indeterminancy

"all inferences from experience suppose, as their foundation, that the future will resemble the past...if there be any suspicion that the course of nature may change, and that the past may be no rule for the future, all experience becomes useless, and can give rise to no inference or conclusion" david hume. enquiry concerning human understanding_____________________________________humans are creatures of habit and their certainties are rooted in past experience...which works a lot of the time...

recent events are pointing out, to me at least, that human cognition isn't all it's cracked up to be and that variables we cannot see...

are waiting to blind-side us no matter how carefully we plan and how we set about creating a paradigm...

which fools us into thinking it can allow us to extend our event horizon further and further into the future without unnecessary risk..."planning for the future" they call it...well...the future is nothing if not indeterminate...this should be wholly clear at this point...i have been blogging about covid-19 elsewhere on blogger and, while i do not subscribe to the croakings of "hoax" by right-wing pundits and the doofus in the white house, i am not prepared to panic just yet...what i am seeing is how disruptive fear is and what strange things behaviors it evokes in people...from panic to hoarding to self flagellation in the face of a vengeful jehova...and all because habitual certainties and beliefs are suddenly disrupted by variables that were not perceived or expected...our comfort zone has been invaded by fear which may or may not be justified...we will see...i am prepared to be open minded about it and i am adjusting my own behaviors some in response...i am not panicked just yet but i am washing my hands more because i don't feel 1) especially stupid and, 2) like tempting fate...i am fascinated by the responses of the media and particularly the economy...if this can so unsettle "the market" it should be a heads-up about the shaky foundations of all the abstractions we take as givens...hume may have a valid point there...

and since we have dragged the medias into this ( you didn't actually think you would escape this, did you? )...i just fucking love the way the elitists at the new york times like to tell me how i should live my life...they never fail me.