Uninteresting in the context that nothing of that sort exists and everything can just be explained with a scientific explanation. Does it take away all interest/mystery from it all for anyone else? I wish all that shit did exist because it’d make things a whole lot more interesting.
What I like to say is that the universe is interesting enough as it is without needing to make anything up. Perhaps ghosts and demons and cryptids don’t exist, but what about dark matter and dark energy? They make up the majority of the universe and we don’t know what they are. Why did the Big Bang happen? What’s inside a black hole? Are there aliens out there? How the heck are we even alive?
A big part of science is acknowledging that we really kind of don’t know a lot about the world around us. Scientists regularly find things that just make us think, “Wait a second, this shouldn’t have been possible…” Just because there are some things that we do know, doesn’t mean that we know everything. And likely, we won’t be able to know everything, even in the far future. It’s ok to want a bit of mysticism! In fact, science encourages you to dream big and think about what sorts of things haven’t been discovered yet. But there’s too many dreams and too many undiscovered things, and you need to pick and choose which things to get excited about.
Why get excited about demons when you can discover where the demons came from and which group of humans named them? Why get excited about cryptids when 90% of species are still undiscovered and the ocean trenches are virtually completely unexplored? In the same vein that a friend who responds to your messages is more interesting than a friend who ghosts you, wouldn’t it also be true that a field that promises real unknowns and consistent discoveries is more interesting than a field that maybe, possibly might have discoveries?
To put it bluntly, if you think science isn’t full of unknowns and hopes and dreams, then you’re not digging deep enough!
It’s up to you to make your life interesting. Don’t blame it on Bigfoot
The avid cryptozoologists in my extended social sphere are among the least interesting people I know, so I think you are on to something here.
Umm, what makes you think that if they did exist they wouldn’t also be explainable by science? Also, if you dig really deep into anything you’ll find all kinds of fascinating stuff even if it’s not supernatural.
My thought exactly! If anything of the type OP mentioned did actually exist, it would now be in the realm of science! Science at its core is just observation.
Does the realm of science include all established science or all of reality?
Both, I would think. What’s currently undiscovered in reality will only be discovered by employing science, in some degree.
These things would have had to exist to make life interesting in the first place. My life isn’t less interesting because Superman does not exist. Like their immortal counterparts, the gods, cryptids don’t explain anything, they just introduce more questions. It’s a fun fantasy, and folk lore and mythology are endlessly interesting, but they are just that.
Superman doesn’t exist??!!! Next you’re going to tell me Santa doesn’t exist. I’m not listening to you 🙉
I hope you’re sitting down because I have some bad news about the Easter Bunny.
Is it going to be about where a bunny gets so many eggs?
There is a monster in the mountains near my home. It’s known to have killed many people across history.
There are instances where these things are known to have hunted humans. They’re incredibly strong, weigh as much as a car and can take your head off in a single swipe.
Few people who encounter an angry one survive.
They call this beast… A grizzly bear.
There is a lot of Internet lore about the “fact” that the word westerners use for bear comes from “brown one” (bruin is one version) because their ancestors were so terrified of bears that they wouldn’t utter their actual name for bears, and it’s since been lost. This is similar to plenty of modern religious beliefs about only using euphemisms when referring to Satan (et. al.).
That said, true or not, our ancestors have left cave paintings suggesting that they were terrified of, you know, lions and tigers and bears, but also wolves and aurochs (the ancestors of cows).
If I remember correctly, there is some truth to that - fear of naming the things due to the belief they it might summon it. However, I think that the word is known.
If cryptids were real, youd probably think they were uninteresting too. The platypus for example, was thought to be fake by a lot of people right after they were discovered because they were so unusual. But now that you know that theyre real, they dont seem THAT interesting. Theyre a weird animal sure but not so weird that you doubt that they exist.
And if magic were real youd probably think it was just as mundane as a lot of science is because you were accustomed to the world having magic in it and working in a particular way. Especially considering that a lot of science is far enough beyond your current understanding that it may as well be magic. i.e just as unpredictable.
But I would argue that understanding things does not make them uninteresting. There are plenty of car guys that think cars are just the most fascinating things that have ever been made and they probably understand cars better than everyone on the planet except for the engineers that designed them. And beyond that, just because magic isn’t real does not mean that there aren’t things that we do not currently understand, it just means that there is nothing in principle that we cannot understand and thats inspiring and exciting. To me part of what makes the world interesting is that we are capable of solving the riddles of how things work and we can use that knowledge to create things that have never existed before.
I dunno…the idea of nothing existed and then a big bang happened and all this shit coalesced and formed and it’s been here so long it’s all too far away. … I mean, WTF? Explain that? That leads to all sorts of potential… the dinosaurs were around for tens of millions of years. TENS!! OF MILLIONS!! I guess, human ancestors were here 6million years ago too.far out, nothing then something. Science says a big bang… like a pop test? Anyways, I think theres no room for ghosts and shit when there’s all the unexplored
Isn’t this enough?
Just this world?
Just this beautiful, complex, wonderfully unfathomable, natural world?
How does it so fail to hold our attention that we have to
Diminish it with the invention of cheap, man-made myths and monsters?
If you′re so into your Shakespeare, lend me your ear:
"To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw perfume on the violet… is just fucking silly"
Or something like that.
Do you think we’ve somehow explained everything that exists already? Or are you just sad that the particular things you want to exist don’t exist?
I think the basic fact of physical existence of anything is so interesting and unexplainable that it doesn’t really matter whether we have explained some of the mechanics of how it’s working now.
If ghosts and demons existed and were explained by science, why would you find them more interesting than alligators and consciousness and humans and oceans and dimensions, all the stuff that is in existence? The way we can transmit information with light? The planets and space?
Did you try to learn Quantum Mechanics? The weird shit that exists there beats ghosts and demons.
I watched Ant-Man…does that count?
Does it take away all interest/mystery from it all for anyone else?
Not really.
To quote Douglas Adams:
"Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too”?
Or Richard Feynman
I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.
If they existed, scientists would study them like everything else and they’d become just as mundane.
Do you realise that the more we discover, the more questions we have that cannot be explained by science?
- Dark matter and dark energy
- Quantum entanglement
- Quantum gravity
- Singularity in a black hole
One day scientists might find answers to those questions, and I am sure even more puzzling questions will come up.
It is far from boring.
Yeah? Magnets, how do they work? Seriously. Go beyond the high school level explanation and suddenly you find no one really knows.
This is a real scientist explaining why this is so difficult.
Post- high school I’ve seen explanations that describe magnetism as a consequence of electricity with the understanding of relativistic effects.
Quantum entanglement, black holes, dark energy … all way more interesting than ghosts. We know these things exist and hope that science may one day be able to unravel them.
And replace cryptids with life that exists in some of the most extreme areas of Earth. Life in those areas have evolved some really weird ways of surviving and can be unlike anything you or I see on a day to day basis. Show one of these creatures to someone from ancient times and they’d think it was a monster/cryptid of some kind.
Even everyday animals are extremely interesting. We overlook ants all the time. One time I stopped to watch some ants. There was a big ant and a bunch of little ones. The little ones were fighting the big one. It fought back valiantly, but was overwhelmed and died. Then the little ants started dragging it away. There was this whole battle happening right beneath my feet and I almost didn’t see it. How many of those battles do I literally step over while walking to my car.
The world is incredibly complex and fascinating. You don’t need to add ghosts, Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness Monster to make the world interesting.
