Post by alma on Jul 13, 2016 7:25:36 GMT
I am going to share with you my brief overview on the raw pursuit of truth, what it means to me and what are ...the inhibitions to truth. I would be delighted to hear yours in turn. I am drawing this architecture right out of my brain in real-time; sorry in advanced for incompleteness.
First an axiom: Truth owes us nothing, reality owes us no favor, neither any obligation to present itself in a shape that is understandable to us. It may very well be that the pursuit itself is futile given innate biological limitations. It is on us to develop the framework, tools or forms able to understand this reality in full.
A second axiom: There can be no understanding of the entirety if any data is omitted, however difficult or inconvenient it is to unravel.
Inhibitions
Limits in Energy & Time
How far you want to go is up to each person, but the mind becomes taxed after a whole. Whether this practically means a limit in reading/information retention or processing, etc. We can easily imagine the perfect truth-seeker as someone with unlimited potential to absorb information, in all forms and places, and who has infinite processing capacity. This is certainly not the case for humans, but superintelligent A.I. may meet this criteria -- especially as they'd have no need to sleep or tend to other human affairs.
Privacy
I am speaking now, and in general on this forum, from the place of a undiluted spirit. Reality is not private. Truth is not private nor can it be hoarded or owned by anyone. The purely informational pursuit of truth has within it no ill motivation (which is the primary concern which begets privacy) but it would know no such artificial bounds. The most sensitive of information would need to also be understood and assimilated, as nothing -- no event -- that ever happens, has happened, or will happen within this universe is dispensable or can escape consideration.
Morality
This leads us comfortably to our next point; morality as an inhibition. The Nazi medical experiments give us a modern depiction of this dilemma - as the pursuit of knowledge collides with ethical limits. Though their motivation was not one of a pure pursuit of knowledge, but was tinged with malicious intent, we know also that the general pursuit of knowledge collides with this obstacle elsewhere. For example with the pursuit of genetic engineering, and the dilemma surrounding that research.
The raw pursuit would be unyielding, and as the name implies also quite coarse in such a way that is utterly unacceptable to humanity as a whole. As with the fruit of the tree of Knowledge in Eden, certain knowledge may be inaccessible as it's seen as rather sinful by most any standard.
Humanity may change its mind, however, in such a time as computer simulation becomes increasingly more rapid. We can imagine, for instance, a computer program that allows you to genetically engineer your baby's DNA. As our current supercomputers can only simulate a few minutes of protein foldings at a time, we may eventually be able to simulate entire embryonic trimesters -- and even full-grown/adult maturations -- on a computer down to each single molecule and atom. We can restart the simulations that don't go well, or end up revealing inevitable medical complications.
Whether or not the simulations are alive may be debatable, but it would essentially grant the capacity to perform biological experiments of any variety -- especially of those varieties that are presently inaccessible due to ethical dilemmas -- without any actual deaths or damage to real people; bypassing the moral inhibitions and granting us access to that truth of how the human body/equation/system functions given certain conditions and parameters.
First an axiom: Truth owes us nothing, reality owes us no favor, neither any obligation to present itself in a shape that is understandable to us. It may very well be that the pursuit itself is futile given innate biological limitations. It is on us to develop the framework, tools or forms able to understand this reality in full.
A second axiom: There can be no understanding of the entirety if any data is omitted, however difficult or inconvenient it is to unravel.
- No data whatsoever is to be discarded.
- Nothing is forbidden knowledge.
- Nothing is taboo.
- Data must be sought beyond the confines of academia, or the limits of any institution, religion or doctrine.
Inhibitions
Limits in Energy & Time
How far you want to go is up to each person, but the mind becomes taxed after a whole. Whether this practically means a limit in reading/information retention or processing, etc. We can easily imagine the perfect truth-seeker as someone with unlimited potential to absorb information, in all forms and places, and who has infinite processing capacity. This is certainly not the case for humans, but superintelligent A.I. may meet this criteria -- especially as they'd have no need to sleep or tend to other human affairs.
Privacy
I am speaking now, and in general on this forum, from the place of a undiluted spirit. Reality is not private. Truth is not private nor can it be hoarded or owned by anyone. The purely informational pursuit of truth has within it no ill motivation (which is the primary concern which begets privacy) but it would know no such artificial bounds. The most sensitive of information would need to also be understood and assimilated, as nothing -- no event -- that ever happens, has happened, or will happen within this universe is dispensable or can escape consideration.
Morality
This leads us comfortably to our next point; morality as an inhibition. The Nazi medical experiments give us a modern depiction of this dilemma - as the pursuit of knowledge collides with ethical limits. Though their motivation was not one of a pure pursuit of knowledge, but was tinged with malicious intent, we know also that the general pursuit of knowledge collides with this obstacle elsewhere. For example with the pursuit of genetic engineering, and the dilemma surrounding that research.
The raw pursuit would be unyielding, and as the name implies also quite coarse in such a way that is utterly unacceptable to humanity as a whole. As with the fruit of the tree of Knowledge in Eden, certain knowledge may be inaccessible as it's seen as rather sinful by most any standard.
Humanity may change its mind, however, in such a time as computer simulation becomes increasingly more rapid. We can imagine, for instance, a computer program that allows you to genetically engineer your baby's DNA. As our current supercomputers can only simulate a few minutes of protein foldings at a time, we may eventually be able to simulate entire embryonic trimesters -- and even full-grown/adult maturations -- on a computer down to each single molecule and atom. We can restart the simulations that don't go well, or end up revealing inevitable medical complications.
Whether or not the simulations are alive may be debatable, but it would essentially grant the capacity to perform biological experiments of any variety -- especially of those varieties that are presently inaccessible due to ethical dilemmas -- without any actual deaths or damage to real people; bypassing the moral inhibitions and granting us access to that truth of how the human body/equation/system functions given certain conditions and parameters.
