EXPERIENCE (Axiom of)
Charles François (2004). EXPERIENCE (Axiom of), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics, 2(1): 1217.
| Collection | International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics |
|---|---|
| Year | 2004 |
| Vol. (num.) | 2(1) |
| ID | ◀ 1217 ▶ |
| Object type | General information, Epistemology, ontology or semantics |
- “The future will be like the past, because, in the past, the future was like the past”.
This ironical so-called “axiom” by G. WEINBERG is a “wolf in sheep clothes”. Our knowledge of the past is always quite relative and we now understand why this is so: Deterministic chaos in complex situations makes practically impossible not only a perfect prediction of future but altogether a complete understanding of the tangle of causes that produced some past event.
We thus can never be sure that a present situation apparently similar to a former one will evolve in exactly the same way.