View source for 2007-07-21 response to LJ posting

[[category:Dated Items]][[category:Woozle writings]]''I was just going to post this on LJ, but LJ pops up a little dialog saying that it's too long: "Sorry, but your comment of 4457 characters exceeds the maximum character length of 4300. Please try shorening it and then post again." Sorry, LJ, I guess you haven't seen the stuff I already left out...''

* '''Subject''': braindump in response to [http://futuresoon.livejournal.com/30224.html?view=340496#t340496 the above]

It's fairly well known at this point that there are things about the universe which can only be determined by trying them, to find out how they go. This has been proven [[wikipedia:Gödel's incompleteness theorems|mathematically]] and [[wikipedia:Halting problem|logically]]; it's not just "something everyone knows".

So, for instance, you can't come up with a simple equation that predicts how a civilization will work out 10, 50, 100, or 1000 years from now (Hari Seldon notwithstanding). The best you can do is run a simulation, throwing in as much detail as you possibly can -- and every missing bit of detail might turn out to be the one that gets you the wrong answer. The butterfly flaps its wings <i>this</i> way instead of <i>that</i>, and the hurricane ends up in India instead of Louisiana (to overextend a clich&eacute;).

By much the same reasoning, you can't write a simple equation or a book or a "perfect" computer program which can always guide you, with the sureness of a pocket calculator working out a cube root, to the "correct" answer -- the right thing to do in every situation, the best way to solve a problem, the best way to be a decent sentient being.

The best we can do is explore as much of life as we each can, learn as many of the possible questions, and how the different answers to each of those questions work out, as we can, and then try to generalize when the details don't match up precisely. As a species, we are pretty damn good at doing this -- but still, the data is vital.

The memoirs of a holocaust survivor's 2 years in hell tell us far more about the universe than 10 years of a reality TV show, because the latter looks at the same small thing over and over again from essentially the same viewpoint, while the former is a glimpse of something huge and terrible -- like the images from a deep-space probe on a mission to Jupiter. The space probe might be fairly ordinary (or at least not especially useful) hardware sitting here on Earth -- but because of the extreme unusualness of where it has been, the trickle of information it sends back is vastly more valuable than the terabytes of archived footage from <i>[pick your favorite useless TV show and insert here; thank you]</i>.

We are all like space probes, configured with a vast number of parameters (tweaked slightly from one unit to the next) and then pushed out into the vast information-space of life to see where we go and what we find. We generally all find out an awful lot, but much of it is overlapping and doesn't seem all that impressive, so we tend to overlook it. (We could probably learn an awful lot if we each had our own Mission Control poring over everything we find and analyzing it without the pressure of daily interaction to distract us... but I digress.)

Nonetheless, those discoveries, whatever they may be worth, are <b>absolutely irreproducible</b>. Just as an endangered plant in the Amazon rainforest may turn out to be capable of curing some terrible disease, so might any of us turn out to have an understanding about the universe which turns out to be terribly important once it gets out. If the plant goes extinct before it can be bred in captivity -- or the person dies before they get the chance to find out what they might know that might be valuable -- the chance is lost forever.

(This is why we create works of art: the experience we live is too complicated, in many ways, to explain in purely rational terms; emotion is a part of it, and we don't yet have the tools to create objective recordings of the entire experience. So we use words and music the way the impressionists used paint -- to try to convey certain types of <i>feeling</i>, even while we're also trying to get across the more significant parts of the objective reality behind the art. It's all about sharing our data and thoughts and trying to make connections with other beings through mutual understanding -- like "I've been to that planet too, and it was scary; let's be friends, and maybe together we can explain it to other people who haven't been there." This is where love comes from, and joy and sadness and probably other things we often dismiss as illogical or irrational. Emotion is just complicated logic.)

The Master is (was?) an already extremely-rare (and potent, even if highly toxic) plant, from a species now all but extinct... and one of only two remaining probes with experiences of a world now dead.

Even if they could never be friends, or even allies -- even if The Master would always be a danger unless kept under tight control (like samples of the Smallpox virus) -- is it any wonder that The Doctor would refuse to destroy him?