Now maybe if you could put a dozen or so smoke signals in parallel and add error correction codes...
My immediate response in this context is the back button - if you haven't given much thought to the medium, you likely haven't given much thought to the content itself.
Socrates didn't really write stuff down...
Telegrams are insufficiently complex to express ideas on the nature of existence, and even if they were not, a frontier philosopher would run short of either money or time long before he reached his second axiom. You cannot use telegrams to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content.
Tell that to Wittgenstein. Tractatus would have been a twitter thread nowadays.
Literally smoke signals implemented in rocks so dumb we tricked them into thinking.
..-. .- .. .-.. ..- .-. . / - --- / --. .-. .- ... .--. / - .... .. ... / .-- .. .-.. .-.. / --. . - / -.-- --- ..- / -.. .- -... -... . -.. / --- -. / -... -.-- / . ...- . .-. -.-- / -- --- .-. ... . / ..- ... . .-. / . ...- . .-. --..-- / .- -. -.. / .- .-. --. ..- .- -... .-.. -.-- --..-- / . ...- . .-. -.-- / -.-. --- -- .--. ..- - . .-. / ... -.-. .. . -. - .. ... - / .-- .. - .... / . ...- . -. / .- -. / .. --- - .- / --- ..-. / .--. .... .. .-.. --- ... --- .--. .... .. -.-. .- .-.. / ..- -. -.. . .-. .--. .. -. -. .. -. --. .-.-.- / --- ..-. / .-- .... .. -.-. .... / .. / .- -- / .- - / .-.. . .- ... - / .- / -.. .- -... -... .-.. . .-. / --- ..-. / - .... . / ..-. --- .-. -- . .-. --..-- / .- -. -.. / .- / -- . -- -... . .-. / --- ..-. / - .... . / .-.. .- - - . .-. .-.-.-
It doesn't take that many leaves to make smoke.
Nice Rorschach there with your quip about racism, however. You may want to think about that a bit.
In Mexico, we don't have clean water in our faucets. Electricity and the internet shuts off, randomly due to infrastructure problems or maintenance. And yet, we are humorous. We make fun of each other. And yes, this includes racial and cultural differences which we laugh at, in poking fun at each other, together. In England they might call it "taking the piss out of you". In Mexico, it's normal.
And yet in the US, there's not these "third world problems",
So the aspect of "simultaneously hilarious and unnecessary" I mention is regarding how people in the US, since they don't have "third world problems", they make their own problems to create drama about... I suppose so that they can feel some sort of relevance of a struggle.
In doing so, they reduce the capacity of dialogue, and they ruin and potential existence of Humor in a conversation -- because people are expected to walk on egg shells on certain topics.
It really destroys the fun in conversations when you have to worry about "oh my goodness, I am risking talking about something that's not politically correct! Someone who isn't actually related to the conversation content might pretend to be offended for the sake of some other non-existing-in-the-conversation person to show off their virtuous nature".
Religious figures and scientists both argue over how the universe was created. Religious explanations often posit that some sort of higher power created the universe but fail to provide the story prior to that. The same is true of science with its big bang. I argue that these stories perhaps tell us about the early universe, but not how it was created.
Now think for a moment, can you construct a sentence that is at all logical, that doesn't move the goalposts or do any linguistic trickery, that could possibly describe where our universe came from? Don't worry about it being true, just a reasonable sentence that obeys the laws of cause and effect?
I believe that human language has not yet reached a point where it could describe anything like that. If that has true we have debated for centuries about a question that even if an individual knew the answer they would be unable to express it to anyone else.
All you've done is ask a trick question, like "prove Fermat's Last Theorem without using any math". The problem is you used the words "where", which means "a place in the universe", and "cause and effect", which means "tracing the causes of something backward in time", with "time" again existing only within this universe. It's a little like Zeno's Paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. All we've found is that this particular way of asking the question or describing the question is insufficient.
Obviously in order to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, you need to use math. Obviously to talk about anything "external" to the universe, you need to use something that is not a "where" within this universe and does not follow the cause and effect defined within this universe. The question is: is it, therefore, useful to ask the question, given that we are stuck in this universe?
No. It's not.
I haven't seen much arguments about this. In most civilized countries, religions have stopped to make factual claims about the "antediluvian times", because all their previous claims were proven false. For many decades, scientists have almost stopped arguing with religious figures. The tendency is that scientific people are less permeable to religious beliefs, and religions are almost powerless in scientific domains. Lastly, religions don't argue, internally or with each other, over the origin of the world.
> Religious explanations often posit that some sort of higher power created the universe but fail to provide the story prior to that.
The religious explanations failed to satisfy you, but at least some of them provide a consistent explanation. For instance, Genesis states that their god was there from all eternity, then at one point he created the world. You may dislike this "story before that", but it is clear and consistent.
> The same is true of science with its big bang.
It's not true. There are several theories about the origins before the big-bang, or at the big-bang. Science does provide the stories you long for, but at the same time science asserts that these are just hypotheses, and that it's highly probable that models in this domains are won't ever be proved.
Hmmm? It doesn't state anything about what happened before the creation, or where God came from.
It starts with "in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth" (or "when God began to create heaven and earth") and nothing in Genesis mentions any moment or occasion prior to that.
Are you thinking of other aspects of Jewish or Christian tradition that aren't derived from the text of Genesis?
There is an uncreated God who is self-existent and immutable. He has no end or beginning and contains within Himself fullness of being. From him all things derive their being. He doesn't "exist", he just *is*; that is, His being is underived. Everything else derives their existence from Him. There has never been a time when he has not been, because he is self-existent apart from time; time itself is something He has made. So there wasn't "story prior"; there was just God. This is the God that Christians worship, who added to his eternal nature the nature of a man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus testified to this, saying: "Before Abraham and Isaac were, I AM."
This is meaningless, the verb 'is' literally means 'to be', i.e. to exist. How can someone/something/God not exist and yet 'be'?
This is a very widespread problem with the Abrahamic family of religions (and maybe other religions, but I'm most familiar with this family). When pressed, philosophers and proponents are very adamant about the fact that 'God' is not an entity comprehensible to a human, it's useless to apply plain old physical or commonsense logic to 'him' or try to derive any useful facts about 'him' or just reason about 'him' in any way other than 'he exists and he wants me to say and do things'. But doesn't this, like, invalidate the whole enterprise of worship ?
If God is so incomprehensible that you can't even explain why evil exists when he is supposedly all-good and all-capable of enforcing that good, what makes you think he wants or needs worshipping, you just said he doesn't obey any comprehensible rules. You might object that he himself told us to worship him in the $Book, this doesn't work. Even assuming $Book is true and uncorrupted, what makes you think God really means what he says, you just assumed he works by a rule that even humans don't always obey. Maybe God just made himself known to us and requested that we worship him as a joke, you might object that this makes God unacceptably 'Juvenile' for a cosmic entity, but again, this just assumes human standards and social protocols. Etc etc etc.
Not one of us decided to be born, but through the actions of others we came to be. And we continue to be, because we have food and water and shelter and clothing, etc.
God, unlike the things He has made doesn't depend on something else to be or continue being. He has always been. He isn't out of anything but is self-existent; He doesn't exist but rather is. And because He is, everything else (all of which depends on Him to be) continues to be.
I hope I've worded that clearly.
IOW, why is there something rather than nothing.
Mathematical realism ala Tegmark's level 4 multiverse is a concrete example; if mathematical consistency causes existence then the big bang and our universe have a definite, understandable cause.
Do you wish to create it? Y/N
Why would it need to obey those laws? What made them "laws"?
Empirical reference is central.
You don't explain the taste of a lemon. You hand them a lemon.
Everests of bullshit have been built upon merely metaphorical understanding.
Actually you just need to binary encode your mesage using puffs of smoke, something they are perfectly capable of.
pairing known ideas can create new ideas by guiding a contextualized listener to discover the essence of the idea themself. if a cloud of smoke could represent a well known idea, which it can, and about 10 different smoke shapes are possible (for example).. then after 8 puffs of smoke the shaman can create up to 100000000 distinct chains of ideas to direct his audience to whatever it is he wants to them to understand. with smoke symbols for north south east and west, and the delays between when he creates them having assumed meaning, he could give directions to any location on earth - theoretically - with just two to three puffs of smoke
since language is shorthand and referential, it can never contain all the knowledge within itself that is necessary to properly understand it - which is part of the point of the original post. within my tribe, a single word might need a novel to explain to yours, if it is explainable at all. Kind of like being at the bar and something is said and a bunch of people start laughing and all they can communicate to you about it is "you had to be there". the ability to describe details is not the same as the ability to communicate
The smoke puff might be nonsense to an outside observer, but after a few carefully selected puffs curated for the perfect audience - you can communicate literally anything.
likewise, although i have given up on twitter - i do respect that there is often a mountain of context behind popular tweets. although those tweets might not be saying much to me, there is a tribe out there who have a much deeper experience with it than i do. And timing is a huge part of it, as well as the context of mainstream news, and a bunch of other things depending on the intended audience
For the same reason he mentions other things: to convey his thought in a precise manner. I don’t understand the criticism.
Every time I see a Twitter post like this, I remember this quote.