Thankyou for your comments.
Niche seeking appears intelligent to intelligent beings, but not to the niche seekers.
OK. Assuming intention
the cat didn't do it. Grace did.
Just a sec! What did Grace do? In response to what? That carnivorous, opportunistic, germ carrying furball does something - gives her a signal or series of signs and does something for Grace - or she wouldn't give it the time of day. There is a transaction. I didn't say they understood each other. Think cleaner fish. But yeah, the cat is vulnerable to changes in the Grace niche.
I am charmed by the signalling stuff. The cat gets Grace below the level of her formidable intelligence (unless she focuses it on the Grace-cat/cat-Grace relation).
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.
Other operational ways (?): oral poetry, tool use, memory systems, language. Operational definitions are arbitrary. We have to make an argument for each one. Writing is good. It makes others' thoughts and memories arbitrarily accessible and portable - technology applied to language.
A humahn can't observe alien writing and conclude that the writer is intelligent in humahn terms.
Of course, it's alien. It is possible to make hypotheses and test them. Cats are alien - different species, much smaller brain than ours - but not inscrutable. We can observe their behaviour and the signs they make to each other - and to us - and figure out what they mean for cats. We can do it with fish, insects and octopi and they're even more alien. Want to bet we can't eventually do it with murderous three sexed Alpha Centaurians? What's the logical difficulty? But if we've got their "writing" and no Centaurians and no equivalent to a Rosetta stone, then we can't necessarily be sure it's even writing. (Remember the "signal" from space which most likely turned out to be a quickly rotating star?)
So a procedure would be to analyze the aliens signs and signals and corresponding activities to see if we get evidence of language activity, or something like it. The usual stuff that we do with everything else. Observation- theory -trial and error.
But, quite honestly, I think I'm being led astray I don't think aliens are quite apposite to what I was saying.
So does intelligence move a creature beyond the power of evolution once it's developed a theory of evolution?
Badly formulated, perhaps, since you were making the claim about natural selection.
I think we add to natural selection with activity additive and analogous to it. And I don't think it's "totally random."
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...
Relative to how good some of us are at doing it now compared to others of us now. Relative to how good some of us were in the past compared to others then. And relative to how good some in the present are compared to those in the past. We are a new species and we just haven't had a lot of practice at thinking -which is what sets us apart from other creatures - and even less experience at examining it. It's only very recently we've started closely examining things like logical pitfalls, how emotions affect thinking, and building huge amounts of knowledge for our thinking to bite off.
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.
Whether tyranny was normal course or not, the Athenians didn't like it. It always, inevitably, led to institutionalized brutality, spying on the citizens, kleptocracy, and capricious justice and that's what the Athenians complained about: No matter who the tyrant was, or how they got him, that's what they got -brutality, spying, kleptocracy and injustice.
Plato, no friend of democracy, makes it very clear: they wanted no more tyrants for those reasons. The Athenians had no trouble co-existing - they farmed, manufactured, traded, big time. What they had was difficulty running such a big enterprise - finding good government. They were going through tyrants like grass through a goose.
Geometry and motions were considerations of the academy, not of the people, and not of any significance until the Renaissance.
The Athenians had the same considerations as the Renaissance Italians. They had to engineer, survey, and build roads, docks, homes, temples, gymnasia. And like the Renaissance folk, their engineers, geometers, scientists, builders, and business folk were often the same people and included "academicians". Athens was a cosmopolitan trading city. Being literate and numerate was necessary to get ahead and there were folk available to teach the skills for a price. Teaching paid well and there was lots of competition - you had to keep up. There was a market for culture and education. Plato didn't have a corner in the business of "higher education."
F:Europeans fought over the tyranny problem for over two thousand years and
A:they still haven't solved it.
Their partial solutions are better than no solutions. What they have is a vast improvement over previous. Right now they seem to be replacing democracy with bureaucracy but the strains of the next few years might change that as national requirements conflict with those of bureaucrats.
F: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.
A:I don't see how you can put this contemporary perspective on post Bronze Age Europe.
Because it's not a contemporary perspective. Education became a public good in England and throughout Europe as it was during the Roman period. This was due to the requirements of administering the Holy Roman Empire and due to urban development and the vast increase in manufacturing, trade and commerce during the medieval period and especially after the Black Death. There were church schools, guild schools, business schools. There was quite a large literate population but not a great deal to read until Gutenburg. Then of course there was the further impetus the Reformation gave to being literate. By 1500 folk were selling books on the streets of every city in Europe. We vastly underestimate medieval Europe. The Reanaissance didn't spring from a vacuum. (There's a new book by Nicholas Orme coming out this Spring which should fill in a lot of lacunae in our knowledge of medieval education).
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.
The US applied its limited democracy because it had to replace the ruler and control his succesor's excesses. Just like the Athenians, they needed good government.
The problem in both cases was similar. Who was going to make laws, enforce them equitably, raise an army and collect taxes to pay for these things and how might their excesses be curbed? And if the citizens would do it themselves, how would they curb their own excesses? (Athenians and Romans never did figure that out).
It's not just a matter of getting along. These were very difficult problems for the folk who had to solve them. The British and Americans knew if they made too many mistakes it was back to same old same old.
F:Democracy and science both have certain requirements for success. An obvious one for both is toleration of those who disagree.
A: Science and democracy have been histories of intolerance. Both bring about dogmatic maintenance and that breeds intolerance.
Your statement and mine are both true.
A corollary is that intolerence of dissent needs be suppressed.
I assert that intolerance is good and necessary. Are you going suppress me?
That doesn't mean much, if anything. Whatcha got? You have to be intolerant of something. What are you intolerant of and more important, what are you going to do about it? Are you going to (1) write a nasty letter to (eg) the American Academy of Foolishness, or (2) establish the New AAF, or (3) picket it, or (4) disrupt its meetings, or (5) encourage others to so, or (6) bomb it, or (7) encourage others to do so? If it's 4 through 7, I'd see if I could persuade you not to, and failing that, yes, I'll suppress you.
You're showing the reason why people become intolerant, and you don't see it developing in you.
Not true. I've been told numereous times I'm intolerant. I've always been intolerant of some things and known it.
I've been down on PCism since before it was called PCism. And I'm really intolerant of Islamists and other fascists. I'm intolerant of culture of entitlement - what I call democratized kleptocracy - which is institutionalized stealing by everybody from everybody, and particularly the "rich" because they've got the most. (I'm not rich. I'm in the position of the butcher who deals with the rich folk on the hill - he wants them to do really well).
I vote against, speak against, and contribute money against, and act against these things. For sure, I'm intolerant of lowlifes and psychopathy.
What is an intellectual style?
I might place too much reliance on this but I'll give it a shot because I think it's useful.
Toleration, putting up with what we don't approve of, (and intoleration, also), is sort of like couture, or better yet, interior design or landscaping.. We can change our personal collection of tolerances and intolerances as we can change from a baseball cap to a fedora, change the wardrobe from Dior to Punk, or change the paint, decorations, windows in our homes, or change the flower beds, trees, and vistas in our gardens and parks. Doing all these things take varying degrees of commitment, effort, planning, discussion, judgement, negotiation, conflict and by the time they're done, our outlook changes a bit. We've put things "in a different light."
Sometimes style refers to performance. I think Roger Federer is a very stylish tennis player. Compared to most other players he has such command of himself, physical fundamentals, strategy and tactics we can actually see tennis better. There is a cable program called "neat" in which a lady goes to homes of slobs like me and shows folk how to clear out the clutter and organize and run their homes better - kind of trivial we may think - but she has style the way Federer does. In the same way I think Hume is a really stylish philosopher and Mozart a stylish composer.
Style is like lighting: It illuminates, shades, and colours what we see, but we don't ordinarily see the lighting - even in the theatre. Lighting is good: it illuminates some things but can mislead because it obscures other things.
After a while a new style may become habit - the way things are done - and may even inspire "dogged maintenance that breeds intolerance" or, at least, suspicion of other styles.
I think there are fundamental styles of intellectual performance and placing extreme reliance on any of them can be perilous. Two styles which can prove to be just about mutually exclusive, if too great preference is given to one or the other, are reliance on faith and custom, and reliance on reason and science. Extreme reliance on one and we have the Inquisition, and on the other, the Reign of Terror. Other examples of intellectual styles are tolerance and intolerance, bravery and cowardice.
This is an extremely old fashioned approach but I don't think I've abused it and given it more weight than it can bear.
Cleaning up speculation in the previous post: In a two and a half millenia struggle against a nearly fixed environment of tyranny Europeans and their American descendents killed a very large number of their fellow humans in their effort to create a so-far successful alternative to tyranny: limited democracy. During this time, due to the culling, it's possible they evolved a preference for an intellectual style, which wouldn't necessarily show up in gross anatomy but might well show up in finer limbic and cortical changes leading to different ways of doing things, such as finer discrimination and more precise action in their tolerance and intolerance. This is an evolutionary process analogous to and additive to natural selection.
I think 2500 years is long enough to demonstrate, or at least suggest, non-randomness - that culture does have an evolutionary vector: The accelerating spread of democracy seems analogous to the expansion of a successful new species.
I thought at first maybe the PCers who demonstrate for the interests of intolerant islamists and against those of their own tolerant society would be a fatal counter example, but this phenomenon is more likely due to a distortion caused by higher education which has been temporarily captured by a narrowly defined ideological group. . The Joe and Joan Lunchbucket crowd, a much larger population not exposed to higher education, show much less confusion. Not even those of them in the paint shop and, heaven knows, they breathe enough fumes....
Humahns will evolve but not in the Darwinian sense exactly, but from the conditions that humahns put in place. See post #7683.
Given that we do apply technology to ourselves for all sorts of reasons that dystopian future is a possibility but not the only possibilty. Projecting present into the future....
If a goodly number of us get into space and stay there for a while we may well evolve in several directions - principle of isolated populations - sort of a Darwinian thing. |
