24 Troubles with Translating Tribbles

[Charlie Wiederhold]

Three of the newer books in my reading list are The Rosetta Stone (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0486261638/qid=1135182867/sr=2-2/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_2/002-7473094-0226429?s=books&v=glance&n=283155) and The Egyptian Book of the Dead (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/048621866X/qid=1135182989/sr=2-2/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_2/002-7473094-0226429?s=books&v=glance&n=283155) (both by E.A. Wallis Budge), and Fingerprints of the Gods (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0517887290/qid=1135183069/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/002-7473094-0226429?s=books&v=glance&n=283155) by Graham Hancock. A couple of disclaimers. I don't fall in line with the conclusions Hancock comes to in the book, and I also am of the group that feels his methods of evaluating history are exceptionally questionable. However, he asks interesting questions and also tends to bring up subjects that are difficult to come across when sticking to more traditional research. For example... due to the book I now have an excellent understanding of Piri Reis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piri_Reis) and his world map (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piri_Reis_Map). Not because of the content in the book, but because he went off on map making and that map in particular and I followed it up by learning what other people have to say about it. I believe Hancock is absolutely wrong, but there have been dozens of things in the book that I had never heard about for whatever reason and the questions he asked were interesting enough to make me want to do further research. My understanding of the evolution of map making has grown entirely because his book gave me a few starting points to work from.

Now, that said... the two books by Budge are also very old and outdated. However, I'm going to be following them up with newer analysis of the same content to see how the understanding of the Egyptian language has evolved over the past 100 years. I'm sure you're yawning your bored little head off at the thought of this... and that's ok because it just makes it easier to push you over and laugh at you while pointing out you aren't bored anymore.

The biggest problem Hancock has is he doesn't give any allowance for translation/misinterpretation issues when coming to his conclusions. It's not just him though, it's something that haunts our lives every single day. The deeper into religious writings you get the worse it gets (due to being re-translated far more than anything else, along with the emotional/political need to "fudge"), but any international or historical endeavor will be plagued by the same problems. The idea of mistranslating isn't obscure of course, everyone has a basic idea of it... but where most people fall flat on their faces is accepting something they read or hear as "close enough" and move on for the rest of their life never checking to see if this holds true. The best history scholars will even fall into this trap. Not because they are bad, but because it's simply impossible to know everything all the time. So you'll have some translation of a 2000 year old document which you are using as the base to decipher some other 2000 year old document. Unfortunately at that same time someone around the world has found yet another 2000 year old document which shows there is a problem with a phrase in the document you were using as your base. Based on this new information, much of your assumptions are wrong and the conclusions you were coming to on the newest document are now invalid. Nightmare. Especially since we don't always get a "correction"... and continue for hundreds or thousands of years thinking we know what something said and we're wrong. It might not be a large problem, but anything based on it will be wrong, and anything based on that will be wrong, and it can (and does) spread.

This of course doesn't take into account deliberate mistranslations as happened almost uncountable times during the translation of biblical texts. Some people have actually attempted to count them, because they are even more fascinated with mind numbingly boring things than I am.

As an example: Take the discussion about finding God. Let's pretend that scientists were eventually to take a stance that they too are trying to find God, just not necessarily the same one as espoused by religion. They decide to take God and start using it to refer to the Unified Theory of Everything which could answer the same questions as the religious God (and allow for there to potentially be a religious God, but it isn't required to find the UTofE). There could be political motivations behind this (obscure the legal language) or sociological reasons (take power away from the word God and thus Religion's monopoly). This event is happening in modern times and all documentation of how this dual meaning of the word came to be are electronic, word of mouth, and limited paper. After enough time it's just understood which God is being referred to based on context and no further documentation on this transition is required.

Now, something drastic happens that results in the decline of the society using these terms and the eventual complete loss of said society. All that is left are fragments here and there. When these documents are discovered years later, the language isn't even in common usage anymore. A new translator deciphers the language by comparing it to something that they do understand. Each time they encounter the word God, it will be tainted by the understanding the current person has of their image of God as well as the language they are comparing it to. No matter what, it will be absolutely impossible for them to distinguish between the scientific God and the religious one... and the idea of God from current people might not even match the idea of God for the translation help text or the person doing said translation.

What you'll get is someone trying to deduce what people today are like, but without any possible method of accurately conveying this information. It might even be used to suggest that scientists today were actually on their way to finding the "Real God" of religious origin, and might lead someone like Hancock to believe that scientists of the future time should start looking as well. What started as a mere play on words, could, given enough time and motivation, turn into an entirely new religion or science based upon a misunderstanding. It's entirely likely that wars and discrimination would occur based upon the belief that man at one time actually had scientific evidence of God, especially by people with absolutely no training to understand the translations, much less the actual content behind the translations.

While this example comes with a great deal of holes, and would be extremely unlikely to transpire, we've got documented evidence of similar scenarios happening through history. The "War on Christmas" is exactly one of these mistakes, and it doesn't even occur with dead languages that are impossible to understand. The entire situation is due to most people now not having an accurate understanding of the history behind the words, the event itself, or even their own religion. Nobody is dying from it, but we're all paying in money and time, and some people in emotion. People have died from mistranslations (deliberate and not) through history though, but little thought is given by the average person to what they are throwing their weight and support behind. Most people wouldn't even be able to properly understand the writings of the United States founding fathers, simply because words and phrases they used have taken on entirely different meanings today.

It's impossible to verify everything you read or hear, of course. However, it's painful to see so many people put so much effort into something they believe in, based on a current reading where they "trust" whoever translated or updated it to have done it accurately. Most of the mistakes aren't on purpose, they simply arise due to it being completely impossible to accurately convey a message from one language/culture to another. So they do their best, but after enough time or enough additional translations the original meaning is completely lost and the new one has taken on a life of its own. While I think Christianity is the worst offender of this, that's simply due to the massive worldwide effect it has right now. It exists everywhere, even in the hallowed halls of historical research... though generally the scholars of history consistently work to remove the errors instead of acting upon them.

What does this have to do with games you ask? Nothing. Games will likely never experience this problem because they are so dependent upon a set of hardware to function. It's conceivable that a future civilization would be able to create technology able to read DVD's and basic data storage. However, recreating a computer able to run actual software that only worked during a tiny segment of human history? Possible, but not likely. Thus games will be lost to the ephemeral nature of time. Most games made today won't be remembered even as footnotes in history 50 years from now. It's unlikely that even games such as Half Life will be more than minor blurbs. The Sims and Grand Theft Auto are the only two games of our current era that will have a potential place in history. The historical nature of games (and absolute lack thereof) is a different subject that I'll write later. Most likely the closer DNF gets to being complete and I start contemplating the long term historical place this project could have, if any.

[Charlie Wiederhold]

Note: Since the post limit is 10k characters, I had to kinda break it apart. :)

---

I've updated a couple of the picture pages. My vehicle history (http://www.gamingisstupid.com/pictures/Vehicles/) page and the Longhorn Alumni Band (http://www.gamingisstupid.com/pictures/alumniband/) page. Still working on the Stockholm one as I can't get my pictures off my phone. Sprint sells the car charger, but not the wall charger, which is what I need to hook the Palm to the cable to dump with. Bah. I'm terrified of the prospect of converting the Japan trip, but I'll have to do it eventually.

Kyle and I started watching 24 Season 3 at roughly 9pm Monday night and watched the entire damn thing straight. 2:30pm on Tuesday and we were finally done. This wouldn't have been that rough, except I had decided it would be a good idea to get an early start on Monday and woke up at 6am. The show is 10x better in one sitting, but there are some fuzzy parts in there where the eyes just had to close for a moment. Not quite as grueling as the Twin Peaks-a-thon at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, but close. And without all the Cherry Pie.

[Duke Rocks]

Thus games will be lost to the ephemeral nature of time. Most games made today won't be remembered even as footnotes in history 50 years from now. It's unlikely that even games such as Half Life will be more than minor blurbs. The Sims and Grand Theft Auto are the only two games of our current era that will have a potential place in history. The historical nature of games (and absolute lack thereof) is a different subject that I'll write later. Most likely the closer DNF gets to being complete and I start contemplating the long term historical place this project could have, if any.

I agree with you and this kind of makes me sad.....but think of it this way-DNF has a very good chance of still being on peoples' minds a half-century in the future.


Why??
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
It will probably still be in development!!

I kid, I kid.

But you have to admit that you basically set yourself up for that one-you should've seen it coming. ;-)

[Micki!]

Damn Charlie... You sure like to make loooong messages..! :o

[Charlie Wiederhold]

haha... actually I didn't expect that one, but I did set myself up for it.

We've joked around here that the single guys need to get married and have kids so by the time we're ready to retire they'll be able to pick up where we left off on the project. ;)

Micki!... if you think that's long, you should check out a couple of the doozies on Planetcrap.com or in the archives of the 3DR Forums. *grin*

[Duke Rocks]

Yeah, I remember that lengthy post you made about 3DR's policy on screenshots and how they don't want to spoil the game. It was pretty profound, and I think it should be a sticky so people can read it before bitching about the lack of media.

Ironically enough, in that post you said that you were disappointed that the look of the unreal engine on DNF was spoiled by the screenshots released in 1999 because it was such an enhancement over the quake 2 material.....I bet you didn't think at that time that DNF would get second facelift (hence the current state of the game) :)


And about the original post, I agree with you and I never really thought about translation as whole being a problem, but now that I think about it, I want to go out on limb and say it is one of the more troublesome plagues that the human race has had to deal with simply due to the fact of the whisper down the lane theory where the original story is inadvertantly modified by each participant until by the end of the line, the story bears absolutely no remsemblance to its initial state. While this is an issue in places like high school ("did you hear what sally and joe did in the locker room?") in the form of rumors and such, it plays a much more prominent role in the history of the world. At the risk of reiterating the first message ( and correct me if I'm wrong) pieces of work like the bible will have a whole new meaning and significance in 100000000000+ years and it will probably have nothing to do with what it says to today. Even now, people can get into all sorts of arguments and debates (just thinking about it gives me a headache) over works of literature and what everything in the bible represents and their moral values and the list goes on and on...
Think of what it will be like in the year 200500 when we have had a good hundred thousand plus years to contemplate these sort of things. I like to think about this kind of stuff because unlike in math, for example, 1+1 does not necessarily equal 2 and there is really no "wrong" answer, just the answer that is more widely accepted-but doesn't have to be true.


Also I think that there has to be some way to preserve mankind's accomplishments of today (and yesterday), so much good stuff can't afford to left to waste, but if you look at it from the perspective of "nothing lasts forever" (which is true) things like the Constitution and the classic examples of literature will be around for years and years to come. It won't be an issue that we, our children, or our grandchildren (and many more future generations) will have to deal with.

That being said, and at the risk of sounding like a nut, I say that in the far off future, longer from now than I can probably imagine, time will not be an issue anymore as people will develope new technologies that allow them to recover lost artifacts such as what you mentioned above and might I even venture to say that time travel *might* be feasible? I am kind of a doubter in this sort of thing myself, but I try to look at things with an open mind and think of what people said that was impossible a mere 100 years ago and look at what we have now.
Example: If you were to explain to someone like Thomas Jefferson or even Ben Franklin the concept of PC games and bumpmapping and whatnot and even "primitive" tech like TVs, you'd probably be looked upon as rather odd-in fact, downright out of your mind.

And nowadays people scoff at the idea of time travel, but didn't they used to have the same attitude about visting the moon?

In short, I think that in the future, almost anything we can think of now will be possible. Wouldn't it be nice to travel somewhere 2000 miles away in less than a second(much like the "Beam me up Scotty" idea).

But even though in the "relatively" near future people won't be able to recover or care about the works of today, I think that much later in the world's history people will be able to retrieve anything from the past. But it is most likely that subsequent time periods from today will produce much more practical and simply better forms of entertainment, literature, music and politics. In fact, they may be able to somehow combine everything into one. So what I'm basically saying that when people are able to truly experience virtual reality and possibly even whatever real reality they want, it's unlikely that they'd want to play a game like half life, even though they COULD if they wanted to.

Even though it's inevitable that all will be lost eventually(but maybe only temporarily), I think everything has its place and time and we should enjoy it while it lasts. :)

If you're still reading this and made it this far, I guess either you have lots of free time, or we have lots in common-I don't think I would ever read this post if I hadn't posted it. I guess I just like sharing my opinions. :)

And this has probably been the only time that Star Trek, historical figures and DNF have ever been mentioned in one post. Hope I didn't kill the bandwith. :)

[FireFly]

I'd like to go off topic a bit and suggest that the real problem is with information in general; there's too much of it. Right now thousands of scientific studies are being carried out across a huge spectrum of disciplines. In each discipline there will be hundreds of thousands of people analysing the evidence, linking it in with existing theories, conducting experiments of their own. There are historical commentators, social commentators, scientific commentators all trying to track the flow of human affairs. And on an individual scale each person makes their own history, comes up with their own unique understanding and exerts their own unique influence on the world. All we can ever see is a very small slice of the total sum of all information.

So information is shared, and organized hierachically, according to specialisms. If we want to find out how a particular aspect of something works we see a specialist who may refer us to another specialist, and then another. But there is no comprehensive central processing mechanism, no way to take all the information, process it, and then give out the correct (or the most likely to be correct) conclusions. In a perfect system we'd all link up to share and receive knowledge, so if a particular translation was wrong everyone would know about it. There'd be one central information bank.

In reality we are dealing with collections of information centers, each with their own take on what is right and wrong, with their own evidence, attacking or supporting other center's claims, their own branches to reeducate people. So for the person who wants to know "what's right", it can be hard. I think this is why people accept the commonly held conceptions, because they don't want to or can't analyse the information themselves, because it's not just a case of learning but understanding and comparing. There is no central information bank to go to, just a collection of independently motivated information sources. So one branch of a religion will preach a certain interpretation and another branch will preach a different interpretation.

This is why I quite like the idea of one huge artificially created mind to analyse every disparate scrap of information, every event that occurs in the world. It would be in a way, God, like Helios in Deus Ex. Then there'd be only two groups - those that would agree with this God and those that wouldn't.

[Micki!]

Welcome Firefly..! :)
God, all these theories and explanations are way too complex for me to understand..! :eek:

[Unregistered]

I was here a little while ago. I've just been lurking :)

[FireFly]

Woops. That was me.

[Unregistered]

I was here a little while ago. I've just been lurking :)

Nice to see you post here anyways..!
Now, STAY ACTIVE OR DIE!!! *GRRRR* :mad: :p

[Micki!]

^^
Crap, that was me..! :doh:

[Charlie Wiederhold]

Ironically enough, in that post you said that you were disappointed that the look of the unreal engine on DNF was spoiled by the screenshots released in 1999 because it was such an enhancement over the quake 2 material.....I bet you didn't think at that time that DNF would get second facelift (hence the current state of the game) :)[QUOTE]

You can't possibly imagine how much I didn't expect that. :)

[QUOTE=Duke Rocks]Think of what it will be like in the year 200500 when we have had a good hundred thousand plus years to contemplate these sort of things.[QUOTE]

Honestly, I would be extremely suprised if by that point (and actually much much MUCH sooner) we aren't to the point where all possible information is easily accessable anywhere a person is, and instantly available to their mind. I could speculate all day on how we would interact with that sort of knowledge base and how it would be organized, but more than likely it'd be pretty foreign looking to us. Much like a primitive person trying to describe an airplane or computer. I can't see us not being essentially a massive network of consiousness within 5000 years unless war/natural disaster sets us back.

[QUOTE=Duke Rocks]Also I think that there has to be some way to preserve mankind's accomplishments of today (and yesterday),

I'm certain we'll reach a point where no information that someone wishes to preserve can't be preserved (or at least referenced via writing/images). We're reasonably close now, it's just a matter of organization and economics right now. Wikipedia + Google is probably the start of whatever system eventually evolves out of that. *fingers crossed*. The internet is great, but if someone decides to take their page down, or the server it's on dies, the information is lost. It will require a central repository that is distributed/duplicated around the world at all times.

And nowadays people scoff at the idea of time travel, but didn't they used to have the same attitude about visting the moon?

The only real problem with time travel right now is getting the physical aspects to match the mathematical. Otherwise, I agree, I don't think it's entirely unfeasible, although it may come in a form very different than what we usually imagine.

For example, it may be the case that you can't send physical matter through time, but you can "detect" different periods of time in a way that will allow you to "record" a position and have that signal transferred to ourselves in a manner that would let us view said time period/place. So instead of actually *seeing* what happened, you are instead watching a recording. Kinda like our current recording process, although using an entirely different aspect of physics (IE... not light/magenetism).

So what I'm basically saying that when people are able to truly experience virtual reality and possibly even whatever real reality they want, it's unlikely that they'd want to play a game like half life, even though they COULD if they wanted to.

I'm with you there. Lost simply due to obscurity and a lack of need/interest.

If you're still reading this and made it this far, I guess either you have lots of free time, or we have lots in common-I don't think I would ever read this post if I hadn't posted it. I guess I just like sharing my opinions. :)

At the end of the day, information exchange is what life is all about! :) Almost everything we do can be boiled down to that, so exchange exchange exchange!

[Charlie Wiederhold]

All we can ever see is a very small slice of the total sum of all information.

This is a neverending source of personal frustration for me. :)

So information is shared, and organized hierachically, according to specialisms. If we want to find out how a particular aspect of something works we see a specialist who may refer us to another specialist, and then another. But there is no comprehensive central processing mechanism, no way to take all the information, process it, and then give out the correct (or the most likely to be correct) conclusions. In a perfect system we'd all link up to share and receive knowledge, so if a particular translation was wrong everyone would know about it. There'd be one central information bank.

I'd suggest that Google + Wikipedia is shifting us in that direction. Wikipedia provides the mechanism for people to organize and contribute information in a logical and (somewhat) manageable manner. Google provides the mechanism for sifting and searching the information. Clearly these two aren't necessarily the final versions, but I can see the vague outlines of where it can be 15... or 1500 years from now.

In reality we are dealing with collections of information centers, each with their own take on what is right and wrong, with their own evidence, attacking or supporting other center's claims, their own branches to reeducate people. So for the person who wants to know "what's right", it can be hard.

In a way, other than mathematic topics, that results in a more "true" recognition of the world. Even science is succeptable to this "there is no 'right'" situation. There is a constant refining of all information, but even then it's impossible to ever actually arrive at a try "what's right" other than extremely limited physical phenomina.

Analysis of all politics, history, literature, etc. will always be subject to the viewer, so the best that can be provided is the list of "what happened", but like you said, the ability to decipher this is often too complex for most people. Without a significant evolution of the human brain, I don't see this being solvable, and even if everyone has the capacity to understand and analyize the information... it will be impossible to always conclude a "what is right" perspective.

There is only what did and didn't happen, and what would and what wouldn't happen. If we allow the population to continue growing unabated we'll be forced to find a new resources "somehow". Whereas if we limit it to 500 million, we could potentially provide an "eternally" sustainable population on a single planet. There is no way to know which one will ultimately be better for humanity, or will allow mankind to survive the longest, survive massive worldwide extinction due to environmental changes beyond their control, etc.

So even with a perfect ability to sort and view all information, we'll still have the neverending back and forth between different people breaking the information down and trying to come to conclusions.

Although it can be difficult, I think the state of "it's almost impossible to determine what is right" is the most natural and proper state a person can arrive at when learning and viewing information. Frustrating, but the most true to reality.

This is why I quite like the idea of one huge artificially created mind to analyse every disparate scrap of information, every event that occurs in the world. It would be in a way, God, like Helios in Deus Ex. Then there'd be only two groups - those that would agree with this God and those that wouldn't.

Without other "Gods" to provide their own analysis, that would be the ultimate undoing of mankind and probably the extinction. The more central and singular information becomes, the more likely a single mistake becomes that can harm the most people. More easily corruptable (since it is still dependent upon being fed information) and the more easily manipulated.

We will always need the push and pull of knowledge and analysis in order to be flexible and adjustable.

[FireFly]

Sorry for bumping this old thread up, but I didn't get round to replying until now.

I'd suggest that Google + Wikipedia is shifting us in that direction. Wikipedia provides the mechanism for people to organize and contribute information in a logical and (somewhat) manageable manner. Google provides the mechanism for sifting and searching the information. Clearly these two aren't necessarily the final versions, but I can see the vague outlines of where it can be 15... or 1500 years from now.
Yes, but I think you have to understand that Wikipedia's purpose is collect all knowledge and represent it on the meta level – its an encyclopedia. So every school of thought is represented and described, along with the corresponding beliefs and justifications.

But it never really goes beyond that level. So for someone who wants to get an idea of the widely held beliefs in each field it's fantastic, but for someone who wants to understand the process by which these beliefs were formed and the exact point where they diverge, it's not much good. It's a shame that something so comprehensive, something that disseminates information so well, couldn't go a bit deeper and actually map all levels of knowledge.

Also, I see the knowledge distribution system as a part of the knowledge creation process in the first place, because understanding is based on prior knowledge and as such is built up at multiple levels of abstraction. At the lowest level you have the actual experiments/discoveries themselves, which are then analysed and built up into theories which are then combined together to form meta-theories and then finally entire topic branches.

In a way scientific disciplines are just a reflection of the information contained in the world around us - the way individual elements interact, their relationships, whether dealing with the relationships of people, or the relationships of particles. So information is crucial a each level of understanding. New experiments may bring old theories in to question, or cause them to be revised. Existing evidence may be reinterpreted or a new, more plausible explanation for existing studies may come to light.

Any theory must be able to deal with all experiments, all possible conclusions, and it must represent the most likely scenario among all possible explanations. The problem is that without an effective information distribution system, you can't create a unified theory. I'll give an example:

Biologist Dr Jacques Benveniste, found by accident, that water could retain the 'memory' of molecules contained within it, and even when diluted millions of times, it could function as the original substance. This contradicts much of our current entire understanding of chemistry and biology.

"After many experiments, in 1988 Benveniste managed to get an account of his work published in Nature, speculating that the water used in the experiments must have retained a "memory" of the original dissolved aIgE. Homoeopaths rejoiced, convinced that here at last was the hard evidence they needed to make homoeopathy scientifically respectable. Celebration was short-lived. Spearheaded by a Nature team that famously included a magician (who could find no fault with Benveniste's methods - only his results), Benveniste was pilloried by the scientific establishment."

...Enter Professor Ennis and the pan-European research effort.

A consortium of four independent research laboratories in France, Italy, Belgium, and Holland, led by Professor M Roberfroid at Belgium's Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels, used a refinement of Benveniste's original experiment that examined another aspect of basophil activation.

In order to make sure no bias was introduced into the experiment by the scientists from the four laboratories involved, they were all "blinded" to the contents of their test solutions. In other words, they did not know whether the solutions they were adding to the basophil-aIgE reaction contained ghost amounts of histamine or just pure water. But that's not all. The ghost histamine solutions and the controls were prepared in three different laboratories that had nothing further to do with the trial.

The whole experiment was coordinated by an independent researcher who coded all the solutions and collated the data, but was not involved in any of the testing or analysis of the data from the experiment. Not much room, therefore, for fraud or wishful thinking. So the results when they came were a complete surprise.

[]

The result, shortly to be published in Inflammation Research, was the same: histamine solutions, both at pharmacological concentrations and diluted out of existence, lead to statistically significant inhibition of basophile activation by aIgE, confirming previous work in this area.

"Despite my reservations against the science of homoeopathy," says Ennis, "the results compel me to suspend my disbelief and to start searching for a rational explanation for our findings."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4152521,00.htm

Yet even after this study the findings weren't accepted by the scientific community - there was no attempt to replicate or analyse them.

In a way, other than mathematic topics, that results in a more "true" recognition of the world. Even science is succeptable to this "there is no 'right'" situation. There is a constant refining of all information, but even then it's impossible to ever actually arrive at a try "what's right" other than extremely limited physical phenomina.
Well, what I really mean is "what is most likely to be right". We always have limited information, but we still choose to believe in something. There's no way to prove that this world is real, that we're not living inside a giant simulation, or that the people around us aren't elaborate constructs. But still that's always the belief we start with.

When faced with limited information we have to have a way of deciding what to believe. So the argument that "we can never know what is really true" flies in the face of the fact that every day we form beliefs about what is true or not. And what I'm getting at is there has to be some criteria for this, it can't be completely arbitrary.

If it is arbitrary then there's no point choosing one belief over another because they're all just as likely to be true. So there's obviously a logical process. And surely we can assess that process itself, look at how it is formed, what assumptions it makes, and then compare it to other processes. So two experts in the same field might disagree because they've chosen to interpret the facts differently, but we should still be able to look at each of their interpretations, find the crux of the disagreement and then make a decision about which perception is more likely to be correct.

At the very least we can present the split, so someone trying to understand the truth will come down a hierarchical series of logical conclusions and then reach a point where he has to make the next step.


Analysis of all politics, history, literature, etc. will always be subject to the viewer, so the best that can be provided is the list of "what happened", but like you said, the ability to decipher this is often too complex for most people. Without a significant evolution of the human brain, I don't see this being solvable, and even if everyone has the capacity to understand and analyize the information... it will be impossible to always conclude a "what is right" perspective.
That's why I suggested an artificial intelligence that would be able to do the processing for us and provide an extension to our perception.

If we allow the population to continue growing unabated we'll be forced to find a new resources "somehow". Whereas if we limit it to 500 million, we could potentially provide an "eternally" sustainable population on a single planet. There is no way to know which one will ultimately be better for humanity, or will allow mankind to survive the longest, survive massive worldwide extinction due to environmental changes beyond their control, etc.
Right, and in a sense there are an infinite number of questions to answer. "What will happen to the earth under this conditions" isn't a question that's covered by our current knowledge structure. It requires that information is processed in a way that's beyond our current comprehension. We can build computers to simulate future events but they're dependent on the rule sets used to create the simulation. How do we create a rule set to describe the interaction of millions of unique people across hundreds of years, with the knowledge that just one decision by one person, could change everything?

So I would agree this is beyond our capacity to know, but I think that any accurate perception would recognise that - it's outside the field of human knowledge.

Although it can be difficult, I think the state of "it's almost impossible to determine what is right" is the most natural and proper state a person can arrive at when learning and viewing information. Frustrating, but the most true to reality.
I don't know, it doesn't feel natural to me ;)

The human mind isn't very good at dealing with uncertainty, I find there's only so much of it I can take.

The more central and singular information becomes, the more likely a single mistake becomes that can harm the most people. More easily corruptable (since it is still dependent upon being fed information) and the more easily manipulated.
And how do you define a singular entity? Is a society a singular entity?

What if the god was to be a collection of trillions of independent information processing and collection elements just like a society is made up of thousands of people?

[Parkar]

HOLY CRAP! that was a long post, gona have to save that one for later.

[Micki!]

HOLY CRAP! that was a long post


:eek: indeed :cool:

[FireFly]

It would be longer if there wasn't a 10,000 character limit! I guess that's for everyone's sanity though.

[Micki!]

Hehe... You really wen't that long..?
You could just have split your message in two you know ;)...

[Dalton]

I can understand where your coming from talking about the misinterpretation of the Bible and/or other religious documents of the past but your must remember most religious people are only religious because of a troubling time in their life where there freinds were not able to help them such as a loved on dying or maybe a divorce or another type of hardship they have faced and humans relying on emotion feel that "God" will be able to help them because none of there friends can bring there loved one back or changed what happend because who would need God or even acknowledge the existence of an all powerful being know as "God". Human emotion depends on others becuase most humans are not capable of being self-sufficient(mostly becuse of the reason that the homosapiens inhabit the earth we live on today are wrongly guided by world views and dense or just plain moronic leaders in the world today are told that they cant live without God in their lives or some other higher being such as buddah or allah or even the other mythologial gods or ancient civilizations such as zues or ra)and live their life by their emotions so if they think they need guidance at a hardpoint in their life they will look to god or a higher power for supposed "guidance". BUt who is to say if the guidance is right or wrong especially with the moral issues of today. Every religion teachers their own beliefs and morals of which they think mankind should follow. Christians and muslims could even be compared now days as republicans and democrats becuase everybody has a different opinion on life wheather they were taught it as a child or they learned it on their own. I know I'm continuing this almost pointless babble but people these days are so shallow and look for guidance by others wheather it be a preacher or god or some other person in their life when they need to just beleive in themselves. Thats just my view as a level person not taking sides as an atheist or a devoted beleiver of a religion but no matter what people read they will always have their own views.

-Dalton