Maddenation
Predicting the future
It occurred to me the other day that most of life is about predicting the future. We used to make a big deal out of this centuries ago, with oracles and shamans and fortune tellers and astrologers. Come to think of it, maybe we still do. But what about science? It’s really a legitimate way of predicting the future. Learn the underlying law and you too can say with precision how the planets will behave. Or chemicals. Or human beings (with somewhat less accuracy).
History? “Those who do not learn the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat it.” Theology? You want to go the heaven, don’t you? Art? Well, I said most of life, not all.
All of this predictive capability comes from our big brain and the fact that we have consciousness and a memory of the past. Lots of creatures have some sort of consciousness, but nearly all of them have limited or no capacity to analyze the past and extrapolate to the future. I am reminded of a nature special I watched years ago that investigated the life of a type of parasitic wasp. It would sting and paralyze a large bug, like a beetle, and then drag it, still alive but unable to move, to it’s borrow. It would stop just outside the hole, leave the beetle to go check that the hole was clear, and then drag the beetle inside. There it would lay its eggs in the body of the beetle, and later on, they would eat their way out. Wonderful.
The wasp’s ritual of checking out the hole beforehand sounds like pretty intelligent behavior. However, the investigator found that, if he moved the beetle away from the wasp’s den while the wasp was inside, the wasp would come out, drag the beetle back up the entrance, and then repeat the process of going into the hole to check it out. This could be done repeatedly and the wasp would never figure out that it had just checked out the nest multiple times, and surely it didn’t need to go in one more time! The wasp has a short-term memory problem! God knows how the behavior got started in the first place, but one must assume that millions of years ago, a lot of the wasps that didn’t first check out the hole got eaten by some other meaner, tougher creature.
So where am I going with this? Not sure. But two ways to make people miserable are 1) put them in prison where they can predict a bleak future, or 2) take away their ability to see the future by making it hard to predict. Maybe that’s why we often settle for a comfortable, predictable future, instead of taking risks that may pay off in bigger and better ways.
Dad • Observations • 12/18/04 • 1 comments
Comments
Poker Mania! • 01/12/05 • 10:55 PM:Ha! It’s just me, Dave. I wanted to see what happened if I did this. Dad and I are talking right now. It was really his idea, sorta. And I wanted to make Dad feel better about this entry, seeing as no one had before.
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