And I thought hitchhiking across Texas was a long trip.
Faith means never having to give up the evidence
I believe in Harvey Dent.
Can you claim with certainty that unicorns don't exist anywhere or anytime in the universe?
Someone might engineer one once we get designer pets. And maybe they existed on Mars before the migration to Earth, but didn't get on the Ark, and the persistence of the legend is a holdover from the earliest Terran settlers.
But that wasn't my point. My point is that you can imagine something that doesn't exist, such as infinity. For something (the universe) to exist, it has to be
something. Identity implies limits. A thing that is not something specific is not anything, i.e. it is
no thing.
No one is ever going to genetically engineer infinity. Infinity wasn't around before Mars got too dry to support life.
This might be applicable to an individual, but we're talking loads of very smart people all agreeing on a set of concepts. The concepts become formalised as theories via mathematical or other intellectual deduction, waiting for someone to come along and disprove it in the face of the existing evidence.
Assuming that their abstractions are logically derived from experiments, and there are no flaws in the process, what happens if they are beginning from a blanket assumption that identity or causality are irrational biases? In their final analysis, are they going to interpret their findings in a manner that is consonant with a universe in which identity and causality are immutable absolutes?
What if they conclude that based on their experiments, identity and causality are an illusion, or that reason is incapable of understanding what they just discovered. How is reason capable of discovering that reason is useless?
From what I read, it's not so much gospel truth embellished with math as real-world experiments conducted thus far in the area of wave-particle duality not yielding a definitive answer. Consider a Moebius strip made by twisting a length of paper and joining the two ends. You can trace your finger along the width of it without ever reaching its end, while at the same time you are simultaneously on both sides, yet neither side.
So long as they understand that the problem is with their understanding and not with the realities that they are observing, I see no issue. Where I take issue is when they claim that these findings are evidence that the universe is inherently contradictory, such that a thing may be what it is and not what it is, at the same time, and in the same respect. Contradiction is an error in conceptualization. A thing is what it is, and will never be not what it is. You can call it whatever you like, but things aren't what they are because we gave them names.
In other words he had faith?
In other words, he understood that contradictions don't
exist.
That's not an article of faith. That's sanity.
We're amazed because we don't understand it is what I'm suggesting. And we can likely never understand it because we're not equipped - our intellect, ultimately, is inadequate. Which is cool, because a life without amazement would be no fun at all
Our state of knowledge may be inadequate, but there is nothing about our minds that makes them incapable of understanding anything. Our senses are limited. We cannot see all things at once. Our minds are designed to get past that. You
can conceptualize the entire universe (I just did). Knowledge is a process, and the fact that we don't know how something works in the present is no indication that we cannot know it in the future.
Something as basic as electromagnetic theory would be inconceivable to **** sapiens 30,000 years ago. Today, you flip a lightswitch without thinking twice. However, if you stop and think about everything involved with that simple instance of cause and effect, how can you not be amazed?
