More stoner grab-ass philosophy.
While I'm being all deep and shit, here's more crap.
I think we are wired for meaning. Or rather, we are wired for purpose, but grasp for explanation and causal relationships. Lions and penguins don't worry about this stuff, or if they do, it's in a relatively narrow way.
We don't experience the universe objectively and to large extent our self is determined by our relationship with others. The limitations of our biology keeps us shielded from total understanding, so we rely on culture to give us context. Other animals experience their own subjective form of reality that would be extremely alien to us (think sharks, or bats) because they have access to sensory data that we can only experience through the intervention of technology, which gives us an indirect abstraction of the experience. The people who do have a talent for seeing the outskirts of what may be the objective world have to concentrate very hard and use data compression (math, language, data, theory) to understand it. We also can't qualify and quantify what doesn't occur to us to do so, so you could say that Science is a history of the limits of human senses.
The nice fringe-benefit of being curious, imaginative, yet imperfect investigators is we will always have wonder and mystery. We are so good at exploiting this quirk of our natures, we have developed art and religion so we can take that wonder and mystery "indoors'' through our own aesthetic work.
It seems to work pretty good all and all, the subjective indirect experience of the world, at least at the clan level. The key, I think, is understanding our limits as a species. But that's just my subjective take.
One thing to consider is the fact we did pretty good without concerning ourselves with attempting to interface objective world for the majority of our existence as a species. The exploration of the objective, as half-assed as we can do it, has made us healthier and materially a lot more comfortable.
I guess you could say we do interface with the objective world, or else we couldn't engage with it, but I think nature is a parsimonious old cow and we have just enough brain juice to manage in our biological niche.
I haven't slept too well lately, so I feel all spacey and introspective.
I think we are wired for meaning. Or rather, we are wired for purpose, but grasp for explanation and causal relationships. Lions and penguins don't worry about this stuff, or if they do, it's in a relatively narrow way.
We don't experience the universe objectively and to large extent our self is determined by our relationship with others. The limitations of our biology keeps us shielded from total understanding, so we rely on culture to give us context. Other animals experience their own subjective form of reality that would be extremely alien to us (think sharks, or bats) because they have access to sensory data that we can only experience through the intervention of technology, which gives us an indirect abstraction of the experience. The people who do have a talent for seeing the outskirts of what may be the objective world have to concentrate very hard and use data compression (math, language, data, theory) to understand it. We also can't qualify and quantify what doesn't occur to us to do so, so you could say that Science is a history of the limits of human senses.
The nice fringe-benefit of being curious, imaginative, yet imperfect investigators is we will always have wonder and mystery. We are so good at exploiting this quirk of our natures, we have developed art and religion so we can take that wonder and mystery "indoors'' through our own aesthetic work.
It seems to work pretty good all and all, the subjective indirect experience of the world, at least at the clan level. The key, I think, is understanding our limits as a species. But that's just my subjective take.
One thing to consider is the fact we did pretty good without concerning ourselves with attempting to interface objective world for the majority of our existence as a species. The exploration of the objective, as half-assed as we can do it, has made us healthier and materially a lot more comfortable.
I guess you could say we do interface with the objective world, or else we couldn't engage with it, but I think nature is a parsimonious old cow and we have just enough brain juice to manage in our biological niche.
I haven't slept too well lately, so I feel all spacey and introspective.
Labels: Thinking about crap
posted by Greg Mills at 8:16 PM
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