Union would collapse within your lifetimes? Just a general question. What about the climate, oil, and over-population? Where these (now current) issues prominent in your mind when forming your expectations about the future? I'm wondering if my rosy tinted glasses are realistic or not?
Finally, why don't philosophers talk about the future or have I simply not been exposed to less mainstream figures (apart from Marx). Hegel seems to be the only prominent philosopher that utilizes the man made concept about 'the future' in his work, with great finesse. This is starting to be a topic worthy of another topic; but, I'd like to pin it down before it flies out of my head. Namely, that only philosophers worth reading incorporate 'the future' into their work. Otherwise, it ends up as idealistic and far distant as say Plato's Republic.
Thoughts?
It seems that every person wonders about the future. I mean how couldn't they? That's the only thing worth striving for and adapting towards-the future, that is. What it holds for us and our place in it. What new technology will bring about new change, increases in productivity, bountifulness, discoveries in medicine, physics, and such.
Personally, as a believer in technology and progress I am anticipating a future that most tech giants are pointing towards, more or less. One where machines have become more efficient than humans in resource allocation, meaning that for the most part every task done on the market will be done more efficiently and effectively than humans could do in comparison with artificial intelligence. How far am I projecting into the future to this situation. I don't know; but, at least within my lifetime.
Now, I wonder what some of the wiser fellow's that grace this forum have to say about 'the Future'? How many of you knew in your hearts that the Soviet Union would collapse within your lifetimes? Just a general question. What about the climate, oil, and over-population? Where these (now current) issues prominent in your mind when forming your expectations about the future? I'm wondering if my rosy tinted glasses are realistic or not?
Finally, why don't philosophers talk about the future or have I simply not been exposed to less mainstream figures (apart from Marx). Hegel seems to be the only prominent philosopher that utilizes the man made concept about 'the future' in his work, with great finesse. This is starting to be a topic worthy of another topic; but, I'd like to pin it down before it flies out of my head. Namely, that only philosophers worth reading incorporate 'the future' into their work. Otherwise, it ends up as idealistic and far distant as say Plato's Republic.
Thoughts?
Comments (41)
Isn't ..."Any time after the present", the past"?
?? The past is before the present, not after.
Sure the past occurred before present chronologically but my point of view is in the present, in the flow of time, and from that POV what has occurred I call the past, what is yet to occur I call the future.
Right. What has occurred is what occurred before what's occurring now. What is yet to occur is what will occur after what is occurring now. So after the present isn't the past, it's the future.
Fine, but do you agree that what is chronological, depends on, is derivative from, our POV in the flow of time?
Though the details have changed, concern about the effect of modern civilization on our world has been around a while. When I was kid, the concern was pollution. (I looked it up--the "crying Indian" PSA was 1971.)
So there's continuity there, but also difference. There was this sense 40 years ago that we could (a) stop messing up the planet, and (b) clean it up. Now we know that (a) is a lot harder because it's not littering or the occasional bad actor illegally dumping toxic waste that's the problem, it's the fundamental driver of modern civilization, i.e., burning fossil fuels. And it turns out (b) might not be an option, if we can cause permanent, irreversible damage.
So in a way an environmental activist from 40 years ago could say now "I told you so," but in another way they were probably wrong at the time about the two most important points. Talking about the future is almost always like that--even when you're right, you're wrong.
It's relative (indexical) to a given reference point, yes.
:D Think i might know what you are getting at here, having had a similar thought before. That time can be thought to flow in two ways. First, is a linear, progressive type. Imagine Past, Present, and Future in a consecutive row. This could be visualized as the years 1920, 2017, 2100, for example. The direction of the flow of time is from left to right. It was the year 1920, 1921... to the present 2017... eventually reaching 2100, assuming humans don't completely screw up the planet. Unless there is a clever dolphin around to read a Timex watch that is still ticking despite everything being flooded.
The second way to view time is a "energy flow" type way, going right to left. Time "flows" from the future to the present to the past, if viewed in a certain way. For example, when you are in a car, and see a billboard in the distance which could represent the future. It is heading towards you, or so it appears because you are heading towards it. When the billboard is next to you, it is in your presence or "present". And when you have sped past it, and can only see it in your rear view mirror, it is in your "past" so to speak.
Either way, time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin', into the future. Where does the time go? Maybe it just goes back to wherever it came from. What this has to do with the OP, i am not sure. Just a minor tangent. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming...
[quote]When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o' clock and then I was in time again,hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
The whole poem.
I like the Blue Oyster Cult. Time is one of the ways we intuit what we experience, and at that level, it, is the ego's point of view that counts, without an ego there is no disco. They do seem to interpenetrate each other, so yea they slip through each other, but time as intuition goes nowhere.
At 70, my future is a lot shorter than my past. I'm fine with that. Ten more years would be about right--twenty, too long. But I could be dead this afternoon. There aren't any big exciting events on my schedule, so that would be alright too.
Our collective future is more interesting and most likely at least somewhat dystopian. Dystopian rather than utopian, because our species does not have good skills at foresight. I do not see a techno-utopia in our future, but certainly more machines and AI. Some people expect life-altering, paradigm-redefining technology. I do not, because I expect that little new technology will be developed first and foremost for the benefit of humankind as a whole. IF retinal replacements, enhanced memory and thinking implants, or body replacements made to order turn out to be practical, they will be standard fare for only a small elite.
We won't be leaving our terrestrial ball for distant celestial orbits, and for the same reason that I don't expect life-altering, paradigm-redefining technology to remake this world. We have discovered the basic principles of matter; that revolution can not be repeated. Human travel to the nearest star (Alpha Centauri) isn't inconceivable, but offers no escape from our difficulties here. Biological science has plenty of room for development, but the hazards researchers will risk will create more, and perhaps insoluble new problems. Our deficient foresight comes into critical play here.
Our best bet is orderly devolution to a smaller population, sustainable lifestyles, and no innovation beyond our capacity to manage risks. Fat chance, right?
Not sure. Do you mean that most people have a bias towards the future, which fits in well with our culture's sense of progress? But, not everyone.
The conclusion of Daniel Quinn's Ishmael offers a possible hopeful future in which humans allow evolution to continue. But only if "civilized" humans cease their complete conquest of the world, turning everything into human consumables. Wiping out anything and anyone that gets in the way of total domination, and fueling both unlimited population growth and pollution, which is contrary to the Earth's ability to handle. But Quinn says it more elegantly than i could, peering into the prehistoric past as well as our possible future. The future is a seedling or a sprout, which could either be trampled or tended.
We have a lot of technology on hand already. Here's a picture of the Erie Canal, which it turns out, is coming in handy for moving cargo that is too long, too large, and too heavy to move on railroad or truck. The cargo are tanks (12 in all) for the Genesee Brewery in Rochester, New York.
Twelve enormous beer tanks, headed to the Genesee Beer Company in Rochester, are among the oversize cargo populating the Erie Canal. Credit Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times
Well, the German tradition carries on, and those who do and don't descend from Hegel are also fascinated by our attitude towards the future.
Heidegger had an anti-technology view that you would perhaps dislike, but he saw our, Dasein's attitude toward the future as central. It is both to face one's own death, the death of all one's comrades, and yet to plunge into the consequences of what we are doing. There's a difference then between merely 'expecting' and resolutely 'anticipating'. To anticipate, or 'run ahead' - translation is a tricky thing here - is to encounter the possibility of the authentic life. Here's where Heidegger leads to Sartre, at least in my head: to act towards and into the future is to choose, and one can quiescently opt into the learned pattern of things, or choose the authentic, with all its angst and facing up to stuff.
I quoted Eliot because I think he has an interesting, if eventually a rather mystical and conservative, view towards the future. Living itself is living-towards, every moment is poised on the edge of a future. Apo's naturalistic philosophy and my own would for instance agree on that, and I think it's philosophically interesting to reflect on that area.
But to speculate about humans' future relation to technology is for me just a popular sport, without clear meaning: I don't know what criteria makes one person's opinion more pertinent than another, as forecasts are usually crap. I gather Harari has written a futuristic how-we-will-be-cyborgs book, forgotten its title; I liked his 'Sapiens' as an opinionated piece of populism, maybe he has something useful to say?
That would just be riding out the clock and would pretty much guarantee our extinction. The earth is ultimately a deathtrap and the longer we remain earthbound the more we run the risk of being wiped out by any of the many natural cataclysms that are certain to occur within the next millennia or so. Fortune favors the bold, better to shoot for the stars than be sitting ducks.
For soft, juicy thin-skinned endo-skeletoned beasts like ourselves, I imagine the whole universe is pretty much a death trap.
True, there are various cataclysms stalking us, some of our own making. And riding our fleets of interstellar ships to comfy planets that we don't know about will involve risks of other cataclysms and catastrophes.
Fortune is a tricky bitch -- don't trust her.
Well, this is it, isn't it? Is there an arrow of time without memories of the past, a past that appears fixed and a future that also appears fixed considering that in the physical world, everything that is finite or dies requires an arrow of time. It all becomes futile, however the paradox here and in relation to Ishmael is that once we begin living in the present alone, your identity becomes absorbed into Nature and where the future interlinks with the past; the "future" like children are as much a part of you as is the well-being of the environment and the natural system as a whole. The only thing left is the joy of living a moral life.
The reasoning by your attempt to understand your past - which is absolutely imperative - is to attain the insight that is necessary to let it go and begin reasoning with a present-autonomy.
I'm not completely sure what you're asking, but what it is for something to have a meaning is for an individual to make particular sorts of mental associations a la the thing in question triggering the associations in a translational though possibly abbreviated or symbolic manner.
Well, I hope it will be a while longer, just so that you can post here and share the wealth in wisdom and knowledge.
Quoting Bitter Crank
While this is true, there's one exceptional person out there that has already taken the steps to 'democratize' technological progress through making it open source and available to all. He's Elon Musk. He's a really smart guy and I think he will take the world in a completely new direction with his many startups.
Well, I mean that any conception of 'the future' is dependent on some concept of the past by an individual. So, to answer my own question, so it would seem, that to have a concept about the future, some point of reference is necessary.
Thus, this somewhat justifies my sentiment that most philosophers are committing an error in omitting what the future may be like with respect to the past, and instead propose monolithic and idealistic conceptions of society and governance.
Any "general thinker" should try to get a grip on as much past and future as he can manage: understand where we have come from (not an easy task) and where we seem to be headed (a more difficult path). Some cataclysm can create altogether new and unexpected possibilities for the future (like the meteoric hit in the Yucatan that ruined things for the big lizards and created an opening for us mammals). Cataclysms are rare, though.
I like the analysis of the industrial revolutions (which began a bit before the steam engine and ends in the early 20th century, 200 years later (give or take a few). We now know the limits of matter and energy. (No, that doesn't mean that everything has been discovered and invented, only that we now know what we have--and don't have--to work with.)
We can be confident that this terrestrial ball is ALL THERE IS for us. We either survive here, or we don't survive at all. Decamping to a planet around another star is a fantasy. Setting up a shop on the moon or Mars is technically feasible for a few dozen people, maybe, but as a "new territory" for the species they are both non-starters.
We can be confident that if we do not preserve and enhance the environment we have (even though somewhat degraded) we reduce our chances of biological and cultural survival into the longer-term future. If our biological survival is quite likely--sex and DNA will take care of that--our cultural survival is only as certain as generation-to-generation maintenance. A full set of culture has to be successfully transmitted from one generation to the next. When the transmission is less than complete, the culture can be gone in as few as 3 generations -- maybe less.
When the western Roman Empire went out of business, a millennium was required to recover the cultural goods that had been everyday fare in the empire. A collapse of our culture--happening rapidly or slowly--might take longer to recover, likely not much less.
Yet, you have some of the most prominent philosophers appealing to idealistic notions of governance or appealing to emotions (most notably Marx) about work conditions for the poor (despite the pretty accurate observation that a rising ride lifts most boats, even those of the poor). Clearly, this is a sign of a lack of balance between what a person thinks ought to be and what it actually is. Historicism, I don't know; but, Hegel did get the dialectical method spot on despite his most notable student perverting it.
Quoting Bitter Crank
I have thought about this, and to be honest we are barely touching the potential resources of this plant. There are precious minerals in abundance in the ocean. We have barely tapped the surface of this planet in regards to minerals and other natural resources. There's enough deuterium and tritium in the ocean to power us for an ungodly amount of time. I really do believe that the American ethos of progress, change, and expansionism has not been exhausted in any way by the lack of available goods at our disposal. Rather, it is the sick self-serving elite that has perverted the focus on the US to serve a small minority of people on the top.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Yes, this is true. Globalism though has mitigated that fear along with the abundance of information at one's fingertips. I don't think a cataclysm would set back us as a civilization that dramatically.
There is something problematic about this statement:
First, there is a difference between easy to get and hard to get. It takes a mammoth amount of energy to obtain the "easy to get" resources. Think of the huge open pit iron and copper mines. Those resources were easy. for the most part, those resources have been extracted and used.
Second, the "hard to get" mineral resources are dissolved, very deep (too deep), or very dispersed and diluted--even on dry land.
There may be a lot of oil in the ground, but when it takes more energy to suck it out than is available in the oil, then the extraction process is over. All resources have to be "affordable" to be useful.
There are megatons of minerals to be had, but they have to be had at a reasonable cost and with only manageable damage to the environment. Strip-mining the ocean floor for mineral nodules might not be a great idea.
I guess, but I am not sure what you are trying to get across here. Clarify, perhaps.
Question, think! Most of the information at your fingertips is dependent on a continuous supply of electricity. Delete the electrical supply (lots of cataclysms would do that) and the information at your fingertips disappears, some of it/most of it forever. Turn off the electrical supply and don't turn it back on again... how long do you think it would take the next generation, or the one after that, or the one after that, to figure out what all those little black boxes had been for? How long to figure out how to reconstruct modern science--from near scratch?
In a post cataclysm novel A Canticle for Leibowitz it takes roughly 1000 years to figure out electricity again. Sounds about right to me.
Do you agree that there are two concepts of future:
1) The future that entails making that dentist appointment, being somewhere at some later point in time, the future as being part of the flow of time.
2) Chronological future, the history of events, I think future here is more anticipatory, one event does not cause the next , rather they are just ordered in a certain manner.
Think about how these respective points of view must vary. The POV of being in the flow is the ego, no ego, immediacy and no flow. The POV of chronology is scientific, god like, transcendent.
My question, Question is whether or not a synthesis of these two POVs is possible or not, what would that entail. Can something to be experienced imminently and transcendently at the same time. Maybe the effect of a work of art where the universal particular lives, in which the observer adopts the POV of the work.