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And here's another Firespark's-been-left-alone-to-think-a-little-too-long-again rant. I promise something a little lighter for next update. But until then, here we go.
Certainly Knowing
I love it when we, as a species, get our evolutionary superiority complexes thoroughly tread on. Not in a malicious or spiteful manner do I enjoy these events mind you. I just like to see it when someone boldly claims to have created, or discovered, or denoted the ultimate finality of a subject, only to have said creation/discovery/notation soon after be overturned/disproven/shown incomplete. If there is anything that we as a species should really have figured out by now, it’s that there is no such thing as total certainty.
A couple thousand years ago, mankind was absolutely certain that the earth was the center of the universe. Several hundred years ago, the educated and enlightened people of Europe were certain that the world was a flat plane. And since time memorial, on cultural subset of homo sapiens knew that they were in all ways superior to some other cultural subset of homo sapiens, if for no other reason than because they said so. Over time, and time and time again, we have shown all these to be incorrect. The latest and greatest assumptions are just as groan inducing as ever. Pity so many can’t see them that way. Men being better than women in any shape or form, or human beings considering themselves so much further up the evolutionary ladder than other species, and the thought that humans can make other humans more “normal”. Whether through unnatural selection or artificial chemical manipulations (read: brain drugs), we can all be “normalized”.
Some of these are downright laughable. Others should shake us to our core. What we should really be taking from all of this is the fact that even though we don’t know much for certain, we still get along in the world just fine. Even when the certainties that had stood for generations were proven incorrect, it didn’t change the fact that people managed to survive all that time under incorrect assumptions. So obviously what we do or don’t absolutely know obviously has no bearing on our ability to survive, thrive, and go on doing all sorts of human things.
So is the pursuit of knowledge a bad thing? Will technological advancement spell doom for our species? Of course not, at least, not in and of itself it won’t. But the sooner we realize that we don’t need to know everything, that we don’t need to be 100% certain about the universe and our place in it, the sooner we can be about living life. And then enjoying how we spend it.
- FireSpark Out
"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality,
they are not certain,
as far as they are certain,
they do not refer to reality." - Albert Einstein
 FireSpark · Wed Sep 29, 2010 @ 07:27am · 0 Comments |
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