What is the ultimate goal of Science?

Truth?
Say we discover a perfect "theory of everything" -- now what will we do?

Provide some people with something to do with their lives. Something that helps them feel there is meaning. Something that offers hope in the face of their own mortality and all the meaningless suffering. Something to make the game a little more serious and a little more interesting.

Better Beer.

Ya um... computers?

To create approximations of observable reality.

What is the ultimate goal of better beer?

(re-edit)
So here it is for me at a personal level and more (the ultimate purpose is the truth and the higher awareness/wisdom it provides) ;


The only resurrection of my soul i aspire for is the one delivered through the eyes of a 9 year old that dares to dream and embark on a life long voyage, a dream to engage the universe in pursuit of the truth and enlightment through that one glorious, mythic, romantic epic the enterprise of discovery human drama is.

May the dream outlive a thousand deaths and gain strength from the smiles of the immortal dead.


---

and this;

Remain forever sweet hostage to the optimistic dream of Hilbert; we must know, we will know. Yield to none but this one glorious eternally romantic moment of discovery that fathers human awareness and brings you an illuminated, fearless and overwhelmingly promising future. A future vulnerable to a sole undefeated ancient opponent* awaiting all life, the moment individual awareness fails to secure the continued witnessing of the magnificent drama that is the yet unrevealed forward human adventure, betrayed only by natural law but not the ageless will to thrive and remain permanent student of nature.

Betrayed until that ancient opponent shall fall too, once the keeper of the dream becomes controller of its own destiny, ultimate beneficiary of the incoming technological singularity, massively more ethically responsible for what shall be the next step in awareness and purpose...

*i mean of course natural death.



Therefore without any emotional glorification (which however is indeed the highest form of high i have ever experienced and i cannot ignore the feeling) basically this simple statement;

To uncover the character of natural law and realize higher awareness that will enable the next step in the rise of complexity in the universe (ie what follows the emergence of intelligent life).

Our "purpose" of course is to enable the next step. Science is the way there. The purpose of things in the absence of a designer is emergent and recognized eventually as the enabling of a higher structure. The "purpose" of Chemistry is of course life in that sense.

The world doesnt have a purpose intrinsically in the absence of a designer other than to play the game ie explore the rise of complexity that natural law enables.

Cliff notes of the above:

Science makes the game more interesting.

We do science...because it's something interesting to do.

It's about sorting things out. And getting a better standard of living.

More inspiring flavors that make you think the beer is better than the one you had last year or last month. Progress in a brown bottle.

Scientific methodology tests your critical thinking skills. If life is not a challenge it loses some of its appeal and luster. Also, this leads, ultimately, to a more useful understanding of the universe we inhabit and the cesspool of humanity that is contaminating it. It beats bowling IMO. But I could be wrong.

I think this mirrors somewhat what Masque said. But I think my post is better because I dank some wine before posting.

To understand and explain the natural world.

See post #3.

Omniscience and omnipotence

Why should I want omniscience and omnipotence?

So we will always be chasing a better future... and then die?
When will we be content here and now?

For the same reason you learned to read rather than stay ignorant (reading gives you power).
For the same reason you choose to use your body to move and type rather than sit motionless in a wheelchair (moving gives you power and experiences).

Power and knowledge create possibilities, increase creativity, keep you safer, allow you to experience more than the mundane, and make life more interesting.

Most of what you do is the seeking of greater power. For example, all of your delving into spiritual philosophy is a search for greater power. That's why you delve into these questions instead of spending your life counting the number of specks in a dust mote.

Why do people talk and argue about God and not the flea that lives on their dog? Because power is interesting and complete lack of it is not. Our questioning of what is is a search for power; we think if we know the secret of The One, we will be unassailably powerful.

Ironically, it's the cucks into Buddhism and similar, always talking about the present and spirituality, who are some of the most lost searchers for power, unaware that that's what they're doing, unaware that they're doing it in a hilariously misguided way.

The problem I have with seeking knowledge and power directly is that, like most "wise men" have said, I believe the key to omniscience is non-knowing and the key to omnipotence is surrender.

Seng-ts’an of Zen said, "The more you think about it,
the further you are from the truth.
Cease all thinking,
and there is nothing that will not be revealed to you."

Lao Tzu said, "In pursuit of knowledge,
every day something is added.
In the practice of the Tao,
every day something is dropped.
Less and less do you need to force things,
until finally you arrive at non-action.
When nothing is done,
nothing is left undone."

Jesus said, "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these!"

To me that's just a psychological trick, not some great truth. Acquiring knowledge involves both a seeking and 'letting go" so that you can process it/see it in perspective. Similarly for seeking after power. It's merely an exhortion to avoid tunnel vision and obsession.

All the "wisdom" of these great wise men can be summed up in 5 seconds of 1990s song from the band Smash Mouth:



Add a bunch of dopey "mystique" to it and you have eastern philosophy.

Do you think we, modern humans, are more content with life than humans were 10,000+ years ago?
(generally speaking, of course)

To your edit:
This is simply a false statement. You can become more aware of your tendencies and habits by being "quiet" in your mind, you can unlock some level of creativities and insights, but only a level. There is no "oneness" you can reach where truth just comes to you. That's just nonsense from dopey people who thought their Emperor was a living God, along with other stupid things.

What happens is that mental quietness and introspection and "letting go" allows you realize relationships between thoughts and experiences you've had, and the suddenness of that has felt like a magical insight to cucks like your zen master. They were so butt-stupid they didn't realize what I did at 12 - that while these things are useful, extrapolating them beyond what our psychology as humans allows, create delusions of power and potential omniscience which trap unwary minds.

Sounds like a guy seeking ultimate power/knowing in a very stupid way. Again, here they're just extrapolating and extracting aspects of our psychology far past the point at which they break down. This is eastern philosophy in a nutshell.
This is more a statement about the power and beauty of God than an exhortation to non-action. It is claiming that your best worldly efforts cannot compare with what God can do. Which is an attempt to overawe with power.

This is a very difficult question to answer. The general view is that the romantic view of prehistory that some have is very wrong. Life was "nasty, brutish and short", for all intents and purposes. We were ignorant, superstitious, bound to toil, and with little security or freedom to think. Visit some of the old missions in San Francisco, for example, and note the ages on the grave stones. That's only a few hundred years ago. Life was definitely short.

I would say we are far, far more content these days than any of our ancestors. How many besides some fat ladies with low self esteem want to live in India, or Africa? They're closer to prehistory than we are in the West. Yet the migration flow is entirely one way.

It's hard to say though. I do think we've lost things in the modern world. Life is probably far richer when societies have slavery and some suffering, for example. It creates meaning, perspective, longing, gradations of power. I think the Greeks with their Bacchus festivals and philosophy probably lead interesting lives.

Regardless, what we have now is the price we pay for elevating humans out of such conditions. Is it worth it? Probably.

I think the greatest thing we've lost that could contribute to modern unhappiness is space (this is a consequence of overpopulation), interacting with the rich ecology of nature (most of us are in cities), and the loss of small tribe dynamics which we're probably designed for. People who compensate for that with a friend/family group seems extremely content to me.

We've lost other things too - aspects of power over the world, the power-work direct outcome relationship (we've abstracted that out to money which is less satisfying than skilled hand work), and the fog of lack of knowledge, which allows all kinds of exciting philosophical journeys and imaginings.

These are just the inevitable results of moving further along the story, though. You can't always be at the first page of a book, with all the excitement and promise of what you don't know yet.

How would you design a more perfect world? If you could set humans at a point in time, where would you put them on the above timelines?

How do you know that?

I don't. It's highly probable to be true, though.

For one, from the theory side. We are physical beings bound in space time. Why would there be an Ultimate Knowledge™ filtering through our souls into the physical world? It makes no sense whatsoever, no matter you believe about God, souls, etc. It fits perfectly with what humans would desire, however, to make themselves feel connected and powerful, rather than pitiful. The history of these claims (that humans are empowered in some non-physical way) is hilariously false.

For two, multiple levels of empricism.

- Psychics do not exist. People are unable to gain knowledge of facts that haven't come to them via physical means

- No one has figured out the truth of various aspects of the world without observation. No eastern philosopher came up with Maxwell's equations. Or even, shockingly, evolution by common descent, which could be deduced 100,000 years ago with sufficient insight. Eastern philsophy has brought precisely nothing, despite gaggles of monks sitting in caves for, collectively, thousand of millennia. In medicine, physics, biology, etc, materialistic empiricism has crushed introspection as a means of finding truth.

- Our cognition appears to be bound to and reside in the physical world. Dementia can be induced by brain damage/drugs/physical decline. No 90 year old can compete with a 20 year old in cognitive tasks, despite far more time to get his "oneness" on. If I cut off blood flow to your brain, you cease to be conscious in a matter of seconds, regardless of how much oneness you've stacked up. And if we are bound to a physical processing unit, it is trained by sense experience and has various limitations. No one has ever demonstrated that they can overcome those limitations; in fact we seem bound by them.

There are other reasons, but that's long enough.

Let me put it this way. What's more likely:

a) There is a "oneness" you can achieve through meditation or the right kind of introspection in which you can be omniscient (a deep human desire for millennia)

b) While introspection can be helpful with gaining insights, due to the psychological processing of information that it allows, extrapolating that process out to claiming that once can reach omniscience by simply sitting there is just one of the latest in a very long list of silly wishful thinking and power-grabbing philosophies that have existed.

The latter is 99.99999999999% to be true, imo.

Never quite.

I tried to upload my face of disapproval, to little avail.

Where's the technology? This needs FACIAL dissaproval.