Take the television show Jersey Shore for example. A bunch of orange idiots humping and punching each other all day. Why? What's the point? You're exactly right. There isn't one. So how could we have evolved to the point where there are such large portions of our population that have no purpose whatsoever to their existence? Well, lets start with religion..." It's an awesome dream.
Internally inconsistent and disconnected, the human existence is plagued with contradictions. An incomplete species that seems to do nothing but destroy. A species whose very existence has been nothing but a cursed and pathetic blight on the world. What purpose could there possibly be for this? You all had your 7 terabyte theology and philosophy chips implanted last week, correct? And biology and chemistry? Good. Let's review for a moment. The average human body contains 50 to 60 billion cells, all of which contain genes in the form of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. These are the fundamental building blocks of all life that exist inside the cells' chromosomes. They store genetic information that can be passed down from parent to child. The structure of DNA is common throughout all life. Through DNA recombination, lifeforms take on differing forms with variable abilities. Now what could have possibly led us to the situation we are in today?
Of course, the expiration of individual beings as a varitaion within the species will still occur, because even synthetic materials like us humans won't last forever. We're like... living plastic. Only more quickly degradable. And in this room we have our latest project, influencing large groups of people using only a single remote-controlled person. We use neurotransmitters to manipulate the nerve transmitters in certain parts of the brain a certain way to control the feelings, thoughts, and even personalities of other humans. And here's the museum. From single-celled organisms to protozoans, from fish to amphibians, and eventually from reptiles to birds and mammals, we humans have been evolving for millions of years. Beginning with a cerebral neocortex, which only exists in higher-form mammals, the anthropoid brain enlarged and developed at an accelerating pace until it became the human brain we are now familiar with. Do any of you know why?
I've often had dreams of leading a tour through a laboratory in the future, after having fixed everything that's wrong with the human species. "And this wing was built to reform the human evolution process that we have so thoroughly smurfed up over the past few centuries. Every brainwave, muscle fiber, genetic strand, etc. has been completely decoded and is under constant surveillance to ensure no serious negative mutations occur and corrupt the general public. Over here we have memory scanning and rewriting, and on that side of the room is brain development and behavior, along with simulating thoughts and feelings within individual specimens - it's all just electrical signals flowing through the circuitry of the brain, after all. The vessels of flesh and the substances of blood and other various fluids can all be reproduced through cloning. Even 'souls' can be simulated. It's as if death no longer occurs, or needs to occur.
Sorry I quoted and then summarized the rest. here Oh yeah - either the problem is not being able to marry objectivism with subjectivism or that it was because we're simply incapable of understanding it. Look at page 12 (or read the whole thing and then respond to page 12) whee
I understand what you mean about philosophy not being able to go forward, as I've had similar discussions myself in my theoretical physics forum (although how we got onto the subject of philosophy is baffling at the moment) where it was pointed out that some of the most widely accepted philosophical generalizations - such as Immanuel Kant's critical transcendentalism - were simply built off of the works of other great philosophers without really adding anything new; critical transcendentalism is merely a combination of John Locke's empiricism and David Hume's skepticism. The fundamental problems of metaphysics cannot be proven by either speculative thought or by scientific demonstration, but are needed to render our moral actions coherent. But what I don't entirely get is why we wouldn't be able to comprehend an alien explaining to us the flaws in our own philosophies. If that's what you meant. I may not be able to infer from the text exactly what you meant.
good enough. You mentioned the saddle shape. wtf @ that Wait you said philosophy. I have something on hand. I asked a bunch of my intellectual superiors and peers and they just called me a crazy asian: Imagine that Aristotle, as he's walking around the Lyceum, encounters a time-warp and pops forward to today, on a well-known campus somewhere in some English-speaking country, with the ability to speak English, dressed in modern garb, and that he doesn't become deranged as a result of this. Curious about the state of knowledge, he finds a physics lecture and sits in. What he hears shocks him. A feather and an iron ball fall at the same rate in a vacuum; being heavier doesn't mean falling faster, something he doesn't understand.
Aristotle along with the rest of the class is shown the experimental verification of this from the moon (from the moon?!?!?) performed by Commander David Scott of Apollo 15. The very same equations (equations?!?!?) that explain why an apple falls to the ground explain how the moon stays in orbit around Earth and how Earth stays in orbit around the sun (orbits?!?!?). He learns of quantum mechanics strangenesses. The more he hears, the more shocked he gets. Finally, he just faints away. He faints away again in cosmology class where he learns, for starters, that comets and meteors, and the Milky Way are not atmospheric phenomena, as he concluded. The Big Bang, relativity, the size of the universe, the number of galaxies, dark matter, and dark energy...are too much for him. In biology class, he learns that a living thing's potential, its matter, is not at all explanatory, as he thought, but instead learns of genetics and developmental biology.
He also learns that his idea of spontaneous generation is just plain wrong -- not even close to being correct. He learns of evolution and the discovery that all of life on Earth is related. As the class continues, he again faints dead away. There's two takeaways here. The first is that Aristotle cannot hope to just understand science and physics. The second is that we have no problem accepting that he can understand our most complex philosophical ideas (at least once they are explained). The argument posited by the essay is that philosophy is incapable of going forward - we can only adjust philosophy to do two things: keep up with our metaphors, and um...nothing else. The alternative is that the solutions for our philosophical issues are unsolvable by our own minds. For example if an alien who can easily understand and refute our philosophies tried to explain it to us, we would not understand it. Now I have to say something PGish. So asl ?
Well, I'm an epistemological scientist and philosopher. I don't "believe" or trust any one idea, as everything is purely a problem of possibilities, and the world is stabilized only by the viewpoint of the one who observes it. There isn't a definite shape, and the idea is still under heavy debate. There are many possibilities, and even a flat 4-dimensional concept recently proposed that I personally have not found any flaws with, yet. In String Theory, the universe could be an impossible third-dimensional shape, or it could be infinitely spherical. Although I will say that I lean slightly towards the idea of a hyperbolic universe, as described by hyperbolic geometry, which can be thought of locally as a "three-dimensional analog of an infinitely extended saddle shape." Although I really have no logical basis for my preference.
