On 9/29/2015 at 7:50 AM, Asker of Questions said:
Is there value in having your mind blown just for the f*** of it?
Other posts have addressed the utility of astronomy, but not the actual question posed. I thought it might also be good to address this question. The main reason why nobody addressed this question is because it isn’t a literally-interpretable request for discussion, but we can remedy that. First there is the question of what you mean by “having your mind blown”. In a somewhat literal interpretation, destroying your mind is the antithesis of “value”, it leads to death, when your head literally explodes. So you must not mean that. Second, I don’t understand the meaning of “just for the f*** of it”, I assume you mean “without any purpose at all”, or “at random”. I do not think that a person can truly act at random, without some external controlling device (i.e. a random number generator that determines your actions). Humans choose their actions, and despite rhetoric to the contrary, it is not a random choice, it is based on some purpose – possibly a very stupid purpose or possibly based on terrible logic. There is no “just for the f*** of it”.
People often choose an action because they conclude it will yield an immediate physical good, such as food or lumber, or a stand-in for goods – money. This is one type of life benefit. Receipt of money can be immediate, but money itself is a delayed good, a potential – you can use it to buy food or lumber, or whatever. That’s why we moved from a barter economy. The ability to see a future benefit is also a rational purpose. It is always possible that the projected good will fall apart, that’s why I kick myself for buying a Kaypro rather than an IBM (just kidding). Because man’s nature is to survive by reason and reason is the faculty that integrates perceptual knowledge into conceptual knowledge, expanding knowledge has the potential to facilitate man’s survival.
However, every individual must arrange values in a hierarchy, so that you can decide “what should I do?”. While knowledge is valuable to man, generically, not all knowledge is equally valuable to all men. I place more importance on understanding the tone changes in the Logoori counterfactual conditional that I do on understanding string theory. I imagine others have those two purposes in the opposite order in their own hierarchy. There is no “universal hierarchy of values”, because not all humans have exactly the same nature. Some things, like “being the rational animal”, are universal for men (and not applicable to dogs). So in asking if there is value in something, that has to mean “does anyone find that thing to be relatively important”. So, compared to what? I suspect that faced with the choice “You can know all of these facts about stars, but only on the condition that you die 5 minutes later”, most people would not chose that offer of knowledge over existence. When you flesh out “of value – to whom – and compared to what?” the question becomes unanswerable. If you just look at the picture especially on a web page, your immediate emotional reaction may be minimal and if that is as far as you go, then it is of little value to you compared to e.g. someone giving you a Testarossa. Astronomers make a different use of this information, just as I make a different use of a Logoori person saying “if they had seen”, and astronomers just don’t care.