100 Years From Now

My grandfather was known for his memes; a favorite: “100 years from now, nobody will know the difference!” He was acknowledging the well-known but oft-forgotten human tendency to aggrandize what is Proximate (here, now, personal) at the expense of what is more remote, even Ultimate (eternal, universal). 

Our nation is the best, our high school is the best, our children are the best, etc. E Pluribus Unum. But not everything can be ‘best in class’. 

Case in point: Assemble 100 people in a room. Ask each person to mark an index card, anonymously of course. Question: Do you think you are more or less intelligent than the median person in this room? Write 0 for less, 1 for more. No other answers will be considered.

You will find that 67% of your audience think they’re above median in intelligence. Of course, that can’t be true; somebody has an inflated image of himself! Now change the question: “More or less ethical? More or less creative? More or less empathetic?” The result will always be the same: 67% are above median!

While I suspect that such myopia is broadly characteristic of homo sapiens, it is significantly stronger in some individuals, societies, cultures and eras, and proportionately weaker in others. I don’t claim to be an omni-math but I suspect that this bias is nowhere stronger than it was in the North Atlantic Community 1500 - 1900 CE.  

The proof is in the painting. The Renaissance’s ‘discovery’ of perspective allowed artists to make the proximate larger and the remote correspondingly smaller.  That meant that things closest to us (i.e. the viewer) would automatically assume the greatest importance on the canvas. And just like that, the hook was set! Now we were locked in a loving relationship…with ourselves. Happy Birthday, Narcissus! 

But prior to the 15th century, after the 19th century, or anytime away from the academy, the rules were more relaxed. Giotto (14th century), Juan Gris (20th century) and Grandma Moses all painted the World from God’s point of view. The size and positioning of ‘objects’ on the canvas are a function of aesthetics and semantics, not optics. The artist tries to see and convey the subject as God would see it, objectively and from a transcendent vantage point.

***

Back to my grandfather! There are several critical philosophical concepts embedded in his simple meme:

• “100 years from now…” We are looking at a concave World through convex lenses (or is it a convex World through concave lenses?). Either way, we are focused on the Proximate (now) while the Universe is focused on the Ultimate (100 years). 

Example: Remember Jack and his sister Jill? They grew up ‘economically challenged’ (skint) and despite the boundless generosity of the modern Welfare State, they could only afford vision care for one. 

Ever chivalrous, Jack, who is farsighted, volunteered to wear eyeglasses prescribed for his nearsighted sister. Like Jack, we are trying to navigate life while looking through the wrong lenses. We stumble through the World as if it were an Outward Bound obstacle course. No wonder Jack fell down and broke his crown! 

• “…No one will know the difference.” Sounds simple… but it isn’t! Why won’t anyone know the difference? How could they not know? There are several very different ways to account for this disconnect and each one comes with its own unique cosmology:

• Entropy: Order decays! Events interfere with one another, ultimately cancelling each other out, leaving no residual effects. As in Frost’s Road Not Taken, all roads lead to ‘Rome’ (the sacked version that is). It is exactly as if those events had never occurred. Big Bang  → Heat Death. 

• Overdetermination: Events in 2026 reinforce one another, leading to events in 2126. But no one event from 2026 causes any one event in 2126. Specific future events are not caused by specific prior events; future events emerge from a constellation of multiple events. 

Certain combinations of prior events are sufficient to cause specific future results; in most cases there are many ‘sufficient’ combinations but no single combination, let alone any one event, is ever necessary. There are always, or almost always, multiple pathways. 

• The Butterfly Effect: What happens in 2126 (‘thunderstorm’) is in fact caused by events that happen in 2026 (‘butterfly’) via a linear pathway, but it is impossible in principle to connect any event (2126) to any other event (2026). Nothing is repeatable. 

• Holism: There is a connection between the Past and the Future per se but there is no connection between any specific past event and any future event. The future is only impacted by the past as a whole, as a field, as illustrated below:

E1 E3

         ↘       ↗

P    ↔ F

         ↗         ↘

E2 E4

• Autogenesis: There is no causal pathway from the past to the future. Every event is sui generis and causa sui; it is free to develop by itself, for itself. To the extent that there is ever any appearance of causality, it is generated by future events as they appropriate the past as their medium. Future events determine the significance, even the identity, of prior events.

So my grandfather was on to something! He challenged the bedrock assumption of our Naïve Realism: Laplacian ‘Billiard Ball’ Causality. We imagine the Future as if it were the Present, superficially distorted by a Fun House mirror. It isn’t! 

There is a connection between the Future and the Past, but what is the nature of that connection? Is there any way to choose among my non-exhaustive litany of options (above)? Or should we regard at least some of these options as complementary (think Wave-Particle duality)?

***

Wait! My grandfather did make a difference after all! But not the inscrutable difference made by his physical presence or by his DNA. This conversation we’re having right now is emblematic of that real difference. He could not have imagined the content or the setting of this conversation, but the outline, the spirit, of his ideas has clearly been conserved; and as soon as I hit “Publish” it will be conserved for the indefinite future (perhaps more than just 100 years). 

The differences that make a difference are the qualia, values, ideas. The Future may preserve nothing of the Present intact; but the Subjective Form of that Presence - the ideas, the emotions, the spirit - casts a long and possibly indelible shadow.  

So my grandfather in his wisdom was also wrong. 100 years on, something has made a difference, i.e. his meme: “100 years from now nobody will know the difference!”

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In The City of Paris, Delaunay moves beyond traditional representation to express the dynamic energy and fractured light of the burgeoning 20th-century metropolis. By intertwining the classical Three Graces with the modern Eiffel Tower, he suggests a thematic bridge between antiquity and the industrial future, unified by a singular, rhythmic vision. Ultimately, the painting's message is one of simultaneity, where time, space, and human form are no longer separate entities but are fused into a vibrant, crystalline whole.