350 / Extrapolation #2

Extrapolation doesn't work in the world of Nature, at least in the sense of producing any long-term prediction of what the future will be like, based on the continuation of current trends. Things don't continue along the same lines indefinitely. Death intervenes. In fact, the world of Nature maintains its continuity and stability, despite what an extrapolation from present measurements would seem to suggest might be major changes in the offing. This is because all natural processes do include death as a major component.

Human beings have never reconciled themselves to death as a primary and salutary feature of the Natural World. Thus, we tend to think that we can predict the future through the techniques of extrapolation, defying death. Extrapolation is how we think we can decide what is "going to happen."

In the human world, the other world we inhabit, the realities that exist are the realities we create ourselves, both individually and collectively. For this reason, extrapolation doesn't work to define the future in the human world, either.

In our world, because we are always free to do something genuinely "new," something never thought of or done before, and something inconsistent with and contradictory to the existing trends, what will happen in our world can never be "predicted."

In our human world, a whole new reality, a different world, can always be initiated, despite what the science of extrapolation may claim.