Saturday, September 24, 2022

The Epistemology Of Preparing For The Future

There are events that are logically possible (any event that does not contradict logical axioms could happen or could have happened), but no future event is logically necessary in that it is impossible for it not to happen even if it seems highly improbable: no war, election, business activity, marriage, car accident, or bout of weather is fated to happen by sheer logical necessity.  Even if strict determinism in the physical world (which is not the phenomenological realm) is ultimately true, a different set of initial natural phenomena could have taken place and led to a different sequence of natural events, so no particular event is logically necessary.  With humans and any other conscious creature with volition, it gets more complicated because events voluntary caused by humans could be triggered or averted by choice, and even then, a being with my limitations cannot know what will happen, only what is possible or seemingly likely.  This fact shapes human life in ways that could be easily taken for granted or misunderstood by non-rationalists.

There would literally be no reason to exercise or eat healthy foods if one knew that no illness would befall one due to a lack of these things other than sheer subjective preference, for instance.  The entire basis of doing such a thing to prevent an undesired outcome would be completely eliminated!  Moreover, why would someone insure a house they knew would never be destroyed or robbed, apply to a job they knew they would not receive, or pursue a relationship they knew would be brief and one-sided?  Why would anyone invest in a business that will fail or show mercy to someone who will abuse it?  Yes, some people might still prefer to act in certain ways as a symbolic gesture or an expression of their personalities despite knowing things will not go as they wish, but many people would at least probably pause and change their mind about a great number of things.  Knowing which logically possible future events will occur and what events precede and follow them with absolute certainty would so thoroughly change human life that almost everything besides dwelling on logic and introspection would be altered.

Betrayals could be avoided, fruitless medications or careers could be sidestepped, and the sins of others could be identified ahead of time.  The inability to know the future (beyond the fact that whatever happens, events will be necessity be logically possible because the laws of logic cannot become untrue or cease to exist) is of course denied, ignored, or trivialized by many non-rationalists, who pretend like they can know future events in some cases and admit, likely without even fully grasping the truth, that they cannot know if other events will occur in other cases.  Still, the whole of human life in the external world--as opposed to interacting with logic and introspection, which need no external world to be grasped and underpin all epistemology as it is--with all of its social planning, personal goals, and scientific probabilities must be lived with an unknowable future looming.

It is no exaggeration to say that preparing for the future is to either knowingly or unknowingly labor in anticipation of some possibility that might or might not actually come to pass, with entire lifestyles and decisions hinging on the unknowability of the future.  This might deeply frighten some, and it might excite others, depending on their worldviews, personalities, and life experiences, but it is an inevitable truth that a being that cannot logically prove what specific events will happen in the future cannot know what will happen.  With individual, more focused examples, almost anyone selectively knows this already even if they do not understand it very thoroughly or know how it relates to broader epistemology and, inescapably, to the laws of logic.  Realizing this is a default human limitation with regard to all future events is where most people err or remain in ignorance, and yet the only way to not prepare for a desired or likely future is to do do absolutely nothing with one's body, as well as not think about the future at all (this could be mental preparation).  Non-rationalists will just be more surprised in a general sense when things do not always unfold as they believe they "must" because they have made assumptions the whole time.

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