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Vulture comments on Rationality Quotes April 2012 - Less Wrong
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Leonid: Without a purpose, a man is nothing.
Newton: Yes. But we wonder...do you share our gift? Do you have the necessary vision? Do you know the final fate of man?
Leonid: How could anyone know things like that?
Council: The Greater Science. The Quiet Math. The Silent Truth. The Hidden Arts. The Secret Alchemy.
Newton: Every question has an answer. Every equation has a solution.
Isn't one of the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorem that there will always be unanswerable questions?
Only if the questioner is consistent.
And there's no way to tell whether the questioner is inconsistent, or there exist unanswerable questions, right? [In any case, I would be greatly astonished if "What is the final fate of man?" was found to be isomorphic to a human Godel sentence ;-) ]
The point of this one isn't clear.
I guess it probably should have been broken up into a couple of shorter ones, but it was a single, short exchange and I just couldn't resist. That the question of the final fate of man, can, like any question, be answered with a greater science, with the hidden arts... this is essentially the message of transhumanist rationality, and it was beautifully phraseds here. "Without a purpose, a man is nothing"... this really should have been off on its own, in retrospect, but its meaning is a little bit less obscure, I think.