Let's learn about a "User Guide to the Future". Have you ever been worried or anxious about facing the future environment | humanity | users
For humans, the "future" is a wonderful and important concept. The reason why it is wonderful is that the past has become a predetermined fact, while the future contains multiple possibilities, providing infinite space for human magical imagination. Thinking about the many possibilities of the future and preparing for it to the best of one's ability is of great significance for individuals, as well as for the entire ethnic group, region, and country.
However, it is somewhat surprising that the question of how Earth's creatures and humans think and respond to the future has not become an independent discipline or discipline. This does not mean that no one pays attention to and predicts the future development of the natural environment and human society. On the contrary, everyone is paying attention to possible trends and trends in the future, and countless experts and scholars use them as a means of making a living. However, few works have focused on the general mechanisms of thinking and managing the future from microorganisms to human society, which is precisely the core issue of David Christian, Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Oxford in the UK and director of the Institute of Grand History at Macquarie University in Australia, in his book "The Grand History of the Future: How to Build Future Thinking".
"The sky remains unchanged, and the way also remains unchanged"
The future is closely linked to time. Philosophers often lament that time is gone forever. Therefore, time is often compared to a flowing river, passing by like this, unwilling to sacrifice day and night, or an arrow shot from the past to the future, moving forward without turning back. However, in Christian's view, this one-way concept of time from the past to the future has only become a universal concept in modern society. Throughout the long history of humanity, individual life has existed in a relatively static natural and social environment. In such an environment, direct life experiences tell people that the world is not constantly moving forward, but rather repeating and repeating itself. This forms a relatively static worldview, as the saying goes, "The sky remains unchanged, and the way also remains unchanged." "Under the sunlight, there is nothing new.".
Of course, this does not mean that the future is certain or secure. War and famine often bring devastating blows, but people's response to potential dangers in the future mainly relies on experience and customs. The logic behind this is that in a relatively static and recurring world, past experiences provide reliable guidance for the future. In fact, many religious beliefs are simply systematizing these experiences and customs, and then providing legitimacy and legitimacy in the name of gods, divine will, or ancestors. By recognizing this, we can understand why there are so many physiological and psychological diseases among humans in modern society, many of which did not exist in the past.
In ancient society and ancient times, human influence on the natural environment was not as great as it is today, and the changes in the social environment in which humans lived were not as fast as they are today. For a short human lifespan, adapting to environmental changes relied on generations of biological evolution. However, the agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago and the industrial revolution more than two centuries ago greatly enhanced the ability of human society to transform the natural environment, and also accelerated the pace of change in human society itself. The speed of natural and social environment changes far exceeds the speed at which humans rely on biological evolution to adapt to environmental changes.
Over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, human body structures have become accustomed to running and hunting on grasslands. However, such body structures are obviously not suitable for long-term work facing the yellow earth and facing the sky, or long-term desk work in the office. Therefore, modern people often experience physical function degradation and neck, shoulder, waist, and leg diseases. In order to cope with complex interpersonal relationships and changes in the social environment, some natural physiological reactions still play a role, such as life and work stress leading to excessive or insufficient secretion of certain hormones in the body, resulting in negative emotions such as anxiety and depression. In a complex and ever-changing human environment, the spontaneous mechanisms of human response to uncertainty are frequently activated, leading to various functional diseases.
"Time needs to be increasingly precise"
Since modern times, the progress of science and technology and the expansion of capitalism have made human society more closely connected as a whole, and the division of labor and cooperation between people has become increasingly important. Therefore, the importance of relatively static natural time and individual biological time decreases, and the social time for each person's actions needs to start coordinating. Since the 19th century, different countries, organizations, and individuals have adopted a unified time and calendar, and timers have become increasingly accurate. In an era of deepening globalization and expanding market mechanisms, every individual, village, community, town, and country can no longer be isolated. Economic and information networks closely connect everyone together. Technological breakthroughs, new product launches, war outbreaks, or economic crises thousands of miles away are closely related to our immediate interests, constantly affecting our nerves. Therefore, almost everyone lives in a world of endless change, and for the first time, humanity realized that the idea of assuming that things remain largely unchanged is wrong. How to think about the future and deal with future uncertainty is crucial for everyone.
From the perspective of biological evolution, the basic steps for thinking and responding to the future, from microorganisms to humans, are the same: collecting information, judging trends, and making choices. Of course, other organisms besides humans may not be able to truly "think" or make conscious choices. They only respond instinctively to changes in the external environment through biochemical reactions. However, in reality, the mechanisms by which humans often respond are also the same, such as drastic changes in the levels of certain hormones in the body under environmental stimuli. The boundaries between humans and other living beings, including cognitive, emotional, conscious, and rational boundaries, may be much more blurred than people imagine. Therefore, it is not entirely inappropriate to compare other organisms to the way humans think about the future. Various organisms, including humans, rely on perceptual systems to collect information, such as sunlight, moisture, temperature, humidity, potential food, or potential business opportunities. Then, the nervous system processes the information, identifies potential trend changes, and selects the best course of action to maximize the probability of survival and reproduction.
"Social progress is like biological evolution"
The two great transformations of language and writing have enabled humans to stand out from other living beings, significantly improving their ability to collect and process information, ultimately becoming a creature with advanced intelligence. Starting from hundreds of thousands of years ago, humans have developed their own language, which has greatly enhanced their ability to share information and accumulate information as a group. This promotes collaboration among human individuals, expands the size of the human community living together, makes human social behavior more important and complex, further stimulates the increase in human brain size and information processing capabilities, and promotes stronger human language function. Language condenses rich information, endowing humans with abstract abilities or what the author of A Brief History of Humanity, Yuval Herali, calls "fictional" abilities. This fictional ability integrates an increasingly large population and gradually forms concepts, cultures, organizations, and systems that promote human collaboration. The emergence of text has promoted the dissemination of information across a wider range and more generations, making information and knowledge a collective "asset" of humanity. Each individual can share this knowledge to varying degrees, and at the same time, countless individuals can contribute to the accumulation of collective "assets".
The continuous accumulation of knowledge has led to the emergence of new technologies, connecting more and more humans to a vast network and placing them in an increasingly rapidly changing world. When thinking and dealing with the future, humans are like playing a game of cat and mouse. On the one hand, the enhancement of information collection and processing capabilities, especially the popularization of computers and the application of big data, has improved human thinking and ability to respond to the future; On the other hand, the faster technological progress and the wider human connections, the stronger the uncertainty of the future, which poses greater challenges to human thinking and ability to respond to the future. To this day, whether humans can win in this game is still an unknown number.
The accumulation of knowledge and technological progress have significantly improved human predictive abilities for the future in certain areas, such as in natural science fields such as celestial movement, weather prediction, and drug efficacy. However, in other aspects, human predictive ability for the future has not significantly improved, such as in social fields such as economic operation or political activities. This is because all predictions are based on past experience and existing knowledge, while predicted events occur in the future, and there is no mechanism to ensure that future environmental conditions are consistent with past situations, as David Hume said, there is a logical leap in inferring the future from the past. Of course, this difficulty is much smaller in the natural field than in the social field. Some social phenomena depend on human social behavior and the interaction between individuals. Individual behavior is determined by their thoughts, and human thoughts are constantly changing. When a social group pattern is discovered, it is often the time when this pattern fails, because the discovery of this pattern can change an individual's thoughts and behavior, leading to a change in this social pattern. Because of this, humans should not be overly arrogant about their ability to understand the world. They can transform the world according to their unquestionable values and ideal forms, which may lead to various unexpected results. Understanding and transforming complex human societies is even more so. The progress of society, like the evolution of organisms, is more about the process of countless individuals repeating interactive games based on a reasonable rule. Of course, the never-ending curiosity, enterprising spirit, and willingness to innovate have always been the enduring driving force for the continuous development of human society. What we need to be wary of is only "fatal arrogance".
"A 'User Guide to the Future'"
Christian applies his discoveries to predict and respond to the future, interestingly imagining the human world a hundred and a thousand years later, as well as the distant future of galaxies and the universe. This book also serves as a "user guide to the future.". Obviously, what we are most concerned about may still be the author's so-called "near future," which is the fate of humanity a hundred years later. The author believes that population growth is not a concern for the challenges of the next century for humanity, but the destruction of climate and ecosystems caused by human activities, the shadow of destructive weapons and war, and the increasing inequality of wealth and power may lead to the downfall of human society. Technological progress, consensus on achieving sustainable development, and the emergence of multinational organizations may prevent or delay the occurrence of disasters, while conflicts of interest between different groups and unpredictable political factors bring more uncertainty. It is possible for human society to collapse, shrink in scale, achieve sustainable development, or grow in a hundred years. The challenges faced by human society in the future are undoubtedly extremely severe. Maintaining a reverence for future risks may be the true manifestation of our advanced intelligence as creatures.
"Future History: How to Establish Future Thinking" by David Christian, translated by Wang Kaihao and published by CITIC Publishing Group
