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

[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).