Herbal Remedies

[sufi]

evolution itself is obviously a way more subtle process than can be evidenced, the material changes we've developed over the last few generations of ultrarapid environmental change are obvious, and might only become permanent if current conditions persist, dna will be part of that, perhaps some lucky mutants will react to handle obesity and pollution better, and those physical changes might be not only heritable but trackable,
in the meantime we'll all have become cyborgs on the quiet

 

[shiels]

overwriting less graspable but more accurate concepts

such as?

 

[sufi]

such as?

well the obvious answer is that i have no clue, since i was also exposed the viral meme about viral memes and it displaced anything that pre-existed in my bonce

 

[sufi]

I can just about recall the feeling of it clicking into place as brute logic supplanted organic understanding

 

[constant escape]

Well it seems like the ultimate defense strategy against concepts fusing with your perception of the world is the whole map/territory distinction, which is itself a concept, no?

 

[constant escape]

But if a concept just clicks with you, and you can't see around it, so to speak, then its ultimately a matter of faith that said concept is still just an approximation of whatever it seeks to map out.

 

[sufi]

Science is a beauty. Only the most rigorous aesthetes believe in it.

edit: as a map, that is.

the map is part of the problem with science, it can't perceive the limitations of its own vision.

 

[constant escape]

Isn't that the significance of Godel's incompleteness though? Don't know the technical, logical articulation of it, but I'm pretty sure it boils down to stating that a system of knowledge cannot be both complete and consistent. And science seems to painstakingly strive for consistency mapping out more and more, integrated more and more into a consistent system.

(edit: consistency as in the usage of a collectively established, vetted notation system; minimal redefinition of concepts; everything or almost everything being logically reducible to some set of axioms; constants that serve as the bedrock for the international system of units; etc.)

But yeah I think your point stands. Many scientifically inclined people, probably even some who are renowned in scientific communities, aren't able to see beyond the system that they're fleshing out.

 

[sufi]

such as?

I suppose thinking more deeply about it, perhaps the idea that there are physical ways to pass memories or consciousness through generations, like this idea of inherited trauma, is an example of an alternative to dawkins freefloating meme concept,
but science itself is smilarly colonising, so it just can't co-exist with other idea spaces, it has to kick them out

 

[constant escape]

Anything beyond said system qualifies, not without reason, as pseudoscience. The misstep, which we seem to agree on, is that venturing beyond the framework of science is not a purely negative thing.

 

[sufi]

Godel's incompleteness

sounds good to me but unfortunately i didn't get that plugin yet

 

[constant escape]

I suppose thinking more deeply about it, perhaps the idea that there are physical ways to pass memories or consciousness through generations, like this idea of inherited trauma is an alternative to dawkins freefloating meme concept,
but science itself is smilarly colonising, so it just can't co-exist with other idea spaces, it has to kick them out

Yeah there is this totalizing, imperial quality to it. A system that simultaneously strives to uphold consistency whilst moving closer and closer to completion. But again I think that is the crux of Godel's incompleteness, at least according to my philosophical grasp on it.

 

[constant escape]

And this is why I think the more poetic/daemonic/etc types should reckon with science to some extent, in the interest of communicating that you can pragmatically exit the parameters laid out by science, for science.

edit: @luka

 

[sufi]

moving closer and closer to completion.

this is a fallacy

 

[constant escape]

Not an imperative so much as a possible approach for dealing with science in a manner that isn't purely negative.

 

[sufi]

this is a fallacy

it's getting less and less accurate the bigger it gets, and further and further from "completion", which can never be achieved (at least not by using science at any rate)

 

[sufi]

my lenses on this issue are back to front:
1. religion accepts science but not vice versa,
2. dawkins is a cunt so his theories must be shit

 

[sufi]

+ a BA in archaelology from SOAS @WashYourHands

 

[constant escape]

this is a fallacy

This gets into the territory of faith, for me, but yeah I think there will always be things science cannot explain. Unless there is some kind of collective intelligence singularity where the distinction between the map and the territory, between our understanding of the cosmos and the cosmos itself, is obliterated. The Omega Point, which would also be a sort of cosmic salvation.

I tend to think of such progress as asymptotic, with completeness being a horizon that we are chasing.

 

[constant escape]

Yeah I don't really know anything about Dawkins, nor do I have much interest in him.