ThomasHobbes wrote: ↑May 26th, 2018, 6:32 am
chaos_mora wrote: ↑May 25th, 2018, 4:35 pm
Not at all. I'm seriously having trouble seeing the point you're trying to make. Essentially, what I think you're saying is that the Greeks imagined traveling to the moon, so therefore it was feasible? In that case, what of the Internet? I can't think of anyone prior to the late twentieth century who actually believed the Internet would someday be invented based on the science of their day, outside of pure science fiction. My point with this is to show that we have no way of knowing what advancements we will someday achieve, and therefore, no reason to believe that anything we consider "impossible" right now truly is so.
Here is your essential error. You said "In my opinion, all of this seems to indicate that there really is nothing "impossible," at least not within human understanding."
This is inherently absurd and refutable by a single wild claim that a child could make.
You back it up by being disappointed with people who declare things impossible, and seem to think that landing on the moon was unimaginable 120 years ago. It was not.
You shoot yourself in the foot by saying that the Greeks were making an absurd claim since going to the moon was not understood.
But you cannot reject reasonable rejections of modern absurd claims now, but demand the Greeks were wrong to imagine what was then "the impossible".
Either you think absurd claims are reasonable or they are not; which is it?
Let me try to start over so you can see the point I'm trying to make. There are many things in the past that have been claimed to be "impossible" that turned out not to be. Arthur C. Clarke gave a few examples in "Profiles of the Future," wherein he presented his now-famous "laws" of prophecy. One example is how heavier-than-air flight was, indeed, considered impossible even leading up to and within the lives of the Wright brothers. This is just one example of how, in the past, people have assumed something would not be feasibly possible. However, it ended up coming true.
Everything you've said about the Greeks and the moon landings makes no sense to me. You seem to be attempting to refute my point about "impossibility" by claiming that the moon landing wasn't unimaginable. I never said it was unimaginable; I said that, at some point prior to its occurrence, it was natural to consider it impossible. "From the Earth to the Moon" by Jules Verne is proof that it was
imagined. There was a time when we didn't even know the moon WAS an astronomical body as we know it to be today; it was simply a giant disk on a sky revolving around the Earth in a geocentric universe.
Any body of knowledge at a given time has extents, limitations, and "impossibles." In medieval times, especially under the geocentric model, landing on the moon was feasibly and even hypothetically impossible. The notion was absurd. But in 1969, it happened, in real life. It wasn't because our ancestors failed to think correctly, because they had no way of knowing what we'd discover about Newtonian gravitation and rocket science between then and now. It may have been impossible then, but now it is, and has happened.
If you claim that we're any different from them, you're assuming that our knowledge right now is at the epitome of what it will be. We know everything we will know, and therefore have the right to assign the word "impossible" to certain things. But this is not the case. If anything, we're discovering more now than we ever have before, with huge advancements in science and technology every year. If we already had a grasp on what's possible and impossible fundamentally, we'd likely have mastery over the universe. Instead, we keep on moving forward, with new discoveries continually deconstructing what we thought we knew.
Nothing can meaningfully be called impossible because we have no way of knowing what limits we perceive are, in reality, arbitrary.