Monday, October 31, 2011

Sudden Strange Epiphany while reading "The Lost Symbol"

I was halfway reading Dan Brown's latest novel, "The Lost Symbol", when I had this sudden epiphany.

In that particular part of the story, it speaks of "Man" trying to find his link or relevance to the rest of the world.

I realized that the meaning of our existence must be defined by another higher order being.

Consider this, the study of lab rats in a given habitat...

The rats live in their given habitat, happily eating, fornicating and defecating.
By their instincts, they have to forage and breed without much thought to their purpose of existence.
As they live their lives following their instincts, they are unaware that their lifestyle is being monitored, tracked and recorded for some other purposes.
Their lives is defined by the scientists that bred them for specific purposes.

It takes a higher order of intelligence to study and understand the lives of beings with a lower order of intelligence.

Scientifically speaking, it is impossible to measure or quantify without some form of intrusion to the environment in which the absolute result is required. i.e, it is not possible to measure the exact temperature of water without using an intrusive thermometer that has its own thermal properties and hence when introduced to the water, changes the way the thermal energy is spreaded within the water. Though it may be negligible [(mass of water x thermal energy of heated water) vs ( mass of thermometer x thermal transfer )], this causes change to the absolute quantifiable result that it is trying to obtain. Moreover, the butterfly effect theory comes into play with of minute changes that will introduce undesirable and unexplainable phenomenons in the long run.

Akin to the Observer Expectancy Effect experienced in the Hawthorne Factory experiments, placing a person to study a group of people will not produce accurate results, regardless of how dissociated the person is with regards to the group of people that are studied. Further reading of this effect can be found reading about Epistemic Feedback on Wikipedia.

To watch without knowing that they are being watched...
To study the subjects that are oblivious that they are being studied...
Closed Circuit TV(CCTVs) are also considered intrusive for that matter, for subjects whom know that CCTVs are meant for surveillance and will react and behave differently knowing that they are under surveillance.

To watch and study human subjects is impossible, without being intrusive.
And that our nature and instincts that defines our individual selfish needs to survive, far surpasses our need to understand our own kind as a single entity.

Thus with my epiphany, I conclude that we, as humans, can never be able to study or research on ourselves as a species because we are always limited to the technologies that we created ourselves.

If we can study lab rats whom are oblivious due to the technologies we use to watch them,
that "might" also mean that we, as a species, may be oblivious to technologies used by another species of higher intelligence used to watch and study us.

If the above is true, then, there just might be a God somewhere out there...

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