http://urbanhonking.com/ideasfordozens/2010/09/14/the_cone_of_plausible_pasts/ Thu, 19 Jun 2014 09:26:37 +0000 hourly 1 http://urbanhonking.com/ideasfordozens/2010/09/14/the_cone_of_plausible_pasts/#comment-555 Thu, 16 Sep 2010 17:04:35 +0000 http://urbanhonking.com/ideasfordozens/2010/09/14/the_cone_of_plausible_pasts/#comment-555 I thought about that and even thought through the whole cone thing. I thought the problem with that was that, while possibly right, it was too depressing. If you start with the premise of: we don’t know anything about anything, how do you proceed? So, I decided to take it as a relative thing. I do think we actually know (or can know) more about the present than the future or the past, especially if you take “present” a little generously to include the immediate past and future. We can talk to other people, we can go places, we can do research, etc. Maybe think of it as a cylinder with a belt in the middle: maybe it doesn’t come quite to a point, but it is relatively more defined in the present.

]]> http://urbanhonking.com/ideasfordozens/2010/09/14/the_cone_of_plausible_pasts/#comment-554 Wed, 15 Sep 2010 07:34:46 +0000 http://urbanhonking.com/ideasfordozens/2010/09/14/the_cone_of_plausible_pasts/#comment-554 But why would you assume that *now* is knowable? It seems to me that the what we’re actually dealing with, if we accept our ignorance, is a very wide very long tube where we exist at some unknown point… (that almost sounds pessimistic, but I don’t mean it that way).

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