• You are currently viewing our forum as a guest, which gives you limited access to view most discussions and access our other features. By joining our free community, you will have access to additional post topics, communicate privately with other members (PM), view blogs, respond to polls, upload content, and access many other special features. Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free, so please join our community today! Just click here to register. You should turn your Ad Blocker off for this site or certain features may not work properly. If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us by clicking here.

[MBTI General] Why we can't know all of nature's secrets.

guesswho

Active member
Joined
Jul 9, 2010
Messages
1,977
MBTI Type
ENTP
Because when we understood fission and fusion we made bombs and blew people off the face of Earth.

Now we can blow off all the life on Earth.

Why should we be granted the potential of unlimited understanding, allowing us to blow off the entire universe?
 

thisGuy

New member
Joined
Mar 14, 2009
Messages
1,187
MBTI Type
entp
Because there still exist people who start off the morning by calling their mothers. Who will take time out of their very busy week and go brighten up some kid`s day at the sick children hospital. Who make the effort to hold the door for the person behind them. Who take the time to educate and mold someone else`s kids. Who will pick up someone else`s litter and trash it.

And most of all, because we have amongst us the epitome of innocence and potential - kids.

For all of them, the sun rises, spring blooms, and birds chirp. The rest of us just got lucky that we live amongst people like that.
 

Fluffywolf

Nips away your dignity
Joined
Mar 31, 2009
Messages
9,581
MBTI Type
INTP
Enneagram
9
Instinctual Variant
sp/sx
Besides, what else are we to do if not discovering all of nature's secrets.

I know, let's all go back to living in damp, disease riddened caves and chew off each others ticks because they are nutricious!
 

guesswho

Active member
Joined
Jul 9, 2010
Messages
1,977
MBTI Type
ENTP
I don't understand what you said (both of you), or how it may be related to what I said.
 

guesswho

Active member
Joined
Jul 9, 2010
Messages
1,977
MBTI Type
ENTP
I never said that nature stops being beautiful if we don't understand it, or that there's anything wrong with living in a cave. We are animals aren't we. And animals aren't miserable in nature.
Nor did I say that we should give up our humanity for the sake of understanding.

 

MiriMiriAru

New member
Joined
Apr 27, 2011
Messages
52
MBTI Type
INFJ
Enneagram
5w4
What I fail to understand is what you mean by this:

Why should we be granted the potential of unlimited understanding, allowing us to blow off the entire universe?

Nothing's been "granted", it's just that there are things to be understood, and people willing to do so. Unfortunately, there are also people willing to use the outcome of the aforementioned people's efforts to make crazy doom-bombs.

But, as Fluffywolf alluded, the alternative would be to for the human race to be tick munching cave dwellers. I think you have to take the good with the bad.
 

guesswho

Active member
Joined
Jul 9, 2010
Messages
1,977
MBTI Type
ENTP
I guess what I was trying to say is that nature is so carefully calculated, that it would be sloppy to allow us to know too much. But this is an entirely subjective perspective, which may not make much sense.
 

Lark

Active member
Joined
Jun 21, 2009
Messages
29,569
I reckon that understanding of ecology and the global climate has already resulted in weaponised environmental science, cloud seeding with silver iodine and messing with global temperatures by super heating parts of the ocean with nuclear subs is only the thin end of the wedge, the right sorts of charge in volcanos can create dust clouds which make instant no fly zones and I'm sure there's other applications used all the time effecting crop yields or resource harvests.

While the state and specialist knowledge has increased public knowledge has decreased.
 

Satan

New member
Joined
Apr 14, 2011
Messages
11
MBTI Type
ENTP
I guess what I was trying to say is that nature is so carefully calculated, that it would be sloppy to allow us to know too much. But this is an entirely subjective perspective, which may not make much sense.
Why would it be sloppy? If we kill ourselves, we would cure the earth from the cancer we really are.
 

Stanton Moore

morose bourgeoisie
Joined
Mar 4, 2009
Messages
3,900
MBTI Type
INFP
Because when we understood fission and fusion we made bombs and blew people off the face of Earth.

Now we can blow off all the life on Earth.

Why should we be granted the potential of unlimited understanding, allowing us to blow off the entire universe?

So this is a moral issue for you?
 

Beargryllz

New member
Joined
Jun 7, 2010
Messages
2,719
MBTI Type
INTP
We can always learn more. Why does it always have to be all or none? Can't it just be more? Can't we want more and more? Why be complacent? Why are people unnerved by power? It takes power and malice together to bring the kind of despair you're obviously suffering from. Hate the hate, not the knowledge.
 

Xyk

New member
Joined
Mar 27, 2011
Messages
284
MBTI Type
INTP
Enneagram
5
Nature is pretty sloppy. Evolution is a really imperfect process, and is never complete because the environment keeps changing. I mean there used to be sooo many more species, but because nature isn't perfect, they died out. Another example: back problems caused by bipedal posture. We can't even walk on two legs all the time.

So that's why we have the capability to know so many things. Nature is pretty sloppy. It'll correct itself in a while.
 

guesswho

Active member
Joined
Jul 9, 2010
Messages
1,977
MBTI Type
ENTP
I mean there used to be sooo many more species, but because nature isn't perfect, they died out.

Everything is in a perpetual change, it's the key to life.

I don't find it sloppy.

To me it's the opposite, the closest representation of our abstract concept of perfection.
 

MiriMiriAru

New member
Joined
Apr 27, 2011
Messages
52
MBTI Type
INFJ
Enneagram
5w4
Well, it's not about sloppiness. Nature, for me, encompasses all of existence, so really, that nature allows* humanity the ability to potentially destroy the earth, is in the grand scheme of things, utterly insignificant. The death of the earth, or all life on earth, or simlpy the human race will not have an repurcussions on anything beyond the earth.

*I have a problem with this, since it appears to attribute intent to nature, which doesn't make alot of sense.
 

guesswho

Active member
Joined
Jul 9, 2010
Messages
1,977
MBTI Type
ENTP
I have a problem with this, since it appears to attribute intent to nature, which doesn't make alot of sense.

Well yes, that's kind of the point.

Nature seems so carefully calculated ...why is that? Should an "intent" variable be taken into consideration?
 

MiriMiriAru

New member
Joined
Apr 27, 2011
Messages
52
MBTI Type
INFJ
Enneagram
5w4
Well yes, that's kind of the point.

Nature seems so carefully calculated ...why is that? Should an "intent" variable be taken into consideration?

Hmm... can you provide some examples that suggest to you careful calculation? The universe seems to me to be completely random, with any impression of order due to our inability to perceive it on the necessarily vast timescale.
 

guesswho

Active member
Joined
Jul 9, 2010
Messages
1,977
MBTI Type
ENTP
Hmm... can you provide some examples that suggest to you careful calculation? The universe seems to me to be completely random, with any impression of order due to our inability to perceive it on the necessarily vast timescale.

wtf
in physics?!

Why are the constants the way they are? (considering that if you change them, life as we know it can't form)

There's a theory suggesting that there are a great number of universes, and we just happen to live in one with the right values. Otherwise, I can't get it how can nature create itself the right way.
 

MiriMiriAru

New member
Joined
Apr 27, 2011
Messages
52
MBTI Type
INFJ
Enneagram
5w4
Physics is a little too fundamental for what we are discussing. I mean, the universe as perceived by the average person is random for all intents and purposes. Orbits degrades, planets and moons collide, star distabilise and collapse and explode, or slowly burn out, comets fly into other space borne objects, asteroids crash into planets... There are most definitely constants acting upon these things, but they are outside the experience of the average person. Paradoxically, because several of these things occur over such a long time, there is an impression of permanence and order.

To put this on a small scale, if I roll a can down some stairs, its action in falling will be random, and no physical constants would be violated.

I still cannot see any intent in this. Things just happened and happened and happened and so on, until here we are. There are also theories that laws of physics were not as they are now, or as rigid, early in life of the universe. So it would seem that the constants are not entirely constant over time.
 
Top