Comments on: Future Generations http://www.corinnasherman.com/blog/design/future-generations Wed, 16 Nov 2011 17:47:21 +0000 hourly 1 By: M. Loebs http://www.corinnasherman.com/blog/design/future-generations/comment-page-1#comment-780 M. Loebs Sun, 11 Oct 2009 17:39:05 +0000 http://www.corinnasherman.com/?p=545#comment-780 The attitude, and thus the question, is already reversed. By definition, of course, future generations can do nothing *for* us unless we wish to violate temporal causality, but they can do something *to* us. While other species can probably conceive of the concept of time--changes in stimuli, essentially--none of them seem to have history, which is to say a sharable culture or story of that change. Because we do have knowledge that our species, in theory, can continue indefinitely (within reason of the time frames conceivable easily by the human mine) but we, individually, cannot (I assume) then by definition once we have knowledge of this possibility of "future", our attitude, whether we know it or not, has shifted. So what can "the future" do for anyone? If we take it in the literal sense of not-yet occurred events and unborn humans, then nothing, obviously. If we take "the future" as a concept that has motivated human history for the past 10,000 years, then "the future" is the abstract notion of progress, or at least continuation, that got us here to our present world. I would advise snarky bestial egoist that if he doesn't like what "the future" has done for him, he go back to picking berries in the woods and living in caves like some friggin' hippie in the Hobbesian state of nature. Gah, hippies. FINIS. The attitude, and thus the question, is already reversed. By definition, of course, future generations can do nothing *for* us unless we wish to violate temporal causality, but they can do something *to* us. While other species can probably conceive of the concept of time–changes in stimuli, essentially–none of them seem to have history, which is to say a sharable culture or story of that change. Because we do have knowledge that our species, in theory, can continue indefinitely (within reason of the time frames conceivable easily by the human mine) but we, individually, cannot (I assume) then by definition once we have knowledge of this possibility of “future”, our attitude, whether we know it or not, has shifted.

So what can “the future” do for anyone? If we take it in the literal sense of not-yet occurred events and unborn humans, then nothing, obviously. If we take “the future” as a concept that has motivated human history for the past 10,000 years, then “the future” is the abstract notion of progress, or at least continuation, that got us here to our present world. I would advise snarky bestial egoist that if he doesn’t like what “the future” has done for him, he go back to picking berries in the woods and living in caves like some friggin’ hippie in the Hobbesian state of nature. Gah, hippies.

FINIS.

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