Can you predict the future using the past?

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For example, if you're in a bad relationship, unless something radical happens things are going to tend to continue in the same direction as you're going to get more of the same thing. Simply put it'll get worse and worse.

From this perspective, it looks like the future is just more of the past, and the logic looks simple: I understand the past, I see where things are going, so I can predict the future.

That logic looks right except that it's actually wrong, and here is why -you don't really understand the past, you just think you do.

We confuse understanding with seeing all the time, but they're not one in the same thing. You can see past events, results, and generally how things turned out but that doesn't mean you understand why things happen the way they did.

And unless you can understand consequences and implications you cannot predict anything with accuracy -facts don't tell stories.

What's even more, because we are missing a critical element -we also attribute wrong reasons or consequences to what we see ending up with is a false understanding of the past from which predicting the future becomes impossible.

So can the future be predicted using the past?
Yes absolutely, but only to the degree that you can take into account billions and trillions of variables involved as well as the dynamic interactions between them. Oh wait, the human mind can not really do that - can it? We are not quantum computers.

We pretend to know a lot more than we actually do, and we can in fact predict a lot less than we make it seem.

We do however have a sense of general trends and directions, we have real needs and desires and we do our best to satisfy them in reality.
We people don't predict the future, we build it.
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