> You are uncertain, to varying degrees, about everything in the future; much of the past is hidden from you; and there is a lot of the present about which you do not have full information. Uncertainty is everywhere and you cannot escape from it. > > Dennis Lindley, Understanding Uncertainty Some view the past as bathed in the golden glow of timeless glory. A time in which founders and heroes shaped our identity with prophetic hands. Others see the past as crude habitat of our primitive forebears. Savages living archaic lives that were nasty, brutish, and short. Both of these views are equally absurd, but perhaps not for the reasons most apparent to us. For one, they do not stand up to scrutiny by historians and archeologists. But also, these views make a false assumption that is all too common. They view the past as a ***settled historical fact***. Something fixed and static. Frozen objects, gradually receding in the rearview mirror, driven by the unrelenting forward motion of time. But past events are not distant monoliths of questionable relevance. As we have seen in the previous section on [[Evolution]], they are the raw material from which we manufacture a precious commodity: **Inferences**. The past, despite its apparent solidity, is a structure built not from stone but from interpretation, and interpretations, as history teaches us, are subject to collapse. We do not act upon the past as it was, but upon the past as we **believe it to have been**, a distinction that renders it as pliable as wet clay, moulded by the shifting pressures of knowledge, memory, and perspective. The events themselves remain fixed in time, but the meaning we assign them oscillates with the tides of our understanding. What we call the past is, in truth, a series of **narratives**, constructed from partial knowledge, cognitive biases, and the scaffolding of our present needs. It is a framework of certainty built upon foundations riddled with uncertainty, a map of what was drawn from the vantage point of what is. And as with all maps, the discovery of new terrain can render old boundaries meaningless, can transform what once seemed true into something wholly unrecognisable. Consider the moment when an individual discovers a family secret, some hidden fracture in their personal history - a long-lost relative, an unknown parentage, a revelation that reconfigures the entire scaffolding of self. The past they have lived is unchanged, yet its meaning is irrevocably altered. A father once seen as distant and cold is suddenly understood as a man burdened by silent grief. A childhood remembered as idyllic is reinterpreted through the lens of withheld truths. The psychological shift is seismic: the person they believed themselves to be is no longer who they are. But this phenomenon is not confined to the personal—it operates at the level of civilisations, of collective memory. The **Copernican Revolution**, for example, did not alter the position of the Earth in the cosmos, but it obliterated the framework through which humanity understood its place in the universe. The past of a geocentric cosmos, a world ordained by divine centrality, collapsed overnight. What we believe about what has been determines what is, and when belief is overturned, the past is rewritten—not as fabrication, but as revelation. To live, then, is to navigate the unsettling reality that our history is not behind us, but **beneath** us, waiting for the tremor that will shift its shape once again. The past is not a monolithic mass, frozen in time. It is an endlessly changing space full of surprises, obscuring and revealing, pregnant with possibility. To master the ***art of uncertainty***, we need to remain open to re-interpreting bygones, for they have not truly gone by. Because our knowledge of the past is partial, every new thing we learn about it has the potential to change our present. Whether we like it or not, we participate in a fitful yet fertile dance with the dynamic past. One might reasonably assume that future scientific discoveries will yet again annihilate firmly held frameworks through which humanity understands its place in the cosmos. Our attitude toward the past, and toward uncertainty, will mediate the tremors yet to come. Yet again, clinging to certain truths in the face of upheaval is like seeking refuge from an earthquake in a building already on the verge of collapse. The wise do not brace themselves against crumbling walls; they step outside, into uncertainty, into open space - where survival lies not in shelter, but in adaptation. [[Present|Next page]]