Technology that refuses to die

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I disagree. Religion is a system, a method, a procedure and a technology. Religions have been shown to be effective as tools to keep populaces under control. When everybody thinks alike, it becomes easier to maintain rules and laws.

Note that I regard religion and belief to be two very different concepts;

Logically, it's impossible to not have a belief at some level. Otherwise, you'd have to know everything. Therefore, saying that having personal beliefs is either preferable or not makes no sense at all. Acceptance is the only sane resolution.

Religion (or any kind of dogmatism) however, is telling you what to believe (often forcefully), and is therefore hindering peoples ability to achieve real contentment and satisfactory answers to their questions. Especially now that we have access to so much more information (ie. science) than we used to.

And by the way, did I say I am an atheist? I prefer the term agnostic. I find it more scientifically accurate.

Two things:
1. Religion isn't a technology, because it's not exactly a tangible object (or something that is created through tangible objects, e.g. computer software). It's simply a collection of ideas and theories.
2. I don't think this is the right place to start a religion-focused flame war.

Ennergy density is an important important factor but EROIE (energy return on invested energy) is the most important of all. You need a high EROIE to keep running this whole civilization.

The infamous COBOL... I fear It will still therefor the 10KY bug.

A: If I understand your definition of "technology" correctly, I don't agree with it. In fact, it doesn't even make any sense [to me] after having had a closer inspection.

Let me try to explain:

• Nothing has ever indicated that anything can be 'created' (however defined) through objects, entities, concepts or ideas, that, either themselves are not tangible, or not ultimately descending from something that is tangible.
  Unless you rationalize that something conceptually symbolic and abstract is somehow capable of influencing our physical reality directly (ie. be the definitive cause of energy changing states → affect distribution of matter, alter the position or velocity of atoms, warp spacetime, etc.) - in which case I'd have to opt out of this discussion until my brain has lucubrated the ability to adequately process such information, without getting spun up at (pun intended) eternally recursive logical cognitions, due to me currently still appreciating it to be incoherent and riddled with contradictory paradoxes.

This critical observation (or lack thereof, if you prefer - which, in the context I'm trying to portray, basically means the same thing) translates to the following sequential and bold conclusions, according to my own subjective sense of deduction (or lack thereof, if you prefer):

• Any inferentially presumptive origin of the ultimate ensemble must be tangible.
  Assuming we agree on the definition of "tangible" as something that is directly pertaining to our physical reality - discovered or not.
  
• Religion is something that ultimately must have been created by - or through - a corporeal entity.
  Just like everything else, and for example by humans. (What do I know?)

If these statements are not agreed upon, there can be only two alternative explanations:

1. at least one assumption has to be made from an imaginary standpoint that is based outside of observed reality.
2. there is something I have overlooked, don't know about or utterly fail to understand - in which case I'd really appreciate getting corrected, completed and brought to final enlightenment.

My definition of "technology" on the other hand, as assumed in my list of technologies that refuse to die, is reconcilable with the following catenation (having the pieces that I think are accommodating the term "religion" in bold):


Note though, that I'm making a few a reservations myself. For example, I believe that thoughts, dreams, ideas and beliefs (!) are essentially abstract sums of observable physical processes or derivatives - not something based in any chimerical reality. So, please go ahead and confront me if you have any objections or questions to what I'm trying to say!

I know from repeatedly obtained personal feedback that I can be hard to follow at times, and tend to have excessively complex (read: long-winded) explanations bordering on circumstantiality.


A: That was never my intention. I was merely listing technologies that refuse to die, when unexpectedly motivated to interpret my reasoning behind some of them.

Have a nice day!

EDIT:
- Fixed layout to make the unintelligible appear intelligible.
- Grammar.
- Semantics.

Last edited by Kenjuudo on 21 Mar 2013, 8:09 pm, edited 9 times in total.

So, according to you, practically everything is technology? That seems about right.

So far gas and oil are giving good returns. That is because the damage to the environment is not taken into account properly.

ruveyn

No, that is not what I tried to convey. I just tried to systematically disassemble your argument - like any disputation participant would have to do in order to be taken seriously, before presenting their own convictions. Though, doing it in a manner such as to appear unapproachably intelligent and so unparallelably thought-through that I'd be able to win the argument through attaining reciprocal awe, unconditional respect, likes and other forms of lazy obliviousness alone - and apparently not succeeding at all, and instead probably emerging as a big douche with megalomanical narcissism as primary attribute - together with a host of linguistic disorders having to do with not acquiring comprehension from my conversational audience.

Last edited by Kenjuudo on 21 Mar 2013, 6:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.

To actually answer your rhetorical question, instead of just continuing my pointless ramble of self-indignation, I gather I'd have to make a more substantive analogy:

• All birds are animals, but not all animals are birds.
  The elucidation of an affinitive one-to-many relation.

You see, while all technology is based in the real world, I didn't mean that everything in the real world is a technology.

But then, by including the consideration of perspectives external to our pronounced circumscriptions into our definition - that is, a rationalization that a given supposition doesn't necessarily have to be constituting (or even subsuming) an instigation by humans in order to have "technology" be a congruously felicitous denomination - anything could in fact be considered a technology of somebody or something...

EDIT: Though, I guess that wouldn't be very pertinent to the more explicit and methodizing nomenclature of "human technology"... Is that what we were chatting about?

Mercury sphygs. General practitioners (at least in Britain) love them and are slow at moving over to electronic NIBP machines. In some older GP practices you can find mercury sphygs bolted to walls.

Paper based record systems

Your entire net worth is stored on the bank systems harddrives.. granted it is in more than one place but kinda scary if you think about it.


You gotta have a lot of faith to trust your civilization's hundreds of years of discovery to a quickly rotating metal disk with a warranty.



Our technology is good, but i'm still all for paper birth certificates. Wouldn't want anyone to get deleted by accident.

It is backed up frequently and redundantly. Magnetic surfaces hold their magnetic orientation and they are less succeptable to destruction than paper, which burns to ashes.

ruveyn

I'm not against using harddrives.. just saying that wanting to do away with paper altogether is pretty brave and kind of silly, considering harddrives aren't a time-honored method. They are very new, history-wise..

The fact that they allow data multiplication to more than one place at a time is their saving grace. And as solid state becomes more reliable who knows.. we may go paperless in the end.


Can you imagine a harddrive lasting over a 3 year sea voyage, getting bounced around, exposed to moisture, dust, static, sand. And then needing electricity to power it up when your done with all that? In any environment other than ours harddrives start to become inaccessible. When you can't get at your data it's no longer any good to you!

We like to think we are above old methods just because there's something new, but you can't say pen and paper require micrometer-levels of precision!

I expect much the same thing was said as paper began to replace stone or clay tablets.
"What, use that flimsy nonsense to store valuable data?! But it burns, and water washes off the writing!"

Yes, easily. Every technology requires a "care and feeding" regime - even paper, and if the benefits of using a technology are great (as they clearly are with hard disks), then those requirements simply become absorbed into that functionality. It just becomes "this is what's needed to use X".
Look at the way a ship's compass was carefully mounted, to ensure it functioned properly in rough seas - or chronographs, used in calculating a position.
Any precision technology requires some degree of protection but generally, as a technology improves through new ideas, the requirements for protection diminish - hence the electronic compass, GPS and SSDs.

I think paper (and paper-like material) holds a relatively unique position because we're able to convey meaning simply by scratching marks on it, and that extreme level of simple functionality is unlikely to be completely replaced.
But when several million pages of information can be moved or duplicated with 100% accuracy in seconds, why would paper even be considered practical in those situations?

Making marks or pictures on more or less flat surfaces goes back at least 25,000 years. Paper is just the latest flat surface to make a permanent mark on. And ink does not wash off. Just the other day, I read from a Torah Scroll that was at least 200 years old. The ink look fine on the parchment.

ruveyn