Buckminster Fuller & the Acceleration of Information Development

from http://bfi.org/node/131

SPECTROSCOPE

And through the spectroscope we learn about refraction of light. Through the spectroscope we are able to take the light from all those observations. And each chemical element has its unique frequencies when incandescent, and we have been able then to–little human beings on our planet have been able to take inventory of the relative abundance of chemical elements in the sweep-out of eleven-and-a-half billion light-year observation.

SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN BEINGS

That we have that kind of capability, despite our absolutely negligible magnitude physically, that we can we deal with our minds in such magnitudes and do so quite reliably gives us a hint that human beings must have some very great significance in the scheme.

INFORMATION INCREASE
Just making a little jump in information. As humanity on board of our planet entered into what it called World War I, the scientists around the world had ways of reporting to one another officially. Chemists have what they call chemical abstracts. Chemical abstracts are methodical publications of anything and everything any chemist finds that he publishes information regarding, it becomes a chemical abstract. As the world entering World War I, in what we call the 20th century (which is a very arbitrary kind of a counting matter), we had some 100 – I’m doing this off the top of my head from my memory – about 175,000 known substances, possibly almost a quarter of a million substances, by the time the United States came into the war, known to chemistry. But we came out of World War I with almost a million substances known. By the time we entered World War II, we were well up to 10 million and we’ve come out of it now, where the figure is really getting to be astronomical. We can’t really keep track of the rate at which we are discovering more, just talking about differentiable substances, chemically distinct from one another.

ACCELERATION OF INFORMATION AND EXPERIENCE

Those are typical of the information release at a bursting rate now, I’m speaking now in relationship to my own life. One life in the extraordinary numbers of lives there must have been on board of our planet. That the information is multiplying at that rate during just one lifetime indicates that something is going on here right now that is utterly unprecedented.

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do you think that there is any end to knowledge? is knowledge representational of understanding or of experience? if it is more closely realted to experience, it would follow that “knowledge” will be ever increasing. on the other hand, if it is more closely related to understanding, is it possible for a human (or even a society collectively) to achieve unihibited understanding? could the existence of god or other seemingly unexplainable concepts/beings ever be proven or disproven? still, are we really meant to understand everything about the world and its people? perhaps, then, the end would not exist because everything is explained, appreciated, and understood; it would simply be the stopping point of the extent of human understanding.

I don’t know, really.

Some thoughts:

1. Skepticism — in the sense of “withholding belief in any belief system”. Skepticism seems to be an island people find, if they’re lucky. It keeps them intellectually nimble. It keeps them from being sucked into stale beliefs.

If you take as your premise:

I am little. Whatever IT is (IT is whatever exists other than me) IT is immensely larger than me.

Then, I bet you’d keep inventing yourself. You’d keep shedding your outer shells and never stop growing.

2. Some claim there *is* a state of mind where words are useless. That in this state of mind, awareness is without end and borders. If this state actually exists, maybe there *is* an end to skepticism.

Who knows? = )

But I like your question.



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