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The Future Is Unkown: Thus, Plans And Prognoses Are Unreliable
Obvious truths, cogently stated, can lead to greater understanding. The following passage from a book about financial valuation of companies deals with such an obvious truth ("the future is unknown"), but it is so well-written that it helped me understand better another obvious truth ("prognoses and plans are unreliable in nature").
It's good to keep in mind for (a) reading "market research" about the future, and (b) writing business plans, or any other plans for that matter.
Notwithstanding all scientific endeavors to lift the fog of uncertainty through statistical methods, neuronal networks, fuzzy logic or more recently chaos theory, not only is insight, but -- much more fundamentally -- is the ability to gain insight about the future, definitely limited for humans. Prognoses are based on the law of causality, and this very law only extends to a limited area of experience. Quantum mechanics, with the uncertainty principle discovered by Werner Heisenberg, have substantiated the proof that, processes in atom physics are not determined in their entirety. Thus, scientific prognoses too contain inexact and subjective components, and a complementary relationship to the metaphysical question about the freedom of will develops.
Freedom, after Kant, is a purely rational idea and thus a transcendent concept, the objective reality of which is not explainable, but which is nevertheless naturally clear due to its effect. It manifests itself through the law of morals. Freedom is based on the independence of reason and thus is not subject to the law of causality in nature. It has an independent causality, which for example comes to light with the categoric imperative and is not subject to impacts from exterior natural laws. Thus, free decisions by reasonable people can never be predicted deterministically by a third person.
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Physics and metaphysics confirm the limits of all insights based on reason. The future is not foreseeable because exterior, observable causality determines completely neither physical nature nor the free decisions of man. Most reliable about any prognosis thus is its unreliability.
Translated from the book "Finanzwirtschaftliche Unternehmensbewertung" by Thomas Hering, Wiesbaden 1999, pages 7/8.