At 10/11/09 02:24 PM, FUNKbrs wrote:
At 10/11/09 05:14 AM, RP207 wrote:
You made a blankent statement without any premises.
Good job.
Wait... what?
I merely took your example and pretty much exchanged hate for love. My point was to point out you can justify progress with more than just hate and therefore you ought to provide more evidence for your side of the case.
Love of knowledge? BAH HUMBUG!!! It was hatred for grubbing in dirt, hatred of starving, hatred of death itself that caused humanity to pull itself out of the muck of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The expanse of human knowledge is an act of flight from ignorance, not a desparate search for knowledge. Science rarely delivers good results, it is serendipity that provides true innovation, and that serendipity is given opportunity in our haphazard flight from ignorance towards an unknown future.
I believe it is impossible to realize you are ignorant if you truly are ignorant. Progress as we know it didn't even happen till the invention of the scientific method of research. Also back in the ages of 'dirt and much of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers' the ideas people had about the world were much different to ours: people saw events and happenings in the world as cyclic: the sun would rise and go down, people were born and dying, wars were followed by peace and so on. This lasted till the Christians brought with them the concept of a linear time: that is a world going from creation to destruction.
This concept was essential for people seeing the world as 'progressing' and thus the idea that man can progress as well was spawned.
But all the way back, the only people who actually had something close to scientific thinking were philosophers, or 'lovers of knowledge' as they were called since there really was no reason seen as to why would someone collect such 'useless' things as knowledge. Noone really saw technological advancement by thinkers (perhaps by craftsmen... but definitely not during one lifetime), therefore knowledge was pursued only by those who had the time and will for it: the people who loved having it.