Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (38363)	9/21/1999 1:44:00 PM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

Ah, it is always a pleasure to engage in stimulating discussion with someone of such grace, refinement, and penetrating intellect....Here are the posts I promised: Message 11228434 Delbert Kroupa: After you are done laughing, answer this. How much consciousness,emotion, artistic expression, ideas, or intellect would you possess if, from the moment of your birth, you were never taught anything. You would have no exposure to books, art, ideas, emotion, etc., only fed so that you wouldn't die. All of these things are the result of absorbing the collective wisdom passed on to us by all of our ancestors, just as it was passed to them. It happens much the same way that physical evolution does, with bad ideas falling by the wayside, and the good ones prevailing. Many of the "new" ideas come to us by observing nature, and trial and error. techstocks.com Neo: Del, you have been suckered by a common fallacy. There is no "progress" in mechanistic evolution, no question of "good" prevailing and "bad" falling by the wayside. It is simply a matter of environmental compatability....the survival of the fittest TO SURVIVE, whatever the conditions....Cultural progress, including the progress of science, depends on an element which is very unlike evolution, the active intellect hypothesizing and constructing tests for its hypotheses.... techstocks.com Lather: >Cultural progress, including the progress of science, depends on an element which is very unlike evolution, the active intellect hypothesizing and constructing tests for its hypotheses.... < ... but in a way it is very like evolution. The progressive element in biological evolution is that if the current species is chosen as a baseline, we can start "doing combinations" on its genetic code. The current theory favors random mutations - lots of them. Many give up fitness, and their stock dies out. Many others are neutral in terms of fitness or advantage. They might or might not stick around for the ride, depending on with what genotype they are bundled. But a very few confer advantage and advance the subgroup's and then the species' baseline level of "fitness". If that isn't progress - what is? In the intellectual arena - a new idea needs to be tested and found sound or at least interesting. This is the life-or-death analog. Intellectual progress can be held up indefinitely by applying external and irrational canons a priori. Only when these canons can be tested for soundness and subject to evolutionary pressure can we think of intellectual progress. Jmo techstocks.com Neo: Mechanism and purposive cultivation are essential unlike, although, as with selective breeding, they may in some respects resemble one another. In any event, the conditions that affect the viability of an idea have less to do with truth than with its ability to be understood, remembered, and accepted by a large mass of people...