>>12101506There should be a name for it. The illusion that one lives in peak times of enlightenment.. This illusion submits to the idea that no more major conceptual breakthroughs in human understanding are possible. It subscribes to a very narrow sense of human knowledge. Typically it encompasses the belief that the state of human consciousness remains essentially the same, and compares only recent technological innovations within recorded history, ignoring anything outside this domain. It thinks in very short time frames.
It does not weight upon them to consider that at one point in human history human ancestors had no sentience. Nor does it occur to them at at one point human ancestors had no abstract reasoning powers. At one time there was no concept of numbers, or causation, both of which are fundamental to the development of mathematical systems and science. Yet here we are.
Their willful arrogance and conceit are such they can not envisage a future time when mathematical concepts and scientific principles may change, as a result of further conceptual breakthroughs, to become unrecognizable by the standards of today. One only needs to look at recent history, the overturning of the heliocentric model, the development of subatomic physics, the advance of cosmology, the advent of evolutionary theory, to witness ample evidence that knowledge and science are constantly changing, and that breakthroughs in understanding in occur in clusters or sparsely over long periods of time. And these are fairly trivial breakthroughs compared to the magnitude of insight by the human who fashioned the first fishhook.
Whether it takes 100 years or 10,000, a blink in human history, one can be reasonably certain that conceptual ideas and knowledge will keep advancing ( providing an extinction doesn't happen ). In the far future our descendants may consider the current concepts of things such as energy, matter, to be as archaic as we consider alchemy and witchcraft today.
