Rational Philosophy

While we live in the moment we must accept the uncertainty of the future… and the past.

“Prophesy is a good line of business, but it is full of risks,”
– Mark Twain (who may lose his house twice over…)

Back in the dark ages of last November I wrote about a stockbroker who, in anger, jostled the stationary bike of a fellow spin-class member. Frustrated by the man’s grunting and shouting, he grabbed the handlebars of the offender’s bike, lifted it off the ground (while he was still on it) and dropped it. My blog post on the subject sports a photograph of the purportedly injured party, Stuart Sugarman, a partner at an investment firm, wearing a neck brace. Here we are in sunny June and I read that a jury has acquitted the stockbroker of assault, having found Mr. Sugarman to be an unreliable witness, and deciding that the incident didn’t, beyond reasonable doubt, result in Sugarman’s injuries.

When I wrote my original post I was convinced that the stockbroker, Christopher Carter, was guilty of something — perhaps not a crime, but certainly of unreasonably losing his cool. The current news story casts a somewhat heroic glow on Carter’s vigilante act, blaming Sugarman for being a boar in the class, and a liar to boot.

Where does the truth lie?

Some scientists have apparently decided that wherever the truth about dark energy lies they are not going to find it. Current calculations indicate that the universe is 4% regular matter (stars, planets, pencils), 22% dark matter, and 74% dark energy (not related to dark matter as far as we know). Despite a lot of attention and investigation, dark energy isn’t yielding its mysteries, and some scientists are worried that it won’t.

Such pessimism seems unwarranted at this point in time. After all, the future could last a long time. Why give up now?

I’m reasonably sure that Ray Kurzweil, noted futurist, would concur. Kurzweil has been making predictions about the future for over thirty years, with impressive results. In the ’80s he predicted that a computer would defeat the world chess champion by 1998 (it happened in 1997). Some of Kurzweil’s current predictions:

• Within 10 years, a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight.
• Within 20 years, all energy will come from clean sources.
• In 15 years… your life expectancy will rise faster than you age.
• And then, by 2050, the Singularity, when humans and/or machines begin to evolve into immortal beings with ever-improving software.

Still doubtful? “Two decades ago he predicted that “early in the 21st century” blind people would be able to read anything anywhere using a handheld device. In 2002 he narrowed the arrival date to 2008. On Thursday night at the festival, he pulled out a new gadget the size of a cellphone, and when he pointed it at the brochure for the science festival, it had no trouble reading the text aloud.”

From a philosophical perspective, an interesting aspect of all of this is that time, as we perceive it, is all in our minds. The past and the future, as we commonly conceive of them, don’t exist. All of existence rests on the current moment. Reality is transitional. Causality creates our perception of time. The predictable changing of things, the nudge of being from one moment to the next. Without this, time would be meaningless.

(This, as a digression, is the clue to understanding our existence. Once we have accepted that the rules of causality shape the universe we live in, we can begin to understand why we live, think and feel the way we do.)

This morning when I woke up I was the proud owner of an idea for a sure-fire business opportunity. By 9:30am, that sunny feeling of certainty had been toppled as I found out that someone already held the copyright to my idea. All was lost. By 3pm, after a brief nap, I’d regained my optimism after dreaming up a revision to my idea… Time, you faithless lover, revise me again.