GPS, what a thoughtful post. Very interesting. As you say, in SI we are mostly in the burning at Shiva's feet, aflame with passion, ignorance and desire. Stuck in our genetic codes, with a brain only 1 kg big, I don't think we'll be clear of it any time soon, with DNA twisted up in Gordian knots holding it all together. Not that I have heard of Shiva, so maybe I have the analogy wrong. Google, having a much bigger brain than 1 kg, will know.
The Gordian knot of the human brain is being cut right now, as the knowledge is freed to roam in the wilds of cyberspace. A law unto itself - a zygotic consciousness on a grand scale. The fifth force, joining the four forces of the apocalypse, is consciousness, which creates the other forces in the same way that Schroedinger's Cat is brought to life by the observer and a photon's state is brought into existence by an observer.
But I don't buy this commonly asserted idea: <
While I don’t think that our genetic coding could have significantly changed over the last 5,000 years, I do think that our self-understanding has developed at a breakneck speed. This has allowed us to move from hunter/gatherer societies to space explorers within an astoundingly short interval >
On the contrary, I assert that the change has been phenomenal and is still rapidly underway. As proven in the last hundred years by the Flynn Effect.
The idea that change is slow is because mutation rates are slow. But we don't need mutations to make changes in the population total. We just need filtration. Assuming that 100 people 5,000 years ago had one good gene each which nobody else had. Over 5,000 years, those 100 special genes could replace all the others by selecting them more and more in each generation.
Hey presto, something which wasn't even evident 5,000 years ago, being concealed inside 100 different people, with just one gene each, stirred up among millions, appears like a ghost out of the night and 6 billion people all have those 100 genes, doubled [having got them from their mother and father].
We can see a similar process in the breeding of dogs. A rat-dog looks nothing like a wolf, and neither does a great dane or bull-dog. It was just filtration and selection, without much mutation helping.
Women are notable for their picky picky attitude to blokes. Any bloke of even slightly average DNA finds that women are NOT lining up so he can have his way with them. Sure, Brad Pitt and co might find a large surplus, but the below average blokes, and especially the bottom 10%, have a tough time.
I doubt that the bottom 5% makes it out of each generation into the next one. If they squeak by in one generation, they certainly won't make it for the next 100 generations.
I've got nothing against violence. Nature is founded on the four forces of the apocalypse and throughout the biological world, force and violence are essential to carving out a piece of real estate and having dinner. I eat plants and animals. That's violent. Sure, I can arrange it very easily, so it's not as gory as an elephant ripping plants to pieces without anaesthetic, or a bunch of lions eating a buffalo alive, or a praying mantis consuming a fly bit by bit while it tries to escape.
My point is just that in hssn relations, there isn't a useful purpose for violence these days. Cooperation is wildly successful. $ill Gates has a large army all cooperating to defeat the enemy. QCOM has a large force too, and hires IBM and others to do the ASIC production which they sell to hordes in China who use the mobile cyberspace to help them produce mountains of stuff Made in China.
Violence was for when women were having 10 or 15 children each, which they had to do so that their tribe could have sufficient young males to take over neighbouring tribes in genocidal battle. With population pressure, people simply had to fight to survive. If they didn't have the children and succeed, their neighbouring tribes would.
At that time, food was a matter of territory and hunter gathering or agriculture in recent millennia. Land was essential to survival. Numbers were essential to getting land. Violence was essential. There's nothing wrong with violence from a four forces of the apocalypse law of nature point of view.
But cooperation, specialization and tools have become more and more important over the millennia until now there really is not much point in violence other than to get a few natural resources such as oil and maybe because the value of a lot of young blokes is low and in an effort to find something for them to do, an invasion and genocide becomes tempting - as per Rwanda. There's always the old megalomaniac drive too, which can lead to carnage on a grand scale even if it's a really stupid idea = such as Germans thinking that Sieg Heil was a good chant and Japanese thinking that an empire would be good sport. A couple of nukes put paid to that thinking.
The Geek shall inherit the Earth. They are already mostly there. It is not just a cultural shift, in which hssn choose to be cooperative. It's contained in the DNA.
It was only a few thousand years ago that dogs were wolves. It's only a few thousand years before that that people were quite like chimps. The change is very fast once the trend is set. Punctuated equilibrium is the jargon.
Mqurice |
