Surprise!

The future is not a place. It is that which remains uncertain

“Scientific people,” proceeded the Time Traveler… “know very well that Time is only a kind of Space.”

—The Time Machine, H.G. Wells

Wells’s Time Traveler was wrong. I’ll tell you why, and how you can use the fact to your advantage.

Battling Uncertainty

We’d all like to know the future. What’s maddening about the study of the future is that we can know some future events, like solar eclipses, with uncanny accuracy, centuries in advance. And yet we have no idea if we’re going to trip on the way out the front door. —Much less understand what’s going on in our world politically and economically, especially lately.

It’s almost like there were two kinds of time, one regular and perfectly predictable, and another that’s absolute chaos.

I think there are at least three kinds of time and they are radically different from each other. Our decision-making abilities can be paralyzed or seriously led astray when we mistake events occurring in one kind of time for those unfolding in another. But where we can’t predict, we can still prepare, and by knowing in what kind of time an event is unfolding, you can navigate an otherwise unpredictable world. I’ll show you how

First off, let’s deal with the Time Traveler’s idea that time is a kind of space.

From Stonehenge to Antikythera

We need to act in the hear-and-now and to do that we have to understand our situation. We have various ways of doing this—history, investigation and surveillance of our surroundings, and prediction. We evolved an instinctive faculty for grasping history, which we rather dismissively call “storytelling.” According to Alicia Juerroro, our narrative faculty evolved to help us deal with non-repeating events that can only be understood in terms of two factors: context, and history. Tornadoes, for example—can accurately describe the physics, in the abstract, but any given tornado can only be described in the context of the situation where it happened, and its particular sequence of events.

Narrative is an incredibly powerful mode of thought; as Brian Boyd says, “Narrative is the default mode of understanding of the human mind. By this I mean that if the mind can understand something in narrative terms, it automatically will.”

We evolved to be explorers, so investigation and surveillance come naturally to us. That takes care of the past and the present, when it comes to making decisions. Things get dicey when we try to understand the future.

This is not because the future is unknowable—far from it. We recognized the regularities of natural systems from the start, and deployed them to our advantage. Stonehenge was built, at least partly, as a reliable calendar. Using it, people could accurately predict when to plant crops, and when to harvest them. This was incredibly empowering; and, as devices such as the Antikythera mechanism show, the ancients became very good at it.

There was always a residue, though—an element of the future that remained unpredictable no matter how much knowledge we had about solar cycles and the acceleration of dropped objects. We could know, in general terms, when to plant, but we could never anticipate that late-spring frost that might kill all our seedlings. It was as if the gods were toying with us by dangling the promise of perfect knowledge then snatching it out of the way at the last second. It’s our inability to reconcile that perfect predictability, on the one hand, and the unknowability of the next five seconds, that convinced us that the gods were either hostile or toying with us.

Because systems like Stonehenge worked so well, it was reasonable to expect that, if we just applied ourselves hard enough, we could learn to predict those eruptions of chaos that interrupt the perfect predictability of the universe. I talked in “Who Paints the Dew on the Daisy” about the many different theories of change humanity’s deployed over the aeons to bridge this last, most important gap. Depending on which theory of change you’re using, you may approach an unfolding situation with confidence or hesitation. Where we get ourselves into trouble is when that confidence is misplaced. For example, in “Crisis, or Event?” I talk about the idea that occurrences that don’t fit our model of how the world works—that we literally have no words to describe—are essentially unknowable even as they’re unfolding. As if the present somehow takes on the same quality of invisibility as the future. Alain Badiou calls these irruptions events, and they’re terrifying to live through. Arguably, the present moment in the United States is an unfolding event in exactly this sense.

If we could predict perfectly when the sun would rise in a year, why couldn’t we have predicted in 2015 what the world would be like in 2025, only ten years later? Why can’t we tell what the effect of Elon Musk’s takeover of the American treasury will be? There are consequences when disruptions happen. Kodak’s failure to anticipate the impact of digital photography, climate policy inertia, and geopolitical surprises such as Ukraine’s spectacular resistance to the supposedly unstoppable Russian army—we’ve invented gods, spirits, soothsaying, astrology, systems theory, and futurology, all in an attempt to see such things coming. And always, it kinda sorta works—until it doesn’t. Why?

The Three Kinds of Time

We’ve been deceived by our deeply-ingrained conflation of time with duration. Duration is the measurable part of time—clock time, hourglass time. Or the time it takes to walk from here, to there.

Imagine human beings walking from one place to another over a hundred thousand years. Knowing that it takes two hours in one case and three days in another, combined with the fact that geography is involved, made it easy for us to draw destinations as lines on the ground; lines became maps, and maps gave us not just the shape of our surroundings, but the duration of travel.

Millennia of doing this wormed an ur-metaphor about time deeply into our unconscious minds. It’s become part of our languages: in English, before and after mean the same as in front of and behind; they’re geometric. The past is behind us, the future ‘ahead of us.’ Everybody knows this, and physics confirms it.

Except, what if the way we express time in physics were a result of the metaphor of time as a kind of space—not its cause? —Because when it came to describing it, physicists bent all their math to fit the metaphor they’d grown up with?

There are other way of thinking about it. In his bizarre and mostly useless Philosophy of Nature, G.W.F. Hegel does drop a nugget of wisdom at one point by reframing time with no geometrical or spatial component at all. It’s easy, he says: the past is what logically implies the present, and the present is what logically implies the future. Time is a knot of mutual implication. Duration is a result of us passing from one logical necessity to the next, not in some analogue of space where moments are dots along a line, but because moments only exist as this implication. Being (the dots) doesn’t exist, only becoming (the relations), and so we have to experience time.

This is a great idea but almost useless for any practical purpose. On the other hand, I’m halfway through writing a time travel story based on Hegel’s theory, and it’s tons of fun. When you abandon the idea of time as a line, issues like the grandfather paradox are exposed as deriving from that core metaphor—and they dissolve, to be replaced by a whole new set of paradoxes. I’m not going to describe any of that here. You’ll have to wait for the story. The point is, you can think about time without putting events on a line, and some thinkers felt that this might be a good idea.

Knowing that we can reframe time, though, provides an opportunity. We can fan out the different kinds of time, like cards from a deck of possibilities. Doing this, the cause of our frustration and the limitations of prediction become obvious.

Let’s do it and see where we end up.