The reason why there is always more washing up to be done is that there are always people generating more washing up. Assuming that living sentient beings will always generate something that may be called "washing up", then it's an infinite task in so much as the persistence of sentient life is infinite (which I certainly hope it is, but who knows?).
The reason why there is an end to the reading of the poem is that the person who wrote the poem decided to end it at a particular point, and doesn't keep adding new verses.
So the question of whether there is an end to the knowledge that can be acquired boils down to "is there someone, something, or some ongoing process, that causes new potentially knowable (but as yet unknown) things to exist?"
And scientifically speaking, we don't have an answer to that question, nor can I imagine any way we could detect the existence of such a thing. (But that doesn't mean no one will ever manage to imagine such a detector, or indeed get around to building it. I just can't get my head around what that would involve... But then, that's one of the things science has done for us: Given us the tools and the language to get our heads around various things we could never even conceive of before. Long may that continue!)
But here's a philosphical issue: it's been postulated that in our quest to know everything, we ourselves might actually be *generating* new unknowables. That maybe quarks didn't "really" exist until we strted trying to figure out what atoms electrons were made of, and electrons didn't exist till we started investigating what made the various phenomena we now ascribe to "electricity" tick. Maybe there's some deom out there, or some power within our own minds, thyat creates new mysteries so long as we have the hunger to solve them. In that case, the washing up analogy is spot on: We create the new washing up as a by-product of enjoying our food served on the plates we washed yesterday.
I hope that isn't the case, as it would seem as though we've just been fooling ourselves all along.. and yet, at the same time, wouldn't that be a really neat way of making humans be creative? Causing us, by dint of our own acts of wonder and investigation and discovery, to create the very unknowns that we are then driven to investigate, as a consequence of which we are able to invent new tools to do stuff with, and new ideas to speculate and write about in things called SF novels... How much more "made in the image of the creator" could you get?
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2011-02-22 12:53 pm (UTC)The reason why there is always more washing up to be done is that there are always people generating more washing up. Assuming that living sentient beings will always generate something that may be called "washing up", then it's an infinite task in so much as the persistence of sentient life is infinite (which I certainly hope it is, but who knows?).
The reason why there is an end to the reading of the poem is that the person who wrote the poem decided to end it at a particular point, and doesn't keep adding new verses.
So the question of whether there is an end to the knowledge that can be acquired boils down to "is there someone, something, or some ongoing process, that causes new potentially knowable (but as yet unknown) things to exist?"
And scientifically speaking, we don't have an answer to that question, nor can I imagine any way we could detect the existence of such a thing. (But that doesn't mean no one will ever manage to imagine such a detector, or indeed get around to building it. I just can't get my head around what that would involve... But then, that's one of the things science has done for us: Given us the tools and the language to get our heads around various things we could never even conceive of before. Long may that continue!)
But here's a philosphical issue: it's been postulated that in our quest to know everything, we ourselves might actually be *generating* new unknowables. That maybe quarks didn't "really" exist until we strted trying to figure out what atoms electrons were made of, and electrons didn't exist till we started investigating what made the various phenomena we now ascribe to "electricity" tick. Maybe there's some deom out there, or some power within our own minds, thyat creates new mysteries so long as we have the hunger to solve them. In that case, the washing up analogy is spot on: We create the new washing up as a by-product of enjoying our food served on the plates we washed yesterday.
I hope that isn't the case, as it would seem as though we've just been fooling ourselves all along.. and yet, at the same time, wouldn't that be a really neat way of making humans be creative? Causing us, by dint of our own acts of wonder and investigation and discovery, to create the very unknowns that we are then driven to investigate, as a consequence of which we are able to invent new tools to do stuff with, and new ideas to speculate and write about in things called SF novels... How much more "made in the image of the creator" could you get?