http://ask.metafilter.com/tags/humanknowledge Questions tagged with 'humanknowledge' at Ask MetaFilter. Sun, 01 Oct 2006 19:24:05 -0800 Sun, 01 Oct 2006 19:24:05 -0800 en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 60 http://ask.metafilter.com/47670/What%2Dhappens%2Dto%2Dthe%2DLibrary%2Dof%2DCongress%2Dwhen%2Dthe%2Dasteroid%2Dhits What efforts are currently being made to preserve human knowledge and culture (great literature, scientific theory, et cetera) for far-future generations, or in the event of a worldwide catastrophe? I'm thinking about something with the same kind of timescale as the <a href="http://www.longnow.org/">Long Now</a> project. I feel there must be an archival project of this type out there, but my Google-fu has failed me on this one. tag:ask.metafilter.com,2006:site.47670 Sun, 01 Oct 2006 19:24:05 -0800 archive humanknowledge library postapocalyptic fermion http://ask.metafilter.com/35208/How%2Ddo%2Dwe%2Djump%2Dinto%2Da%2Dclosed%2Dset If humans communicate via symbols and can only understand something (i.e., give it some semiotic 'identity') by way of comparison to already-familiar things, how do we begin at all? If the identity we assign to something—insofar as we acquire whatever 'stuff' we need to make it a topic of conversation—has its roots in things we already understand, we're breaking into a closed set. WTF?<br> <br> I get what Pinker said about innate capacity for language, but a CPU's innate capacity to act on certain instructions to produce certain results doesn't generate any input for it to process...<br> <br> I'm posting this in Science &amp; Nature because I have more input from Philosophy and Religion than I can handle already. But if you've got some stellar rebuttal of Aristotelian logic, or some especially clever intellectual poo-flinging that shuts Augustine down, don't let me stop you. tag:ask.metafilter.com,2006:site.35208 Tue, 28 Mar 2006 06:52:27 -0800 Augustine'sHobbyHorse ClosedSets HumanKnowledge Yeomans