Ability to predict the future. Drop your shoe - do you think it will fall, float or something else? That's something easy for us to understand and predict because we know about that.
Habit: a dominant or regular disposition or tendency; prevailing character or quality.
I know it’s strange to think of gravity as a habit, but if we go by the definition above, I think we can regard gravitational pull as predictable due to the extent that it is a dominant or regular disposition or tendency, a prevailing character/quality.
Eliz: Can one of your parents predict how the other one is going to react to a particular circumstance?
It depends on how well my father knows my mother’s habits. He actually seems to know her pretty well. On Christmas, there are certain gifts that he seems to know will provide the desirable reaction. He gives her books by the authors that she claims to like every year and her reaction is the pleasant one that he hopes and for the most part predicts.
If he cheated on her, I’m sure he knows that if he told her the truth of his philandering, her reaction would be un-enjoyable for him and her.
Existance is much more complicated than just shoe dropping or spousal prediction (and not everybody can perform that trick) so we can not predict all of it.
We can predict to the degree that we understand the habitual conditions that our prediction is taking place in. The more complicated our conditions, the more difficult it is to make predictions.
before Hurricane Katrina hit, They predicted that New Orleans would fill up like a soup bowl because of where/how it was constructed, and demonstrated it on a graphic model as the storm was approaching. They had enough data and the computer capacity to figure it out.
Yes, they were able to make a prediction because they had an understanding of the conditions (which are basically comprised of habits)
200+ years ago the public would have attributed that kind of prediction to witchcraft.
Its true. And if we go back far enough, people probably would have attributed the disaster itself to the works of some God. The pre-philosophical greeks – Hesiod and homer laid the foundation for greek common sense. All events in nature were attributed to the whims of God’s who were capricious, spiteful, punishing and *unpredictable*.
As philosophers began to emerge, explanations came closer and closer to gaining a bit of predictive power and soon, by the time Plato hit the scene, the only Gods that were still taken seriously were conceived of as being responsible for that which was predictable and orderly. So a bit of a reversal took place.
Events are predictable to the degree that we have complete, accurate information, an understanding of the conditions that we wish to make a prediction in.
