7 ms·
Understanding Everything
- rrwright 3y agoOn the topic of “thinking is analogy”, the book “Metaphors We Live By” by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson is an excellent and foundational read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphors_We_Live_By https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphors_We_Live_By
- IIAOPSW 3y ago"A physicist is a person that wants to know everything while learning as little as possible". The universe is the ultimate infinite game.
- Ferret7446 3y agoUnderstanding is a purely artificial/subjective concept. "Understanding" only exists if there is a conscious observer, and "understanding" means whatever that observer wants it to mean. A lot of people have found full understanding in religion. It takes off a lot of the stress from not understanding. You may call this understanding of understanding meta-understanding.
- barrysteve 3y agoUnderstanding is a word developed by humans, for humans. Of course it only exists because there's a conscious observer. That's the people who use and received the Word. That's no reason/excuse to describe it as purely subjective. We can all understand that objectively the Earth exists and (to a level or standard) one can be said to objectively understand the Earth and it's existence. Understanding relativism makes no sense, because the majority of the topics we wish to understand objectively exist and are empirically/scientifically provable. You didn't take the stress off understanding, you gave up and mangled the meaning of the word in the process. Please don't do that.
- bjornsing 3y ago> Understanding is a purely artificial/subjective concept. Not necessarily. It can be mathematically defined as the ability predict the future, i.e. to assign (relatively) high probability to events that occur.
- rocketbop 3y agoI think you can understand how for example an engine works, in a way which couldn’t be described as subjective or artificial. You might have a shallow or deep understanding of this depending on your profession. People who are religious tend to talk about belief rather than understanding. I don’t suppose many Christians claim to understand God’s mind or his will, quite the opposite. Also, claiming to know God’s will as zealots do is not the same as understanding it.
- mistermann 3y ago> "Understanding" only exists if there is a conscious observer, and "understanding" means whatever that observer wants it to mean. A lot of people have found full understanding in religion. It takes off a lot of the stress from not understanding. The same is very (but certainly not identically) true of science or most any ideology/framework, from the perspective of the average civilian.
- Scarblac 3y ago> Well, one of the core measures of a well-designed game (for a given player) is the felt experience of immersion, or flow. Specifically, an immersive game should hold the player in the flow channel at all times. In life, that's not the case. We sometimes choose to do things that are frustrating or boring, because they must be done. Because they're worth doing. Not everything needs to be entertainment. > Instead, I want to play an infinite game That's why I came to believe in reincarnation, actually. Life on its own can seem pretty meaningless -- you can try to learn all you want, achieve your wildest dreams, and then we all die and in a few centuries will be utterly forgotten. A bit like how a single game of rock, paper, scissors is not especially interesting. There's no real strategy to a single game. But repeated rock, paper, scissors, there are tournaments in that, computer engines, there are several strategies and ways to exploit other strategies. The "optimal" play (always random) is guaranteed to end in the middle of the pack. There's much more to think about. So I choose to assume reincarnation exist (with no possible way to communicatie between lives). And now what I do in this life may influence my next one. Everything has more meaning, just by a simple assumption.
- falcor84 3y ago>exist (with no possible way to communicate between lives) ...what I do in this life may influence my next one. Could you please clarify what you mean by this? If there is no communication in either direction, in what way does one life affect the next?
- vonbaum 3y agoKarma?
- gnz11 3y agoI suppose genes would fit the bill? Environment can affect gene expression so how we nurture our current environment could affect the genes of future generations. Might be a stretch, I’m not a geneticist or biologist.
- LiveTheDream 3y agoA person today could build something to be used by a person tomorrow.
- a_c 3y agoAfter being a father, now I see life as a recursion, a recursion to pass on life. On micro-scale, it means being good parents, to pass on accumulated wisdom, or the lack of, to children. Then scale the recursion to extended family, community and maybe whole humanity. I've internalised the feeling that things that help the recursion are things worth doing, and the smaller the scale, the stronger the feeling is.
- quonn 3y agoThe reproduction of life can never be meaningful by itself, in part because a single life is already countless moments and the problem is the same. I think what you perhaps want to point at is the opposite: the fact that _a_ life is finite and therefore things worth doing/things that are meaningful look beyond that - and the wider they look the more meaningful they can be.
- shanebellone 3y ago"therefore things worth doing/things that are meaningful look beyond that - and the wider they look the more meaningful they can be." Are "meaningful things" qualified by the persistence of their consequence?
- quonn 3y agoNot necessarily, so I wrote „wide“. By wide I mean wide in space and conceptually this also extends to wide in time. So there is are multiple positions in space at the current time and likewise there are multiple positions in the future and they all equivalently can be touched or not.
- patcon 3y agoI'm also a strong believer in recursion being a key feature of living processes and intelligence..! A book you might like: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691145471/the-recursive-mind https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691145471/th...
- bjornsing 3y ago> I want to understand everything (…and how it all fits together.) I have this personality trait too. I suspect it was very beneficial in evolutionary times, when it was possible to learn everything that was known and then start using that knowledge. But in the modern world it becomes a bit of a personality flaw: you just learn and learn and learn, and then you die. :)
- DontchaKnowit 3y agoAnd if you like learning, you die happy :)
- mrleinad 3y agoI have the feeling that AI is going to help us get better at connecting different ideas AND be able to implement the connection without having to be a master in every field
- satisfice 3y agoThis piece is highly aligned with my way of thinking about learning as I wrote in Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar. Exciting to see another buccaneer’s take on things.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- another_poster 3y agoThe Ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle puzzled over the same observations. Aristotle called your topic “First Philosophy” because it studies the primary substance that underlies everything.
- Jeff_Brown 3y agoI felt similar for decades. To anyone else who does, I recommend studying economics. It's not about money, really. It's the study of choice.