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by acex
4310 days ago
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How can someone like this call himself an intellectual or be called a leading world's intellectual. I think that an intelligent design is an insult to both, intelligence and design and I as well think that circle (more than a triangle) arise from a biochemistry and as a part of the same evolution. Dawkins in the same piece uses the same argument to claim that the evolution came late in the development of human mind. Late compared to what? Evolution? Millions of yeas compared to a few thousands years of a written word or since we invented a more persistent method to pass the knowledge than story or since a man drew some of the first inscriptions on a wall of a cave. And this is no allegory. Let us get rid of the PI formulas then. It does fit the model. Since we can only approximate it we cannot use it. The world is a better place today than it was hundreds or thousands of years ago. The idea that it can be better is the very idea of ideal and abstract types we are never to reach and should always aspire to. Essentialism, from an evolutionary standpoint, relatively is no less correct than some other approximation of what a certain species is in some period. The evolutionary traits are the same for hundreds of thousands of years for a species. Mutations take place rarely and only on extreme environmental changes. The nature (or the evolution) is perfect there. Its every 'design' has a function perfected through many centuries. This is essential (sic) problem with the certain type of scientists (those of celebrity type) is that they not count in how short is human experience on this world. We say Earth is 4.5 billions years old and that we know that and those people who claimed differently are in wrong as if we as a human race posses our own memory since primordial soup. In a shallow struggle against those 6 thousands years we tend to forget that ideas and their shapes were experience of the world. Colours are not wrong, we experience the colours the same way as thousands years before. And will experience them in the future in a broader spectre. Like we always did with everything. The very world we experience, even when we do it with our best tools is no more than an approximation of a world more perfect (or less measured and computed). |
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I have developed a sort of notion about the inevitability of invention which I believe can be generalized to the discovery of other concepts or the development of abstract ideas.
It works basically like this: Nearly all inventions require prerequisite inventions. For example, the ipod required transistors and batteries (among many other things) to exist before it could be invented.
Looking back at history, we can compile lists of technologies that would have been prerequisites for other technologies. We can determine when these prerequisites were met, and then compare that date to the date of invention. Is there a small gap between the two, or a large one?
Many inventions have very small gaps between their genesis and the fulfillment of their prerequisites. Powered heavier-than-air aircraft are a good example; they were created within years of the creation of a suitably light and powerful internal combustion engine.
Some inventions have very large gaps between their genesis and the fulfillment of their technical prerequisites. If you were a "Connecticut Yankee" in King Arthur's Court, these are the inventions you would [re]invent. Things like the phonograph. Basic clockwork, wax, needles, and parchment are all that you need to create a rudimentary phonograph that works well enough to prove the concept (to show how simple it is: if you've got a shitty vinyl record laying around, you can play it back with a paper cup with a needle stuck through the bottom).
Inventions that came long after their strict prerequisites can be considered "late". They weren't waiting for technology or better materials, only waiting for somebody to have the idea. The vast majority of inventions were not particularly late.