Seeing into the Future: A Short History of Prediction PDF
Preview Seeing into the Future: A Short History of Prediction
SEEING INTO THE FUTURE S E E I N G I N TO T H E F U T U R E A Short History of Prediction MARTIN VAN CREVELD REAKTION BOOKS For Erich and Anneke Vad Published by Reaktion Books Ltd Unit 32, Waterside 44–48 Wharf Road London n1 7ux, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2020 Copyright © Martin van Creveld 2020 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 978 1 78914 229 7 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 7 PART I: A MYSTERIOUS JOURNEY 1 A VILLAIN OF A MAGICIAN 18 2 IN THE NAME OF THE LORD 30 3 ORACLES, PYTHIAS AND SIBYLS 54 4 A DREAM TO REMEMBER 61 5 CONSULTING THE DEAD 78 PART II: BE SOBER AND REASONABLE 6 SEARCHING THE HEAVENS 98 7 CLEAR AND MANIFEST 113 8 ON BIRDS, LIVERS AND SACRIFICES 122 9 THE MAGIC OF NUMBERS 129 10 DECODING THE BIBLE 145 PART III: ENTER MODERNITY 11 FROM PATTERNS TO CYCLES 158 12 WITH HEGEL ON THE BRAIN 173 13 ASK, AND YOU’LL BE ANSWERED 191 14 THE MOST POWERFUL TOOLS 199 15 WAR GAMES HERE, WAR GAMES THERE 207 PART IV: THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE 16 LOOKING BACKWARDS 222 17 WHY IS PREDICTION SO DIFFICULT? 232 18 IS OUR GAME IMPROVING? 247 19 A WORLD WITHOUT UNCERTAINTY? 250 REFERENCES 255 FURTHER READING 282 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 283 INDEX 284 INTRODUCTION Do you want to make God laugh? Tell him your plans. Woody Allen T he idea of doing this book was born somewhere in mid- 2017. Its parent was Homo Deus, the second of three volumes written by my former student, the famous Yuval Noah Harari. As I went along, a single thought kept entering my mind: how can he, as well as many others who have engaged on a similar endeavour, know what the future will bring? How about Ray Kurzweil, Stephen Hawking, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne? And how about Nostradamus, Hildegard of Bingen, the Roman augurs, the Greek Pythia, the Hebrew prophets, the ‘Chaldean’ astrologers? What were their underlying assumptions, what kind of reasoning did they apply, and what methods did they use? The more I thought about these questions, the more difficult they appeared. If I dared tackle them, then this was precisely because I saw them as a terrific challenge. The role that the willingness and ability to look into the future plays in human life, both individual and collective, can hardly be exaggerated. Call it anticipation, call it vision, call it foresight, call it forecasting or call it prediction: without it, human life as we know it is utterly impossible. Goals cannot be established, nor efforts towards realizing them launched; nor the consequences of reaching, or not reaching, those goals be con- sidered. Neither can threats and dangers be identified and either met head on or avoided. All this is as true today as it was when we first became human. Presumably it will remain true as long 7 seeing into the future as human we remain. Briefly, but for foresight and the attempt to exercise it, much – perhaps most – of what we understand as thought would be impossible. ‘Blind we walk, till the unseen flame has trapped our footsteps,’ said the chorus in Sophocles’ Antigone.1 Some philosophers and scientists go further still. To them, the ability to anticipate the future, meaning something that does not yet exist, and to act accordingly does not belong to us humans alone. Instead they see it as an essential, perhaps the essential, characteristic of that mysterious and hard-to-define phenom- enon, ‘life’.2 After all, ours is the age of so-called posthumanism. And one key pillar of posthumanism is a renewed emphasis on our evolutionary ancestors and the things we have in common with them; this specifically includes the belief that our brains are nothing more than ‘linearly scaled-up’ versions of primate ones,3 which in turn are nothing more than ‘linearly scaled-up’ versions of vertebrate ones. And so on and on, all the way back to the ‘protop lasmal primordial atomic globules’ of Gilbert and Sullivan fame. As a result, all sorts of qualities that until recently used to be considered exclusively human are now seen as being shared, at least to some extent, by many other animals as well. So with empathy, so with altruism, so with reason. And so, surpris- ing as it may sound, with morality and what many believe to be morality’s origin, religious feeling. Some vague form of the last- named, the greatest living expert on bonobos has been telling us, can be found among those animals.4 And as with those qualities, so with foresight. Starting at least as long ago as ancient Greece, all over the world folklore credits various animals with the ability to foresee important events, including the weather, sinking ships, earthquakes and other dangers that may threaten their lives to one extent or another. Scientific opinion on whether such is in fact the case remains divided.5 However, the ability of some animals, notably squirrels and magpies, to exercise foresight by caching food and 8 Introduction retrieving it later on has been well established. Experiments con- ducted by ichthyologists show that fishes are also able to look into the future. At least, to some extent, under some circumstances and for some purposes. Certain kinds of fishes, somehow aware that the seaside ponds in which they live are about to dry up, leap to nearby ones (how they know about those ponds and how to reach them is another mystery, but one that does not concern us here). Others wait their turn to do this or that, thus presumably showing that they have some idea that such a thing as the future exists and of what it will bring.6 Still the question remains. Hats off to Paul the Octopus, who, living in his tank at Oberhausen, Germany, and no doubt look- ing deep into the future, correctly predicted the outcome of so many football matches. But does it really make sense to attribute foresight to – and put ourselves on the level of – a mollusc, which strictly speaking does not even have a brain? And how about those simplest forms of life, germs and viruses? Do they too have visions concerning the shape of things to come and adjust their behav- iour accordingly? Or are they simply blobs of protein that react to the stimuli to which they are subjected, such as heat, pres- sure, moisture, acidity and the like? True, every single vertebrate animal that has been tested was found to have the ability to link some signals to the events they portend. The animals in question could also foresee the consequences of their own actions a few minutes, or at least seconds, ahead.7 But an ape that sets out to discover what will happen in the future in the way shamans or prophets, astrologers or futurologists make it their business to do, remains to be seen. For years now, tens of thousands of scientists around the world have been doing all sorts of things to brains, both human and non-human, in an effort to show that they are ‘nothing more’ than electrochemical machines. And tens of thousands of com- puter engineers, coming from the opposite direction, have been trying to build machines that can ‘think’ as well as, or better than, 9
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