Know the Future

Are you serious?

Is it something impossible? Or is this not a pleonasm? Both the extent of the past in time, the depth of our instruments and our increasing knowledge of the past grow ‘our’ common knowledge everyday. Through science we also increasingly know laws according to what has happened and will again happen in the future. Our ability to plan, predict and document grows so much that the future might be just plain knowledge and to know the future… knowing knowledge.

Structures, systems and variables

The Universe is assumed started homogeneous and isotropic, hence with few variables, themselves not much variable or even not at all if it were not for an Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (HUP), which would derive from a co-necessity principle such as previously proposed, cf. our first blog.

This means that new variables have ’emerged’ over time, allowing for instance events and phenomena as constraints, clauses ranging from nucleosynthesis to ‘Large Scale Structure’, life and finally ‘us’.. not bad after all, assuming we are happy to be on board.

So new variables have come with time, or rather time and more precisely the future, has come with new variables which, by introducing new degrees of freedom, develop a time oriented universe in their direction as opposed to the one with existing and time reversible variables, which is their past somehow because this is where the limited number of degrees of freedom makes its probability null as opposed to the direction of the future.

This avoids the cosmological coincidence problem to recourse to the Anthropic principle. Homogeneous and huge were the datasets and their successive complexity layers and nevertheless fewer and heterogeneous were those that make the future and yet, being more complex and fragile, decay with entropy growth, going to the past.

Now the goal here is not to enter and wander into debates, however important [1] they may be, among diverse attempts at realism such as between reductionism, positivism, Platonism, Aristotelianism, naturalism… which seem to come from looking the same thing from diverse angles.

Our purpose today is to focus on the sort of phase transition, about this coincidence, that saw life and, much more decisively and recently, the human take over the role of driving the future, even at a point that some geologists call ‘Anthropocene’, as a world of pioneers.

Is this human future predictable?

Quite amazingly it would seem that the future of our planet and the universe would be predictable if it were wholly natural, hence from laws of a Nature questioned as Natura naturans versus Natura naturata by Spinoza and in not so much different a duality by Kant in his last Critique. There, humans appear on the ‘naturans’ side and it is therefore striking that this part of the flow to the future may be the one that humans do not predict!

Hence one way to reconcile reductionism to emergentism from the article in reference: the first come from the future and the seconds from the past and they need one another because there is no future without a past and conversely.

Indeed it seems that we constantly fail at predicting the future inasmuch as it radically differs from the past, does not reproduce it but always, even systematically, creates it through disruptions, breakthroughs and even more the kind of revolutions that Kuhn concludes unavoidable for Science – but what may still expect to escape the reach of Science? – and Schumpeter and Chandler for innovation, entrepreneurship and management…presumably also art and not to speak of societal, social revolutions.

So here are some good news after all:

• the future will always surprise us
• it comes increasingly from or through us (whom are indeed surprising) and this is the future organization of a better world, the much sought after world of knowledge,
• its adds new levels of variables and constraints… and oracles to close them up, so that the filling and increasing in complexity levels optimally hence most efficiently fills the layers of increasing complexity to us as future or conversely knowledge as pas from us.

Reductionism play it with names and formula, hence from a mathematical world with its smooth, dense, proving power set which is also the power of semantics or natural language, and it projects it onto the discrete finite lattice – as huge as it seems – of experimental data and verification.

Emergence is Big, with Data, but Reduction to formula is Powerful, with Meta, complexity as summarized on the somehow reductive formula of emergence above: the key point is something that physicists fight in order to reduce and remove it from their incommensurable (hence future) and just keep what actually emerges, under the name of renormalization.

This might be the greatest among many remarkable contributions of Computational Complexity discoveries to Science: the reduction of the incommensurable to a commensurable.

Conclusion on predicting the future

You would be surprised by the extent to which the future is both always so surprising and yet so systematically predicted or more exactly anticipated, ’caused’ as told, one way or another. Before so many plans – especially when it comes through no plan – it is written or evocated but the surprise comes when, where and inasmuch as it is effected, actualized and emerges.

These are the projections from the dense, smooth semantic and mathematical future into our discrete lattices of quantized and entangled variables, that we need to renormalize in a much wider sense to predict which piece of future will appear, emerge when, how and how much.

This is what the interdisciplinary project i/REVUER, cf. www.revuer.org is planning to reach upon the premises of its ongoing and incoming n/REVUER and next, disciplinary but already disruptive d/REVUER next major step.

The predictive power of disciplinary fields is already summarized in our previous blogs and has been the bread and butter of epistemologists over decades, if not centuries: the new challenge is now the plan to develop and reach the General Predictability inherent to what would become an effective, interdisciplinary… field of fields.

[1] G. Johnson, Challenging Particle physics as Path to Truth, New York Times, 12/4/2001