The Epic of Gilgamesh narrative certainly was the seed for Near-East/Western cultures, including Near East/Western moralities. Could an absolute among peoples from this lineage be drawn from this? I think so.
I wouldn’t extend it down to genetic levels though as it’s cultural. But it extends so far back in our collective histories in those regions influenced by the Epic of Gilgamesh that its power is indisputable.
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https://www.britannica.com/topic/Heike-monogatari According to encyclopedia britannica, the Heike monogatari serves a similar function for them as Gilgamesh did for us.
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Whatever culture wasn’t written or drawn or transmitted orally through successive generations, was lost, sadly. But what we do have is rich enough to keep us busy.
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That said, I learned at a young age, “information is neither created nor destroyed” (as I was a physics buff as I would watch Carl Sagan’s COSMOS and Nova with my grandmother as a little boy).
I believed that this held true for all information of any kind.
I still want to believe it. I begrudgingly accept that there is irretrievably lost knowledge that, without a time travel machine, can never return, but I still fight to maintain what information we have, whether it is my own personal memories or internet history (hence my interest in Internet Archive.
I still don’t want to accept the concept of information being destroyed, even though I intellectually know it is true.
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[on a side note two levels removed (two dimensions away) from the OP, I wonder if I were to fully “be ok” with the reality of information being destroyed, would many of my hobbies and habits change? I currently save everything that I can. It “feels important” to fight entropy. Yet what if I were to fully accept entropy of information? I don’t know].
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Never ceases to bother me though. I guess I believed something incorrectly when I was young, and when I discovered “the truth” it was traumatic enough for me to change my habits and ways around maintaining data and correctness of information lest other information that was not true (inaccuracy bothers me less than falsehoods) would then dominate.
In short, trying to make true (information is neither created nor destroyed) something that isn’t.
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Yeah that’s what I believed when I was a kid and I’m *still* trying to reconcile with the idea that it might not be so.
Or even if it *is* so, it’s closer to a religious text / fantasy story because we have more evidence to the contrary than to support it.
I still want to believe it though. I still ultimately believe it. Yet the pragmatic part of me keeping trying to make it true by saving and tracking information that is under my purview, like a duty that’s been assigned to me somehow to make sure that theory is made true to the best of my ability.
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But what if information is inaccessible to us in perpetuity? Can we say something exists if we cannot show that it exists? This is where it crosses over into religious belief, which is fine, but I’m working on proper categorization of concepts.‘
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Oh by religious I mean ‘faith based’. Hope. The realm of maybe and someday and perhaps.
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What of that experiment they did… oh what was it… where they used a magnetic trick to temporarily shoot beyond absolute 0K and noticed some odd properties?
I should find it – see if it was confirmed or not. Is that related?
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t But here’s another issue : a thorny one when we use physics as a metaphor for all information : [and physics itself uses mathematics as metaphor for real world things, which thankfully works unreasonably well for that purpose] :
what of lies? conditionals? half-truths? They are information.
By what paths do we determine truth values? We have some things that are observable but not all things are amenable to photons, at least not directly and rely instead on narratives as information bearer.
If a narrative is corrupted and that is the pathway we use to determine truth-values, how will we know?
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Absolute truths, even if fictions, then also exist as information. Conditional truths, even if fictions, also exist as information. I suppose this is where pragmatic truth comes into play. Pragmatic truth is perhaps less logically and mathematically satisfying, but it gets the job done.
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One place where fermion and boson statistics may be interchanged is in our imaginations. That is one place where we can hold such contradictions simultaneously even if we cannot find a way to map such concepts mathematically.
So that’s something.
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