Will there be a knowledge barrier?

Rye · Post by **Rye** » 2004-12-02 05:12pm

I was pondering minutes ago about education and human progression in technology, physics, and the like. Now, if we project ourselves to be university students in the future, a few hundred or thousands of years or so, and scientific investigation has progressed as it has done for the last 200 years, will it eventually get to a point where there's just been so much progression there's just no way to absorb all the relevant data?

What would happen? Would schools just skip out vast parts in favour of [comparitively to modern]specialised fields? Or something else?

Post by **Colonel Olrik** » 2004-12-02 05:26pm

Rye wrote:I was pondering minutes ago about education and human progression in technology, physics, and the like. Now, if we project ourselves to be university students in the future, a few hundred or thousands of years or so, and scientific investigation has progressed as it has done for the last 200 years, will it eventually get to a point where there's just been so much progression there's just no way to absorb all the relevant data?

We reached that point a hundred years ago.

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2004-12-02 05:35pm

No one can possibly even understand all of mathematics, much less all of higher learning, today.

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2004-12-02 05:43pm

This is why school covers the basics of the most useful fields and then you have the choice to specialise later on. Just knowing all of any of the Big 3 sciences is hard, which is why they're all split up into smaller topics like quantum mechanics, petrology and genetics.

Rye · Post by **Rye** » 2004-12-02 05:55pm

Yeah, but what I'm asking is would it eventually become impossible to progress due to the sheer volume of pertinent information you'd have to assimilate to progress further?

Zac Naloen · Post by **Zac Naloen** » 2004-12-02 05:59pm

Rye wrote:Yeah, but what I'm asking is would it eventually become impossible to progress due to the sheer volume of pertinent information you'd have to assimilate to progress further?

I dobut, things will just become more specialised. Theres far less likely to be one person breakthroughs... simply due to the fact that breakthroughs will rely on people of different Specialities getting together and working towards their goal. We see it today with research teams. These will just have to be larger.

Enforcer Talen · Post by **Enforcer Talen** » 2004-12-02 09:53pm

Rye wrote:Yeah, but what I'm asking is would it eventually become impossible to progress due to the sheer volume of pertinent information you'd have to assimilate to progress further?

ie, hitchhiker's guide's time travel physics, which takes 5 lifetimes to learn?

I think we'll just specialize even smaller amounts.

lgot · Post by **lgot** » 2004-12-02 10:23pm

perhaps will be like the Achilles and the turtle paradox... the more distance we cover, there will be still half to cover, ever and ever...

Shroom Man 777 · Post by **Shroom Man 777** » 2004-12-02 10:35pm

That could be countered by humanity discovering the secrets to...IMMORTALITY!!! *dun dun dun*

Mayabird · Post by **Mayabird** » 2004-12-02 11:03pm

There's still the possibility of genetic engineering for intelligence and neural implants. Make people smarter and better capable of learning and retaining knowledge, and then add supplementary computer processing power and memory. If that ends up happening, who knows what'll happen next?

Drooling Iguana · Post by **Drooling Iguana** » 2004-12-02 11:08pm

There's also the fact that many advances actually make things simpler, by unifying previously discrete theories into one broader one.

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2004-12-02 11:23pm

lgot wrote:perhaps will be like the Achilles and the turtle paradox... the more distance we cover, there will be still half to cover, ever and ever...

Hate to tell you this, but Xeno's Paradox was solved hundreds of years ago.

lgot · Post by **lgot** » 2004-12-02 11:30pm

not the logical solution but the phylosiphical implication that in are objective (such as finding all knowledge) that is given in form of infinite time (such as "One day we will find") may lead to advances just for us to found out there is still meters ahead despite the advances...ie. meaning we are never going to find the point of total knowledge despite the constant and perhaps even aparent progression, because each advance will just cause the point to advance (hence Achiles and the turtle)...

Frank_Scenario · Post by **Frank_Scenario** » 2004-12-02 11:41pm

Master of Ossus wrote:
lgot wrote:perhaps will be like the Achilles and the turtle paradox... the more distance we cover, there will be still half to cover, ever and ever...
Hate to tell you this, but Xeno's Paradox was solved hundreds of years ago.

My curiousity is piqued. What solution is this? Now, I'm aware of the fact that when the paradox is schematized, it's typically represented by a geometric series whose sum is 1. However, this doesn't seem to actually address the issues Xeno was raising. To quote Russell:
"Zeno was concerned, as a matter of fact, with three problems... capable of purely arithmetical treatment. These are the problems of the infinitesimal, the infinite, and continuity. To state clearly the difficulties involved, was to accomplish perhaps the hardest part of the philosopher's task."

The (correct) answer that the sum of the series Xeno describes is 1 certainly doesn't address the difficulties involved, which find root in the difficulty of describing these phenomena in any sort of intuitive, coherent way.

A mea culpa: I'm not a Xeno apologist, per se, but I like to see the man get his due.

Kuroneko · Post by **Kuroneko** » 2004-12-05 02:11am

lgot wrote:not the logical solution but the phylosiphical implication that in are objective (such as finding all knowledge) that is given in form of infinite time (such as "One day we will find") may lead to advances just for us to found out there is still meters ahead despite the advances...

How are things as implications of Zeno's paradoxes?

Frank_Scenario wrote:
Master of Ossus wrote:Hate to tell you this, but Xeno's Paradox was solved hundreds of years ago.
My curiousity is piqued. What solution is this? ... The (correct) answer that the sum of the series Xeno describes is 1 certainly doesn't address the difficulties involved, which find root in the difficulty of describing these phenomena in any sort of intuitive, coherent way.

What exactly is to be described that produces difficulty?

Frank_Scenario · Post by **Frank_Scenario** » 2004-12-05 09:38am

Frank_Scenario wrote:
Master of Ossus wrote:Hate to tell you this, but Xeno's Paradox was solved hundreds of years ago.
My curiousity is piqued. What solution is this? ... The (correct) answer that the sum of the series Xeno describes is 1 certainly doesn't address the difficulties involved, which find root in the difficulty of describing these phenomena in any sort of intuitive, coherent way.

What exactly is to be described that produces difficulty?[/quote]

The metaphysics of time, causation, etc. run into Xeno-type difficulties when we start talking about, say, the individuation of events or the preservation of identity across time. The former is a problem of the infinitesimal, and the latter a problem of continuity, which were the targets of Xeno's paradoxes. The mathematical account of a solution doesn't seem to translate into a metaphysical account.

Kuroneko · Post by **Kuroneko** » 2004-12-05 11:40am

Frank_Scenario wrote:The metaphysics of time, causation, etc. run into Xeno-type difficulties when we start talking about, say, the individuation of events or the preservation of identity across time. The former is a problem of the infinitesimal, and the latter a problem of continuity, which were the targets of Xeno's paradoxes. The mathematical account of a solution doesn't seem to translate into a metaphysical account.

There is absolutely no problem in defining an instant to have infinitesimal duration. This was once a valid concern, but the difficulty only persists as long as one clings to the continuum picture of the timeline while simultaneously insisting that the instants be well-ordered in the natural way--it's an absurdity akin to demanding that a natural number be odd and even at the same time. If that approach is so problematic, then it should be abandoned; that's all there is to it. Either time is continuous and instants are infinitesimal but not well-ordered, or time is granular and instants have finite duration and therefore are well-ordered. Either alternative avoids Zeno's dichotomy paradox while enabling events (or instants in time) to be individuated. Whence the problem?

As for preservation of identity, those are not about Zeno--if Zeno's attack is successful, then the solution is trivial, since then there is no change of identity, while if it is not successful, then the very same kinds of problems are present regardless of the ultimate nature of time (e.g., Ship of Theseus and various generalizations thereof). Either way, Zeno seems irrelevant here. It is therefore not at all suprising that the mathematical formalism of infinite series offers no metaphysical guidance regarding this matter, since it was never a product of Zeno's dichotomy paradox to begin with.

lgot · Post by **lgot** » 2004-12-06 01:14am

How are things as implications of Zeno's paradoxes?

not sure if that is want to hear, but kind of , the more knowledge we have , the "final barrier" of knowledge advances a little bit more, so no matter the advancement, we would always find more stuff to learn...(not infinite time, since we are limited to our existence, so when time runs out the race is over)...

kheegster · Post by **kheegster** » 2004-12-08 03:06pm

Computers have enabled calculations and simulations that were completely inconceivable 50 years ago, and they're getting more powerful. Of course, just wait till quantum computers come on to the scene, although that might take a few decades. So basically, while the human mind is finite, it is not unaided.

As others have mentioned, yes, things are getting very specialised, but they have been for quite some time, and don't overestimate the difficulty of cross-germination in science. In many cases, a trained scientist could probably jump to a completely new field given a couple of years' sabbatical to learn things up.

I can't speak for other fields, but most university physics courses already compress classical mechanics to a one- or two- semester course, when not so long ago classical mechanics WAS physics. The basic gist of this is that most universities try to teach undergraduates the skills and basic foundations needed to carry out science rather than the concentrating much on the cutting-edge research. The specialisation comes only in post-graduate level.

Back in Classical Greece, the scholars could be jack-of-all-trades, and immediately after the Enlightenment, scientists could still afford to be generalists, e.g. Hooke, who was a physicist, chemist AND a biologist. By the beginning of the 19th century, the all-round scientist was a rarity, and certainly soon after that no single person could claim to understand ALL of science, let alone now.

It's rather sad that modern science has reached the point where the individual personalities are no longer as important as they were, but science continues to march on....

sketerpot · Post by **sketerpot** » 2004-12-08 08:38pm

Mayabird wrote:There's still the possibility of genetic engineering for intelligence and neural implants. Make people smarter and better capable of learning and retaining knowledge, and then add supplementary computer processing power and memory. If that ends up happening, who knows what'll happen next?

I can make one guess: people who remember what life was like before augmentation will discover that there's so much more that they have to learn, and pretty soon it will become fashionable to complain about it, rhetorically asking if any of this has made their lives better or enabled anything new.

You see it today with computers. "For all the great advances in computer capabilities, are we any better off than we were when we had to work with wimpy little computers with less memory than my digital camera? After all, we had word processing and spreadsheet software back over a decade ago, and they haven't gotten any better, just prettier. Blah blah email blah blah hectic life et cetera. It's not progress at all".

Of course, the people who complain the most about this are generally the people who don't know about all the things that are possible now that wouldn't have been possible back in the Good ol' Days. Imagine computational fluid dynamics on a 386! You'd say to it, "use Monte Carlo methods!" and it would say to you, "Out of memory, and the calculation would take forever anyway. Abort, Retry, Fail?"

Kuroneko · Post by **Kuroneko** » 2004-12-08 09:50pm

lgot wrote:not sure if that is want to hear, but kind of , the more knowledge we have , the "final barrier" of knowledge advances a little bit more, so no matter the advancement, we would always find more stuff to learn...(not infinite time, since we are limited to our existence, so when time runs out the race is over)...

Such a result has nothing to do with Zeno.

lgot · Post by **lgot** » 2004-12-09 01:23am

As a metaphor ? I have seem similar interpretations done by, for example, Jorge Luis Borges.

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Will there be a knowledge barrier?

Will there be a knowledge barrier?

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