>I said "beyond usual human comprehension". Meaning, not able to be
>understood by most of the people in the society, and considered to be
>outside normal human understanding.
Are you saying the proof of Fermat's Theorem is shamanistic? I don't think
shamanism has so much to do with understanding as it does with gullibility.
For instance, there are mathematical transformations that I know that I
will never get my head totally around ... but I can understand the
principles well enough to believe the results. On the other hand the first
principles of Shamanism aren't clear to me at all.
Wade, if you've stated the first principles in an earlier post would you
mind recapping them for me? Can they be quantified?
Eva-Lise Carlstrom wrote:
>Besides which, do you really mean to claim there is nothing that is
beyond
>human comprehension?
Is knowing why you cannot know something the same as its being beyond
comprehension? I would think we would have to define terms here ... I
think it is still to early to claim that anything is or is not beyond our
comprehension. For instance I'm told we have a pretty good hypothesis
about what happened milliseconds after the birth of the universe, but no
knowledge about what happened before those first milliseconds. If we know
that it would take more energy then currently exists in the universe to
perform an experiment that could establish what happened at that time does
that mean that those events are beyond our comprehension or simply
unknowable?