How to understand with the Past, present, future

“Understanding is often, though not always, related to learning concepts, and sometimes also the theory or theories associated with those concepts. However, a person may have a good ability to predict the behavior of an object, animal or system—and therefore may, in some sense, understand it—without necessarily being familiar with the concepts or theories associated with that object, animal, or system in their culture. They may have developed their own distinct concepts and theories, which may be equivalent, better or worse than the recognized standard concepts and theories of their culture. Thus, understanding is correlated with the ability to make inferences.”

From Understanding Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding

Or google - wikipedia understanding

The information above from Wikipedia has a great explanation about the different ways to understand I recommend reading this to further your understanding.

That being said the below reading is my own twist on understanding.

If you want to understand most things it has a past, present and future. So where does it come from? Well it all has to do with time of course and if you are wondering where time came from it started with the creation of the universe or the big bang theory.

The Past

Let’s start with the past. When you look into the past you are going to make assumptions so you need to gather evidence to make it true. If you find it hard to gather evidence then you may need to Infer, deduce, reason, workout or conclude the subject matter. It would also help if you have other people looking at the same thing from there all parties involved can come to a consensus to come up with the right conclusion. If you don’t have any other people to help then you are left to your own conclusions which could be faulty. Having many eye balls viewing the same subject matter increases accuracy.

The Present

With the present you can start making comparisons with the past and discover what’s changed over time. This will increase you understanding and help with how to use the information.

The Future

Once you have a better understanding of the past and present can you predict the future? There are several techniques and explanations that I will show in later chapters of this book.

Example 1

For example, What’s the history behind photography? So, looking back to the past you might think its to do with the renaissance period because they made paintings or portrait paintings. You could say renaissance paintings were a precursor to the camera. Now this kind of reasoning requires a consensus because it’s hard to find facts that support this. What about the present? For now, everything has changed because of technology. So, what’s the future for photography? This can be a bit more tricky but I predict no change.

Example 2

Which came first art or the wheel? Well if you look to the past you might infer art because there’s evidence with cave man drawings which dates back thousands of years ago. So, you then have to prove this is true. What’s the present will I believe it’s to do with progression and the future I predict no change.

Example 3

What’s the history behind the car? Again looking back you could say before cars there was the horse and carriage. And for the present its to do with progression again. For the future you could predict electric cars or if you want to go way out try flying cars.

Example 4

Are we free to do as we please? Not really dating back to the hunter gather times we lived in small communities and from there existed social norms that we stick to. So, you can’t decide to kill someone for some reason it goes against these norms and you will be judged by your peers. Once again can you prove this is true? Great what about the present? Well today we have rules and the law and for the future no change.

Example 5

What’s the history behind dating? I think in the 1980’s you had to use video tapes (does anyone remember that) and the videos contained prospective candidates show casing themselves about who they are you then contact them. As for the present we have online dating and video conferencing. So, what about the future? I’m going to guess virtual reality dating. That’s right you can create an entire virtual world where people can interact with each other. You can also create virtual bars or hubs or meeting places or shops as of year 2021.

The mentioned above works for most things and does have a few flaws but I do use it on many occasions. So, in saying that you have got to start from somewhere and I believe this fits nicely.

Concepts and the mind

Concepts are abstract ideas and has similar meanings to idea, notion, abstraction, theory, hypothesis, belief, opinion, view, impression and picture.

I can’t figure it out but for some reason the more you practice using the past, present and future your mind finds its easier to understand concepts or come up with your own concepts. You could say using past, present and future is a stepping stone to conceptual.