“Life is chaos. Chaos is life. Control is an illusion”
Trance Gemini to Capt. Dylan Hunt of the Andromeda Ascendant.She is quite right. And chaos, by definition, can’t be predicted. Anybody can predict A future. Just ask any psychic. The trick is to predict THE future. Consider a pool table. It’s comparatively simple to predict, within a certain degree of accuracy, where that little white ball will end up after a direct shot. It becomes more difficult with a rail shot. When you include combination shots it becomes extremely hard very quickly. Life is this way only even fuzzier due to the addition of quantum uncertainty which adds interest to an otherwise Newtonianly boring Universe. In the pool table analogy consider that neither the cue ball or any other object ball is well defined in space-time. The rails are fuzzy as well. Now try and predict the path of even a single cue ball. Sometimes you get a glimpse of what might happen. Most of the time you can’t see past the end of the cue stick.
The physical Universe on the small scale is like that. People are even worse. Not only do you have quantum mechanics to contend with but you have people’s perceptions which are inconsistent at best and colored by their own histories. That is to say, no two people see things alike. Just ask several people who saw the same event. Plus the fact that knowing what might happen has a tendency to alter what might happen.
As far as predicting the chaotic future is concerned the best you can hope for is determining an attractor shape in some multi- dimensional space and averaging that into some kind of probability density field distribution. Just remember that the inputs and feed backs are changing in their own fuzzy ways all the time.
Anybody can predict A future. The trick is to predict THE future.
Predicting the future is not completely ruled out. It’s just that doing it with precision is mind staggeringly unlikely.
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Author: Chris Johnson
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