You do realise that a language is a big part of culture and by removing it you would cripple all, but those based arround english? OT I would remove ageing past like age 20.Aerosteam 1908 said:
What if you could erase one aspect of mankind?
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As someone who lost a filling recently, has booked my dental appointment but has a week to go, I heartily agree, it's evolution waiting to catch up right? We know there's a problem, we've done all we can to fix it, so the brain should be able to process this information and dial down the signals to 'background' for now. 'OW OW OW - hi, can I get an appointment I have trouble with my teeth *pain fades* thanks, see you on monday!'theevilgenius60 said:
(I realise it sounds flippant compared to what you've gone thru, but still, anyone who's had serious toothache knows there's nothing else in your existence until it stops.)
Also, imagine the productivity returned to the world, if the millions with constant back pain were suddenly relieved of it. Then there's all the 'old people' stuff, like athritis, etc, that just makes living past a certain age pretty damned miserable.
TheSniperFan said:
But if we can get fusion then the primary consumption dies. Everyone gets electric cars because filling them up becomes dirt cheap because energy is dirt cheap meaning only production things still take oil, this extends the supply of oil massively. Plus one of the biggest problems we have for developing new technologies is the power requirements are beyond imagining. If we had fusion thats no longer a problem so tech leaps forward. I mean the only reason we cant as of right this moment freely create anti matter is because the power required to make one nano gram makes it the single most valuable particle on the planet, to the point no nation in the world could afford 1kg. When the problem of power is mute, whats to stop us developing this new unimaginably powerful energy source?
If I had to offer my own suggestion to the thread however -
I'd get rid of racism and discrimination in all it's forms, it's bloody ridiculous and hateful and holds us back as a species.
That and the French.
I'd get rid of racism and discrimination in all it's forms, it's bloody ridiculous and hateful and holds us back as a species.
That and the French.
You need to see the "The Invention of Lying" if you haven't already.L-J-F said:
Anyway, being truthful could be great, but I feel like those who are less privileged in certain departments will never risk or try to achieve more than they believe they can, because realistically, they know that they are doomed to their own predisposed existence.
Erase a criminal's capability to commit future crimes.
Allow me to explain. When someone is convicted of committing a crime, their knowledge of how to do such a crime, as well as any information that comes with accomplishing that crime (i.e. someone who is a hunter that killed someone with a gun loses all of their training and instinct for hunting and they can no longer operate a gun). The individuals still go to jail and upon being released, if that even happens, they will be incapable of committing similar crimes. If they commit other crimes, they will continue to lose more capabilities until they are rendered harmless.
I can probably see where this might backfire, though. Criminology would not be as accurate or useful if we were incapable of studying the activities of criminals and we would not be able to ask for help from past criminals (reformed criminals fighting for the law or notorious hackers).
Still, the idea of losing experiences permanently is enough of a deterrent to prevent crimes and it would be funny for drug dealer to lose their ability to count, measure, and hide things.
Allow me to explain. When someone is convicted of committing a crime, their knowledge of how to do such a crime, as well as any information that comes with accomplishing that crime (i.e. someone who is a hunter that killed someone with a gun loses all of their training and instinct for hunting and they can no longer operate a gun). The individuals still go to jail and upon being released, if that even happens, they will be incapable of committing similar crimes. If they commit other crimes, they will continue to lose more capabilities until they are rendered harmless.
I can probably see where this might backfire, though. Criminology would not be as accurate or useful if we were incapable of studying the activities of criminals and we would not be able to ask for help from past criminals (reformed criminals fighting for the law or notorious hackers).
Still, the idea of losing experiences permanently is enough of a deterrent to prevent crimes and it would be funny for drug dealer to lose their ability to count, measure, and hide things.
thats a pretty well reasoned way to put it, but let me pose a few questions that beg to be answered:BNguyen said:
- [li]"by limiting usage to one language we would all have the same understanding of everything" it seems to me that saying it this way is implicitly suggesting an assumption that 'understanding' a concept and 'communicating' a concept through a linguistic medium are near one and the same ie understanding (as a cognitive process) is not independent of the individuals liguistic knowledge. but what is the rational behind this? does everyone not understand mathematics, art, relationships all the same way irrespective of langauge? i think to prove your point here you would need to declare a propistion which is true in one langauge but false in another, which is impossible if you beleive that translations perserve the truth/falsity status of propositions.[/li]
[li]"we only come up with new words to describe or define something we have not yet encountered" what about the following phenomena: "zoological garden" being the entymological precurssor to "zoo". you cant say that this is a case of one word just being 'spelled' differently beacuse this is an instance of two words becoming one, wheres as spelling is an operation on single words. in this case there is nothing conceptually new in the mind of the individual, this is just a matter of combining words for the sake of efficiency. so in other words, there are other operations that generate new words besides a word generating operation used for naming novel concepts.[/li]
but in the first place, no finite list of words would ever be able to encapsulate all meaningul entites or experiences in human life. just think of trying to name the natural numbers, for every n we call it something, but theres always gunna be a n+1, so naming the natural numbers would require an infinite number of distinct words. to remedy this what the langauge needs is an operation for generating new words based off existing words. that way starting with a finite base of words, new words can be constructed by various algorithms to generate an infinitely big list (or at least sufficienty big so that from the human mind in all practicality it is infinite). conversely, just saying this the other way around, for a langauge of this kind every instance of a word would be either a base word or had been constructed from base words.
this is actually the case for all human langauges (the existance of a base set of words), and whats more is that these base sets are identitcal between human langauges (with the relationship of identity being defined as identity of semantic content). its quite easy to justify this to yourself, imagine you go to a foreign country, say japan, and you need to ask where you can find food so you ask someone "how do you say 'food' in japanese?" why would you assume that japanese has a word for food? because intuitively, you know that a base set exists in japanese that encapsulates such commonly encounted concepts as 'food', 'hello', 'head', 'pain', 'water', etc.
so really the way langauges differ, is in three ways:
1)how the words are represented in speech (phonology and phonetics)
2)how the base words are combined to get new words (morphology)
3)how the base words and derivations are appended with language specific words, and then ordered to produce a comprehensible speech act (syntax)
so, to unify langauge, since we would already have a base set to work with (a semantic core), we would only have to specify the above 3 parameters. becuase of its considerable arbitrariness, a writing system could be defined later; it is not nearly as important as the other 3 parameters. basically my thesis here is that to maintain unification, you have to prevent any and all change in these 3 domains specifically; since change implies linguistic diversification. i think this program would be absolutely miserable lolz...
I wouldn't, all of our actions are rationalised by our own internal logic, to change that would be to recreate every individual person into something different, maybe something better, but what right would I have to do such a thing?
Individuality. At least we'd get things done.
Just kidding I like arguing, I'd erase stupidity. Because while I like arguing, I don't like arguing with idiots; even less when there are more than one.
Just kidding I like arguing, I'd erase stupidity. Because while I like arguing, I don't like arguing with idiots; even less when there are more than one.
A thread like this is just begging to have all the self-hating emos come out of the woodwork and talk about how mankind doesn't deserve to live. Yaaaawn. I'd want those people to go out and do something productive to try and make things better, instead of sitting around wishing everyone was dead and hating on everything.
You're right all innovation would stop.Trent Kama said:
Me I honestly don't know. Everything serves a purpose, and unless I can eliminate the thing for only a specific group of people or within a certain range then I honestly can't think of anything. I mean sure disease and genetic disorders would be nice, but they seem pretty lackluster and half assed.
