Re:Time-lapse of a single cell transforming into a salamande...
by cicero on Tuesday January 26, 2021 @11:03AM
(#25917345)
Humans understand these things because they are persons. Where did their personhood come from if not another person? How personhood can arise out of non-personhood is unexplained.
Re:Time-lapse of a single cell transforming into a salamande...
by thisisbrians on Tuesday January 26, 2021 @12:56PM
(#25919011)
"Personhood" seems a very arbitrary (and not at all clearly defined) qualification here. "Understanding" arises from thinking, not from "personhood". And surely, there are non-person minds that understand less complex things. That they can evolve to achieve person-caliber capabilities incrementally and over long periods of time is well-accepted.
As an aside, we can't communicate very well with the smartest animals, so we don't know how much they can understand. It could be more than most of us think.
Re:Time-lapse of a single cell transforming into a salamande...
by notSupplied on Tuesday January 26, 2021 @12:06PM
(#25918288)
Actually, that’s pretty much what Douglas Hofstadter has been trying to explain in GEB and I am a Strange Loop.
How does that logically follow? To me that is clearly just a projection of the human concept of a "creator", a person who makes things (like a house, a fire, or a website), onto the universe. I see no reason to project my human experiences and ideas onto something as vast as the universe. Whatever is "out there" or "beyond" is by definition something that far exceeds our comprehension, our human concepts. If you want to call that "god", so be it, but I don't see how that's anything more than just a placeholder for something we can't reach.
We can, on the other hand, gradually understand more and more of the laws and properties of the universe itself, and how those work together to create the phenomena we find in the universe. All those gaps in the subset of phenomena that we can observe, I am confident that we are at least theoretically capable of understanding.