4 ms·

If it's not supernature, than science can evaluate it and in time even understand it. After that, it's just a question of engineering.

grannyg00se 15y ago
There are completely natural phenomena that have been studied and evaluated for centuries and still have no concrete explanation. We may not have sufficient time to answer some of these questions, and we may also reach a limit to how much we can understand and discover about ourselves.
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  Again, you are speaking in terms that make it difficult to extract your meaning, so correct me if I have failed to understand what you are trying to say. In particular I would be interested to hear what some of these phenomena are. See, the lack of a "concrete explanation" isn't really a useful thing to say about something. We don't yet have anything that could be called a "concrete explanation" of even things like gravity. What we do have are theories that allow us to make useful predictions about how gravity will effect things. Imperfect as those, like all, theories are, we've still put stuff on other planets with them. There certainly are many "open problems" in science, but to my knowledge we have yet to ever encounter anything that is fundamentally beyond the grasp of the physical sciences. Take for example the Coronal Heating Problem: On the surface it seems to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics (which is some rather heavy shit...) but even in extreme cases like that science solders on. There are numerous hypothesis that have been proposed to explain it, and over time our understanding of it will only become more robust. Anyway: To address this particular concern I'd like to say that until we have any strong evidence to suggest that humans possess a more powerful model of computation than we already regularly reason about, we have to assume that they do not.
  - grannyg00se 15y ago
    Well let's take your example of gravity. We know a lot about it. Like you said, we've put stuff on other planets. And we have satellites in orbit. Amazing. But even with that we're still theorizing about exactly how it works. And we definitely can't recreate it. It's possible that there are hard limitations on our ability to recreate some of the very fundamental phenomena we experience in everyday life. Intelligence may be among them.
    - wlievens 15y ago
      The only theoretical hard limit that makes sense is a limit on information. If you can't transmit information from A to B faster than C, then yes you've got a hard limit. Every other natural phenomenon that doesn't obscure infromation that way can be figured out. There may of course be soft limits like it taking a billion years to figure out.
    - burgerbrain 15y ago
      That was my entire point with bringing up gravity... Anyway, comparing creating intelligence to creating gravity is nonsensical. I literally cannot make sense of that.
  - Nick_C 15y ago
    > Coronal Heating Problem Serendipitously to you mentioning this now, only a couple of weeks ago they announced they have a good candidate for the explanation, which is Type II spicules. http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=118338&WT.mc_id=USNSF_58&WT.mc_ev=click http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=118338&WT....

grannyg00se 15y ago

There are completely natural phenomena that have been studied and evaluated for centuries and still have no concrete explanation. We may not have sufficient time to answer some of these questions, and we may also reach a limit to how much we can understand and discover about ourselves.

burgerbrain 15y ago
Again, you are speaking in terms that make it difficult to extract your meaning, so correct me if I have failed to understand what you are trying to say. In particular I would be interested to hear what some of these phenomena are. See, the lack of a "concrete explanation" isn't really a useful thing to say about something. We don't yet have anything that could be called a "concrete explanation" of even things like gravity. What we do have are theories that allow us to make useful predictions about how gravity will effect things. Imperfect as those, like all, theories are, we've still put stuff on other planets with them. There certainly are many "open problems" in science, but to my knowledge we have yet to ever encounter anything that is fundamentally beyond the grasp of the physical sciences. Take for example the Coronal Heating Problem: On the surface it seems to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics (which is some rather heavy shit...) but even in extreme cases like that science solders on. There are numerous hypothesis that have been proposed to explain it, and over time our understanding of it will only become more robust. Anyway: To address this particular concern I'd like to say that until we have any strong evidence to suggest that humans possess a more powerful model of computation than we already regularly reason about, we have to assume that they do not.
- grannyg00se 15y ago
  Well let's take your example of gravity. We know a lot about it. Like you said, we've put stuff on other planets. And we have satellites in orbit. Amazing. But even with that we're still theorizing about exactly how it works. And we definitely can't recreate it. It's possible that there are hard limitations on our ability to recreate some of the very fundamental phenomena we experience in everyday life. Intelligence may be among them.
  - wlievens 15y ago
    The only theoretical hard limit that makes sense is a limit on information. If you can't transmit information from A to B faster than C, then yes you've got a hard limit. Every other natural phenomenon that doesn't obscure infromation that way can be figured out. There may of course be soft limits like it taking a billion years to figure out.
  - burgerbrain 15y ago
    That was my entire point with bringing up gravity... Anyway, comparing creating intelligence to creating gravity is nonsensical. I literally cannot make sense of that.
- Nick_C 15y ago
  > Coronal Heating Problem Serendipitously to you mentioning this now, only a couple of weeks ago they announced they have a good candidate for the explanation, which is Type II spicules. http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=118338&WT.mc_id=USNSF_58&WT.mc_ev=click http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=118338&WT....