Philosophy Now Forum

attofishpi wrote:Check the timestamps peoples...going toe to toe with atheists that have bowed out..pathetic.

One of which you purposely ignored, and both of which you wouldn't, and couldn't, answer, after making wild accusations regarding the identities of Leo and I. The only pathetic thing is your behaviour, as anyone who follows this thread can plainly deduce.

People like you I will not abide, and will not bother with.

Obvious Leo wrote: Me too. However in my case it's a bit more than simply annoyance, it's more a case of genuine outrage.

Of course, but not at Doc, who is a low-wattage advert (Some of them are salvageable.) I reserve my outrage for Billy Graham and their various holimesses, the popes, chief rabbis and ayatollahs.

When is enough going to be enough? When will the bloodthirsty tastes of the god of vengeance finally be slaked? Has our world not feared and obeyed this misanthropic villain for long enough?

Come, come! All villains in a novel can do is commit the acts their authors dream up. All gods, devils and angels can do is carry out the deepest, most secret desires of the people who invent them. It's never going to be enough until humanity grows up or self-destructs. A tight race.

Skip wrote: I reserve my outrage for Billy Graham and their various holimesses, the popes, chief rabbis and ayatollahs.

And their apologists -- don't forget the foot soldiers of the holy crusade.

Skip wrote:Come, come! All villains in a novel can do is commit the acts their authors dream up.

Too true, Skip. My rhetorical flourishes have cast the blame at a non-existent being instead of at those who would oppress their fellow man by appealing to their innermost fears and ignorance. Religion has always been the tool of the oppressor because "divide and conquer" has always been the most effective strategy of the tyrant. Us is us and Them is them and when things go pear-shaped in our lives its always THEIR fault.

Skip wrote: It's never going to be enough until humanity grows up or self-destructs. A tight race.

In my opinion if the problem of religion is not sorted out within the next generation our species may not see the century out. If not within one generation then certainly within two it will become possible for a single well-resourced and determined individual to bring about the extinction of the entire human race. I'm in no doubt that such evil-hearted villains do and will continue to exist and I'm not even sure that this would be such a bad thing. Biologists tells us that human-level sentience could evolve and become extinct at least 100 more times on planet earth before it becomes too uncomfortably hot to sustain life. With any luck you'd reckon somebody would get it right eventually and if it's not us then it doesn't deserve to be us. Nature obviously doesn't give a shit because she has an honourable track record of simply casting her failures into the wastebasket of cosmic history and moving on. When evolution stops for any given species that's the end of the ball game because neither can evolution cannot go backwards. It's onwards or bust.

Would it be worth speculating which species comes up after us, and what kind of world-order they'll create? I often speculate about that, privately.

I think any new self-aware species that have needs and ego will inevitably mess things up the way we have.

Dalek Prime wrote:I think any new self-aware species that have needs and ego will inevitably mess things up the way we have.

I suspect you're right, Dalek, and for very good biological reasons. Homo sapiens was his own genetic engineer. He climbed to the top of the tree of sentience by eating the dumb ones and he's never managed to shake off the habit. Armageddon is probably hard-wired into us because no species could ever become this smart without following a similar evolutionary trajectory. Once a species reaches a certain level of sentience it has no natural predators left apart from others of its own kind. There is no other possible evolutionary imperative for increasing intelligence.

"Homo hominis lupus est"... Plautus. "Man is the wolf of man"

Of course Plautus was a playwright and not an evolutionary biologist so he probably imagined he was composing a metaphor rather than making a scientific statement. As it happens he was doing both.

"The survival value of human intelligence has never been satisfactorily demonstrated"....Michael Crichton

Skip wrote:Would it be worth speculating which species comes up after us, and what kind of world-order they'll create? I often speculate about that, privately.

I'm a dog-lover, Skip, so I wouldn't mind seeing the dogs have a crack at it. They're a lot nicer than us and most of them are a lot smarter as well. All they need is hands and they'll be ruling the world in no time.

Dalek Prime wrote:I think any new self-aware species that have needs and ego will inevitably mess things up the way we have.

I don't think it's as inevitable or obvious as all that. Some of the most intelligent are less aggressive than the late-stage chimps - and, anyway, the bonobos might have got the breaks instead. Much is down to geography, weather, and just plain luck.

I don't see canines or felines in the front running, partly because they're carnivores - one-tracked minds, not inventive. (On the other hand, I may be wrong http://www.amazon.com/Lives-Monster-Dog ... 1574531123)

Some clever omnivore is more likely. Pigs are handicapped by hooves; bears, by solitude. If the environment is fairly hospitable, I'd vote for raccoons; if it's bad, the rats have a good shot; if it's crappy, cockroaches will rule.

Whether the inheritors mess up will depend on how practical they are. If they can avoid superstition, they'll be okay.

The bonobos are just primate hippies, Skip, but peace and love don't cut it when it comes to survival skills. Homo is the top order uber-predator on the planet precisely because he's a carnivore. Carnivores are always the most intelligent organisms in any food web for two reasons. Meat has a far higher energy and protein content per mass than vegetation which makes it a more efficient food. It also contains a number of crucial catalytic enzymes needed for brain evolution which cannot be obtained from plants. Secondly carnivores are smarter than their prey because they've got to be. A dumb hunter starves. Pick any food web you like and at the top of it you'll find a murderer because as the saying goes:

"Nature is red in tooth and claw"...Alfred Lord Tennyson

Obvious Leo wrote:The bonobos are just primate hippies, Skip, but peace and love don't cut it when it comes to survival skills. Homo is the top order uber-predator on the planet precisely because he's a carnivore. Carnivores are always the most intelligent organisms in any food web for two reasons. Meat has a far higher energy and protein content per mass than vegetation which makes it a more efficient food. It also contains a number of crucial catalytic enzymes needed for brain evolution which cannot be obtained from plants. Secondly carnivores are smarter than their prey because they've got to be. A dumb hunter starves. Pick any food web you like and at the top of it you'll find a murderer because as the saying goes:

"Nature is red in tooth and claw"...Alfred Lord Tennyson

I would agree that a carnivore is the most likely suspect, something that could evolve into the same function as hands would be useful. I have a program on disk where a scientist claims that cooking was one factor that led to higher intelligence. According to his research, cooked food is easier to digest, therefore requiring less energy, and it releases more energy to the organism when digested. So the net result is more energy for brain development, and a smaller gut. I believe I recently read that the brain consumes 20% of the energy consumed by the body, yet only constitutes a few percent of the weight of the body. It seems that high intelligence requires a lot more energy.

attofishpi wrote:
Physicists on paper are suggesting far more dimensions that create our reality

They only exist at the quantum level so do not affect our perception of reality

Doc, I saw a show that mentioned the same thing about cooked food, in particular protein. It was suggested that man came upon beasts caught in forest fires, and developed a taste for it, as well as the appreciation that it could be more readily chewed and digested. That protein-dense food helped us to increase our brain mass. And with that brain, and our unique hands, we learned to plant, harness other animals for our work and food, and settle from hunting and gathering. Communities could then develop language, and the rest is truly history, because we could pass it down.

Two things made us the dominant species; brains and the ability to manipulate objects. Whatever comes next will need that mix.

Doc and Dalek. The prevailing wisdom is just as you say, both about meat in general and cooked meat in particular. These were crucial evolutionary developments in terms of both brain size and brain complexity and similar evolutionary trajectories are seen in other mammalian predators. In the natural world there's no such thing as a smart vegetarian and there probably never will be. Even humans who choose a vegetarian diet need to go to quite a lot of effort to acquire all the various proteins and enzymes they need for health. It can be a healthy option for those willing to put the work in but the health outcomes are not good for those who aren't.

Interestingly amongst birds the herbivore/ carnivore divide is not so clear cut. However some birds are extremely smart. For instance the biologists reckon that the second most intelligent group of animals on the planet behind homo are the corvids. I get a number of corvid species on my property and I've always been quite a bird-lover and will therefore attest to this. Corvids are very clever indeed, as are the parrots, but corvids are not only tool-users, they are also tool-makers. In our entire biosphere it is thought that only the higher-order primates can match them in this.

Omnivore, not carnivore. It's an important distinction, because, 1. you can survive for long periods in the absence of prey animals and 2. you develop a lot more creativity and curiosity, looking for different kinds of food than by specializing in a single skill.

The other thing is: Our projections come from a sample of precisely one dominant species. We've seen some behaviours in common with various other species, but we've never seen anything else behave the way we do, or have our kinds of obsession, especially that one with our image. Who says every other species - or even any other species - want to dominate? Suppose, once we're out of the way, they all just find their ecological niche, work as much as they need to, relax the rest of the time, and nobody commands them to "fill the earth and subdue it?" Maybe we were a tragic fluke that won't happen again.

Skip wrote:Omnivore, not carnivore. It's an important distinction, because, 1. you can survive for long periods in the absence of prey animals and 2. you develop a lot more creativity and curiosity, looking for different kinds of food than by specializing in a single skill.

The other thing is: Our projections come from a sample of precisely one dominant species. We've seen some behaviours in common with various other species, but we're never seen anything else behave the way we do, or our kinds of obsession with image. Who says every other species - or even any other species - want to dominate? Suppose, once we're out of the way, they all just find their ecological niche, work as much as they need to, relax the rest of the time, and nobody commands them to "fill the earth and subdue it?" Maybe we were a tragic fluke that won't happen again.

Well, I doubt we wanted to dominate anything as scurrying little mammals, but the tragic happened, and here we are. I hope it is just a fluke, and everything just kind of flows again in harmony, as you say, Skip, after we're gone.

That, btw, is what VHEMT is hoping for.

http://vhemt.org