Perhaps one day, i'll understand ('understand what?' i might imagine you ponder, and maybe that's the bigger question?). I wonder though if this is something i even want. There may be truth in a finite world but no Wonder, no Impossibility, no kiss awakening eternal sleep. ((I might've made the error of watching too many fairy tales this week; of the disney kind and the early cinema kind (i blame the mood that took me there, which i consequently blame on the fact that i've just completed my university degree and am wondering what to do now with my eternity (of 50 or so years i predict, i don't think my brain will bother with more cognition than that); work/drink/extendthedegreeintoanMA(nooo)/travel/eatchocolate - all perfectly modest ideas.))
and when i imagine this world in which human technology has reached an accuracy of reality and theory that could be reliably mistaken for truth, i also imagine an end. as a (reluctant) empiricist, i understand that speculation about the future (especially of a future that now for us seems obscured) is a silly project with little predictive value but i'm also an (eager) Science Fiction Person.
(speaking of, maybe it's my tidy-minded preference but i tend to do that thing where you put people into categories based on their hobbies (a terrible psychological habit i've been told; leading to stereotypes, elitism, long noses and indigestion). Another such group is, for example, People Who Read. and by read i mean Read; voracious, unflinching, impatient, greedy, consuming all facets of literature from Shakespeare to Racine to Harry Potter to Bibles and the depths of the Russians.)
So this end, where science and truth align, will be sad. But then i remember all the epistemological cock blocks that emerge with this vain thought, and i remember. Aha. But of course. There are far too many truths, far too much of reality, that it might as well be an infinite academic pursuit for truth to be completed.
This is sad too. (If there is a Truth, religiously and theoretically and idealistically speaking, i know for certain that it will be sad (if sentiment is even allowed to be attributed to an essentially neutral concept?))
I think and think and think and often imagine running away to a corner of the forest where there is a cave within which i might live alone and isolated; where knowledge serves no purpose. Knowledge is a social event. (All those academic networks, those lifetimes of careful semantic banter, where sometimes the only conclusion churned is the difference between linear and non-linear foundations.) In a cave, the only truth there will be is fish and sleep and fire. And then i'll grow bored, i expect.
But there will be peace, if i want it enough.
