| Re: Tower of babylon as a metaphor |
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Group: alt.philosophy · Group Profile
Author: ErrolErrol Date: Aug 27, 2008 02:03
On Aug 27, 7:41Â am, Immortalist yahoo.com> wrote:>
> People dogmatically assert that they know things. One person asserts
> that she knows something, another denies this. It occurs to a
> philosophical eavesdropper to wonder what knowledge is and whether
> anyone really knows. Are we not often wrong when we claim to know
> something? At one time people claimed that they knew the earth was
> flat. But now? At one time, not so long ago, people claimed they knew
> that the idea of a person walking on the moon was a mere fiction. But
> now? At the present time, people claim to know that no one can travel
> backward in time. But later? Who knows?
>
This is not about the scientific problems that need to be overcome in
order to achieve what seems impossible today. It is an assertion
(similar to John Horgan's "The end of science") that further
achievement might be fundamentally impossible in certain areas due to
the energy required to explore smaller and smaller building blocks
such as quarks and strings and whatever might be next.
It is this possiblity that I believe Ted Chiang is exploring in his
story.
All the effort to build an eight mile high tower, only to find
yourself back on earth.
Auxilliary to that is the philosophical talking point that the
universe might very well be "designed" (i know some people get their
hackles up at the idea of design as far as the universe is concerned)
to be inexplicable and unexplorable in certain areas.
A case being that currently and possibly for countless generations, no
human will ever set foot on a planet belonging to another solar system
(nevermind another solar system in a different galaxy) As impossible
it is for humanity to explore the macro (in the sense of actually
travelling there), so it might very well be impossible to explore the
micro die to the physical constraints of the energy required to do so.
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