There are powerful forces at work, fuelling man's drive to establish a seamless and consistent pattern of past and future time: archaeology, geology, astronomy, even biology, all reflect the strength of that drive. The study of history occupies a universal place in school curricula. Children are drawn in particular to local history, which gives them a sense of past time within their own town, their own street. Man is powerfully motivated to search for an image of an ordered past that is consistent with his image of an ordered present. Most people do not believe that history is bunk: a settled view of the past evidently generates increased confidence, when facing an uncertain future.
This remarkable propensity seems to have generated no adverse consequences. It is has proved to be no evolutionary disadvantage. Indeed the evidence suggests that it has assisted man to organise his own life, by strengthening a sense of ordered continuity, enriching each individual's library of precedent, and facilitating the process of learning from the examples and mistakes of others. It has been a positive advantage, in informing the forward planning process.
The FutureBut it is otherwise with the future. Man's sense of future time has proved both an advantage and a disadvantage. It has been the key to his ability to plan ahead, and that in turn has contributed to his evolutionary dominance. The spider spinning its web is not planning ahead, in the sense that a hunter places a trap for a rabbit. Man has proved capable of fashioning increasingly sophisticated tools and techniques for specific future tasks, understanding the rotation of crops, analysing the behavioural patterns of other animals and planning to take advantage of them: these are all examples of the application of man's brainpower to the challenges of survival. The same process is now at work, as man grapples with predictions of his own impact upon the physical resources of the entire planet. In evolutionary terms, this developed sense of the future, and of the passage of time generally, has been man's own distinctive evolutionary territory. |
But man's intelligence, coupled with his heightened awareness of future time, has also led him to recognise a very wide range of uncertainties, many relating to factors outside his control. Those uncertainties, having been recognised, are nevertheless perceived as being amenable to rational analysis and planning: the propensity to plan, to use his intelligence to encompass future uncertainty, would itself appear to be part of man's genetic imprinting or formatting. In his environment uncertainties abound, some life-threatening, some merely irritant. There may be uncertainty about the continued supply of the wherewithal of daily life (food, water, clothing, shelter), about climatic change or natural catastrophe, loss of work or social status, the increasing risk of injury from machines, the risk of war between humans, political uncertainties in the organisation of society, social disorder, and above all the uncertainties of illness and of death.
In addition to those cognitive uncertainties, which can be deliberately addressed and countered, man experiences affective uncertainties - jealously, lack of success in the search for a mate, rejection by family, even rejection by work colleagues, or social unpopularity. This affective dimension of man's behaviour imports a wide range of uncertainties into daily life: most murders occur with the compass of the nuclear family, suicide and mental disorder are common outcome of affective disorders, and a primary subject of psychiatric treatment. The life experience of each individual reflects the unique combination of cognitive and affective uncertainties to which he is exposed.
This core concept lies at the heart of MDU theory. The term "multiple differential uncertainty" predicates a unique combination of uncertainties affecting each individual, peculiar to individual experience, character and circumstance, and varying over time. Uncertainties are conceived as external, circumstantial, capable of being identified by reference to external data. The individual mind is conceived as responding to those uncertainties, countering or succumbing to them, as each individual life unfolds.
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