The Ontology of Tomorrow

In this conversation between futurist Martin Kruse and philosopher Søren Riis, the two tackle some of the big questions; What is the future, and how does it relate to trends and our being in general? Søren Riis is a philosopher, associate professor at Roskilde University and a serial entrepreneur. Martin Kruse is a futurist and senior advisor at the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies.

Martin Kruse: OK, Søren. Let’s dive right into it. What is the ontology of the future?

Søren Riis: Ontology is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of being(s). When dealing with the ontology of the future, philosophers have historically answered this question in the context of time. In Being and Time, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger showed that our notion of being hinges on an understanding of time; beings are plastic and must be understood as temporal entities with a past, present and future. You can define time as duration or as at the distance between relevant events. In other words, time is different depending on who you ask and what domain of entities you investigate. If you ask an astronomer, the lifespan of a human is of little consequence, because they work with the lifespan of stars on a relatively large time scale. If you ask a sociologist, the answer is different once again, because time is linked to human social behaviour. In this way, time is relative to your research interest.

MK: It sounds as though time is linked to free will?

SR: In a way it is. If time is defined as the duration between actions of people who make choices, then time can be extended or shortened by our actions. Or to put it differently, when we say that modern society is accelerating, we are not saying that objective time goes faster, but that more and more events are compressed into the same time slot. This is also often referred to as exponential development.

MK: And how does this pertain to the future?

SR: Phenomenologists would say that the future is partly embedded and anticipated by the past and the present. These three then come together in human perception on a micro timescale. You can think of a piece of music where the nodes follow in a pattern and the past sounds linger in us. In this way we can experience a phenomenon as a rhythm, and if the music suddenly stops, some people would be able to tell you the next note.

MK: Is this like saying the past repeats itself? When we as futurists look for past structures and use them to make assessments about future developments, you could say we are deciphering the music of time?

SR: Yes, there are certain parallels. Working with the future as an object of interest, we extrapolate many processes from the past by recognising certain patterns, and within short timespans this method has great reliability. Concerning longer timespans, we must also understand how this work has a constructive character in the sense that time unfolds in a predicted pattern because we expect it to do so and it pushes many of our practices in specific directions. However, through history we see unexpected events happen that recalibrate our expectations, once again changing the future. This means that instead of predicting the long-term future, it is more fruitful to instead study how and where future expectations and new practices are formed.

MK: A trend is an abstract concept. I can say that there is a trend called globalisation, but I would have a hard time pointing to it even though I can name examples that prove its existence, like the fact that the components in my phone come from more than 43 different countries. What do the different schools of philosophy say about that?

SR: Concepts are often defined as giving unity to a manyfold and in this sense of the word, all concepts are abstract. Traditionally there have been two ways of dealing with your question. One school of thought would say that our concepts have a real existence (the realist), another school (the nominalist) says that language is a tool we use to create order. Following the latter understanding, it is up to us to choose what we want to understand by “globalisation” and subsequently specify certain indicators, which can be measured empirically. First, we need to find out if and where globalisation can be found — the spatial dimension. Subsequently we can measure if it is increasing and decreasing over time, adding a temporal dimension. To address these questions, we can look at indicators such as the number of McDonald’s restaurants in relation to population size or the share of households with Netflix subscriptions.

MK: You mention the number of McDonalds restaurants, you can also use the sum of inward and outward stocks of international portfolio debt securities and international bank loans and deposits (in relation to GDP). These indicators are part of KOF Globalisation index, and they are all quite different. The combined index does show how globalisation is increasing, yet more and more young people do not have televisions, and many choose not to eat McDonalds. Obviously, this does not mean we are less globalised. As times change, subindexes need to change too, and sooner or later we arrive at a point where the entire dataset making out the composite index could have changed. If all the subindexes in the composite ‘globalisation’ have been replaced, are we still talking about the same thing?

SR: Good point. What we really mean by globalisation often must be redefined over time, because we see a trend which manifests itself differently as time passes, which again renews the tension between the nominalists and the realists.

MK: Historically, the concept of ‘development’ has been understood as a process with the goal of reaching an end state — paradise if you are a Christian, or a liberal world order for a thinker like Francis Fukuyama. This inscribes a direction and a purpose to time also known as teleology. What does teleology have to say about trends?

SR: Teleology is a bit out of fashion these days. Sure, you can say that there is design and therefore direction in our genes. A boy will someday be a grown man, and from an evolutionary point of view, monkeys crawled down from the trees and became humans. However, look at crocodiles, they haven’t changed much since the age of the dinosaurs, so where is the direction there? Evolution reminds us that there is a dynamic equilibrium between organisms and their surroundings, not that all organisms will ‘improve’ over time until they become demi-gods. So, it is disputed today if there is such a thing as teleology. If it exists, it could lead to fatalist passivity and have great consequences for our self-understanding. We humans, as individuals, groups, and societies, to a wide extent decide where we are going. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a way we try to define a common direc- tion for the world, but it is not really teleology. Rather, it is an expression of the ‘free’ will of humans trying to create positive change for the human condition and for the planet.

MK: OK, Søren, let’s end on three quick questions. Does the future exist before it becomes the now?

SR: In many ways, yes, but this does not mean that it is predetermined in every way. For example, the future can exist as a dream, like it does for the entrepreneur working hard to realise their ideas. But as the ideas become real and make their way to the present, they also change. In other words, the future changes as it travels towards the present and vice versa.

MK: How does something, which does not exist, come into existence?

SR: One possibility is that it comes into being through hard work or, stated differently, as a potential of that which already exists combined with human
intervention.

MK: Does the singular ‘now’ exist or is ‘now’ as plural and subjective as the multiple futures?

SR: The singular ‘now’ is in many ways a construct and very much connected to our initial discussion concerning scale. In different contexts and work practices, ‘now’ means something different. It depends on whether you are working on particle physics or, say, are a historian of Western civilisation. If we follow the nominalists, we may indeed claim that the ‘now’ exists!