Of course i am not talking about the recent future, not even the distant future.I am talking about a LONG LONG time from here, maybe something like a few million years from now where humankind would have already inhibited the galaxies and stars and we would have a population of zillions of people that would have stayed in different galaxies already.That is where scientists have annonced that they already discovered everything there is to discover already.They will know every single phenomenon that has happened, discovered all elements in the universe, understand all kinds of forces in physics,learned all different types of genes and whatever constitutes our biological being, and solved all mathematical problems already.They will even be able to explain the supernatural, like ghosts and also the mystery of our afterlife.They are even able to solve the ULTIMATE mystery of our existance of whatever had happened before our universe was bornded.Then what will living be for, if we knew everything there is already? Maybe,they could even predict everything about you, your intelligence potential,your characteristics(by looking at the components of your genes) and giving an answer on whether you are a shy,angry,sentimental or hateful person, they will even predict what career you would most likely pursue by looking at these characteristics and using an assumption.Heck, they could even read your thoughts whether you are thinking of your kids or fantasing about the girl opposite by having a machine read your brainwaves.Even more unthinkable, they could predict when and how you will most likely die by again looking at your genes and analysing your long family tree on the possibilities of you developing any kind of dieseases.Then will life REALLY be worth living??
Yes.
How many of us are scientists, really? How many of us dedicate our lives and our identities to the discovery of new facts? Not many of us. Most of us, even those of us that love learning, are content with personal discovery. It’s okay if somebody else knew it before, it’s new to you.
If the scientists someday render themselves obsolete, then the rest of us get to spend our days pondering what they’ve taught us.
If we someday inhibit the galaxies and stars, what, exactly, would we be inhibiting them from doing?
Hmmm…maybe we should just discontinue the human race?
Yeah, that’s the ticket! Discontinuation!
[sub]gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!![/sub]
It’s because I got this THC brain or something…
(Yes, I’ll behave now. Sorta.)
I’m just eagerly awaiting the day they discorver paragraph breaks.
We cannot “know” everything, I am guessing.
Are brains have a discrete structure, and it does things (like thinking, perceiving, and conceptualising things) the way it does because of the way it is “built”.
We can’t see photons themselves, but we can conceptualise little packets of energy, and so we can try to build instruments to capture or measure them.
If we can’t even conceive of something due to the physical limitations of our brains, how do we even know to build sticks to poke at it with?
Ugh.
should be “Our brains”. Most embarassing. My little brain races ahead, and I end up with some weird form of dislexia due to inattention.
What about creativity? Even if scientists knew everything it doesn’t mean you can’t grab some paint and paint something no one’s ever seen before, right?
I happen to like gardening and it doesn’t matter how much I know about it, I’d still like it.
What about sports? If I like swimming it doesn’t matter how much I know about it. I just like doing it.
And knowing when and from what you’re going to die? Well, if I’m not cool with what the computer just predicted then I just got a new hobby. Not dying of what it said I was going to die of.
But you “see” it in your mind (if even only subconsiously). You can conceive of an alien looking flower. Then you paint it. While it only exists in your mind, then the canvas, then my mind after looking at the canvas, we both can still conceive of plants, and can still perceive the painting, and the idea/concept it was trying to convey.
You can’t paint something you can’t conceive. I believe that there is stuff we can’t even conceive of because of the physical limitations of our brains and/or bodies.
Blinks at you. I am missing your point. You don’t need to know “why” you like gardening, but you do know that you do. You can conceive of gardening. You can put past, present, future events into context with cause and effect, so you know that when you do “A, B, & C”, tomatos will grow. You can conceive the satisfaction or pleasure of creating this garden that may be acheived from such an act…
Well, same as gardening example, really. Physical exertion can generate some anti-pain and adrenaline secretions in our bodies that our brains interprete as “nice to have”. But you dont have to know “why”, just that it does. You can conceive of the potential rewards for exercising.
You like confusing me, don’t you? Where does a computer tell you your gunna die? Is it resulting in your exercising above?
Sorry, levdrakon, I thought you were rebutting my post. I see now that you were addressing the OP…
Forgive?
Long before we find out everything, we will stop dying.
But we’ll never find out everything. One of the things we like to find out is history, and how natural events happened. History will still be happening in the future (duh) so historians will always have a job.
But I agree that creativity will never be exhausted, since as we find new thing, and go to new places, and interact with others in new ways, it will inspire new art.
I was responding to the OP. Sorry for the confusion. The OP suggests scientists would be able to tell me when I’m likely to die.
I agree with you though in that based on how our brains (and our senses) are built, there may well be things we can’t conceive of.
On preview I see:
Hey, no bigs! 
Most scientists take it on faith (yes, I used the F-word, there) that we’ll never have everything figured out. But a colleague of mine has pointed out that this is actually a direct consequence of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. Any structure of knowledge that we can have must be a formal system of some sort. But as Gödel proved, any formal system must contain statements which cannot be proven nor disproven within that system. Whenever that happens, we have to perform an experiment to answer that question. We then take the results of that experiment as another axiom, and construct a new formal system based on the previous axioms plus that one, and that new formal system will have a brand new set of questions which are unanswerable by pure logic.
Contrary to what robardin told you here, the word is actually just born.
Don’t be ridiculous.
CalMeacham’s Corrolary to Godel’s Proof states that, even if you think you’ve figured out everything about a physical or philosophical system, there will still be things you don’t know, like Where your car keys are, or Where you left your Glasses (on top of your head, usually).
Let’s imagine that one day “scientists” discover everything. The trouble with that idea is that no one human brain could learn that “everything”. Human brains are finite. Now, of course, the idea that we could discover everything implies the postulate that knowledge is also finite. But even if the total sum of knowledge in the universe is finite, it will still be astronomically greater than any one human brain can store.
Even today there is much more knowledge than any one human brain can absorb. Even if you spent an entire lifetime doing nothing but reading books, you could not read every book in the world. Even if you had a thousand years to read, you could not read every book in the world. And that’s just books. Imagine knowing everything about your backyard. Where every leaf is, every blade of grass, every rock, every insect. It could take you a lifetime to study your backyard in detail, and even then your backyard would change every minute, so your knowledge would always be out of date. Now, how many backyards are there in your town? How many in your country? How many in the world?
So the amount of knowledge in the world (let alone the universe) is effectively infinite in relation to the human mind, whether it’s really infinite or just staggeringly stupdendously huge. How many atoms are there in the universe? Imagine knowing everything about each atom. Now imagine knowing everything about each atom’s interactions with every other atom. The number of relations between every atom in the universe is equal to the number of atoms in the universe, factorial. And that’s a pretty big number. You could say that the number is finite, but it doesn’t matter, because that number is so much larger than the human brain. And even if you had a brain the size of the universe, how could it store more information about the universe than the universe itself? A map of the universe that’s as detailed as the real universe would have to be identical to the real universe. Whoah.
It sounds like the OP is essentially asking if life would be worth living if one were omniscient. Could there be any quality to a life with no element of surprise? I’d have to say it sounds like it might not be that much fun but it’s also not a real possibility.