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Strategies & Market Trends : ahhaha's ahs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: frankw1900 who wrote (7828)	3/16/2006 8:52:31 PM
From: ahhaha	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24758

Intelligence is not confined to humans. Darwin's work and all other work since confirms life seeks niches. Niche seeking is intelligent behaviour. Niche seeking appears intelligent to intelligent beings, but not to the niche seekers. Their actions are conditioned externally, else they wouldn't become subject to the vulnerabilities of the niche where variants don't tread. Grace's cat is a good example of a species branching out into a new niche - the symbiont business. It gives her the right signals and she provides it with food and shelter and removes its crap. Mighty smooth move for a ferocious predator. It seems some cats and dogs have modified the "vector" of their evolution and "re-fixed" their environment. As I implied, the cat didn't do it. Grace did. So does intelligence move a creature beyond the power of evolution once it's developed a theory of evolution? Wrong order. Writing is an operational way to define intelligence. Writing brings a creature to action that may be termed intelligent by an outside observer. However, a cat can't observe writing and conclude that the writer is intelligent. A humahn can't observe alien writing and conclude that the writer is intelligent in humahn terms. It isn't possible to interpret alien writing because there's no common basis of experience. But I don't think we should assume from this that we're yet very good at thinking, Very good relative to what? Must have a common basis of experience to... For example, 2500 years ago Europeans were formally presented with two sets of problems. One had to do with the problem of tyranny and the other had to do with geometry and motion. They didn't look at it that way. Tyranny was the normal course of life. The Greeks didn't invent democracy to break the course, but as a necessity to co-exist. Geometry and motions were considerations of the academy, not of the people, and not of any significance until the Renaissance. Europeans fought over the tyranny problem for over two thousand years and they still haven't solved it. And coincidentally, the geometry and motion problems started being solved. I think this is because there were a lot more people at work on the problems and, more significantly, a lot more people approved of what they were doing and others at the very least got the hell out of the way and let them do it. I don't see how you can put this contemporary perspective on post Bronze Age Europe. But I don't think most classical Athenian citizens would have problems understanding the British and American solutions to tyranny. Tyranny merely broke the US away from her mother. The US applied democracy as a way for everyone to get along just like the Greeks. And would Pythagoras, or at least, his young colleagues, take very long to get up to speed with Newton or Gauss? Hard to say. Probably not. Democracy and science both have certain requirements for success. An obvious one for both is toleration of those who disagree. Science and democracy have been histories of intolerance. Both bring about dogmatic maintenance and that breeds intolerance. A corollary is that intolerence of dissent needs be suppressed. I assert that intolerance is good and necessary. Are you going suppress me? We have cuckoos in the nest... You're showing the reason why people become intolerant, and you don't see it developing in you. It's what we killed all those people for. I say people killed people because they had become intolerant of oppression. Possibly the most tolerant society on earth, (some might say decadent), the Dutch, are actively confronting new arrivals who are intolerant, with new laws concerning immigration and assimilation. Will they back off? Not likely. Yes. They will have to become intolerant in order to rid themselves of a plague. Can evolutionary pressure lead to greater preference for an intellectual style? What is an intellectual style? It doesn't seem impossible. Whatever it is, it doesn't seem meaningful. Humahns will evolve but not in the Darwinian sense exactly, but from the conditions that humahns put in place. See post #7683. Intellectual changes, growing size of grey matter, are not elements of evolution under natural selection. This claim is interesting because it's both true and false. Natural selection led to us, animals led to us, and animals can't be considered intelligent, but they must be intelligent to some degree. This is why the writing criterion is so effective. If intelligence is only a matter of degree then necessarily rocks are intelligent. And under those conditions we're going to have to evolve far more radically than we did here under natural selection if we are to survive. I don't see that survival is all that difficult. I encounter people in the chat boards who should not be able to survive, yet they're probably doing better than me. Failure is rewarded here. About 1300 when the Europeans were really getting down to serious war over intellectual style, ? It was just as well for the Europeans because it would have been demoralizing had the Chinese visited. Their fleets and ships were huge and fearsomely armed - yes with cannon - and European naval power was utterly insignificant. That's what the Spanish thought in 1588 too. For whatever reason, The reason is simple. They weren't a democracy. Their imperial structure made them paranoid and so they had to destroy the fleet to prevent the admirals and generals from taking over. What will they tolerate? They will have to learn to tolerate themselves. The loudest voices there right now say they won't tolerate anything. We'll see. Yet they built the Dome of the Rock.