Predicting The Past & Future
By: Marcus Van Der Erve
Tags: Predictions, History, Machine Learning, Complexity, Future

A friend, whom I play tennis with on Tuesdays at the unearthly time of 6h15AM in the South-African summers, gave me two books to read. I had just published a heavily researched essay with a scenario about the future of humankind in the light of Artificial Intelligence or AI, its very own creation. After such endeavors, I need to read something totally different to get me out of my writer’s rathole and rise above the subject matter again.

The first book was written by the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2018 Nobel prize in Literature. It came with the ‘subtle’ title: “Drive You Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead”. The other, “How History Gets Things Wrong”, was written by Alex Rosenberg, a philosophy professor at Duke University. Rosenberg and his publisher appear to be well connected. On the book’s back flap, one of the authoritative reviewers praises the book as a “page-turner”. This seemed odd because my friend, an avid reader, had told me that he had put the book aside soon after he had started reading it.

Rosenberg makes a daring point: “every explanation in narrative history is wrong.” He bases his claim on a model that shows what goes on in the mind, before it initiates behavior — a “theory of mind”, in other words. Developed by others, the model depicts the obvious: our thinking and behavior are affected by our beliefs and desires and, as Rosenberg adds, so is every narrative that we invent to explain the past. Rosenberg fills his book with a litany of historical examples — until it bores you — making his point in exquisite detail, over and again. Once you’re done reading, it’s clear: we certainly may enjoy historical narratives but we should not trust them.

Should we even trust Rosenberg’s narrative?

Readers must feel left alone in the cold of Rosenberg’s conclusion. Relevant as it is, it falls short in answering one crucial question: “What do we do, instead, to interpret the past so we may learn from it, better than before? If we shouldn’t trust the great minds that concocted explanations of the past so far — Kissinger’s included, then who or what should we trust instead?

Here, Tokarczuk’s book made an unexpected contribution. Tokarczuk, who almost appears to refer to her own propensity, describes the thoughts of her main character, a woman of sixty with “ailments” who helps dress a deceased neighbor after his body was found dead by her other neighbor.

I’ve always regarded the feet as the most intimate and personal part of our bodies. It’s in the feet that all knowledge of Mankind lies hidden, the body sends them a weighty sense of who we really are and how we relate to the earth.

This piece actually made me continue reading Tokarczuk’s book, which, I admit, lies beyond my usual reading interest. When watching people for the first time around, I watch their feet — not just metaphorically, if I can. I like to see the footing, on which their reality rests. So, “What is the footing of the realities that rise in the past?”, I wondered. The emergence of physical and societal realities is familiar terrain to me. This has not much to do with Rosenberg’s ‘theories of mind’ but more with ‘theories of organization’.

My theory of organization, tested over decades, describes the emergence of forms of organization, no matter whether they involve molecules or men. The premise is that organizations are thermodynamic, which means as much as that they arise for a reason. In a thin layer of liquid that is heated from below, molecules start following orderly paths to carry the heat from the bottom to the surface more efficiently. Molecules divvy up the task and entangle their behaviors on paths of least action. Similarly, employees start following orderly paths to supply products and services more efficiently when a market niche ‘heats up’ the company that they work for. They divvy up the work and entangle their behaviors on contextual paths of least action. Of course, whereas molecules in a liquid stop moving in sync when the heat is turned off, employees usually move on to search for new niches as long as the metabolic reserves of the organization allow. Other than that, the behaviors of both molecules and men obey the thermodynamic logic.