Two big disasters have hit Indonesia: The ttsunami in Mentawai and Mount Merapi’s eruption in Central Java. Both disasters remind us that we live in a very unpredictable natural world.
A notion put forward in Earth system functioning discusses the question about it — that is, whether nature is predictable — and it stated that the earth system worked with several processes at the same time, suggesting that earth’s behavior is logically complex and needs studies from various disciplines to predict its behavior.
Some might say that the product of that kind of study can be an early warning system that can mitigate the loss caused by the disasters, but still — with human error and the unpredictability of nature — victims were inevitable.
To be noted, technology is useless without the awareness of the users, human themselves. Thus, as long as there is a probability for human error, the unpredictability of nature is still around us. We live with it.
This sounds like a pessimistic fatalist perception, that we cannot do anything to control the external world. It is indeed the fact, Mother Nature works without our awareness, it works without concerning the benefits for humanity.
Stephen Hawking, on his last controversial scientific statement, said that the universe could happen without God’s involvement. It implies that the mechanistic universe has its own way of behaving.
To assume that his remark is true, humanity is such a super tiny component of the universe. Thus, again, we cannot control and predict its behavior.
This notion leads me to an idea of how the human mind deals with this unpredictability. As implied in Phillip Zimbardo and John Boyd’s book, The Time Paradox, the most primitive condition of human behavior toward the predictability is the present oriented time perspective. Our ancestors lived in an extended present so that there is no concept of predictability.
The same volcanic eruption might occur more often in their era than now but they did not worry about it because there was no concept of “future simulation” in their brain. The human’s mental ability to simulate the future is one of the newest features of human cognitive abilities (no more than 3 million years old) and — concerning the idea of nature’s unpredictability — in my view, this mental characteristic may lead an individual to anxiety.
“Technology is useless without the awareness of the users. Thus, as long as there is a probability for human error, the unpredictability of nature is still around us.”
As implied in Daniel Gilbert’s article The Science of Happiness, the ability to simulate the future is associated with the happiness of an individual. People that have clear life targets and goals are more likely happier than those who do not have it. But, there is an interesting thing concerning the case of the ongoing increase of Merapi refugees.
If we watch the news about Mt. Merapi on television, we can see there are many old people who seem to be happy living near Mt. Merapi even though it has already erupted. They live happily alongside the unpredictablility of nature.
In my view, this reminds us to reflect on our perception of nature. The very old people who preferred to stay near Mt. Merapi, including Mbah Marijan, are people with a solid perception about nature, even though we may say their perception is wrong.
But the most important thing about being happy is not about right or wrong, which is debatable, it is about giving meaning to our life.
Mbah Maridjan’s devotion to the Yogyakarta Sultanate is associated with the meaning of his life as an abdi dalem: loyalty.
Thus, it is reasonable for him to stay in his house during the eruption. He was happy surrendering his life to nature.
At last, I would like to say, to be happy, we should reflect our position toward nature within this universe. And the source of this reflection is belief on something bigger than ourselves — from religion to spirituality or a philosophy of life.
The author is a science writer.
