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.

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

To: KLP who wrote (191347)	1/2/2007 2:16:24 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 794454

Getting older, I've become more interested in my ancestors. While busy with education, work, family, and so on, there isn't a lot of time to dabble in ancient irrelevancies to the present, but with age, a longer point of view is a luxury to indulge. I find it fairly interesting. It's fashionable these days to disparage the British Empire. But when one compares it to all the cultures they bumped up against, it had a LOT of good going for it. For example, the missionaries. One of my great great grandfathers was a missionary who went to Norfolk Island to sort of run the show there from the missionary point of view. Another great great grandfather ran the mission ship, MV Southern Cross ship, which carried Melanesians for education, not just in religion, but in other cultural aspects of civilisation, such as reading, writing, arithmetic etc and on to any level they were good for. They went from Melanesia to Mission Bay in Auckland and later to Norfolk Island [Auckland being too cold for them]. There's a tendency to think of missionaries as mere proselytizers for the religious aspect, but they were far more than that. <I'm not in favor of trying to convert anyone to any religion, as they did. > I'm an atheist, so my perspective is quite different, but there was a lot more to what they were doing than pushing superstition. It was brotherhood of man thinking, education, equality and with a mind to the teleological aspects of existence. It isn't too difficult to see evolution as being more than an accident of arbitrary nature. "In the beginning there was nothing, then hey presto, there were sentient beings". What the heck? How did that happen and why? Sure, it's just a bunch of neurons hooked up together responding to externalities for which the brain is designed to interact. But the whole business is suspiciously different from rocks and rivers. I think the hooking up of billions of cyberspace nodes via fibre, interacting with externalities in billions of ways such as transducers for temperature, flow rate, lumens, chemicals, pressure, and everything else, not to mention the inputs of humans and their silicon/germanium buddies, is nothing less than an analogue of a brain and it seems obvious to me that we are doing nothing less than producing extra-somatic sentience and self-determination. I'm sure the end-stage of sentient existence isn't 20th century homo sapiens sapiens, who can barely remember half a dozen phone numbers and get lost in trivial mazes and think they are clever because the best of them used to be able to beat really pathetic computers. I think proselytizing on such matters above and beyond one's common existence grubbing for survival in hunter-gatherer and agrarian mode with genocidal wars when populations got too big, was a good thing, and so too did those receiving the ideology - many of them anyway. Proselytizing should be projection of ideas for consideration, rather than salesmanship to drum up members and revenue for the priesthood, which is all it usually is. Mqurice It was brotherhood of man rather than commonality of humanity. Women were at the time a separate species, though for the most part considered to be human. There was a 20th century time when women became "equal" but scientifically, they are indeed a different species, totally missing a Y chromosome, which in some ways is no bad thing. Women are also defective in brain function because their brains are fully grown too early [3 years earlier than blokes on average] so don't get the full development experiences that males do. Unfortunately for blokes the problems stemming from having Y chromosome pollution and heavy doses of testosterone limit their life expectancy and cause lots of other problems too. Men NEED that extra brain function just to survive. But even so, they still live shorter lives than women and suffer a lot more damage on the way [much of it self-inflicted].