I suppose anything in the future could be possible couldn’t it…Not just technologly…but a different life…whatever your mind can dream could be possible in the future.
What do you think?[/i]
deltron your statement is very vague. perhaps you could narrow it down… i can see many things that are relevant to your post that could be put here
anyways… im assuming that anything we can think can be accomplished. anything. it has to have some kind of basis for us to think of it. now it might not reach particular parameters or expectations… and may be achieved in ways that you never thought of. the limitations are within us.
on the other hand theres that part of me that says “yeah right, just leave it to the stories and the movies,” that in its abstract technical way still ends up achieving the impossible…
Hey Obscure, great to see you posting once again. Instead of just surfing and reading all these posts and keeping your point of veiw away from the rest of us. Welcome back!
In the future much should be possible. That is of course if we don’t destroy ourselves. I belive that the ‘good future’ (i.e. Back to the Future II, Star Trek in general) will only be possible if we eliminate capitalism and implement some new form of society and economics that works for everybody, while still keeping every body inherently free! Other wise we will witness the ‘bad future’ (i.e. Mad Max, Escape from New York, Terminator series, 12 Monkeys, Alien series, Matrix, etc.)
Was it Socrates that was attributed to saying that all kings be philosophers?
— That was Plato.
— The thing lacking in science and technology is precisely the goal. Science is a method. We know more about the universe (including ourselves) than ever before, yet we frequently lack the foresight and planning to adequately implement this knowledge. Our need to define may well result in our decline. We have weapons of mass destruction (sic!), yet lack international diplomacy, for instance.
I remain uncertain as to whether equality of economic means (or steps in that direction) will alleviate our problems either. toleration levels all values, there have to be differences between people for society to function. The Greeks used the analogy equating the state with the body. I here amplify it comparing the World to the body, if everyone wanted to be a brain and became so, there would be no hands to feed the brain glucose. If everyone were to become hands, there would be no brain to direct the feeding activity.
If we take it easy today our future will be fraught with difficulties, if we temper ourselves today…
I supose anything is possible as long as it applys to the laws of physics and nature.
At what point, however, does idealism cease to be healthy? wouldn’t too much idealism sell the present short at the expense of the future? These and other difficulties will have to be answered if we are to achieve our dreams.
Everything might be possible, but let’s stay realistic. Our generation will not reach those days, when we can do/have everything we see in movies like Star Trek. For me it’s like talking about 100.000.000 $ … that is the amount of money I can’t conceive. Only very very vague. The same is with the future and the technology and achievements in it. It’s possible to think of it, but hard to realize it might be like that one day.
My guess is that even those people in the future (with everything) will still have something to dream for (else why live).
Marshall McDaniel:
I agree. Just think of people about 100 years ago. Could they ever imagine something like a PC, let alone internet. The first time the word ‘internet’ appeared in a book in 1995. Look how far we are at the moment and the science is progressing every single second.
I think mankind is ready for the next step, Colonization of outer space. All it would take is one nuclear bomb (followed by others) or an asteroid (epitomized by the collective unconscious in popular films such as deep impact and Armageddon). Maybe eventually man will be spread far and wide across the universe, start to diverge into other species, eventually maybe most planets will have self-aware beings. Creatures like us and other creatures, friends we have met on the way.
Everything that is impossible is unable to exist, by definition.
So only what is possible can exist.
All that exists is ‘everything’.
Therefore everything is possible.
Things only start appearing impossible when you add things that don’t exist - that are ‘impossible’. Such as dimensions and separation of everything into discrete entities.
Yes i agree with silhouette, just as only something that is alive can be dead. Something been impossible, well, we aways deny a possibility were we see none.
Or ourselves are the universe?
I think a better question to ask is does technology have a limit? will there be a point were the empical apparatus we use finds a limit to what it can do, with the raw materials available to us.
Yes i agree with silhouette, just as only something that is alive can be dead. Something been impossible, well, we aways deny a possibility were we see none.
Or ourselves are the universe?
I think a better question to ask is does technology have a limit? will there be a point were the empical apparatus we use finds a limit to what it can do, with the raw materials available to us.
I heard someone say, somewhere, that the only thing that can understand the universe is the universe itself. We can attempt to understand everything by breaking it down to small bite-size components, but we can’t conceive how they all fit together because we are physically unable to do that. We can only guess by deduction, using what we can understand to link everything together. Which, quite frankly, is woefully insufficient.
The only thing we are gathering knowledge about is how we are able to interpret everything, which in itself is meaningless, because we have nothing to compare it to except other people with the same limitations. And we call this ‘proof’? We need to compare what we think with something that knows everything to prove it, but that is impossible unless there is such thing as God.
Some piece of self-aware matter in a book said that life is the universe becoming aware of itself.
Silhouette said:
(italics mine)
I am not sure that one has to know everything in order to prove some things. For instance, one knows that 2+2=4 without having to know all the particular circumstances of whether 2 goats are being added to 2 pigs, apples being added to oranges, etc. There is also the process of elimination.
1.) there are 4 items in a jar
2.) exactly one item is a beer
If one has pulled 3 items out of the jar, none of which are unfortunately a beer, then the 4th is obviously a beer, even though we have no first-hand experiential knowledge of that beer. It is also possible (though not probable) for people to pool their resources and thus have more knowledge from a collective viewpoint. But perhaps i should understand this statement from the context of ‘meaningless interpretation’ above which is exactly what science is. Science is a method, it can give us no meaning, we must impart the meaning to things. And while it is true that any meaning is arbitrary, it seems, nevertheless, that meaning is somehow essential to the inner psyche and impetus of man.
I hope i have at least half-way understood your arguments Silhouette. Feel free to aid my (necessarily) less than perfect understanding.
A ‘meaningless interpretation’… well if i was to interpret a sentence such as 2+2=4 then i would understand it as a rule such as Wittenstein pointed out, id need a prior understanding of the method you’ve used, which i find from my own experience and predict that by adding 2 to 2 id get 4 – this presupposes that i know a ‘truth’ or connection in the method you use, but im understanding and finding meaning in it! so if i didnt have experience of your method id have to learn it: i continue the series 2,4,6,8,… and so on indefinitely. Wittenstein noted that a learner might continue correctly up to say, a 1000, but then go on in a different way that was more natural to my own familiarizing of the events and write 1004, 1008. This might be wrong to your method but correct in my method. Wittenstein quotes
…We say to him[me]: “Look at what youve done!” – He doesnt understand. We say: you were meant to add two: look how you began the series!" – He answers “Yes, isnt that right? i thought that was how i was meant to do it.” or suppose he pointed at the series and said: But i went on in the same way." It would now be no use to say: "but cant you see…? – and repeat the old examples and explaination.-- in such a case we might say, perhaps: it comes natural to this person to understand our order and our explaination as we should understand the order “add 2 up to 100, 4 up to 200, 5 up to 300 and so on.”-- which method is correct? Its similair to to one in which a person naturally reacts to someone pointing there finger by looking in the directing of the line from the finger-tip to the wrist, not from the wrist to the finger-tip.
So i find meaning and understanding in that and only that which is of normative accord, or familiar to my awareness of the method in my own experience. I’ll find that i have some general claim about the understanding a interpretation, but this is only with words and ideas i can correlate with i.e., words with no relation to deeds are unintelligible, and deeds with no relation to words are inarticulate. Or as Nietzsche so, we can only imagine a cause! and logically relate it to the importance of the interpretater, or the general power the interpretation holds in society: “Following a rule is analogous to obeying an order. We are trained to do so; we react to an order in a particular way. But what if one person reacts in one way and another in another to the order and the training. Which one is right? Suppose you came as an explorer into an unknown country with a language quite strange to you. In what circumstances would you say that people there gave orders, undrstood them, obeyed them, rebelled against them, and so on?
The common behaviour of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown lauguage.”
So as he said, its not interpretation alone, but the system of behaviour upon which it is directed, which determines meaning; and the justification about claims of meaning or familiar accord is provided by interpretation itself.
Well our capacity to think and speak about ourselves, including our apprehension of the basic data in experience, is constistuted as knowledge by the possible relation it has to others, which shows in our being such as to be interpretable by them.
Its ‘possible’ if it lay in co-ordination and accord with the norms which each of us makes sense of the individual’s behaviour – that our practices of judging, and the phenomenon of the familiar’ which they exhibit, are to be fundimental in understanding if something is possible or not. Everyone
is in a connected understanding, its just everything is relative. As Nietzsche’s “On the use and abuse of history for life” pointed out, were forced feed the interpreters moral view of events and values he holds–not that it has any value to present but to keep it in the past. The methods of lauguage(english) and logic we use is a instrument of power giving to us at childhood, along with morals[Nietzsche’s “On the use and abuse of history for life”]: whats going to happen once we realise that the “right” and “wrong” in things isnt nessessarily “right” or “wrong”? How important will the possibility of more knowledge be? What would be the importance of others interpretation of phenomena?- then just been a means to load your will and desires on others.
You can ‘know’ that theoretically and logically, 2+2=4 because that is the answer by its given definition. But definition just is a premise, the assumption upon which logic can be applied, all of which are made up terms designed for theoretical logic. You can know anything in theory, they are just a set of words and rules that all define and complement each other inside their own framework. But the only problem comes when you try to apply theory to practice. Ironically, the very application for which it was created.
It is an animal necessity to try and get an edge on the world around it so that it may carry out its function (to survive and reproduce) best. And the way in which most animals have managed to do this is to develop an ego to make as much sense of the chaos around it as possible so as to direct its id towards fulfilling its animal necessities (which are its desires) in a slightly more prepared, and therefore improved way. Logic has become its tool to find patterns and order to help make a loose prediction of the chaos so that it may be slightly more prepared for what may threaten its animal function and slightly more clued up for to what to do about it.
We can twist theory around until we find something that mostly fits singled out characteristics of practice which we can logically link to other characteristics. But whilst this can help us find vague connections and patterns, it doesn’t ‘prove’ anything other than our ability to fit theory and logic loosely to practice and nothing more than that. We haven’t gathered knowledge - you can only ‘know’ theory. We can ‘believe’ that we know practice because it can fit together in a way that looks right on the surface and seems to match theory. But they are different things - one that can be certain because it is ordered, one that cannot because it is chaos.
In practice, there are no seperate entities or anything that can constitute a singled out characteristic (despite what we see - that is just a convenient illusion for survival), there are no numbers, dimensions or patterns and there isn’t any sort of order. These things can be applied to it in theory. But it is chaos and cannot be understood, or ‘known’. The universe is an infinite ‘one’ and there are no true, clear divisions of it - the only thing that can understand the universe is the universe. It is not physically possible for anything else to do so…at least in theory…
Marshall McDaniel - yes, you can imagine and deduce to logically predict that which you cannot sense. But logic is a product of theory. In theory, it is only assumed that logic always applies to practice. And it is only assumed that what you logically predict is perfectly predicted in terms of accuracy and precision. To really prove something, we must compare it to a perfect source that can know everything in practice and perceive beyond logic.
Well out of the chaos logic has the vital role of making a ‘thing’ consciously equal and familiar to the ego’s own experience, thus giving it meaning; not that it holds anything true in-itself, as you pointed out.
To percieve beyond logic, is to percieve as God, or hold a idea which goes by a feeling that this is the work of something spiritual i.e., something true. Now there is no concept of god or ‘beyond logic,’(well thats if your a athiest like me) so from now on a new theory or new ideas in science aren’t going to hold such a truth as they did (no matter how good the theory is) and with many individuals adding and changing science all the time (such as methods in chemistry change from school to higher education). Will a method find no meaning or point? Or do we psychologically need a meaning or point? (as Marshall felt was essential). So a theory: there have been several observations that agree with the predictions of X. So, until the theory is proved wrong or a simpler theory produces the same results, X will maintain its position as the best theory out there.
Nice discussion, fellas.
Really? I percieve beyond logic everyday. But understand how. The conception of a mechanical universe functioning by the dictates of logic does nothing to constitute a “meaning” or excuse for such. While it certainly does suggest that certain physical features of such a universe are possible while others are not, it does nothing to prove a necessity for such an existence in the first place. Sure, if gravity pulls objects toward the center of whatever mass is generating that gravity, it would be necessary that Newton get hit on the head by the apple which falls from the tree. But is the gravity itself necessary? And likewise, the laws of thermodynamics which produce that gravity, and so on ad infinitum. It is here that the mystery of “possibility” looses any appeal, as it only becomes more meaningless actuality in its state of existence, a state, of course, that conforms to the dictates of logic. My point is that logic is indifferent to human beings, we aren’t concerned with “what” as much as we are with “why.” When I concieve of an existence beyond that which is logical, while even that conception itself is of logical origins, it is not because my existence cannot be explained in terms of empirical axioms, but because resorting to such logic doesn’t convince me that I should go to work that day, that I should pay taxes, that I should love my father, etc.
Soren Kierkegaard-
“In a logical system, nothing may be incorperated that has any relation to existence, that is not indifferent to existence. The infinite advantage that the logical, by being the objective, possesses over all thinking is in turn, subjectively viewed, restricted by its being a hypothesis, simple because it is indifferent to existence understood as actuality. This duplexity distinguishes the logical from the mathematical , which has no relation whatever toward or from existence but has only objectivity- not objectivity and the hypothetical as unity and contradiction in which it is negatively related to existence.”
It is here that Kierkegaard coined the term “existential,” and demanded that the first logical sense to be made in philosophy is that it makes no logical sense. Of course many a following philosopher found this paradox quite unconvincing, to which Kierkegaard replied, “well, then you don’t exist.”
[laughing]
I think what really sucks about life, which I’ve tried to say rather insufficiently in my signature, is that we are told to look for meaning, happiness and motivation, when all we are is just a random function that just ‘is’. So when we realise that what we define ourselves as, isn’t there, and we can’t be defined at all, we just are and there would be no ultimate difference to anything if we weren’t unless we make up one. But when we try to find truth as we are told to do, we find that anything made up is irrelevant and so we are disappointed that what wasn’t there in the first place, isn’t there. I’d rather not have been told to look for anything in the first place to avoid the disappointment and its complementary bad feelings of desolation, which are only bad because I’ve been told they are bad when really they should be expected.
So we are told to look for and desire to possess what isn’t there and we are disappointed when we can’t find of have it when we end up with nothing.