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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (33964)	3/12/2004 2:55:59 PM
From: frankw1900	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793800

We don't evolve. Systems do. And we "Pavlov" to the system. Unfortunately, we have to do it by little by little, with lots of fallbacks. [This rambles. It got a bit out of hand but I think it's sort of interesting.] I think we are evolving. We hit a plateau, or at least, fell into metaphysics, an area of activity with vast possibilities which as far as we know, no other animal has: we have thought and language and can invent incredibly complicated things which other creatures can only do through long evolutionary process. This has allowed us to fill up just about every niche on earth and if we don't kill ourselves, probably the oceans and outer space as well. Despite this, it doesn't take much description to realize that, not counting remarkable outriders, as a group, we really don't think very well. Most of us are particularly bad at inventing or dealing with novelty. (This is not surprising since we are immersed in the space we move through and only with difficulty through an extended chilhood do we manage to distinguish it and others from ourselves, mostly in ways which if not error prone are inadequate and which often discard the advantages of childhood). Nonetheless, once the novelty has appeared we usually take it up, make it ordinary, and celebrate or denigrate the inventor - sometimes for generations and centuries. These days, it's rather easy to see that inventors are a special group because the vast majority of patents are invented by a minority, the members of which usually hold multiple patents. I suspect these folk probably differ in some subtle physical way from the rest of the population and it's possible this might even show up genetically. (Are there any "genetic psychologists", yet?) What the hell has this to do with what you wrote? I was going someplace with this riff. 'Systems evolve, we don't.' Those systems were created by thinking people. Some of those systems possibly have an effect on our evolution making it move in changing directions. Given our genetic uniformity, it's pretty clear, I think, we've tended to breed out most of the time and we tend to select for physical, social, and mental competence. But it's only a tendency - we don't do it all the time and some of the systems we invent mitigate against it and the criteria are a bit different depending on place and time. In evolutionary terms, the last few millennia have been rockem sockem for the human race. Changes in conditions have been speeding up mostly due to our own activities, and if, collectively, we misjudge enough, we'll jeopardize our own existence. It's the matter of judgement, high quality thought, which is becoming increasingly important. You say we 'Pavlov' to the systems, which we create. Perhaps...perhaps not. Evolution made us into metaphysical beings and as a result, through empirical and theoretical thinking, we drastically changed our conditions of existence in a way no other animal has. Some of us probably think better than our recent ancestors (but not very much better) and high quality thinking is always vulnerable to emotions, which over the centuries have received much less formal examination than mathematics, but also have a highly metaphysical (abstractable?) component the initial descriptions of which are more difficult to achieve than were those of mathematics (which took millennia). There are valid reasons it's more difficult to describe initial conditions of an emotional science than of mathematics. We move through space and act in it, we can look at it, divide it up, with effort we can derive it's relations as mathematics. But emotions 'move through us' and 'act on us'. Emotions 'r us. Under such circumstances description is extremely difficult and we've mostly fallen back on the ostensive work of artists, story tellers and the intuitive activities of shamen and priests. It's work of great delicacy and importance because emotions make life worthwhile. They give it zing and piquancy, and drive creative thought, but emotions also can ruin high quality thinking. Consider what emotions did to German thinking in the 20th century and what they're doing to the thought of a significant part of the world's Muslim population right now. (We intuitively consider those with a limited emotional palette as defective or downright dangerous and this judgement was formalized by clinical work with brain damaged soldiers post WW1). In evolutionary terms, it's interesting to think about how many psychologists there were 100 years ago (maybe a thousand, maybe ten thousand?) and how many psychologists (not therapists or psychiatrists) there are now - millions? An awful lot, anyway. Most of them won't do any significant work but that's not the point. It's this: we need to think better, and in an instant of evolutionary time, we have zillions of people doing psychological research. Seems kind of proactive for Pavlovians. It seems more like we work the "system".