The End of Knowledge?

<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote><font size=2 face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote>
...I would love to hear more about this "all_knowing = ex nihilo" philosophy....Why? How?
<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size=2 id=quote>

Like I said, it's my personal strong suspicion. Thinking goes like this - every single thing created by people consists of the following ingredients: matter, energy, information on how to make it, the will to do so. The more we know, the less important become the former two - the matter&energy, i.e. the simpler becomes the material constituent of things. Already now we basically know some ways of how to create any matter, and hence any thing material, from energy. We still need to learn of how to get "free" energy and do the transformations/transmutations fast and clean. But that's not the end of knowledge. If we get control of the "Great Underlying Entity" that manifests itself as our reality (as space, time, matter-energy and forces), the ultimate task would then be completed. I just can't see any difference from the godly status by then... And I don't see a way for us to survive through the process...

<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote><font size=2 face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote>

Cats have intellect more than enough to understand calculus, they simply feel no urge to do so. In fact, intellect of a tiger is higher than that of an average drunkard.


<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size=2 id=quote>

I stand corrected. I have two cats of my own and should have known better. I have discovered that cats have the ability of "cat teleportation". I routinely discover the cats in my house after I have definitely put them outside. My wife claims my memory is going, but I know better, the cats must be teleporting into the house secretly to throw me off balance.

Seriously though - I can't help but wonder that even if knowledge is finite whether we have the mental capacity to absorb what is there. Perhaps we will have to augment ourselves by connecting our brains to computers to go past our biological limits as some have proposed. Stephen Wolfram thinks the "code" for describing the universe can fit on a single typewritten page. I notice however that Wolfram has yet to show us this page of code.

quote:
_____________________________________________________________________________
If we get control of the "Great Underlying Entity" that manifests itself as our reality (as space, time, matter-energy and forces), the ultimate task would then be completed.
_____________________________________________________________________________

What an interesting point! I might guess that the measure of such control exists as a process that, from our standpoint, will only approach an asymptote.

To explain: assuming the MM, space, time and scale are infinite. One may understand all of space (not likely), but then the time element would intervene. Time may be understood, but the scale dimention would present itself. Knowldege is inifinite, therefore; also the use of such knowledge (call it Wisdom?) is infinite.

To have that control... or more to the point, the desire to have it (now I'm leaving science, where it is insufficient, as it relies on empiricism), would be the mover of all things. All things (of which, we as individuals are constituent) are moving due to to that same desire. It operates on all wavelengths, on an ifinite spectrum, always beyond our empirical abilities, because it moves all things, and is therefore beyond all things.

The end of all knowledge?

It sounds like the "Nothing-Theory" forum, where we are presented with two alternatives, each on an asymptote. I would propose, as an alternative "all knowledge," according to the abilities of the subject.

Sorry for the departure, but the forum was headed in this direction from the outset.

I think the view of the end of all knowledge is being taken from current human perspective, or how our brain is currently wired. Human evolution will, if we last a few million years more, lead to different perspectives, and different wiring. I don't say "better" because that is a far from objective approach. The comment about cats earlier was bang on the nail. Cats at their present stage of evolution enjoy lying in the sun, chasing mice and ignoring calculus. Dolphins have brains comparable to humans - and a fantastic ultrasound sense of perception, allowing them to "x-ray" organic matter - this is why dolphins are far more interested in human females than males; they can actually see more going on inside a woman (they go bananas if a pregnant human female enters the water with them, and will flock to study her interior!)! Intelligence is as intelligence does; physics is considered as the top drawer for humans, because it seems to encapsulate "Everything". It is very much a cipher for our materialistic bias (I'm not saying this is a bad thing from our current point of view - after all, I'm also human, and have been programmed this way too!), and represents what we perceive as the ultimate intellectual challenge. It may well prove a valuable stepping stone to prolonging our species' existence, for example, by moving into space, colonising other worlds and getting all our genetic eggs out of one basket, namely the Earth. Perhaps there will be other bodies of knowledge we can't even currently imagine which will draw our focus in a couple of hundred millennia, maybe our ability to comprehend current difficult areas will develop, but right now, science fits the bill nicely as the "mouse" we are pursuing.

Quote [original posting]
____________________________________________________________________________
If not a limit to knowledge what is our limit to comprehend knowledge?
____________________________________________________________________________

If laws do indeed govern the Universe, then perhaps we can say that the Universe itself is intelligent. Its operations happen to be mirrored in each individual, according to the same principle of intellect, and according to the measure of order, harmony, and lack of disturbance that intervenes at the meeting point between the "introverse" and the "extroverse."

The limit of this knowledge is subjective, for reasons perhaps to be debated in other forums. But it is based on the observer, and will necessarily need time to be revealed (or rather, an exclusion from time, when the other dimentions may be revealed in the fullness of their temporal repurcussions).

In such a condition, the knowledge of the observer will be infinite, from the viewpoint of the observer, because the observer simply stands at the meeting point of two infinities.

Moreover, one infinity does not cancel another, and therefore there can be an interaction of these inifnities (identities of personal nature).

quote [from Atko]:
____________________________________________________________________________________
Perhaps there will be other bodies of knowledge we can't even currently imagine which will draw our focus in a couple of hundred millennia, maybe our ability to comprehend current difficult areas will develop, but right now, science fits the bill nicely as the "mouse" we are pursuing.
____________________________________________________________________________________

Yes, science is our only option (we have no other suggestions).

Another ability may develop, as suggested?

One would propose the ability to reverse the trend of relaxing into "bodies of knowledge."

I would submit as qualification of the above quote that yes, there is other knowledge that we can't imagine. A "body of knowledge" presumes a separation from its interaction with other areas of knowledge. Knowledge has only one effect, a quantitative effect; this effect is not separate form any other tue knowledge.

The here-to-for practice of classifying "Bodies of knowledge" works in a way that splinters knowlege. This is the problem with the various schools of scholasticism, and of thought.

If we operate from a fractal view of all things, then the operations of the universe become a function of a single reality; ie. nothing is disconnected from another thing. Therefore, there is only one body of knowledge; and that body of knowledge must be reunified, if the role of academia is to prove useful in any way.