Comments | 4_4_4: On Intelligent Design

4_4_4

On Intelligent Design

Mar 20, 2013 05:48

(Edited to Add this aside: a very nice soundtrack for reading, thinking about, and participating in this discussion (yes, the main post plus comments) can be had by going to Grooveshark, putting "Rapoon" into the search, then selecting "see all," from the albums list, then selecting Easterly 6 or 7 from that list, and then selecting "play all ( Read more... )

Comments 10

sauce1977 March 21 2013, 04:17:52 UTC

Loosely related, but falls into the "we're so stupid we don't even know" category:

http://io9.com/11-of-the-weirdest-solutions-to-the-fermi-paradox-456850746

The problem with life is that we don't live nearly long enough in a universal sense to really be able to figure this stuff out without generation after generation of banging our collective heads against the wall.

4_4_4 March 22 2013, 04:45:00 UTC

Hey Sauce--thanks for reading!

Yeah, I feel there's certainly something to what you're saying there: life's too short to really get a handle on the complexities of manifestation. I mean, people become experts in fields, for sure, but that becomes such a narrow and specialized knowledge that, by necessity, it excludes so much other knowledge or areas of exploration, and how can this lead to an understanding of the universe? I really don't think any form of reductionism is going to crack all the mysteries.

Also, so much for ancient wisdom, eh?

As for why we haven't had contact with ETI, well, I'm not entirely sure that we haven't. I know I haven't, but I certainly can't speak for everyone else!

But, yeah, we don't know much, it seems to me, and we tend to tell lots of stories to occult our ignorance.

sauce1977 March 22 2013, 05:13:55 UTC

One of the biggest problems our species faces is the preservation of knowledge. It's way too easy for a cataclysm or some man-made devastation to lose pretty much all the knowledge we've collected over the last few thousand years.

Your response also brings up a recent movie I watched which, if you're in the film mood, might be a fun watch on an idle occasion.

I was sick a couple weeks back, and I needed something to focus on to take my mind off the bad cold.

The Man from Earth is an interesting dialog-driven exploration of what would happen if someone lived for many ages. I'm pretty sure the main conflict of the story revolves around whether the protagonist can convince the others to accept his fantastical story ( ... )

4_4_4 March 22 2013, 08:18:45 UTC

OK, first: thanks for the movie recommendation--freakin' awesome movie, totally hit the spot. Well written, heavy, but with being a bludgeon (like, say Waking Life comes to mind, which I rewatched recently as well, but this is a tangent...). I can totally see why the line of discussion brought you to put it out there!

From the movie, and in line with what I wrote above, is the difficulty that a person would face with respect to knowledge if he or she could live a longer life: a person can barley keep up (or perhaps even can't keep up) with the cutting edge of his or her own field of specialization, let alone try to keep up with several areas of knowledge. Like John in the movie, sure, if we lived hundreds (or like him, thousands) of years, we could study several different areas of knowledge, but we would never be able to maintain expertise in any more than a few.

We are simply too limited, I feel, to come to any great understanding of things. We are, no doubt, living in The Cave, with little hope of seeing the sun ( ... )

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