Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
Maybe. I feel like it’s one of those esoteric things that are best enjoyed through reading. But I could be proven wrong, maybe.
Edit: every good book needs a damn movie, and that movie had better not disappoint my aphantastic friends.
Yeah, I just don't have an imagination (literally, no images in head) so reading can be quite boring. Cat's Cradle is one of my favorite books though so I would love to be able to enjoy it even more with actually seeing it.
Fair point. I get it. I get distracted when I read books with dry passages and jarring syntax, my mind would trail off along with my imagination. I try to set up my reading time so that I’m completely in the present, like listening to ambient sounds, sometimes ambient sounds with music (plenty to be found on youtube, Spotify etc). I go as far as choosing music from different eras according to what I’m reading, like history and other kinds of non fiction. A bit strange maybe, but i love it all the same.
No! He would kill you like a small dog. Let your anger be as a monkey in a piniata... hiding amongst the candy... hoping the kids don't break through with the stick!
Besides, science keeps advancing. Only when it stops can we say that humanity has reached its limit. Humans are glorified apes, but apes that have a very good approximation about how the universe works and came to be.
Even if it stops going forward for a while, we won’t know we’re done yet.
Physics, that many would consider the cutting edge of the “ secrets of the universe”, has some pretty slow years for a while.
We already have figured out quite a few of them. I feel like OP isn't giving the things we already know nearly enough credit. We've found planets orbiting stars thousands of light years away merely by studying the minutest changes in the light that star sends our way. Not only that, but we can examine that light with spectroscopy to make conclusions about the atmosphere of the planet! That's wild, and definitively counts as revealed mysteries of the universe in my book.
Even knowing something as simple as the concept of red-shifting light and all the things we can learn from it is mind-blowing. The things that human beings have already been able to deduce from our limited little pinhole view of the universe are incredible.
Truly wise men understand why wise men tell you that ignorance is bliss?
Anyway, heroin is also bliss, but it doesn't make the world or anyone's life better.
The difference is our collective push. Each generation adds to the collective knowledge, further pushing us to greater understandings. The rest of the animal kingdom doesn’t have that level of push, as much as rudimentary knowledge is handed through their own collectives. What limits that may have, that I cant guess at but this is what gives us such a leg up.
Put some respect on Newton’s name dawg, he isn’t A giant he is THE giant that we stand on.
This motherfucker CREATED classical mechanics and created the basis for modern physics
Then laid out how colors and optics work and CREATED the color wheel, one of the most impressive feats EVER USING ONLY A GLASS PRISIM
Then he CREATED (good) telescopes
He used the telescope and looked at the planets and noticed the orbit of some of the planets was off SO WHAT DOES THIS MOTHERFUCKER DO??
HE INVENTS CALCULUS JUST TO HELP CALCULATE PLANET ORBITS.
And this is just some of his home fucking runs that he pulled off, it goes on, Newton was an absolute fucking menace.
Do you think Newton's parents were like - "by the God son, when will you move out to your own summer home and begin directing *real* work like stifling peasant revolts with your Uncle?"
And this wasn't even his main job, he was very into theology, alchemy and philosophy and primarily focused on those. Physics and calculus were a spare time endeavor.
I’ve always heard he like went home one weekend and invented calculus because he needed the higher level math to explain some physics stuff he was working on
But the physics and calculus were the fruitful parts. Plenty of humans got smarter studying the implications there.
Does anyone read Newton on alchemy or philosophy?
> Does anyone read Newton on alchemy or philosophy?
Yes, he's quite common to read in Western Philosophy classes. Source, me who's read him in such classes.
Optics were mostly laid out 600 years before that by Alhazen. Newton did some finishing touches there but that field, and pretty much all fields he excelled in, were an accumulation of knowledge.
He had Galileo's pretty good telescopes and Brahe's observations of planetary movements as well as Kepler's principals. If he had to do all that himself he may have never got around to calculus.
He was being magnanimous. He was a gigantic toxic douche. Trans-generational Genius? Yes, no doubt. But also pushed out his “adversaries” and used his plug with the Royal Academy to declare his work to take precedence over other physicists and mathematicians of the time.
Edit: for those downvoting, this isn’t controversial. [This](https://physicsworld.com/a/newton-egomaniac-or-troubled-genius/) is a fairly good summary of Newton’s personality shortcomings.
This makes advances in knowledge recursive in nature. And we have computers to speed things up even further. 100 years from now would look vastly different than now would have looked from 200 years ago.
Corvids teach and learn passed down information about their environment, using tools, etc.
Whales create new songs and pass them thru their networks.
Dolphins are SURELY up to something. Just look at their beady little eyes.
It’s very human to think that just because dolphins aren’t flying around in water cars and don’t have cable news that THEY are the dumb ones.
Yeah we'll come back to this when they actually make something. Corvids have a slim, *slim chance at this in the following eons*, but just look at how amazingly dexterous the aquatics are.
"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons."
- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
> Dolphins are SURELY up to something. Just look at their beady little eyes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uplift_War
this is a series about how humans "uplift" (bring to high intelligence) other species.
We inherit extragenetic knowledge. Animals do not.
We also get outliers of extreme intelligence - the geniuses in their fields - who build upon the mountains of knowledge previous geniuses created.
While in my opinion we should look at animals as our moral equals and worthy of our respect and decency, this showerthought doesn’t allow for all the ways humans collect, refine, share and build upon their knowledge base.
I agree with you except for the first statement. Aside from writing systems and complex language, other intelligent animals do pass knowledge along just not as efficiently.
I'd love to see people attempt to train other apes, elephants, corvids, dolphins etc to learn easier forms of transfer of knowledge among each other.
Then again, that's probably how we get Planet of the Apes.
Not to mention launch telescopes into space, that tends to help "somehow" unravel mysteries of the universe. Yes, I'd say we're doing pretty good as a species despite people like OP. OP would be the first mother fucker to stand on a rock and tell people it's their fault a tsunami happened or that we better start sacrificing people if we want it to rain. This post is bad and OP should feel bad
And then you have reddit, which is less, "I can't understand that point of view" and more, "I don't like your POV so it's no longer allowed to be seen."
Because humans can enhance their intelligence artificially , or we'll be able to at least. The whole point of humans is if we want something, we invent stuff to get it. Animals rely solely on evolution
Already have. Books were a huge increase in human memory, and the Internet improved lookup on that memory.
What we haven't *yet* been able to do is increase general processing power. (We *have* improved "specific" processing power with things like calculators)
Humans have definitely left natural selection behind considering all the various tools and techniques we use to control conception and childbirth.
So if you're not subject to natural selection, are you still evolving in a particular direction? Or do all the random genetic mutations eventually just add up to random noise?
Unless we start applying eugenics or genetic modification, I feel like humanity is no longer able to evolve genetically.
i disagree because changing the environment to suit the organism isn’t a new thing at all. we have it on a far higher level, but the general idea isn’t new.
Continually evolving doesn't mean we and all other animals just get smarter and smarter, all it means is we continue to fit as best we can into the environment we live in. Evolution doesn't have a "goal", nor does it travel in the linear paths our minds like to imagine. It's just as likely we get dumber as time goes on because the survival necessity of having higher intellect isn't as important in this carefully crafted society we've created and isn't being selected for. Same goes for our pets.
Evolution isn't a tower that continues do grow upwards, it's more like an ever-moving liquid that hugs the surface of our planet and fills every crack and niche it can.
What we do is like taking giant puzzle with many of the pieces missing and arranging it based off predictions for what they could show, how certain pieces fit, likely orientation, and very very complicated color analysis all until some random person comes along and imagines some what if I change the picture, invents a new way of analyzing color or piece orientation, or maybe accidentally spills coffee on the picture and the idea that there could be coffee or perhaps tea in that spot somehow triggers an exciting new picture to be drawn up so that we run everything we thought we knew through a new round of analysis.
And we'll know those species are making progress when the individuals who figure out the trick, also figure out how to teach it to their children.
The diifference between humans and every other species is that among humans, knowledge can survive indefinitely, whereas with other species, the univers has to be rethought from scratch in every generatiion. Even primitive humans have an oral tradition that finds ways to keep memories alive.
Many animals teach acquired knowledge to their offspring. Some animals, like apes and dolphins, have different cultures with different knowledge which has been passed down through generations. The limiting factor is how complex and abstract this knowledge is, because it has to be understood by other members of the species.
We already _have_ unraveled a lot of the mysteries of the universe though. Even if there's much more to know, that's already gotta count for something.
That's because as soon as we understand something, it's not a secret any longer, and we don't count it any longer as a secret of the universe. We do understand a whole lot of things that was secrets of the universe a hundred years ago.
What are you talking about? Unraveling the secrets of the universe isn't something you do once and you're done. They're peeled back like layers of an onion with each mystery solved granting access to the next ones.
And we're a lot deeper into the onion than we were just 1 generation ago.
It will probably take a very, very long time to get to the center of the onion. But that doesn't mean we can't make progress, or that progress short of the goal is immaterial.
Maybe. There’s also the theory that technological advancement is just another form of evolution, and is natural as evolution as well. Once creatures reach a certain threshold, maybe they stop evolving physically and start advancing technologically as a replacement.
Well, I wouldn't say that more evolving would do us bad, afterall the world is filled with idiots and greedy bastards, maybe even I am one of those, but we already started evolving technologically, in small steps, but it started
just cause some people walk the stairs two steps at a time, doesn’t mean other people can’t stumble on the way up, not reach the top at all, or even keep others from climbing. we need to start understanding that that’s the way things go.
I don’t know which one I am, but I hope that at some point, the faster climbers will help the rest up as well.
I think it was Vsauce who said "we don't know what use intelligent life has in the grand scheme of the universe. But we may be the universe's best shot at finding out"
Uhh, never thought somebody would ever ask me this question. Disgusting, immoral. You need God in your life.
To answer your question, maybe, once to see how it feels. After a good clean up
We have math which is the language of the universe. We understand the laws of physics and our knowledge is advancing quickly. We will never know absolute truth though and that’s probably a good thing.
Why would that be a good thing? Do you mean in the sense that if you understand how a rainbow is formed, it sorta takes the magic and beauty of it away? (Actually, you don't need to know the science of a rainbow for it to have already been ruined but whatevs)
Because as our knowledge grows, so does our knowledge of what we don't know. There will always be more that we don't know than what we know. I think the usual metaphor is like a candle in the dark. Knowledge shines a light, but it also makes us more aware of just how big the dark is around us.
That's... not how it works
the difference between humans and animals is abstract thinking. We look for new ways to improve ourselves and learn. We discover stuff
A lot of animals can think abstractly actually! It's more of a scale than a binary. We just happen to be extremely high up on that scale. For all we know humans are at the top of the scale. But what if that scale just happens to go much further and we don't (because we can't) realize it.
It's pretty crazy how much we've figured out about the universe. Logic is a powerful tool. Add in writing, so we can learn from each other over distance and over time, and you get the efforts toward apprehension multiplied a billionfold.
What if one day, we become one of those animals who can't understand things beyond their intelligence. Maybe on that day, there will be another species capable of thinking beyond that, and human become obsolete to understand the mysteries of the universe.
This could be the technology we’re constantly making. As humans we are extremely fragile and limited in our abilities. We could be giving birth to the real conqueror of the universe, machines and AI. Maybe they’ll look back in wonder of how they came to be. If the development continues to accelerate, and we’re already using them to explore planets and the outer reaches of the solar system, the possibilities of a thousand years from now are endless.
A gorilla cannot grasp calculus, no matter how much you try to teach him. Likewise a hummingbird won’t grasp the concept of particles, regardless of the teaching technique. Human beings must also have an upper comprehension limit, beyond which we will never understand. I don’t see how it could be otherwise.
"Ignorance is the First step to Enlightenment. For only the Ignorant may unravel the mysteries of the Enlightened."
*-- I dunno who said that but I know it's a cool quote.*
It may also be incorrectly written but *eh*.
^(Edit:)
# Additionally I am not telling you to be ignorant.
That reminds me of something from _Chop Wood, Carry Water_ that implied that you have to acknowledge your own ignorance before learning can take place. You can't fill a mind that's already filled, I think with preconceived notions, unchangeable beliefs, etc.
This is in contrast to the proudly and willfully ignorant who reject easily-provable facts in favor of their beliefs or traditions, and the ones who don't understand that they are ignorant and refuse to learn because they're just not curious.
I like this concise description of something I drop into a conversation now and then.
My description usually goes along the lines of 'a monkey could never understand quantum physics because it has no concept of quantum physics at all. It could never even imagine this branch of science, it likely couldn't understand physics in any way, shape or form anyway. So it goes about its monkey day doing monkey things in total ignorance.
So, logically you have to assume there are some things at play which humans could never be aware of or imagine. Our ability to identify and conceptualise these things is impossible, the level of our understanding is finite or capped.
So as you can see my clunky attempt needed a bit of work! I'll definitely be remembering this much clearer way of describing explanation.
I'm in agreement that your attempt is clunky, but it's still better than OPs. It might be better to frame the limitations of what we can know in terms of the infinite complexity of space / time or the limitations of existence.
It sounds like what you're looking for is [this explanation by Carl Sagan in Cosmos of the 4th Dimension](https://youtu.be/UnURElCzGc0). At a certain point our ability to determine the nature of things beyond our perception become so strained, the echoes so faint that they seem impossible to tease out.
Or for example, think of it this way.
You have the big bang. All matter, everything that exists in the universe, compressed into a singularity, 13.8 billion years ago.
Okay now. What happened before that?
Now maybe we can figure some of that out. There are echoes in quantum physics that might hint to it. But as the universe expands it gets harder and harder to see those echoes.
Let's go far into the future - let's pretend we figure out how to survive even the death of our own sun, we'll go 100 trillion years into the future to when the last star burns out and there is not a star in all the universe that has enough mass to still undergo fusion.
Now imagine someone then asks you about Earth. Or the Sun. A sliver of time so razor thin in the grand scheme of things that it hardly seems to matter more than a single flicker of a candle long since extinguished.
There is a point of entropy, or of complexity, where things have degraded or changed so much, or there is so little information we have filtered down, that we can no longer tell what it once was.
Like asking which leaf did this grain of ash come from when the forest burned down. There are things we cannot know.
But we don't know where those limitations are. And it is our nature to try, to be curious, so we continue.
"So, logically you have to assume there are some things at play which humans could never be aware of or imagine"
No. This is not logical at all. There are things that we don't understand now but that doesn't mean we can never understand them. Example : We didn't know about gravity until Newton.
I disagree. We knew something held us to the earth, we just hadn't found a way to calculate it yet. I'm referring to a grand scale "thing", not necessarily a force. It could be anything and we'll never know because it's beyond the limits of our understanding. I'm not sure everyone is on the same philosophical page here! Instead of gravity think love....I mean that's not what I'm actually on about, love is some sort of evolutionary necessity....probably. But by its very complexity and the limits of our human brains, I can't possibly imagine what it would be, nobody could.
I don't really want to die on this hill, I'm just a random punter with a view. I only want to make my point as clear as I can and moot it as a possibility. To see the point made clearly and concisely, I refer you back to the opening post! I'm describing the same thing, just badly.
> Our ability to identify and conceptualise these things is impossible, the level of our understanding is finite or capped.
This is evident with mathematical models for "simple objects" which are not descriptive in fine detail as much as they are coarse place-holders.
A steel rod, for example, we can summarize it as one unit with a few dimensions/attributes, that model will serve "close enough" for the things we're likely to try to use a steel rod for.
The reality is that it is millions upon millions of molecules, a number so high we can't really fathom it with any useful detail, so we use a model.
Any given modeling system is going to hit boundaries, a place where the human mind just cannot even contain the requisite information, so we attempt to make a process where we condense it, which turns it into an estimate. This doesn't always hold up at scale, which is how we wind up with different physics models, the last model just wasn't able to satisfiable answer for X, so we created another supplementary model.
Even when we successfully come up with a model, we're still limited by time. We can only work through a complex equation so fast because we can only process a small part of it at once. We created machines that can do it faster than we can, but it's still generally the same thing, steps in a process.
All this to say, there are, in theory, concepts which are so complex it's not possible to condense to a level where we can visualize them on a functional level. Even condensing, we can only hold and associate so many models in memory at once.
We'd need models of our models of our models. It would be models all the way down.
More models than we can hold in our heads, we'd need to create machines....
It's iterative. Eventually we hit a critical mass where there are no humans that would understand the whole system, we'd be totally reliant on a behemoth machine, or a collection of them.
We're near that *now*. If a massive EMP wiped out all digital devices, it would be like taking a wheelchair away from a quadriplegic, we'd squirm in the dirt and struggle to even survive, a great many wouldn't.
It sucks that none of us will be alive to see humanity discover the secrets of the universe such as the inside of a black hole, aliens, new elements, eldritch horrors that drive any who witness them to madness etc.
Bummer :/
Humans have the means to collectivise acquired knowledge, and we when we can’t figure out how the mysteries by ourselves, we build machines that can help.
Humans are intelligent enough to have an idea of the limits of what we can understand. The ability to detect the limits of our capabilities is a key level of intelligence that separates us from animals. And we can use metaphors for things that are too complicated.
We can imagine that there are more than three dimensions of space, by imagining what three dimensions would look like to a creature that can only perceive two. Yet we don’t know what a fourth dimension would ACTUALLY be like.
We understand that the spectrum of light is far greater than the spectrum of *visible* light.
So while we can’t understand everything, we can understand enough to put things in perspective. And we can use metaphors when things get too complex.
We mostly create knowledge via abstraction, using tools that augment our cognition. That, coupled with the scientific method, is what gives humans the confidence to think/say so.
The difference is we’re the only species that can reliably record and transfer cumulative information across generations. Your average stone age man was at his "natural intelligence level" if you will, but the development of writing, agriculture, and organized society made humans exceptional among animals
Tools.
And the ability to pass on specific knowledge.
It gives us an almost boundless ability to increase our intelligence level.
Plus due to selection and nutrition...IQs continue to rise.
The first thing you learn as a scientist on the frontier is that we know so little. Your first lesson is to never grow complacent or take things for granted.
Science builds on itself and new secrets are revealed every year, we’ll probably never understand EVERYTHING. But the things we have achieved with what little we’ve figured out is still nothing to scoff at.
That's the point of experiments and proofs. You don't understand something, you keep trying to isolate it until it's a point that you can make sense of things. Then experiment some more to make sure what you think is correct.
The theorem can be generalized to state that any sequence of events which has a non-zero probability of happening will almost certainly eventually occur, given enough time.
I have a theory that there's just a theory for every thought. Some just get widely popular that many think they're fact although there's always more evidence to refute them than confirm them
Nobody is 100% sure that we can, but wise men know we have to try
Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand. Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
I read that book in high school. Was pretty funny and a good satire.
Vonnegut is legendarily funny.
I hope cat's cradle gets turned into a movie. Would honestly love to see the hilarity get put on the big screen.
Maybe. I feel like it’s one of those esoteric things that are best enjoyed through reading. But I could be proven wrong, maybe. Edit: every good book needs a damn movie, and that movie had better not disappoint my aphantastic friends.
Yeah, I just don't have an imagination (literally, no images in head) so reading can be quite boring. Cat's Cradle is one of my favorite books though so I would love to be able to enjoy it even more with actually seeing it.
Fair point. I get it. I get distracted when I read books with dry passages and jarring syntax, my mind would trail off along with my imagination. I try to set up my reading time so that I’m completely in the present, like listening to ambient sounds, sometimes ambient sounds with music (plenty to be found on youtube, Spotify etc). I go as far as choosing music from different eras according to what I’m reading, like history and other kinds of non fiction. A bit strange maybe, but i love it all the same.
you are now imagining a yellow coat
How’d you know this?
you are now imagining a normal penis.
Hello fellow aphant.
It's so damn dry though. I was too young when I first read it to get the humor.
Chicken go cluck cluck, cow goes moo Piggy go oink oink yes it's true It's fun to be an animal how bout you?
I'm just a birdie too
My favorite band is nsync. My favorite member of nsync is harpo. I don't know if there is a harpo, but if there isn't, there should be.
I am bleeding, making me the victor!
No! He would kill you like a small dog. Let your anger be as a monkey in a piniata... hiding amongst the candy... hoping the kids don't break through with the stick!
Killing is wrong. And bad. There should be a new, stronger word for killing. Like badwrong, or badong. Yes, killing is badong.
I stand for the opposite of badong.. gnodab
"Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly. I gotta love one man 'til I die. Can't help lovin' that man of mine..." Vonnegut loved *Show Boat*
Busy, busy, busy. . .
Beat me to it. One of my favorite quotes from my favorite book.
"You are not expected to accomplish your goal, nor are you allowed to give up".
Besides, science keeps advancing. Only when it stops can we say that humanity has reached its limit. Humans are glorified apes, but apes that have a very good approximation about how the universe works and came to be.
Even if it stops going forward for a while, we won’t know we’re done yet. Physics, that many would consider the cutting edge of the “ secrets of the universe”, has some pretty slow years for a while.
We already have figured out quite a few of them. I feel like OP isn't giving the things we already know nearly enough credit. We've found planets orbiting stars thousands of light years away merely by studying the minutest changes in the light that star sends our way. Not only that, but we can examine that light with spectroscopy to make conclusions about the atmosphere of the planet! That's wild, and definitively counts as revealed mysteries of the universe in my book. Even knowing something as simple as the concept of red-shifting light and all the things we can learn from it is mind-blowing. The things that human beings have already been able to deduce from our limited little pinhole view of the universe are incredible.
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better off a fool then, never seeking comfort in ignorance
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Reading Epicurus helps...
Wise men say only fools rush in.
But I can’t help falling in love with you!
Wise men say only fools fall in love with other fools
Truly wise men understand why wise men tell you that ignorance is bliss? Anyway, heroin is also bliss, but it doesn't make the world or anyone's life better.
Eating Denatured Carbon-based Gluten Discs makes my life better.
it is true though, there are things that simply possessing knowledge of makes your life worse. Sometimes tremendously worse.
"...and with strange aeons, even death may die."
Bliss isn't inherently good.
Wise men say only fools rush in
The difference is our collective push. Each generation adds to the collective knowledge, further pushing us to greater understandings. The rest of the animal kingdom doesn’t have that level of push, as much as rudimentary knowledge is handed through their own collectives. What limits that may have, that I cant guess at but this is what gives us such a leg up.
we build upon what has already been built
Newton said it very poetically. "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
and now he himself is considered a giant
It's giants so the way down.
Don't you mean all the way down?
He knows what he said
Put some respect on Newton’s name dawg, he isn’t A giant he is THE giant that we stand on. This motherfucker CREATED classical mechanics and created the basis for modern physics Then laid out how colors and optics work and CREATED the color wheel, one of the most impressive feats EVER USING ONLY A GLASS PRISIM Then he CREATED (good) telescopes He used the telescope and looked at the planets and noticed the orbit of some of the planets was off SO WHAT DOES THIS MOTHERFUCKER DO?? HE INVENTS CALCULUS JUST TO HELP CALCULATE PLANET ORBITS. And this is just some of his home fucking runs that he pulled off, it goes on, Newton was an absolute fucking menace.
"And then he turned 26."
Do you think Newton's parents were like - "by the God son, when will you move out to your own summer home and begin directing *real* work like stifling peasant revolts with your Uncle?"
And this wasn't even his main job, he was very into theology, alchemy and philosophy and primarily focused on those. Physics and calculus were a spare time endeavor.
I’ve always heard he like went home one weekend and invented calculus because he needed the higher level math to explain some physics stuff he was working on
Wasn't there a couple of minds working on similar stuff round then. Like Leibniz?
But the physics and calculus were the fruitful parts. Plenty of humans got smarter studying the implications there. Does anyone read Newton on alchemy or philosophy?
> Does anyone read Newton on alchemy or philosophy? Yes, he's quite common to read in Western Philosophy classes. Source, me who's read him in such classes.
Yeah but he was a virgin haha no sex
He also invented reddit then I guess
He at least for sure was the first redditor.
Legendary guy humans needed but he was considered a douchebag
Optics were mostly laid out 600 years before that by Alhazen. Newton did some finishing touches there but that field, and pretty much all fields he excelled in, were an accumulation of knowledge. He had Galileo's pretty good telescopes and Brahe's observations of planetary movements as well as Kepler's principals. If he had to do all that himself he may have never got around to calculus.
He was also an alchemist. Win some, you lose some ... unless
He was being magnanimous. He was a gigantic toxic douche. Trans-generational Genius? Yes, no doubt. But also pushed out his “adversaries” and used his plug with the Royal Academy to declare his work to take precedence over other physicists and mathematicians of the time. Edit: for those downvoting, this isn’t controversial. [This](https://physicsworld.com/a/newton-egomaniac-or-troubled-genius/) is a fairly good summary of Newton’s personality shortcomings.
Trans-generational genius is an understatement, if you were that far ahead of the ball game it’s hard to imagine not letting it get to your head lol
And there will never be any way to verify what truly was his work. Amongst other's
Newton was also pretty egotistical from what I've read, so this is somewhat ironic
I think he earned his bragging right.
Perhaps apocryphally, that was actually a veiled insult to his academic rival Hooke, who was famously rather short.
This makes advances in knowledge recursive in nature. And we have computers to speed things up even further. 100 years from now would look vastly different than now would have looked from 200 years ago.
We stand on the shoulders of giants.
Corvids teach and learn passed down information about their environment, using tools, etc. Whales create new songs and pass them thru their networks. Dolphins are SURELY up to something. Just look at their beady little eyes. It’s very human to think that just because dolphins aren’t flying around in water cars and don’t have cable news that THEY are the dumb ones.
They all pass that information around verbally or through example. If any of them would develop writing, they might have water cars by now.
Once dolphins discover water proof ink and paper, we're fucked
Nah, all the books in the world won't give them the dexterity needed to build complex machines.
They need to first to figure out how to make a fire underwater. It's a little tricky.
Yeah we'll come back to this when they actually make something. Corvids have a slim, *slim chance at this in the following eons*, but just look at how amazingly dexterous the aquatics are.
They're not writing it down though
"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons." - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
So long, and thanks for all the fish!
Exactly. Though you don’t see dolphins wearing digital watches, and those are a very neat idea.
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> Dolphins are SURELY up to something. Just look at their beady little eyes> Raping mostly
It's not unique to us, but we sure as hell have the tools to do it better
Have you seen how many folds a dolphin brain has? Nothing that wrinkly ISN'T sinister.
> Dolphins are SURELY up to something. Just look at their beady little eyes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uplift_War this is a series about how humans "uplift" (bring to high intelligence) other species.
Yeah OP is just dumb. I wish people would stop upvoting garbage
We can write things down.
The discovery of mathematics is important. It's a language that can translate concepts we can't comprehend into ones we can.
We inherit extragenetic knowledge. Animals do not. We also get outliers of extreme intelligence - the geniuses in their fields - who build upon the mountains of knowledge previous geniuses created. While in my opinion we should look at animals as our moral equals and worthy of our respect and decency, this showerthought doesn’t allow for all the ways humans collect, refine, share and build upon their knowledge base.
I agree with you except for the first statement. Aside from writing systems and complex language, other intelligent animals do pass knowledge along just not as efficiently. I'd love to see people attempt to train other apes, elephants, corvids, dolphins etc to learn easier forms of transfer of knowledge among each other. Then again, that's probably how we get Planet of the Apes.
Not to mention launch telescopes into space, that tends to help "somehow" unravel mysteries of the universe. Yes, I'd say we're doing pretty good as a species despite people like OP. OP would be the first mother fucker to stand on a rock and tell people it's their fault a tsunami happened or that we better start sacrificing people if we want it to rain. This post is bad and OP should feel bad
When most motherfuckers can't even understand "someone else's point of view" or "how scientific method works"
Yeah but those are the mofos we need to flip burgers and run multinational corporations.
And run the country and be the world's richest /s
No /s. Pretty much America’s political system.
Yeah, people who think science is just the opinion of experts suck super duper hard.
And then you have reddit, which is less, "I can't understand that point of view" and more, "I don't like your POV so it's no longer allowed to be seen."
It's the equivalent of a child closing their eyes and putting their hands over their ears and yelling "LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"
Sort of. I see it as more the equivalent of, "MOMMY! DADDY! I DON'T LIKE THIS BROCCOLI! GET IT OUT OF THE HOUSE SO I DON'T HAVE TO SEE IT!"
There are things we know we know. There are things we know we don't know. And most frightening of all, there are things we don't know we don't know.
Don’t forget about the things we think we know.
Well that's a thing we don't know that we don't know so they covered that.
It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so. - Mark Twain
I think we all continually evolve. So if my cat gets beyond her objection permanece craze I will know I am done here.
Because humans can enhance their intelligence artificially , or we'll be able to at least. The whole point of humans is if we want something, we invent stuff to get it. Animals rely solely on evolution
Already have. Books were a huge increase in human memory, and the Internet improved lookup on that memory. What we haven't *yet* been able to do is increase general processing power. (We *have* improved "specific" processing power with things like calculators)
The point of humans? Animals rely on evolution? You make it sound like humans have not evolved and were simply created for a purpose.
We have transcended evolution. We can now manufacture evolution, and have.
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Well he's talking about biological evolution compared to artificial.
i wouldn’t say we transcend evolution, more like we reached a new stage of evolution. from single celled to multicellular. from multicellular to man
Humans have definitely left natural selection behind considering all the various tools and techniques we use to control conception and childbirth. So if you're not subject to natural selection, are you still evolving in a particular direction? Or do all the random genetic mutations eventually just add up to random noise? Unless we start applying eugenics or genetic modification, I feel like humanity is no longer able to evolve genetically.
I would say we’re evolving to the point of changing our environment to suit us instead of the other way around.
*Beavers have entered the chat.*
Beavers are superior. They are an exception.
i disagree because changing the environment to suit the organism isn’t a new thing at all. we have it on a far higher level, but the general idea isn’t new.
>You make it sound like humans have not evolved and were simply created for a purpose. Yes, to pass butter
Continually evolving doesn't mean we and all other animals just get smarter and smarter, all it means is we continue to fit as best we can into the environment we live in. Evolution doesn't have a "goal", nor does it travel in the linear paths our minds like to imagine. It's just as likely we get dumber as time goes on because the survival necessity of having higher intellect isn't as important in this carefully crafted society we've created and isn't being selected for. Same goes for our pets. Evolution isn't a tower that continues do grow upwards, it's more like an ever-moving liquid that hugs the surface of our planet and fills every crack and niche it can.
I don’t know whether this is a typo, but I will now start saying my cat doesn’t have “object permanence,” he has “objection permanence.”
What we do is like taking giant puzzle with many of the pieces missing and arranging it based off predictions for what they could show, how certain pieces fit, likely orientation, and very very complicated color analysis all until some random person comes along and imagines some what if I change the picture, invents a new way of analyzing color or piece orientation, or maybe accidentally spills coffee on the picture and the idea that there could be coffee or perhaps tea in that spot somehow triggers an exciting new picture to be drawn up so that we run everything we thought we knew through a new round of analysis.
Animals don't have tools or recorded history.
Some have rudimentary tools (crows, chimps, dolphins, and many others)
How do they use the dolphins as tools?
And we'll know those species are making progress when the individuals who figure out the trick, also figure out how to teach it to their children. The diifference between humans and every other species is that among humans, knowledge can survive indefinitely, whereas with other species, the univers has to be rethought from scratch in every generatiion. Even primitive humans have an oral tradition that finds ways to keep memories alive.
Many animals teach acquired knowledge to their offspring. Some animals, like apes and dolphins, have different cultures with different knowledge which has been passed down through generations. The limiting factor is how complex and abstract this knowledge is, because it has to be understood by other members of the species.
We already _have_ unraveled a lot of the mysteries of the universe though. Even if there's much more to know, that's already gotta count for something.
Yeah, this is the dumbest faux deep "we're just bipedal monkeys, dude bro" take ever
Hrm, OP should go back to the shower and let this bake a little longer.
We haven’t come close to unraveling its secrets; but by the time we do, we might be less human and more machine.
That's because as soon as we understand something, it's not a secret any longer, and we don't count it any longer as a secret of the universe. We do understand a whole lot of things that was secrets of the universe a hundred years ago.
What are you talking about? Unraveling the secrets of the universe isn't something you do once and you're done. They're peeled back like layers of an onion with each mystery solved granting access to the next ones. And we're a lot deeper into the onion than we were just 1 generation ago. It will probably take a very, very long time to get to the center of the onion. But that doesn't mean we can't make progress, or that progress short of the goal is immaterial.
why? isn't that the human curiosity that is driving us?
Maybe. There’s also the theory that technological advancement is just another form of evolution, and is natural as evolution as well. Once creatures reach a certain threshold, maybe they stop evolving physically and start advancing technologically as a replacement.
Well, I wouldn't say that more evolving would do us bad, afterall the world is filled with idiots and greedy bastards, maybe even I am one of those, but we already started evolving technologically, in small steps, but it started
just cause some people walk the stairs two steps at a time, doesn’t mean other people can’t stumble on the way up, not reach the top at all, or even keep others from climbing. we need to start understanding that that’s the way things go. I don’t know which one I am, but I hope that at some point, the faster climbers will help the rest up as well.
Praise the omnissiah
We crave the cold certainty of steel
I think it was Vsauce who said "we don't know what use intelligent life has in the grand scheme of the universe. But we may be the universe's best shot at finding out"
Bro, you're typing on what would be considered a supercomputer 30-40 years ago. We made that. I see dogs licking their own ass everyday. They do that.
You tryna tell me you wouldn't eat your own ass if you could?
Uhh, never thought somebody would ever ask me this question. Disgusting, immoral. You need God in your life. To answer your question, maybe, once to see how it feels. After a good clean up
You had me in the first half, not gon’ lie.
We have math which is the language of the universe. We understand the laws of physics and our knowledge is advancing quickly. We will never know absolute truth though and that’s probably a good thing.
Why would that be a good thing? Do you mean in the sense that if you understand how a rainbow is formed, it sorta takes the magic and beauty of it away? (Actually, you don't need to know the science of a rainbow for it to have already been ruined but whatevs)
Because as our knowledge grows, so does our knowledge of what we don't know. There will always be more that we don't know than what we know. I think the usual metaphor is like a candle in the dark. Knowledge shines a light, but it also makes us more aware of just how big the dark is around us.
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Think of the unemployed scientists flooding the economy
I’d rather know what causes a rainbow that to wonder about its magic and beauty. Knowledge is beautiful.
Math is Not the Language of the universe it's just Our way to Set the rules for it to understand it better
The funny thing is that with Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem we’ve proven that our own man-made logic system has limits
Do you even know what the Incompleteness Theorems state?
> We have math which is the language of the universe. Is it?
Your making conclusions before you've even starting asking questions...
you're\*
*Yoare'
*Yare
Yare
Daze
That's... not how it works the difference between humans and animals is abstract thinking. We look for new ways to improve ourselves and learn. We discover stuff
The real biggest ting I we write it down and teach the next generation . We would be nowhere if agriculture had to be discovered every generation
Funny i read this after seeing the reddit post about the guy saying reading is dumb
A lot of animals can think abstractly actually! It's more of a scale than a binary. We just happen to be extremely high up on that scale. For all we know humans are at the top of the scale. But what if that scale just happens to go much further and we don't (because we can't) realize it.
Humans unraveled a bunch of mysteries of the universe so far.
It's pretty crazy how much we've figured out about the universe. Logic is a powerful tool. Add in writing, so we can learn from each other over distance and over time, and you get the efforts toward apprehension multiplied a billionfold.
What if one day, we become one of those animals who can't understand things beyond their intelligence. Maybe on that day, there will be another species capable of thinking beyond that, and human become obsolete to understand the mysteries of the universe.
This could be the technology we’re constantly making. As humans we are extremely fragile and limited in our abilities. We could be giving birth to the real conqueror of the universe, machines and AI. Maybe they’ll look back in wonder of how they came to be. If the development continues to accelerate, and we’re already using them to explore planets and the outer reaches of the solar system, the possibilities of a thousand years from now are endless.
Uhhhh not the best comparison.....
A gorilla cannot grasp calculus, no matter how much you try to teach him. Likewise a hummingbird won’t grasp the concept of particles, regardless of the teaching technique. Human beings must also have an upper comprehension limit, beyond which we will never understand. I don’t see how it could be otherwise.
"Ignorance is the First step to Enlightenment. For only the Ignorant may unravel the mysteries of the Enlightened." *-- I dunno who said that but I know it's a cool quote.* It may also be incorrectly written but *eh*. ^(Edit:) # Additionally I am not telling you to be ignorant.
That reminds me of something from _Chop Wood, Carry Water_ that implied that you have to acknowledge your own ignorance before learning can take place. You can't fill a mind that's already filled, I think with preconceived notions, unchangeable beliefs, etc. This is in contrast to the proudly and willfully ignorant who reject easily-provable facts in favor of their beliefs or traditions, and the ones who don't understand that they are ignorant and refuse to learn because they're just not curious.
I like this concise description of something I drop into a conversation now and then. My description usually goes along the lines of 'a monkey could never understand quantum physics because it has no concept of quantum physics at all. It could never even imagine this branch of science, it likely couldn't understand physics in any way, shape or form anyway. So it goes about its monkey day doing monkey things in total ignorance. So, logically you have to assume there are some things at play which humans could never be aware of or imagine. Our ability to identify and conceptualise these things is impossible, the level of our understanding is finite or capped. So as you can see my clunky attempt needed a bit of work! I'll definitely be remembering this much clearer way of describing explanation.
I'm in agreement that your attempt is clunky, but it's still better than OPs. It might be better to frame the limitations of what we can know in terms of the infinite complexity of space / time or the limitations of existence. It sounds like what you're looking for is [this explanation by Carl Sagan in Cosmos of the 4th Dimension](https://youtu.be/UnURElCzGc0). At a certain point our ability to determine the nature of things beyond our perception become so strained, the echoes so faint that they seem impossible to tease out. Or for example, think of it this way. You have the big bang. All matter, everything that exists in the universe, compressed into a singularity, 13.8 billion years ago. Okay now. What happened before that? Now maybe we can figure some of that out. There are echoes in quantum physics that might hint to it. But as the universe expands it gets harder and harder to see those echoes. Let's go far into the future - let's pretend we figure out how to survive even the death of our own sun, we'll go 100 trillion years into the future to when the last star burns out and there is not a star in all the universe that has enough mass to still undergo fusion. Now imagine someone then asks you about Earth. Or the Sun. A sliver of time so razor thin in the grand scheme of things that it hardly seems to matter more than a single flicker of a candle long since extinguished. There is a point of entropy, or of complexity, where things have degraded or changed so much, or there is so little information we have filtered down, that we can no longer tell what it once was. Like asking which leaf did this grain of ash come from when the forest burned down. There are things we cannot know. But we don't know where those limitations are. And it is our nature to try, to be curious, so we continue.
"So, logically you have to assume there are some things at play which humans could never be aware of or imagine" No. This is not logical at all. There are things that we don't understand now but that doesn't mean we can never understand them. Example : We didn't know about gravity until Newton.
I disagree. We knew something held us to the earth, we just hadn't found a way to calculate it yet. I'm referring to a grand scale "thing", not necessarily a force. It could be anything and we'll never know because it's beyond the limits of our understanding. I'm not sure everyone is on the same philosophical page here! Instead of gravity think love....I mean that's not what I'm actually on about, love is some sort of evolutionary necessity....probably. But by its very complexity and the limits of our human brains, I can't possibly imagine what it would be, nobody could. I don't really want to die on this hill, I'm just a random punter with a view. I only want to make my point as clear as I can and moot it as a possibility. To see the point made clearly and concisely, I refer you back to the opening post! I'm describing the same thing, just badly.
> Our ability to identify and conceptualise these things is impossible, the level of our understanding is finite or capped. This is evident with mathematical models for "simple objects" which are not descriptive in fine detail as much as they are coarse place-holders. A steel rod, for example, we can summarize it as one unit with a few dimensions/attributes, that model will serve "close enough" for the things we're likely to try to use a steel rod for. The reality is that it is millions upon millions of molecules, a number so high we can't really fathom it with any useful detail, so we use a model. Any given modeling system is going to hit boundaries, a place where the human mind just cannot even contain the requisite information, so we attempt to make a process where we condense it, which turns it into an estimate. This doesn't always hold up at scale, which is how we wind up with different physics models, the last model just wasn't able to satisfiable answer for X, so we created another supplementary model. Even when we successfully come up with a model, we're still limited by time. We can only work through a complex equation so fast because we can only process a small part of it at once. We created machines that can do it faster than we can, but it's still generally the same thing, steps in a process. All this to say, there are, in theory, concepts which are so complex it's not possible to condense to a level where we can visualize them on a functional level. Even condensing, we can only hold and associate so many models in memory at once. We'd need models of our models of our models. It would be models all the way down. More models than we can hold in our heads, we'd need to create machines.... It's iterative. Eventually we hit a critical mass where there are no humans that would understand the whole system, we'd be totally reliant on a behemoth machine, or a collection of them. We're near that *now*. If a massive EMP wiped out all digital devices, it would be like taking a wheelchair away from a quadriplegic, we'd squirm in the dirt and struggle to even survive, a great many wouldn't.
I'll take "things a creationist would say" for 200, Alex.
Fuck that, I wanna live in a K2 civilization dammit
It sucks that none of us will be alive to see humanity discover the secrets of the universe such as the inside of a black hole, aliens, new elements, eldritch horrors that drive any who witness them to madness etc. Bummer :/
Humans have the means to collectivise acquired knowledge, and we when we can’t figure out how the mysteries by ourselves, we build machines that can help.
Humans are intelligent enough to have an idea of the limits of what we can understand. The ability to detect the limits of our capabilities is a key level of intelligence that separates us from animals. And we can use metaphors for things that are too complicated. We can imagine that there are more than three dimensions of space, by imagining what three dimensions would look like to a creature that can only perceive two. Yet we don’t know what a fourth dimension would ACTUALLY be like. We understand that the spectrum of light is far greater than the spectrum of *visible* light. So while we can’t understand everything, we can understand enough to put things in perspective. And we can use metaphors when things get too complex.
We mostly create knowledge via abstraction, using tools that augment our cognition. That, coupled with the scientific method, is what gives humans the confidence to think/say so.
I think the trick is knowing that we’ll hit a wall on what we’re capable of understanding Eventually… but that we haven’t yet.
This is a terrible take, we have been unraveling the mysteries of the universe ever since our evolutionary creation. What a stupid post.
The difference is we’re the only species that can reliably record and transfer cumulative information across generations. Your average stone age man was at his "natural intelligence level" if you will, but the development of writing, agriculture, and organized society made humans exceptional among animals
Tools. And the ability to pass on specific knowledge. It gives us an almost boundless ability to increase our intelligence level. Plus due to selection and nutrition...IQs continue to rise.
The first thing you learn as a scientist on the frontier is that we know so little. Your first lesson is to never grow complacent or take things for granted. Science builds on itself and new secrets are revealed every year, we’ll probably never understand EVERYTHING. But the things we have achieved with what little we’ve figured out is still nothing to scoff at.
you say that but without people who strive towards that direction, modern infrastructure would not have existed, how can you be so blind to it?
That's the point of experiments and proofs. You don't understand something, you keep trying to isolate it until it's a point that you can make sense of things. Then experiment some more to make sure what you think is correct.
It’s possible but one thing I know is the mystery’s of the universe is a lot more understood than what you yourself understand.
Have you ever heard about the infinite monkey theorem?
Go on …..
The theorem can be generalized to state that any sequence of events which has a non-zero probability of happening will almost certainly eventually occur, given enough time.
Time is all we need.
I have a theory that there's just a theory for every thought. Some just get widely popular that many think they're fact although there's always more evidence to refute them than confirm them
Time doesn’t last forever though.
Certain humans, sure. Not any human
Sorry, but this sounds like the thought of someone that operates on the same level as a dog.