About the future…
I always live in the present. The future, I do not know it. The past, I no longer have it. The former oppresses me as the possibility of everything, the latter as the reality of nothing. I have not hope nor longing.
Fernando Pessoa/Bernardo Soares, The Book of Disquiet
In the end of the 20th century – past – among anthropologists there was consensus that the defining capacities of the human, in contrast to the other living beings, are: (1) self-awareness, (2) a universal notion of the good, the beautiful and the truthful, (3) use and development of languages (4) the ability to imagine the future.
The future is, by definition, “the time that is to come”. It is the set or system of facts, events, thoughts, and narratives referred to what is about to come. The etymology of future is derived from the Indo-European radical *bheue-, “to grow”; from lat. futur-, futurus, a, um, “what will be”, “what ought to be”, “what shall occur”, “destined to be”. Adjective or noun, there are 13 vocables in the English language from middle French and middle English from the 14th century. Absolute future is, in the space time continuum, the region limited by the light cone in which the time coordinate is positive. Futurism is a movement in art, music, and literature, initiated by Martinetti in Italy about 1909 and marked by an effort to give formal expression to the dynamic energy and mechanical movement processes, rejecting the past and everything traditional (Fernando Pessoa, as a modernist, was influenced by it).
The future as a time dimension is either conceived circularly, as in the myth of “eternal return” or linearly when one says, “to know is to predict”. The latter may be represented by an hourglass. It is a divided time, where the granules fall from the upper compartment to the lower compartment, through a connecting channel. And one may wonder if the granules from the upper compartment are from the past or the future? Hebrews conceived time as a function of future, Greeks as a function of present. In Plato’s Timaeus, “time is the mobile image of eternity”. In Aristoteles’ Physis, the concept of movement is the support for time and refers the need to consider the “before” the “now” and the “after”. The concepts of time and movement are tied to each other. Time is measured by movement and movement is measured by time. Plotino added that it is consciousness that measures time. Plato’s moving image of eternity is located in the psyche. When Christian theologians began dealing with the above questions, St. Augustine sustains that time is paradoxical: it is a “will be” which not yet is. There is no present, it is past, there is no future therefore there is no time.
The paradoxes of time had already been foreseen by the Greeks, namely by Zeno of Eleia. Examples are “Achilles and the Tortoise” and “the arrow that never reaches the target”… For Aristoteles paradoxes are fake arguments for they are supported by a representation of time constituted by a sum of instants. Most intriguing is the current theory of multiverse in which space-time is considered to be granular!
In the “Memory Labyrinth”, St. Augustine’s expression, Hope is a sentiment of future. It is to perceive as feasible what one longs for. In Christian faith it is the second of the three Theological Virtues between Faith and Charity. Hope, from old English hopian, before 12th century. Iconographically hope is depicted by an anchor, a sign of stability. In the 2nd century anchors could be seen over the graves at Christian cemeteries centuries before crosses became the norm.
The anchor, from lat. ancora, gr. ágkura, from indo-european radical *ank-, “to bend, to fold, to twist”, was the symbol of the ocean god since Antiquity. It promised security and stability and as such became the symbol of Faith and Hope. To long for the future is to set sail into the unknown, hoping to fulfill our most secret dreams.
To predict the future is real, in one´s relations, in group, in the community, in the world… Some people live making predictions: from football to politics, from the magician to the socialite magazines. Indeed, the predictions we assume as ours tend to be a recapitulation of the ones from our reference or belonging groups. This is the context in which occur the divination, the omen, the augury, the presentiment, as well as the prognostic and the prophecy. In Ancient Greece, at the Temple of Delphi, the Pythoness under the influence of inebriating fumes deliriously answered those who consulted her. The answers were translated into hexameter verses of ambiguous meaning and susceptible of more than one interpretation. When king Crassus asked if he should wage war against the Persians, the answer was that if he would do it an empire would be destroyed! As it happens the destroyed empire was his own!… Similarly, the Roman Consuls, invested with imperium, always asked an augur for divination before going to war abroad, who answered inferring from the flight and the singing of birds.
Futurology, forged in 1943 by O.K. Flechtheim, is the study that deals with future possibilities based on current trends. Alvin Toffler (1970), in Future Shock, bravely proposed that the fast pace of social and technological change would cause physical and psychological distress in people unable to cope with such fast changes. Nowadays we would define the new science of the artificial taking into consideration the continuous changes in the ways of interpersonal communication and we easily accept extravagant predictions. Nevertheless, they may induce anxiety as it is the case of Artificial Intelligence.
Psychologically the future does not exist, only the past is real, that is, it may resist our will. Even non existing, the future is worthy. In all cases to consider the future is a way of extending the knowledge one has both from the present and from the past. – As long as I can remember, year after year, I’ve always heard: “O Brasil é um país de futuro”!… (Brazil is the country of the future).
Rationally there is no future! There is no present! Whatever one may think, the thought is anchored between the past and the future. Neuropsychologically, for that thought to occur an image in the very short-term memory is required. It is a question of milliseconds but that is how we operate. When one performs a task (Aufgabe) which one is barely aware of, it is enough to form a set (Einstellung), originated in an instinct or in an overlearned habit, one’s best bet about the future is that it is a continuation of the immediate past. One does not need to go back to a conscious thought because the emerging power felling is enough. One of the outstanding human conquests occurs when the child replies to a helper: “There is no need, I am capable of doing it myself!” – Notice: this sentence implies a future prediction…
What often is forgotten is that to predict is paradigmatic to experimental research. As a matter of fact, empirical research is turned to the future. The researcher formulates the problem from the observation of the real world and or from the review of acquired knowledge and present theories. In order to solve it he constructs an hypothesis according to previously existing or developing theories and sets the prediction under the terms: if in a given place and time an effect over a subject or an object is produced, that will be a limited variation of the real present. (It is of the future). As a consequence, the timeless criteria of certainty (not necessarily of truth) always resides in the future and also as a probability.
The Chevallier de Méré, a notorious gambler, wrote to Blaise Pascal asking how could he win all the time? The answer contained nothing less than the principles of the mathematical theory of probabilities, the basis of statistical theory, also initiated in the 17th century by J. Graunt, a London merchant. The object of statistics is to collect and interpret numerical data. Originated in the observation of social facts spread out to all scientific domains, including Physics. Some believe statistics can predict futures. Besides economists, that is the case of all those that accept Democrito’s law of mechanical necessity (“every effect has a cause”), the support of materialistic monism. If one knows every cause one can predict, yesterday, today, and tomorrow, the secrets of the universe! However, every event in the universe depends not only on necessity but also on chance!
In the post war, with Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of communications, information became paramount in the Age of Uncertainty (information is the inverse of uncertainty). The creation of the unit BIT, opened a new road for the future.
The future is also uncertain because one cannot predict the discontinuities of physical and conceptual transformations. Catastrophe theory expresses the unstable balance of trajectories over the “border of chaos”. These are situations in which the slightest deviation may produce a huge effect.
On the light side, read the following:
— “Freddy, I hope you live to be a hundred, plus about three months”.
— “Thank you, Alex. But why the three months?”
— “I wouldn’t want you to die suddenly.”
The above anecdote is from T. Cathcart and D.Klein (2006), Plato and Platipus Walk into a Bar…: Understanding Philosophy Trough Jokes, naming Heiddeger’s Sein und Zeit, when the “nothing” is seen as a strange thing. Even stranger is that thing called the future…
Orlindo Gouveia Pereira, MD, PhD
Psychiatrist, Emeritus Professor of Psychology of Art