Should we model the world to predict the future?

We are taught to study the way things behave as a function of time. We organize our days by the hours, we write our functions with respect to time, why is this? Is it because it is advantageous to our species to be able to predict what is going to happen in the future… probably. We learn in school to model things as functions of time: positions, velocities. Time is an appropriate variable because we assume that actions have no effect on the passage of time. To see how something will happen, we simply plug in time and see the output. One type of relationship involving growth that we often see is the exponential. Exponential growth is usually a relationship with respect to time or some other variable element. Exponential growth with respect to time is a value’s linear relationship with its own rate of change. In differential form, an exponential function looks something like: (dx/dt) = ax. Where dx/dt is the instantaneous rate of change of some value x, and a is a constant value. The exponential behavior of a function is a product of the more fundamental behavior, (dx/dt) = ax .

It is the scientist’s nature to view things as passing through time, like a clock ticking. The scientist wants a model of the world which he can look forward or backwards, to predict and analyze and reason. Things exist the way they exist right now, that is the only thing that we can be certain of. The question we might want to start asking is, “How do things exist with respect to themselves and other things?” Maybe we should almost take on the perspective and experiences of an intimate object to analyze its behavior. The rock does not think about falling as a function of time - it does not care. The rock experiences a position, a force, a mass. It might experience a force on it as a function of position, or maybe it experiences a constant force. My point is, the things we analyze are not meant to be analyzed from an outside perspective - maybe we should understand them by forming an intuition about how they would act as if we were them. A far fetched idea for one of science, but maybe one of importance. Modeling things as a function of time puts a greater importance on some abstract usefulness quality over an objective simplicity quality. We treat the world as if we are the only ones capable of understanding it, we assign intelligence only to ourselves. There is intelligence in everything; the way water flows around a rock, the way a ball rolls down a hill, the way our planet orbits the sun. These things have existed billions of years longer than we have and they have much more experience, our arrogance towards it is only a disservice to our understanding of the world.

Maybe we choose to formulate phenomena as a function of time because our objective is not to understand the world, but to manipulate it. If the object is manipulation, understanding is a quite helpful thing to have — but understanding without the ability to manipulate is useless. Modeling things with respect to time is often for the purpose of manipulation — we want to change something and see how it turns out. When we move away from writing our functions with respect to time, we lose the ability to predict simply, the predictions become a bit more tough. We also lose the ability to communicate our idea to people that don’t necessarily care about understanding it. If we lose the ability to explain the use of something, or how it could benefit someone, we are kind of lost… we feel useless.

One question I want to explore is, “Does pursuing understanding limit agency?” I think this an interesting question because it relates to how humans work with other humans. We as humans want to maximize our collective agency, maybe even our individual agency. An adequate understanding of the world is incredible helpful to act in it. However, if someones understanding of the world differs too much from everyone else’s, even if it is optimal, it is useless without the ability to communicate that information to other individuals. Pursuing an understanding too separate form what has been understood collectively is only advantageous if one also maintains the ability to express that information in a comprehensible way.