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A comment on A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Everything (1999). Parent comment

Re:A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Ev... by adjkant on Wednesday April 12, 2017 @03:07AM (#14095447)
I find all of this really hard to take seriously when we work on the assumption that the design of the universe could be understood by a human. Why would something so small relative to the whole assume that its thoughts were high enough to comprehend the entire universe?

I love philosophy, but let's actually spend our time and energy asking questions that do have meaning, because any small meaning to us is more important than trying to do a task we are likely so ill equipped for that has no meaning to us.

I can't help but read titles like this piece and link it back to the anti-political and "above it all" attitudes that technical folk often take, believing that if they just eliminate meaning, emotion, all things that humans complicate pure logic with, and apply logic in the right way that somehow it will do some good. It doesn't matter if any of this is right or wrong - it has no relevant meaning to humans. Without meaning, it's a truly pointless task.

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Re:A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Ev... by adrianN on Wednesday April 12, 2017 @03:26AM (#14095542)
So far we're doing a decent job of understanding the design of the universe. Most things you interact with follow the rules we figured out so well that you'd be really hard pressed to find an experiment to find a difference between prediction and reality. That makes many people confident that we can figure out the missing pieces as well.
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Re:A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Ev... by goatlover on Wednesday April 12, 2017 @05:23AM (#14096056)
Such as experiments in economics and sociology?
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Re:A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Ev... by simonh on Wednesday April 12, 2017 @07:29AM (#14096637)
It depends on whether you think economics and sociology are fundamental to the physics of the universe or merely emergent phenomena. It's quite possible to understand all the fundamental rules of a system while having great difficulty working out all the consequences of those rules at a macroscopic level.
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Re:A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Ev... by ThomPete on Wednesday April 12, 2017 @06:12AM (#14096255)
design requires intent.
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Re:A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Ev... by adrianN on Wednesday April 12, 2017 @07:20AM (#14096592)
You're technically correct. s/design/structure/?
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Re:A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Ev... by ThomPete on Wednesday April 12, 2017 @07:48AM (#14096729)
If there is no intetnt there is no purpose of structure.
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Re:A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Ev... by adrianN on Wednesday April 12, 2017 @09:07AM (#14097242)
Not every structure needs a purpose though.
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Re:A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Ev... by ThomPete on Wednesday April 12, 2017 @09:40AM (#14097527)
What structure doesent?
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Re:A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Ev... by optimuspaul on Wednesday April 12, 2017 @10:02AM (#14097751)
just a stab in the dark... a rock? It has structure, but what is it's purpose?
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Re:A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Ev... by ThomPete on Wednesday April 12, 2017 @11:39AM (#14098727)
structure to us not structure in itself.
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Re:A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Ev... by marcosdumay on Wednesday April 12, 2017 @01:02PM (#14099552)
> Why would something so small relative to the whole assume that its thoughts were high enough to comprehend the entire universe?

Completely unintuitive, isn't it? Empirically, we happen to be very good on it.

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