6 ms·

‘When We Cease to Understand the World’

67 points by prismatic 5y ago

neonate 5y ago
https://archive.is/uF6sU https://archive.is/uF6sU
mathematically 5y ago
The book is pretty interesting even if somewhat dramatic: "...he insisted that all of that, however painful, was secondary to the sudden realization that it was mathematics—not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon—which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant. Not that we ever did, he said, but things are getting worse. We can pull atoms apart, peer back at the first light and predict the end of the universe with just a handful of equations, squiggly lines and arcane symbols that normal people cannot fathom, even though they hold sway over their lives. But it’s not just regular folks; even scientists no longer comprehend the world."
- osrec 5y ago
  Dramatic, perhaps, but probably close to the truth. Our sense of familiarity with our world is probably nothing more than us being blissfully ignorant of its true complexity.
  - throwanem 5y ago
    > The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- hyperpallium2 5y ago
  Irrational numbers, imaginary numbers, spooky action at a distance, quantum mechanics, and "Young man, you don't understand mathematics, you just get used to it"... ... but it's only now that we no longer understand?
- Gravityloss 5y ago
  That's a fun way of putting it, thanks for your comment.
Poabedj 5y ago
Hysterical Realism. Learn to recognize the style. Its exploding all around us and can be safely ignored. Writers in the west, growing up insecure about what happens next are defaulting to hysterical realism, because many have lost the ability generate Faith. Faith in what? Faith that tomorrow can be a better day. That requires much more work than showing unequipped people a reality that mesmerises while it overwhelms. Always pick writers who produce Faith over writers who cant. Its like eating healthy.
- bserge 5y ago
  Yeah, I can do without faith. I see to much of it and it seems dumb to me. I just go about living however I can, doing whatever I can, not being horrible to other living beings (though I talk a lot of shit online), ready to die at any moment.
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  Jab at the postmodernists aside, I’m not seeing a great deal of faith in a better tomorrow anywhere across the literary spectrum. Where do you see it?
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    Look outside the West. While there's certainly lots of challenges throughout the globe, war and strife are much nearer in cultural memory in most of the developing and undeveloped world (and is often ongoing!) than it is in the West. Having Faith that tomorrow will be better is almost a prerequisite to life in most of these parts of the world, and you will often hear volumes of stories from parents and grandparents of wars, purges, poverty, and more.
    - laurent92 5y ago
      But what if this is caused by developing countries having a much better tomorrow, while the West countries are at their apogee?
  - radicaldreamer 5y ago
dustintrex 5y ago
> But the hallucination in which the German naturalist and polymath Goethe fellates the lifeless body of Hafez, the 14th-century Sufi poet whose verses had inspired his Divan, is all Labatut’s. The theme of the book sounds intriguing, but "hallucinations" (read: complete fictions) like this sound thoroughly unnecessary.
lucas_membrane 5y ago
There used to be a rule of thumb that the more things that the average person need not worry about, the better the civilization in which that individual lived, and vice versa. This was translated in the typical mind to mean, "The fewer things that I must worry about, the better I can understand the few things that really matter for me." That era has ended because now, whenever one decides not to worry about X (for just about any X), one has given oneself a reason to worry if that decision is sound, given that conventional wisdom now accepts that fate has obviously aligned itself with the forces of disruptive change. Whoever controls disruptive change controls the universe; whoever understands disruptive change does so only momentarily.
abbassi 5y ago
WHY ON EARTH SHOULD YOU POST A LINK THAT IS MONETIZED?
high_5 5y ago
> “Only a vision of the whole, like that of a saint, a madman or a mystic, will permit us to decipher the true organizing principles of the universe.” The mystic or a saint won't be understood and would be swiftly rejected in the West upon saying that the organizing principle is God or some heavenly realm. It seems that the best science can do is a worldview of Sam Harris and there's that. The result of that is materialistic West replacing transcendence with transhumanism, thus only adding to the confusion.
- dang-guefever 5y ago
  "You are a philosopher, Thrasymachus, I replied, and well know that if you ask a person what numbers make up twelve, taking care to prohibit him whom you ask from answering twice six, or three times four, or six times two, or four times three, ‘for this sort of nonsense will not do for me,’—then obviously, if that is your way of putting the question, no one can answer you. But suppose that he were to retort, ‘Thrasymachus, what do you mean? If one of these numbers which you interdict be the true answer to the question, am I falsely to say some other number which is not the right one?—is that your meaning?’—How would you answer him?"
Borrible 5y ago
'Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.' ― Friedrich W. Nietzsche,Beyond Good and Evil And who can bear his own reflection in the mirror for long?
pattisapu 5y ago
“Could a sufficient concentration of human will — millions of people exploited for a single end with their minds compressed into the same psychic space — unleash something comparable to the singularity?" Calls to mind the Warhammer 40K idea of The Warp: https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Warp https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Warp
natmaka 5y ago
Labatut's approach seems similar to part of James Burke's work, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_documentary) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_documenta...

67 points by prismatic 5y ago

https://archive.is/uF6sU https://archive.is/uF6sU

The book is pretty interesting even if somewhat dramatic: "...he insisted that all of that, however painful, was secondary to the sudden realization that it was mathematics—not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon—which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant. Not that we ever did, he said, but things are getting worse. We can pull atoms apart, peer back at the first light and predict the end of the universe with just a handful of equations, squiggly lines and arcane symbols that normal people cannot fathom, even though they hold sway over their lives. But it’s not just regular folks; even scientists no longer comprehend the world."

osrec 5y ago
Dramatic, perhaps, but probably close to the truth. Our sense of familiarity with our world is probably nothing more than us being blissfully ignorant of its true complexity.
- throwanem 5y ago
  > The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
hyperpallium2 5y ago
Irrational numbers, imaginary numbers, spooky action at a distance, quantum mechanics, and "Young man, you don't understand mathematics, you just get used to it"... ... but it's only now that we no longer understand?
Gravityloss 5y ago
That's a fun way of putting it, thanks for your comment.

Poabedj 5y ago

Hysterical Realism. Learn to recognize the style. Its exploding all around us and can be safely ignored. Writers in the west, growing up insecure about what happens next are defaulting to hysterical realism, because many have lost the ability generate Faith. Faith in what? Faith that tomorrow can be a better day. That requires much more work than showing unequipped people a reality that mesmerises while it overwhelms. Always pick writers who produce Faith over writers who cant. Its like eating healthy.

bserge 5y ago
Yeah, I can do without faith. I see to much of it and it seems dumb to me. I just go about living however I can, doing whatever I can, not being horrible to other living beings (though I talk a lot of shit online), ready to die at any moment.
germinalphrase 5y ago
Jab at the postmodernists aside, I’m not seeing a great deal of faith in a better tomorrow anywhere across the literary spectrum. Where do you see it?
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  Look outside the West. While there's certainly lots of challenges throughout the globe, war and strife are much nearer in cultural memory in most of the developing and undeveloped world (and is often ongoing!) than it is in the West. Having Faith that tomorrow will be better is almost a prerequisite to life in most of these parts of the world, and you will often hear volumes of stories from parents and grandparents of wars, purges, poverty, and more.
  - laurent92 5y ago
    But what if this is caused by developing countries having a much better tomorrow, while the West countries are at their apogee?
- radicaldreamer 5y ago

dustintrex 5y ago

> But the hallucination in which the German naturalist and polymath Goethe fellates the lifeless body of Hafez, the 14th-century Sufi poet whose verses had inspired his Divan, is all Labatut’s. The theme of the book sounds intriguing, but "hallucinations" (read: complete fictions) like this sound thoroughly unnecessary.

lucas_membrane 5y ago

There used to be a rule of thumb that the more things that the average person need not worry about, the better the civilization in which that individual lived, and vice versa. This was translated in the typical mind to mean, "The fewer things that I must worry about, the better I can understand the few things that really matter for me." That era has ended because now, whenever one decides not to worry about X (for just about any X), one has given oneself a reason to worry if that decision is sound, given that conventional wisdom now accepts that fate has obviously aligned itself with the forces of disruptive change. Whoever controls disruptive change controls the universe; whoever understands disruptive change does so only momentarily.

abbassi 5y ago

WHY ON EARTH SHOULD YOU POST A LINK THAT IS MONETIZED?

high_5 5y ago

> “Only a vision of the whole, like that of a saint, a madman or a mystic, will permit us to decipher the true organizing principles of the universe.” The mystic or a saint won't be understood and would be swiftly rejected in the West upon saying that the organizing principle is God or some heavenly realm. It seems that the best science can do is a worldview of Sam Harris and there's that. The result of that is materialistic West replacing transcendence with transhumanism, thus only adding to the confusion.

dang-guefever 5y ago
"You are a philosopher, Thrasymachus, I replied, and well know that if you ask a person what numbers make up twelve, taking care to prohibit him whom you ask from answering twice six, or three times four, or six times two, or four times three, ‘for this sort of nonsense will not do for me,’—then obviously, if that is your way of putting the question, no one can answer you. But suppose that he were to retort, ‘Thrasymachus, what do you mean? If one of these numbers which you interdict be the true answer to the question, am I falsely to say some other number which is not the right one?—is that your meaning?’—How would you answer him?"

Borrible 5y ago

'Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.' ― Friedrich W. Nietzsche,Beyond Good and Evil And who can bear his own reflection in the mirror for long?

pattisapu 5y ago

“Could a sufficient concentration of human will — millions of people exploited for a single end with their minds compressed into the same psychic space — unleash something comparable to the singularity?" Calls to mind the Warhammer 40K idea of The Warp: https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Warp https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Warp

natmaka 5y ago

Labatut's approach seems similar to part of James Burke's work, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_documentary) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_documenta...