Our unique capability: Once one appreciates that one’s thoughts about the future are just representations, one is in a position to evaluate them, to discount them, or to try to compensate for their shortcomings

From 2019... The future-directed functions of the imagination: From prediction to metaforesight. Adam Bulley, Jonathan Redshaw, Thomas Suddendorf. In book: The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination, Apr 2019. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332154143

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1310592701960777728

Abstract: One of the fundamental roles of human imagination is to enable the representation of possible future events. Here, we survey some of the most critical abilities that this foresight supports: anticipating future emotions, setting and pursuing goals, preparing for threats, deliberately acquiring skills and knowledge, and intentionally shaping the future environment. Furthermore, we outline how metacognition bolsters human capacities even further by enabling people to reflect on and compensate for the natural limits of their foresight. For example, humans make contingency plans because they appreciate that their initial predictions may turn out to be wrong. We suggest that the processes involved in monitoring, controlling, and ultimately augmenting future-oriented imagination represent an important and understudied parallel of "metamemory" that should be called "metaforesight".

2. Compensating for anticipated limits: introducing “metaforesight”

Humans, perhaps uniquely, are capable of meta-representational insight into

the relationship between their imagination and reality. In other words, people can

evaluate how imagined scenarios link in with the external world, and thus assess

whether what is imagined is likely to actually occur in the future, and whether it is

biased, pessimistic, or hopeful and so forth. In the broad sense, meta-representation

involves representing the relation between (i) a representation and (ii) what that

representation is about (Pylyshyn, 1978). The development of such a capacity in

childhood is widely considered as critical to the emergence of an understanding of

other people’s minds (e.g., Perner, 1991). In the domain of foresight, this form of

metacognition has long been given a central role (Suddendorf, 1999). Once one

appreciates that one’s thoughts about the future are just representations, one is in a

position to evaluate them, to modify them, to discount them, to discuss them, and to

try to compensate for their shortcomings (Redshaw, 2014; Redshaw & Bulley, 2018).

Indeed, this capacity may be crucial to children acquiring a mature sense of future

time itself – as a series of possible chains of events of which only one will actually

happen (see Hoerl & McCormack, 2018).