RE: Asgard and Archaea
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"The desire for quantification and testing is, in my opinion, due to the fact that people are reluctant to accept something like uncertainty."
Nescience gets people killed. Science produces significant benefits demonstrably preferred by people. However, it is also demonstrable that no matter how reasonable and knowledgeable people are, they all die. Since learning takes time, we are constrained in our quest for knowledge by our need to live, regardless of what we know or don't know. This produces a range of strategies culturally and individually selected that cause a range of rationality and understanding to be affected individually.
Insofar as I can ascertain, these things will not change in the foreseeable future, and I am left with the distinct acknowledgement that one man's poison is another's treasure. While I feel obligated to respect other's choices, it is obvious that I consider my own optimal, and it is this conceit I seek to blunt increasingly as I approach death, as I am ever more confident I should be more humble. It is obviously paradoxical to be confident in one's humility, and Ben Franklin, who strove to exemplify what he considered to be the seven signal virtues, once wrote to his son that he had quite given up on humility, as he was certain he would be proud of achieving it if he ever did.
HaHa! That gave me a good chuckle, thanx!
Indeed, a similar insight is also spread amongst the buddhist philosophers, where it is said that if you want to get rid of desire, this in itself is a desire and so one wants to get rid of the desire of not desiring.
But as being humbled is nothing one would be proud of, just humble, I bet, Franklin wrote it with a twinkling eye.
To the rest of your response, I answer you with a quote from the book I gave you the link for:
I am convinced that whole we perceive is false. Such meaning as it has to us is what we seek to justify in our self-deception.
We are demonstrably incapable of total understanding. Any presumption we make to it is false. Plato ascribed to Aristotle the statement that he knew he knew nothing, and since existence is an emergent event, partial understanding is indeed no understanding, because only complete understanding enables comprehension of emergence.
Because of this I doubt I can ever be humble enough. I hope it is enough that I try, because that is all I can do.
You take it way too literally. If you read a poem, you understand it, yet if you would want to write down your understanding of it, you'll fail greatly. Because the understanding does find itself between the lines, between what is expressed at its best but still cannot be expressed any further.
What you feel deep down in your guts, when you step out into the night sky and look up, that is where you have this feeling of understanding, of something true. But when you go back inside and you would want to share your experience with your neighbor or wife, you couldn't. It would sound weak, compared to the moment of looking into the stars.
Yeah, I agree, I cannot see you humble in this regard.