30 ms·
in what case ignorance holds things together?
by ObeyTheGuts 10y ago
in what case ignorance holds things together?
- golergka 10y agoPersonal happiness. Don't you sometimes wish you were stupid enough to be religious?
- thaumaturgy 10y agoNo. And religion isn't a factor one way or the other. What I've learned about the universe over time looks something like this: | | ____/ | ____/ |____/ +---------------- ...but what I think I know about the universe over time looks something like this: |\ | | | | __ __. | L__.' \__.' +---------------- ...and it's those hills and valleys in my meager understanding of things that makes everything seem amazing and wonderful. The more I learn, the better everything seems to be.
- raphman 10y agoWow, nice graphs. They reminded me of Asimov's essay on The Relativity of Wrong [1]: The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong. [...] My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." [...] [1] http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm
- xj9 10y agoSo arrogant! You don't have to be stupid to be religious, you only have to choose to believe. I'm not religious, but I know plenty of highly intelligent people who are devoted one religion or another.
- flukus 10y agoIt's not required, but it helps. Intelligence and religiosity correlate quite well. Most intelligent religious people will reject most of the content in their holy book of choice.
- smsm42 10y agoYou seem to be under an impression that holy books are just collection of facts that you accept or don't. That's not how it works. Approaching it with that makes as much sense as asking soccer players why they don't just start with the ball inside the goal and save the time. That's completely missing the point of the whole thing :)
- flukus 10y agoIf it's about reading moral stories then why identify as $religion at all instead of reading a variety of religious texts (and other sources) and taking the pieces you want?
- smsm42 10y agoWhy be in a soccer team if you can just buy a ball and kick around as much as you can? ;) Again, there's more to it than reading the books. Some religions don't even have books, in fact. People had religions way before they had books. And if you think there one answer to the question "why belong to a religion" you still miss the point by a wide margin :)
- greghatch 10y agoThere are many that view holy books as a collection of historical accounts given by visionaries or in witness of visionaries - those that view it as "merely" a book of facts to take or leave can still hold this view, and can still be religious. Devoutness comes in many forms. Blind belief in the Bible, for example, isn't something I've really encountered in my religious upbringing - not really all that common to encounter outside of specific examples made a mockery of on Facebook or political rally (grew up in California, likely different in bible belt). Doubt is often encouraged, though min got the better of me and I've since been pretty distant from faith-based living. EDIT: grammar and clarity, minor changes
- vlunkr 10y agoI think HN is having the same effect as Wikipedia here. Someone makes an obviously biased and unsubstantiated claim, and others downvote them bring it back to center, even though some are not religious.
- Retra 10y agoPersonal happiness means nothing. You're going to be a corpse pretty soon, and if all you've got out of life is personal happiness, we'd all be better off if you were put there sooner. There's no point in being happy if you can't share it, and you can't share share stupid with people smart enough to see through it. Being ignorant fundamentally limits the happiness you can create in the world.
- 72deluxe 10y agoAgain, everytime somebody on HN insults religious people or their beliefs, let's ask ourselves: "If we replace the word 'religious' in this sentence with 'an Apple user', is this still acceptable comment on HN?" Or, if we replace 'religious' with 'an atheist', is this still acceptable? Of course not.
- emblem21 10y agoYou see 1 million photons per eye per second. A light buln generates 10^60 photons a second. Your eyes are ignorant the vast majority of photons, and if your brain in it's current form tried to take on a greater number, such a feat would compromise your entire body from glucose consumption alone. So, yes, ignorance is responsible for you seeing what you need to see of the universe in order to survive.
- Retra 10y agoMost of those photons contribute no relevant information. But your argument is shit anyway: you suppose that having more powerful eyes would overload the brain, even though they both developed in relation to each other. If you had more powerful eyes, you'd obviously have evolved a more powerful brain to use them.
- emblem21 10y agoYou've missed the point entirely, perhaps because of some misguided faith. How do YOU know what photons are relevant and which ones aren't? Did you personally train your brain into accepting only photons under certain contextual conditions that only you personally allow? No, you didn't. Two billion years of evolution did that for you when it determined how your neurons would be configured to form your visual cortex. And it did it without your permission. You are ignorant to the history of that evolution, and you are permanently ignorant to everything that evolution was ignorant of. Tell me, how many creatures evolve to have more noses? More ears? Scaling sensory organs horizontally is not a recipe for survival because it is neurologically expensive to support that naive type of scaling. Instead, neurology evolves by intentionally limiting the sample sizes of reality to near insignificance... and then shapes your behavior based on that. It's like me giving you a single pixel of something and you correctly can deduce a huge body of information from that to then determine what actions you can take. Your deductions aren't reality, mind you. They are models, and models are not reality. Thus, the ignorance you seem to think you can conquer if you just try super duper hard enough is a fundamentally permanent to the human condition. There is no such thing as "powerful" in evolution. All sensory intake and neurology is not just linearly relational... it is contingent upon neurology extrapolating MORE about reality from INSIGNIFICANT sample sizes with LESS energy.