From: Fábio Diales da Rocha (crismafabio@mail.telepac.pt)
Date: Wed Jul 14 1999 - 17:19:33 MDT
----- Original Message -----
From: Prof. Gomes <gomes@cnen.gov.br>
To: <extropians@extropy.com>
Sent: Quarta-feira, 14 de Julho de 1999 16:21
Subject: Is it Possible to Preview the Future ??
> Well, supposing the brain of a certain person would be able " to feel"
> sufficient informations about the actual state of the world and also "to
feel"
> its tendencies, it is completely reasonable that a "sensitive" person
would be
> able to "preview" the future behaviour of the world... Something like
> extrapolating a system's behaviour when it is known its dynamic equations
and
> have initial conditions at a time (simplifying...). Obviously the supposed
> sentitives, if real, are subjected to lots of noises and errors...But...
if the
> above supposition is true, when we artificialize brain's functions, we'll
be
> able to reduce the error too... and preview (extrapolate...) the future...
Well, we are all able to predict the future to a certain extent. Common
sense gives us some fairly reasonable power in this domain. If you study
predictive sciences you further develop it. But, although you were kind of
vague, I take it that you meant to predict the future of *humanity - a sort
of a intuitive and innate psycohistory.
This is all theoretically possible but very unlikely. Even if a psycohistory
exists (and then it wouldn't be restrained to "sensitive" people - computers
would probably do it much better) it wouldn't be enough to predict the
future because some individuals have to much power - and no psycohistory is
able to predict the behavior of individuals, by definition - and because
much of what makes human history depends on developments of technology, and
said psycohistory would have to _KNOW_ if things like IA and nanotech (as
well as steam and electricity) are possible or attainable, and obviously
that isn't in its "field".
And even if you don't take that into account and psycohistory is possible
then why should there be an innate version? There isn't much evolutionary
pressure for that, and it would have to have developed after society but by
then humans were already fairly insensitive to natural selection (not to
mention the extremely short time in which evolution would have to act,
especially if you consider that psycohistory is much more complex than even
intelligence).
And even if an innate psycohistory existed, how would the "sensitives"
gather the "initial conditions" of the system?
There is fairly strong evidence pointing to a maximum, and fairly low, rate
at which humans can absorb data. So, by the time the initial conditions were
gathered, assuming the sensitive didn't die by then, they would be grossly
out of date and therefore inadequate - as the sensitive would not have
gathered a single and concise set of past conditions but a mixture of
conditions of past and present).
Fábio Diales da Rocha
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