Early morning thought before I start in on the housework

[avevale_intelligencer]

Prompted by this quote, relaed by 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.

Comments

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

If I may step in?

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?

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to think where I read that "we create the things we look for" idea, it was central to a story. The idea that scientists and other inquisitive and creative people actually caused our 'laws' to be as they are by observing them. (And Quantum Theory does have this thing about things not happening unless they are observed, much like the bishop's tree in the forest.)

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).