Monday, November 10, 2014
But WHY can't we get ahead of Ma Nature?
Followup on previous item.
First question: Have we ever gotten ahead of Nature? Have we ever designed something that Nature didn't already make in some form? I thought radio was an exception, but it's not.
Maybe the laser. But I wouldn't bet heavily against critters like cuttlefish and pyrosomes that use luminescent bacteria. I'd bet we'll find controlled coherent light in those 'devices'.
Second question: WHY is it so hard to get ahead of Nature? Alternately, why haven't we been able to COPY natural inventions?
In every case I can think of, we've invented something using our own imagination and persistence, and then LATER we see ... or sometimes only THINK we see ... that Nature is doing the same thing. A good example of the latter is computing, where we invented a mechanical sorting and counting mechanism and then assumed that our brains work the same. Obviously they don't, but academics haven't yet noticed.
Come to think of it, this mismatch also meta-applies to the process of invention itself. Because we develop things by a long process that is partly imagination and partly trial-and-error, we've assumed that Nature does it that way. Except we didn't even give Nature credit for the imagination part. We just imputed the dumb persistence part, and called it Evolution. And this analogy is obviously wrong, just like the brain/computer analogy.
Labels: Grand Blueprint
¶ 6:32 PM
