Understanding Everything
shimmeringvoid.substack.com
Understanding Everything
1–10 of 33 posts
Re: Understanding Everything
#2On the topic of “thinking is analogy”, the book “Metaphors We Live By” by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson is an excellent and foundational read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphors_We_Live_By
Re: Understanding Everything
#3"A physicist is a person that wants to know everything while learning as little as possible". The universe is the ultimate infinite game.
Re: Understanding Everything
#4Understanding is a purely artificial/subjective concept. "Understanding" only exists if there is a conscious observer, and "understanding" means whatever that observer wants it to mean. A lot of people have found full understanding in religion. It takes off a lot of the stress from not understanding.
You may call this understanding of understanding meta-understanding.
Re: Understanding Everything
#5Understanding is a purely artificial/subjective concept. "Understanding" only exists if there is a conscious observer, and "understanding" means whatever that observer wants it to mean. A lot of people have found full understanding in religion. It takes off a lot of the stress from not understanding. You may call this understanding of understanding meta-understanding.
Understanding is a word developed by humans, for humans. Of course it only exists because there's a conscious observer. That's the people who use and received the Word.
That's no reason/excuse to describe it as purely subjective.
We can all understand that objectively the Earth exists and (to a level or standard) one can be said to objectively understand the Earth and it's existence.
Understanding relativism makes no sense, because the majority of the topics we wish to understand objectively exist and are empirically/scientifically provable.
You didn't take the stress off understanding, you gave up and mangled the meaning of the word in the process.
Please don't do that.
Re: Understanding Everything
#6> Well, one of the core measures of a well-designed game (for a given player) is the felt experience of immersion, or flow. Specifically, an immersive game should hold the player in the flow channel at all times.
In life, that's not the case. We sometimes choose to do things that are frustrating or boring, because they must be done. Because they're worth doing. Not everything needs to be entertainment.
> Instead, I want to play an infinite game
That's why I came to believe in reincarnation, actually.
Life on its own can seem pretty meaningless -- you can try to learn all you want, achieve your wildest dreams, and then we all die and in a few centuries will be utterly forgotten.
A bit like how a single game of rock, paper, scissors is not especially interesting. There's no real strategy to a single game.
But repeated rock, paper, scissors, there are tournaments in that, computer engines, there are several strategies and ways to exploit other strategies. The "optimal" play (always random) is guaranteed to end in the middle of the pack. There's much more to think about.
So I choose to assume reincarnation exist (with no possible way to communicatie between lives). And now what I do in this life may influence my next one. Everything has more meaning, just by a simple assumption.
Re: Understanding Everything
#7After being a father, now I see life as a recursion, a recursion to pass on life. On micro-scale, it means being good parents, to pass on accumulated wisdom, or the lack of, to children. Then scale the recursion to extended family, community and maybe whole humanity. I've internalised the feeling that things that help the recursion are things worth doing, and the smaller the scale, the stronger the feeling is.
Re: Understanding Everything
#8After being a father, now I see life as a recursion, a recursion to pass on life. On micro-scale, it means being good parents, to pass on accumulated wisdom, or the lack of, to children. Then scale the recursion to extended family, community and maybe whole humanity. I've internalised the feeling that things that help the recursion are things worth doing, and the smaller the scale, the stronger the feeling is.
The reproduction of life can never be meaningful by itself, in part because a single life is already countless moments and the problem is the same.
I think what you perhaps want to point at is the opposite: the fact that _a_ life is finite and therefore things worth doing/things that are meaningful look beyond that - and the wider they look the more meaningful they can be.
Re: Understanding Everything
#9> I want to understand everything (…and how it all fits together.)
I have this personality trait too. I suspect it was very beneficial in evolutionary times, when it was possible to learn everything that was known and then start using that knowledge. But in the modern world it becomes a bit of a personality flaw: you just learn and learn and learn, and then you die. :)
Re: Understanding Everything
#10Understanding is a purely artificial/subjective concept. "Understanding" only exists if there is a conscious observer, and "understanding" means whatever that observer wants it to mean. A lot of people have found full understanding in religion. It takes off a lot of the stress from not understanding. You may call this understanding of understanding meta-understanding.
> Understanding is a purely artificial/subjective concept.
Not necessarily. It can be mathematically defined as the ability predict the future, i.e. to assign (relatively) high probability to events that occur.