Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Jimmy... Dead.]

I think all your answers lie in that article/site on "stupid" you posted a week or two ago. Especially the Big Heart/Small Brain section.

 

[Dak]

I'm not asking why there is a difference, I'm postulating that the internet is increasing the difference.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

I gotcha, I'm just saying it relates

 

[Dak]

For example, in a given day (and to use the terminology that you referenced), you as a "Big Brain" person go on the internet and are like "Oooh, 3d Printing Body parts" or "Ooh, Linguistic video" and so on. Because of the ease of access to such a monumental amount of information, Big Brain is pretty much pigging out on the most wonderful buffet ever assembled, growing even Bigger.

Conversely, Small Brain was already smaller, but while Big Brain was stuffing himself, Small Brain was all like "Ooh, Brangelina twitter update!" "Oo, High score on Angry Birds".

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

IMHO it's mostly biological and inevitable.

 

[Einherjar86]

I was thinking about this as I listened to that Chomsky interview and then as I read the blog linked above. At one time, one person could "everything".

Could you elaborate on this? I'm assuming, of course, that you meant "one person could know 'everything'".

 

[Dak]

Could you elaborate on this? I'm assuming, of course, that you meant "one person could know 'everything'".

Yes I did. At one point, one person could read and more or less understand the entire known collected knowledge of mankind.

 

[Einherjar86]

Ah, collected knowledge; that's what I wasn't picking up on.

In this case, knowledge is problematic simply because of what constitutes "collected knowledge"; does a cave painting in Chauvet constitute knowledge? What about graffiti on an abandoned warehouse in NYC? It would seem to me that we make an implicit value judgment of knowledge when we make a statement like that; that is, what has been collected and deemed authoritative. Which you seem to be aware of; I'm not accusing you of not being so.

However, I would argue that much of what is available on the internet is by no means "authoritative," thus complicating the issue. In fact, plenty of what goes on on the internet is comparable to cave paintings. It's plausible that even during Archaic Greece it would have been impossible for an individual to consume all collected knowledge, not to mention simply disparate forms of knowledge.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

I think Socrates had the right idea.

PhilosopyBro summed it up nicely:

I went to all the bros who had these great reputations for wisdom, bros who claimed to know tons of shit, and I'll be damned if they weren't mostly just fucking idiots. It was like, the better a reputation a man had, the fucking dumber he was. I'm not saying I knew more than them - I'm pretty sure that I know jackshit. But these guys also didn't know anything, and were pretty sure they knew everything. And when I tried to point out that they didn't know anything, they just got pissed off like it's my fault they've got their heads up their asses, which is why they told you guys growing up about how I think I'm smarter than everyone, even though I've literally never said that, ever.

"Then I went to the poets, who said cool things, but they thought their poems meant this high-flying bullshit or whatever when they clearly didn't mean anything like that. After that I went to the politicians to see if they were wise, which turned out pretty much exactly as you'd expect with politicians.

"So finally I went to the craftsmen, and they knew some cool things like how to sculpt and how to make chairs and shit, but they all thought that because they knew this really specific thing, they could be authorities on all kinds of other crazy bullshit. It was like, 'I believe that justice is the highest blah blah blah, and you know I'm right because look at this chair I put together.' Which is retarded, and that seems like a pretty dumb handicap to have,

and I figured it was better to be aware that I know nothing than to know like five things and think I know a million.

 

[Dak]

Ah, collected knowledge; that's what I wasn't picking up on.

In this case, knowledge is problematic simply because of what constitutes "collected knowledge"; does a cave painting in Chauvet constitute knowledge? What about graffiti on an abandoned warehouse in NYC? It would seem to me that we make an implicit value judgment of knowledge when we make a statement like that; that is, what has been collected and deemed authoritative. Which you seem to be aware of; I'm not accusing you of not being so.

However, I would argue that much of what is available on the internet is by no means "authoritative," thus complicating the issue. In fact, plenty of what goes on on the internet is comparable to cave paintings. It's plausible that even during Archaic Greece it would have been impossible for an individual to consume all collected knowledge, not to mention simply disparate forms of knowledge.

What has been deemed authoritative is rather irrelevant in the case you give, correct? Since who deems the deemer?

In regards to collected knowledge: A cave painting really can't be collected, not unless you can chisel it out and move it, or at least create some sort of facsimile. We are of course speaking in generalities, even if the sum of knowledge on celestial bodies at some point consisted of tales of the gods moving about the heavens.

 

[Einherjar86]

What is deemed authoritative is irrelevant unless we're using it as a category by which to judge "collected knowledge." Most collected knowledge is knowledge that has, in one way or another, by one or more technicians of a certain field, been deemed authoritative.

But if simply "authenticated" information/knowledge doesn't fulfill this category, then we encounter the problem of what constitutes knowledge, and how exactly we might acquire it. All I'm saying is that I think it would have been just as difficult, at any point in human history, for one subject to know all collected human knowledge. Part of that difficulty lies in the subject needing to be able to know what constitutes knowledge.

 

[Dak]

Examples of what I am thinking:

Food is grown by planting seeds either for trees or grain in plowed fields.

Metal is forged via forge+blacksmith

Apollo pulls the sun across the sky

etc

Now all the information with just those three basic things is infinitely more complex.

 

[Dak]

Different topic, a WTFDUH moment:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/07/christopher-dorner-manhunt-los-angeles_n_2638023.html

The hunt for Dorner led to two errant shootings in the pre-dawn darkness Thursday.

Los Angeles officers guarding a "target" named in the posting shot and wounded two women in suburban Torrance who were in a pickup but were not involved, authorities said. It's not clear if the target is a person or a location. Beck said one woman was in stable condition with two gunshot wounds and the other was being released after treatment.

"Tragically we believe this was a case of mistaken identity by the officers," Beck said.

Minutes later Torrance officers responding to a report of gunshots encountered a dark pickup matching the description of Dorner's, said Torrance Sgt. Chris Roosen. A collision occurred and the officers fired on the pickup. The unidentified driver was not hit and it turned out not to be the suspect vehicle, Roosen said.

"We're asking our officers to be extraordinarily cautious just as we're asking the public to be extraordinarily cautious with this guy. He's already demonstrated he has a propensity for shooting innocent people," said Smith, the LAPD commander.

Really? What motherfucking nerve.

 

[Prismatic Sphere]

Fuckin' cop-roaches.

 

[Mort Divine]

Just saw this, found it kind of interesting

 

[Dak]

Yeah, heard about that a while ago. But that would be a conspiracy theory, and a really old one. You guys don't like those.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

Fuck conspiracies, I remember you saying you believe in ghost. Now that's interesting.

 

[Dak]

I said I've experienced the phenomena once. I don't know what to call it or what causes it.

 

[Dak]

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PLORO0-ApM"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PLORO0-ApM[/ame]

So hard to explain this to some people.

 

[Einherjar86]

Is evolution *gasp* conscious??

This author still doesn't think so, but apparently Thomas Nagel might.

In Mind and Cosmos, subtitled Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, Nagel revives the concept of teleology on the basis of his conviction that the mind-body problem has more serious ramifications for evolutionary science than is ordinarily accepted. How does the electrochemical activity of neurons in the human brain produce subjective, first-person experience? Nobody knows. Nagel says that the appearance of conscious beings such as us can be described as the universe waking up. Yet to him it seems unlikely that life would ever have got started in the first place, somehow springing forth from ‘dead matter’; still more unlikely that some forms of life would have developed consciousness; and extremely improbable that one form of life would have acquired the ‘transcendent’ power of reason. In order to explain these events, Nagel suggests, you need more than simply the ‘mechanistic’ tools of the laws of physics, natural selection, and so on. You need not just physical theory but ‘psychophysical theory’. And you might even need teleology.

http://www.aeonmagazine.com/world-views/steven-poole-teleology/