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Living Earth Simulater: Predict the Past, Present & Future (pg. 2)
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| PivotTechno |
| obviously not. |
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| denys envy |
| quote: | Originally posted by Pjotr G
do you know the answer to the universe, life, and everything? |
procreation :conf: |
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| PivotTechno |
duh. |
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| nefardec |
This is a misguided idea. Predictions from a simulation based on past data cannot take into account the macro-scale effects of compounded quantum-scale chance events - the simulation will be inherently flawed, retrospective, and will serve more as a way to control and limit 'progress' rather than to inspire and promote it. Not only this, but since it it based on historical observation, subjectively human determinations of importance, and historical modes of perception, it cannot factor in unobserved things, unimportant things that have been left out, and things that cannot be perceived yet due to both the failings in power and resolution of measuring instruments and also the failings of human imagination in terms of how else things may be perceived.
Such a simulation, if taken seriously, will institutionalize, sacralize, standardize, and exponentially increase the failings of human perception.
It represents the ultimate in 'reductionism' of reality to an input-output machine. Nature works in wholes, not in parts - one of the cardinal sins of reductionism is that by reducing a whole reality into a set of perceived 'important' parts, perceived 'unimportant' or unperceivable parts are left out, and do not factor into the calculation. This is one of the failings of the scientific method - for instance such reductionism has led to massive destruction of biodiversity in terms of agricultural crops, via nutrionism, which is reductionist science applied to food - not to mention malnourishment, obesity, increased heart disease, etc. Scientists believed that a whole food could be divided into its most important nutrients, so they decided that new food products could be resynthesized using only combinations these nutrients. What they found out for instance, was that when you grind up wheat to only its starchy kernel because the sugars are a very efficient human fuel nutrient, you leave out the part of the seed which contains all of the vitamins that make the human body healthy. People started getting horribly malnourished, so now flour is artificially enriched with vitamins. Every year scientists make new 'discoveries' and these discoveries trickle down to industry, which invariably finds new ways to market new products capitalizing on popular concern for health.
The only people that benefit from this sort of reductionist science are 1.) companies that can use it to sell new products as science changes to represent an ever-more 'progressive' picture. 2.) journalists that can capitalize on writing about the ever-changing information and scientific wisdom du jour.
But really, everyone loses, as the richness and health of the natural world declines in exchange for the reductionist logic of industrial production.
In many ways this is the manifestation of descartes' "Daemon".
Beyond curiosity, the only thing this project can offer humanity is a logical basis for control.
If anyone wants to do more reading on this, check out this essay:
Techgnosis
Magic, Memory, and the Angels of Information
by Erik Davis
http://www.techgnosis.com/index_infoangels.html |
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| Lews |
| quote: | Originally posted by nefardec
This is a stupid idea. Predictions from a simulation based on past data cannot take into account the macro-scale effects of compounded quantum-scale chance events, the simulation will be inherently flawed, retrospective, and will serve more as a way to control and limit 'progress' rather than to inspire and promote it. |
| quote: | Originally posted by nefardec
This is a misguided idea. Predictions from a simulation based on past data cannot take into account the macro-scale effects of compounded quantum-scale chance events, the simulation will be inherently flawed, retrospective, and will serve more as a way to control and limit 'progress' rather than to inspire and promote it. |
WHICH IS IT???!?!?!?!!? |
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| d_Verge |
| quote: | Originally posted by nefardec
This is a misguided idea. Predictions from a simulation based on past data cannot take into account the macro-scale effects of compounded quantum-scale chance events - the simulation will be inherently flawed, retrospective, and will serve more as a way to control and limit 'progress' rather than to inspire and promote it. Not only this, but since it it based on historical observation, subjectively human determinations of importance, and historical modes of perception, it cannot factor in unobserved things, unimportant things that have been left out, and things that cannot be perceived yet due to both the failings in power and resolution of measuring instruments and also the failings of human imagination in terms of how else things may be perceived.
Such a simulation, if taken seriously, will institutionalize, sacralize, standardize, and exponentially increase the failings of human perception.
It represents the ultimate in 'reductionism' of reality to an input-output machine. Nature works in wholes, not in parts - one of the cardinal sins of reductionism is that by reducing a whole reality into a set of perceived 'important' parts, perceived 'unimportant' or unperceivable parts are left out, and do not factor into the calculation. This is one of the failings of the scientific method - for instance such reductionism has led to massive destruction of biodiversity in terms of agricultural crops, via nutrionism, which is reductionist science applied to food - not to mention malnourishment, obesity, increased heart disease, etc. Scientists believed that a whole food could be divided into its most important nutrients, so they decided that new food products could be resynthesized using only combinations these nutrients. What they found out for instance, was that when you grind up wheat to only its starchy kernel because the sugars are a very efficient human fuel nutrient, you leave out the part of the seed which contains all of the vitamins that make the human body healthy. People started getting horribly malnourished, so now flour is artificially enriched with vitamins. Every year scientists make new 'discoveries' and these discoveries trickle down to industry, which invariably finds new ways to market new products capitalizing on popular concern for health.
The only people that benefit from this sort of reductionist science are 1.) companies that can use it to sell new products as science changes to represent an ever-more 'progressive' picture. 2.) journalists that can capitalize on writing about the ever-changing information and scientific wisdom du jour.
But really, everyone loses, as the richness and health of the natural world declines in exchange for the reductionist logic of industrial production.
In many ways this is the manifestation of descartes' "Daemon".
Beyond curiosity, the only thing this project can offer humanity is a logical basis for control.
If anyone wants to do more reading on this, check out this essay:
Techgnosis
Magic, Memory, and the Angels of Information
by Erik Davis
http://www.techgnosis.com/index_infoangels.html |
tl;dr version:
's wack! |
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| nefardec |
| quote: | Originally posted by d_Verge
tl;dr version:
's wack! |
grow a brane, moran!
s dope yo! |
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| Kismet7 |
| quote: | Originally posted by nefardec
This is a misguided idea. Predictions from a simulation based on past data cannot take into account the macro-scale effects of compounded quantum-scale chance events - the simulation will be inherently flawed, retrospective, and will serve more as a way to control and limit 'progress' rather than to inspire and promote it. Not only this, but since it it based on historical observation, subjectively human determinations of importance, and historical modes of perception, it cannot factor in unobserved things, unimportant things that have been left out, and things that cannot be perceived yet due to both the failings in power and resolution of measuring instruments and also the failings of human imagination in terms of how else things may be perceived.
Such a simulation, if taken seriously, will institutionalize, sacralize, standardize, and exponentially increase the failings of human perception.
It represents the ultimate in 'reductionism' of reality to an input-output machine. Nature works in wholes, not in parts - one of the cardinal sins of reductionism is that by reducing a whole reality into a set of perceived 'important' parts, perceived 'unimportant' or unperceivable parts are left out, and do not factor into the calculation. This is one of the failings of the scientific method - for instance such reductionism has led to massive destruction of biodiversity in terms of agricultural crops, via nutrionism, which is reductionist science applied to food - not to mention malnourishment, obesity, increased heart disease, etc. Scientists believed that a whole food could be divided into its most important nutrients, so they decided that new food products could be resynthesized using only combinations these nutrients. What they found out for instance, was that when you grind up wheat to only its starchy kernel because the sugars are a very efficient human fuel nutrient, you leave out the part of the seed which contains all of the vitamins that make the human body healthy. People started getting horribly malnourished, so now flour is artificially enriched with vitamins. Every year scientists make new 'discoveries' and these discoveries trickle down to industry, which invariably finds new ways to market new products capitalizing on popular concern for health.
The only people that benefit from this sort of reductionist science are 1.) companies that can use it to sell new products as science changes to represent an ever-more 'progressive' picture. 2.) journalists that can capitalize on writing about the ever-changing information and scientific wisdom du jour.
But really, everyone loses, as the richness and health of the natural world declines in exchange for the reductionist logic of industrial production.
In many ways this is the manifestation of descartes' "Daemon".
Beyond curiosity, the only thing this project can offer humanity is a logical basis for control.
If anyone wants to do more reading on this, check out this essay:
Techgnosis
Magic, Memory, and the Angels of Information
by Erik Davis
http://www.techgnosis.com/index_infoangels.html |
You articulate knowledge/intelligence well, you should be making more musics.
I'm with you on what you're saying, it goes back to a philosophy I think we share about technology, science, and even data. As things are defined, simulated, benchmarked, categorized, mechanized, unnaturalized etc, the DNA of society and civilization is altered negatively over time. Humans are a product of nature (the sun, the wind, the rain, the elements, food, other humans), when you perpetually decondition that nature from the human, then I think the psyche and body will change to a new nature. A science driven nature that has no morals, no soul, no spirit. How will people have an enjoyable survival in 50 years or 100 years or 1000 years? I know this deep into the future, but you have to ask, will humans WANT to become nanotech driven? Where a computer chip controls the mind? I mean all it would take is peoples ideals and perceptions accepting something like that. Which can easily be done through social reform, technology, and mass media. |
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| Spam |
| quote: | Originally posted by denys envy
WTF was that that just flew overhead? I didn't catch it! |
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| nefardec |
| quote: | Originally posted by Kismet7
Humans are a product of nature (the sun, the wind, the rain, the elements, food, other humans), when you perpetually decondition that nature from the human, then I think the psyche and body will change to a new nature. A science driven nature that has no morals, no soul, no spirit. How will people have an enjoyable survival in 50 years or 100 years or 1000 years? I know this deep into the future, but you have to ask, will humans WANT to become nanotech driven? Where a computer chip controls the mind? I mean all it would take is peoples ideals and perceptions accepting something like that. Which can easily be done through social reform, technology, and mass media. |
I dont think its prudent to discuss morals in this context, and words like 'soul' or 'spirit' have meaning to me, but they are hollow to most here and hard to pin down, and using them will come back to bite you in this discussion.
Also, 'enjoyable' survival is quite a bit of nostalgia. When has survival ever been 'enjoyable'? And for whom?
I don't really like to distinguish humans from 'nature'. I also think environmentalism is a fundamentally flawed enterprise that is completely based on psychological projections of human concerns for bodily health onto the human environment. There is destruction and death in nature, and nature knows not any form of 'waste'.
The strength of an ecosystem is biodiversity. In monocultures, with no biodiversity, the introduction of one new virus can wipe out the entire ecosystem. Native american agricultural practices reflected this basic ecological knowledge by making use of several natural varieties of the same crop in a planting - letting each variety do what it is good at, acting as a sort of insurance policy for unpredictable weather and pestilence. This also had the effect of providing well-balanced, healthy diets, and enriching the soil and ecosystem by letting the varieties affect one another and the rest of the ecosystem symbiotically.
In human culture it is no different. Lack of diversity is dangerous - lack of diversity in culture, language, thought, government, etc. The standardization of human culture into a 'monoculture' for efficient 'processing' of man into industrial pro-sumers is an unsustainable enterprise.
Such a machine that would give a logical basis for the direction of human (and other) activity on a mass scale is only a basis for control.
To me, taking advice from this simulation is the equivalent of saying 'This is God's Plan', or consulting the Oracle at Delphi. When oracles burnt bones at Delphi, that was the cutting edge of technology at the time. What these living earth simulator scientists are doing is to effectively construct an oracle, or even construct the scientific God - a vision of the universe and human fate made in man's image. Therefore it suffers from the same malady as the biblical god and others.
This also reminds me of that TED talk woscar or someone posted where some science fanboy wanted to create a global set of rules for people based on scientific observations and deductions. When the bible was written, it was based on cutting edge observations, called 'prophecies'. Now if you say that the benefit of scientifically-based rules is that they can change as technology and scientific knowledge grows, then what is the point of universal rules/laws in the first place? If you imprison someone for something 10 years ago and then some scientific discovery exonerates him, is that just?
*shudder* |
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| Halcyon+On+On |
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