Equations don't get pregnant... so science overlooks that part of life

[Phil Henshaw]

As we reconnect with nature we will wonder and be shocked by how the most intelligent species has been using a way of explaining the world that is so detached from reality. It's somewhat of an "expert error", you could say, that the equations people plan the future with work just as well forward or backward, and don't have the "messy business" of being driven by eruptions of new realities and needing to change in response to them along the way. The way people explain the relation of past and future is with rules that don't change. The reality of nature is that the past becomes the future by accumulating change that keeps changing the rules.

The key to being successfully pregnant is quickly realizing that your future is about to be changed forever and you need a plan. The telltale sign of how radically your world is about to change is having something new multiplying inside you, say, like a small version of economic growth. The first thing any competent parent does is understand and deal with the fact that their old life coming to an end, and getting ready for the next. You don't need the child's room in the first trimester, no, but needing the child's room suddenly has a schedule. All the complications of ending the pregnancy are the suddenly new and very proper subject, for sure.

The complications of the earth's exploding pregnancy with human population and technology is indeed being widely discussed, but not how to end it, though. Nearly all the experts discuss only how to continue its multiplying consequences without end. Everyone agrees that the math says that in the next doubling period for the economies, 20 or 30 years, people will consume as much more of the earth as the economies ever consumed in the entire history of growth! Think of it as your being pregnant, and your husband not preparing for it to end. If at the appointed hour your husband pointed to your swelling belly and only suggested you should really learn to stretch some more, you'd do more than reject his profoundly ignorant suggestion.

People respond to change erupting in their lives in a great many ways. For critical thinking on the subject one can single accumulative proportional change (change by %'s) as locating natural systems of change, that predict the approach of changing realities. These are very common in all kinds of events. How people cope with them ranges from being creative and early to being confused and quite late, among other things. I wrote a paper on how equations could be trained to include questions about that evidence of approaching new realities. "Models and Change - connecting with the natural world of complex s...

Phil