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 : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gib Bogle who wrote (315753)

10/29/2016 5:55:35 PM

From: koan

Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 540724

I am not talking about biological evolution, I'm talking about intellectual evolution. I believe that our brains are plenty smart to do amazing things if they are given enough information. Look at what Einstein understood.

We are just now really starting our intellectual evolution. We're at the very beginning. I saw this coming in the 60s and I knew that there would be problems during the transition. The reason being that as a social animal tied to the norms and mores of society it does provide an inner compass of what is right and wrong.

As we stretch out into the existential world, there is no real internal compass. We have to develop an internal compass using our mind. And we do a pretty good job of it. The thoughtful existentialists, like yourself, self govern and do a better job of it than most religious people. The reason being, that you can understand the difference better than they can, in my opinion.

But you have two populations of existential outgrowth. Informed and uninformed. The uninformed, are the predators that Hillary Clinton was talking about. Kids who are raised without any ethical guidance and no social guidance to draw from, are by the very process raised to be sociopaths, amoral, to the degree that learned behavior overrides, good biological behavior. Genetic empathy.

We are both killers and lovers. As enlightened existentialists we can override the killer instincts.

<<

I'm not sure how evolution will help. It's quite possible that willingness to engage in violence is genetically determined, and it's not hard to see that natural selection could have produced bomb exporters. For further evolution to reduce this tendency, such people would have to have a reduced chance of successfully raising offspring. In any case human evolution is now exceedingly slow, since virtually everybody can reproduce - where is the selection? A major pandemic would speed things up.

To: Gib Bogle who wrote (315753)	10/29/2016 6:15:20 PM
From: koan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 540724

Why I think the human species is capable of more than we think. We all look at Einstein and say wow he was special. He was so much smarter than everybody else. But look at this from a different perspective. The average physicist today has no trouble understanding what Einstein was talking about. They get it, they can comprehend it and in fact the top physicists moved past Einstein 75 years ago. He figured it out first and that led to the misperception that he was smarter than everyone. And Einstein did have a strong healthy mind, but he also knew all the physics in the world at the time. And the historians have speculated that the time he spent in the patent office helped him to think in a certain way that facilitated his answering the question:"" what is this thing called light?" And from what I have read about how the mind works, what I believe today is that all of the years that Einstein was spending thinking about physics eventually produced the answer when the unconscious brain had enough information to spew it out. Einstein said he just woke up one day and saw it, i.e that time was a relative variable, and I think that's how most big realizations come about. Not through a deductive process as many think. I think the deductive process works fine for simple stuff, but not complex abstraction. So we have to quit thinking about smart and dumb and start thinking about developing the mind through a long-term commitment to do so. We need to practice abstract thinking.