Session 1
Ok, I am lecturing now. I am going to convey some pieces of knowledge to you, and on the way I am going to tell you something useful; give you a tutorial on the Future. You will see; this knowledge I hold is accurate and important, and I know how to conduct analysis in the jargon of authority. In fact, I was up late last night thinking about how to tell you about the future, and what I might say while I am telling you. I decided that I had to know exactly what I know, and tell you exactly all of it, and then I would have some position in relation to you, and we might actually begin to have a dialogue. I still think it sounds reasonable, let’s begin.
In order to begin our Lectures on the Future, we will have to start with the Past. If the Past has ever seemed, well, obsolete, we must here remember that it always lives on because its maximum utility is always in the Future. We have always just missed its value, or in other words, are soon to attain it.
The Past interprets the world better than other things. We can stand here and embrace reality not because of the reassurances of the present, but because of the crippling nature of the Past. The Future is the opposite of behavioral certainty – rather, it is the final, and perpetual, defeat of reason. The Future embodies the Past at the same time that it uses hope to invert it.
Let me get to the meat of this message: the Past floods the barriers between scientific disciplines and mental insecurities. The Past can be seen as a science. Yes, let’s say that this is true. It is a science, and the only science that can capture the global nature of systems. The Past has brought together thinkers from fields that we once assumed to be widely separated. The Past poses problems that both defy and unify conventional ways of working in science.
Most importantly, the Past, as a scientific discipline, makes strong claims about the universal behavior of complex systems.
The first Scientific Theorists of the Past were the scientists who set the real discipline of “systems analysis” in motion. They shared certain sensibilities, and applied those sensibilities to how they saw complex things. They had an eye for time, and they had an eye for patterns. They were especially turned on by patterns that appeared on different scales at the same time, or on the same scale at different times. And yet, they had a taste for randomness, for jagged data and irregularities, as well.
Sometimes these scientists called themselves believers, or converts, or evangelists—because really, what were they addressing? They were doing nothing less than speculating about determinism, free will, evolution, and the fate of conscious intelligence. They were the first to invest in the momentum of thinking rather than thinking itself. They felt they were doing nothing less than rebuking a trend in science toward reductionism; banishing the notion that systems can be analyzed purely in terms in their current state. Ha! They said. As though systems can be studied as a snapshot in time!
The Scientific Theorists of the Past believed these and other things. They believed, most of all, that they were looking for the whole.