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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   3030 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 8, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I would be happy to assume the burden of proof, though I confess I'm not sure how exactly proving my point is supposed to work. Is it enough to simply take the above and recast it as assertive rather than interrogatory? Otherwise, how am I supposed to prove a negative?

I am aware of no way in which the core elements of the human experience have changed at any point since the invention of writing. The themes contained in the Epic of Gilgamesh remain perfectly salient to the modern human experience.

I am aware of no empirical knowledge acquired since the invention of writing that has provided novel answers to the basic questions of human existence.

I am aware of no progress in human thought since the invention of writing. It does not seem plausible to me that such progress exists, or even that "progress" in this sense is conceptually coherent.

I think that assertions to the contrary are artifacts of deeply irrational social consensus, and dissolve if subjected to even a cursory examination.

Obsolescence should not be a mystery. I know exactly why black-powder muskets are obsolete: they're relatively inaccurate, weak, unreliable, delicate, and slow to reload relative to a modern autoloading cartridge firearm. Detailing further specifics of their obsolescence and even edge-cases where they retain value is a trivial exercise. If the ancient philosophy of the Greeks is similarly obsolete, it should be similarly easy to lay out how and why. Oddly, no one ever does so when such obsolescence is asserted.

I am aware of no empirical knowledge acquired since the invention of writing that has provided novel answers to the basic questions of human existence.

Come on dude, this is straightforwardly false.

The hierarchy of physical explanation that takes us from the mathematics, the standard model, and general relativity all the way to biology, evolution, and the history of the universe provides a compelling mechanistic explanation for most of the human experience in a way that was entirely absent before writing. You can trace most anything all the way back to the laws of physics and observed history if you try hard enough. An ancient man might wonder - why do foxes have fur? God's will - sure is mysterious, right? A smart modern says: Because foxes are mammals, meaning the genera descend from a population that diverged from other mammals sometime in the past, keeping most of their characteristics, one of which is body hair to (among other things) regulate temperature, which evolved by a long series of random mutation (including things like duplication, not just point mutations) in an ancestor of mammals that reused an existing protein (keratin) and extruded it in filaments from specialized organs, hair follicles, in skin.

This can provide strong partial answers to a ton of fundamental questions. Why, physically, are we here? What was here before us? Why is there war? Why is there suffering?

I am aware of no progress in human thought since the invention of writing. It does not seem plausible to me that such progress exists, or even that "progress" in this sense is conceptually coherent.

I think that assertions to the contrary are artifacts of deeply irrational social consensus, and dissolve if subjected to even a cursory examination.

Please write a book. I'm begging you.

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