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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!!
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To: Father Terrence who wrote (28036)1/14/1999 12:40:00 AM
From: Krowbar  Read Replies (1) of 108807
 
<< By that reasoning you could trace many inventions back to the harnessing of fire as a source of power. To be credited for advancing the human species (not race as declared by Nihilist!), does one have to start from scratch? Having knowledge is not collective -- it is individualistic. There is no such thing as a collective mind or collective knowledge. >>

Have you ever seen one of the episodes of "Connections" on PBS. It went into great detail of how each of the important technologies of today were the result of a chain of seemingly unrelated events. For instance, the computers that we are using can be traced back to the automatic loom that was run by punch cards. That made cloth much easier to mass produce thus making it affordable to the masses (and made lots of money for the boss). Those punch cards were also seen as useful for tabulating the large amount of European immigrants arriving at Ellis Island. Later, punch cards were used to program the first primitive computers. I doubt if the guy who invented the punch card loom reasoned "you know, some day people will be ordering clothes on the internet using their computer that my punch card loom will evolve into." There were countless people involved to get from there to here, each building on the collective work of those that preceded them to advance the knowledge.

There is no such thing as collective knowledge? What do you call Biology, Astronomy, Physics, etc? Would von Braun or Einstein have achieved what they did if they were locked in a room from birth and denied access to any outside knowledge, and were only given food?

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