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Thanks for the detailed response. I will try my best to answer. > science itself never creates values I did not say I agree with Everything Nietzsche says. I

Thanks for the detailed response. I will try my best to answer. > science itself never creates values I did not say I agree with Everything Nietzsche says. I disagree on that one. > The point was that we are already beyond any dreams Nietzsche could have imagined, the dichotomy religion/science was merely a cultural artefact of the Enlightenment. Hence the replacement you mention is not even an issue. Why are we already beyond any dreams Nietzsche could have imagined? You state it as fact but do not justify it. The Hadron collider has not discovered many of the things people were hoping to. Mathematics optimism was demolished with Gödel. If anything, it feels like we need to put more and more effort to get less and less progress (diminishing returns). IMHO it is fine, what else can we do, but I don't think it is a situation to brag about. This naïve positivity that Science will solve all problems _is_ the cultural artifact of the Enlightenment. By now the optimism has faded. In 150 years no more illnesses? Who can believe that, if we are not all dead from the environment or nuclear war. But most importantly: > As for "hardly knowing anything", just looking at the front page of HN right now If instead of looking at hn we go to a hospital it will be obvious how little we know.

ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
On Nietzsche's dreams, I guess ibuprofen comes to mind (discovered in 1961 by Stewart Adams and John Nicholson). How many of his headaches would have been easily relieved with just a pill. Chemistry was the fundamentally transformative science of the first part of the 20th century, Better Living Through Chemistry [1] and all that. And Nietzsche knew that chemistry was the future, it was in the air. "In a letter of January 1869 to his close friend Erwin Rohde, Nietzsche, reflecting wryly on the vicissitudes of fate, breaks the news that has just intervened to dash their common 'dreams of a Parisian future': 'just last week I was going to write to you and suggest that we study chemistry together, that we throw philology where it belongs, among the household effects of our forefathers'" [2] However, he doesn't pursue chemistry, "In commenting on this same episode of 1869, Mittasch muses: what if Nietzsche had carried out his plan and begun studying chemistry, for instance with O.L. Erdmann and H. Kolbe in Leipzig: would we be counting him nowadays among our great German chemists?" [2], as we know, he falls back into philology and publishes The Birth of Tragedy in 1872. Incidentally, in 1869, apparently in one day, February 17, Dmitri Mendeleev conceived the first periodic table of the elements [3]. No one could have guessed the power that lies in those scribbles, and that's the point: if Nietzsche could have dreamed all the polymers and drugs of today he would have forgotten Greek and Latin. Yes, in physics, plenty of "low hanging fruits" such as general relativity or black-body radiation have been picked early. The incompleteness theorems have crushed the mathematical optimism for only 5 years, from 1931 to 1936, when Turing showed that even without an algorithm to solve the halting problem, you can still build an computer, as we are well aware. Hopefully not even 150 years to cure all illnesses, I'm hoping for 50 because, you know, the clock is ticking. The source for this hope is the work that is being done in regenerative medicine and in programmatic tissue control [4]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Living_Through_Chemistry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Living_Through_Chemistr... [2] Nietzsche’s Conceptual Chemistry, by Duncan Large in Nietzsche and Science, p. 190, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781315247960/nietzsche-science-thomas-brobjer-gregory-moore https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/97813152479... [3] https://www.asbmb.org/getattachment/f3f8ab0a-4766-42d2-8a47-bd96725e49c9/Mendeleev-s_1869_periodic_table.png?lang=en-US https://www.asbmb.org/getattachment/f3f8ab0a-4766-42d2-8a47-... [4] Regeneration, Intelligence in Life & Memory - Dr Michael Levin, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Bwq1oOST7w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Bwq1oOST7w

ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago

On Nietzsche's dreams, I guess ibuprofen comes to mind (discovered in 1961 by Stewart Adams and John Nicholson). How many of his headaches would have been easily relieved with just a pill. Chemistry was the fundamentally transformative science of the first part of the 20th century, Better Living Through Chemistry [1] and all that. And Nietzsche knew that chemistry was the future, it was in the air. "In a letter of January 1869 to his close friend Erwin Rohde, Nietzsche, reflecting wryly on the vicissitudes of fate, breaks the news that has just intervened to dash their common 'dreams of a Parisian future': 'just last week I was going to write to you and suggest that we study chemistry together, that we throw philology where it belongs, among the household effects of our forefathers'" [2] However, he doesn't pursue chemistry, "In commenting on this same episode of 1869, Mittasch muses: what if Nietzsche had carried out his plan and begun studying chemistry, for instance with O.L. Erdmann and H. Kolbe in Leipzig: would we be counting him nowadays among our great German chemists?" [2], as we know, he falls back into philology and publishes The Birth of Tragedy in 1872. Incidentally, in 1869, apparently in one day, February 17, Dmitri Mendeleev conceived the first periodic table of the elements [3]. No one could have guessed the power that lies in those scribbles, and that's the point: if Nietzsche could have dreamed all the polymers and drugs of today he would have forgotten Greek and Latin. Yes, in physics, plenty of "low hanging fruits" such as general relativity or black-body radiation have been picked early. The incompleteness theorems have crushed the mathematical optimism for only 5 years, from 1931 to 1936, when Turing showed that even without an algorithm to solve the halting problem, you can still build an computer, as we are well aware. Hopefully not even 150 years to cure all illnesses, I'm hoping for 50 because, you know, the clock is ticking. The source for this hope is the work that is being done in regenerative medicine and in programmatic tissue control [4]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Living_Through_Chemistry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Living_Through_Chemistr... [2] Nietzsche’s Conceptual Chemistry, by Duncan Large in Nietzsche and Science, p. 190, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781315247960/nietzsche-science-thomas-brobjer-gregory-moore https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/97813152479... [3] https://www.asbmb.org/getattachment/f3f8ab0a-4766-42d2-8a47-bd96725e49c9/Mendeleev-s_1869_periodic_table.png?lang=en-US https://www.asbmb.org/getattachment/f3f8ab0a-4766-42d2-8a47-... [4] Regeneration, Intelligence in Life & Memory - Dr Michael Levin, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Bwq1oOST7w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Bwq1oOST7w