2008年9月5日 星期五

The nature of Prophecy

My idea of prophecy is somewhat differ from the common definition. IN my opinion, prophecy is not itself passively predict what is happening in future, rather it is structure in such a way, when revealed, that would concatenate the existing tendencies toward a future as predicted. Prophecy could thus consider an active shaper of history rather than just waiting to be compared with result. Therefore those prophecies that are never revealed is pointless, and is doubtful of their accuracy.
So prophecy, in a sense, is how the future affect the present in such a way to instantiate itself. And it should consider to be more than merely information, because it also contain an psychological effect on the reader, thus it could seen as a self-recursive loop much like the universe.
I don't believe in the assumption that any n instance of possible outcome must share equal probability. Nature is seldom that fair, and it often biased toward certain direction of development in subtle ways. Those, we could theoretically separate the real prophecy from other ‘false’ prophecy by comparing the process which they come to realize themselves through existing social-political structure through possible reader. We could examine through the route of how prophecy realize itself.

For a superficial instance, there are prophecy talking about Communist China become the most powerful country in the world, and there are those who talk the exactly opposite way. We could thus examine the validity through its effect on the reader. Assume what Communist China lack at the time of surfacing of this prophecy is just morale and self-confidence, then this prophecy has higher chance to be realize than sooth-saying ones via itself psychological effect. On the other hand, if what Communist China now is suffering from delusion of grandeur, overconfidence and arrogance at the moment it appears, then this prophecy meme has lower chance of materialize itself since it harm its own cause . From this understanding, I consider the prophecy of ‘Doomsday for Communist China’ has more chance to be realized.

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