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avevale_intelligencerPrompted by this quote, relaed by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
earth_wizard.
There are two kinds of things we can do, exemplified by washing up and learning a poem. Washing up is always necessary and always there; it doesn't end, it goes on, and even if you use paper plates and plastic cutlery there'll always be something that needs cleaning. Washing up is infinite.
Learning a poem, on the other hand, involves starting at the beginning, memorising each line in its relation to the others, till you get to the end, and there stopping. Once it's done it's done, and as long as you refresh your memory every so often you won't need to do it again. Learning a poem, learning anything, is finite.
But if every time you went back to the book there were a hundred more lines to learn, you'd soon give up in despair.
It's tempting to see this belief (that the task of learning how the universe works is unending) as a desperate grab by some secular scientists at some kind of mysticism. They don't have room in their probably finite universe for an infinite god, so they figure something has to be infinite here. Why not the quest for knowledge? So far it's been a series of Chinese boxes, each one containing a smaller one; why shouldn't that literally go on for ever? Pattern under the chaos, chaos under the pattern, alternating into eternity, and always more to learn. As if, every time you turned up for your driving lesson, there was a new knob or a new pedal or a new lever in the car that you had to learn about before you could take your test, and you knew there always would be, every single time.
I'm quite convinced we haven't cracked the secrets of the universe yet. The task of science is nowhere near complete, and any scientist who says so is mistaken, I think. But that the task is completable--that it is finite--that has to be true, or else there is no point or purpose to learning anything. Understanding must be attainable, or we might as well go and do the dishes. At least they'll be done for a little while.
And speaking of which.
earth_wizard.There are two kinds of things we can do, exemplified by washing up and learning a poem. Washing up is always necessary and always there; it doesn't end, it goes on, and even if you use paper plates and plastic cutlery there'll always be something that needs cleaning. Washing up is infinite.
Learning a poem, on the other hand, involves starting at the beginning, memorising each line in its relation to the others, till you get to the end, and there stopping. Once it's done it's done, and as long as you refresh your memory every so often you won't need to do it again. Learning a poem, learning anything, is finite.
But if every time you went back to the book there were a hundred more lines to learn, you'd soon give up in despair.
It's tempting to see this belief (that the task of learning how the universe works is unending) as a desperate grab by some secular scientists at some kind of mysticism. They don't have room in their probably finite universe for an infinite god, so they figure something has to be infinite here. Why not the quest for knowledge? So far it's been a series of Chinese boxes, each one containing a smaller one; why shouldn't that literally go on for ever? Pattern under the chaos, chaos under the pattern, alternating into eternity, and always more to learn. As if, every time you turned up for your driving lesson, there was a new knob or a new pedal or a new lever in the car that you had to learn about before you could take your test, and you knew there always would be, every single time.
I'm quite convinced we haven't cracked the secrets of the universe yet. The task of science is nowhere near complete, and any scientist who says so is mistaken, I think. But that the task is completable--that it is finite--that has to be true, or else there is no point or purpose to learning anything. Understanding must be attainable, or we might as well go and do the dishes. At least they'll be done for a little while.
And speaking of which.
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no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 05:54 pm (UTC)Which is a false analogy, because you aren't comparing like with like. The analogy would be comparing one job of washing up with learning one poem, whether you decide to do some more washing up or learning is irrelevant. OK, you might claim that you have to do the washing up but not learn a poem, in which case the analogy breaks down from the start.
"I'm talking about the acquisition of knowledge, which you seem to want to be open-ended but which isn't proven to be and doesn't have to be."
But neither is it proven to be finite, and it doesn't have to be finite either. Both are assumptions. However, I am stating that the infinite is an assumption (and therefore may not be true -- since it's untestable because by definition something infinite it can only ever be an assumption), whereas you seem to be asserting that it is false (which is indeed testable, all you have to do is find an end to knowledge).
"if there is no way to understand a finite universe completely, then sooner or later we're going to hit a wall far more painful than the one you seem to be postulating, one that says "THUS FAR AND NO FARTHER" when you can see that there is farther to go."
Huh? Where's that wall come from? My visualisation of the Cosmic All has no need for any such wall, because no matter how big we get the universe will always be bigger. The only limitation, in my weltanschauung, is that as mortal beings (and if we become immortal we will no longer be human in any normal sense) we cannot know the infinite.
Er, yes, that's what "to me" means. In My Opinion. I did not assert it as an absolute or about anyone else, and explicitly said so.
Re-reading? I love it. But there are already quite a few books which I don't reread because I know them too well (it's been around 25 years, I guess, since I last reread LotR, and I feel no particular desire to do so. But I keep the books because it's possible I might want to reread them sometime before I die.)
"not only that everything is not knowable but that somehow that's a happy"
Negative in the wrong place. I didn't say that everything is unknowable, I said that not everything is knowable, i.e. there are some things which are not totally knowable. For instance, in order to say that "there is no other intelligent life in the universe" one would have to explore every part of it -- and still while one was looking in one place they could have gone (or evolved) somewhere else. Can we know what came before the Big Bang (if that theory's still current)? Can we even know what is out there beyond the red-shift boundary, if we are limited by the speed of light? (Yes, that's a 'wall', possibly, and I don't like it.)
I don't think that "science has to proceed on the basis that everything is eventually knowable", Certainly it doesn't at the moment, it ignores areas where it can't find repeatable results and where there are no testable theories (from what I've heard that's part of the definition of science, that if it dealt with those other things then it might be philosophy or something).
Which one is "a happy" is a matter of taste (de gustibus And All That). I'm happy knowing that there is more to the universe than I, or anyone I know, will ever know. You aren't. You say "Personally, if the choice were between boredom and frustration (I don't think it is), I'll take boredom any day" -- I can't argue with that, because that's your personal taste (and mine is different). I do argue with an (apparent) assertion that the way you feel is the way everyone else does (or should) feel about it.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 08:53 pm (UTC)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?
no subject
Date: 2011-02-22 01:46 pm (UTC)That also ties into the fractal idea, that we create the infinitely small detail by looking at it closely.
But even without that, if free will is postulated we create more information just by existing, which we then don't fully understand and in trying to understand it that generates still more.
I don't think of it as fooling ourselves, though, or at least no more so than our tendency to tell each other (and ourselves) fiction. We seem to be a creature which delights in inventing something 'false' if we haven't got enough 'real' stuff coming in (indeed, in sensory deprivation our brains generate illusions all by themselves).