General > RANT
Product designers should be dragged out and whipped in public!
Testlund:
--- Quote ---We live so my idea is that intelligence is a good point(it is in our case). But what is good in evolution, we humans live now but will the specie survive, that can only be told far far in the future. There was a mammel that survived the dinosaurs. Well mammals are overall in animal species smart. And most species that survive nowadays are warmbloaded smart or coldbloaded energiesaving, I thought, could be wrong. So smart survives that's good isn't it.
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You got a point there, though there are some that believe the dinosaurs might have been both intelligent and warm blooded, a theory mensioned in a program I saw last year. It was a program about how the world would have looked like if that meteor had missed. It was said that the raptor might have been the dominant species instead, and maybe intelligent like us.
Peter:
--- Quote from: Testlund ---
--- Quote --- No species delibertly tries to live "in balance with nature".
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No, but they don't try to separate themselves from nature either. What I mean is that humans must agree to live in balance with nature, while other species just do it instinctively. Humans is a species that just suddenly appeared and went crazy on the planet, while other species makes slow progress and changes just a little so nature can keep up, and other species can keep up.
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Just a question what is the definition of nature in your way anyway?
To my definition, practically everything in europe isn't nature. How can we split off or live in balance with something that doesn't exist anymore.
EricL:
--- Quote from: Testlund ---What I mean is that humans must agree to live in balance with nature, while other species just do it instinctively. Humans is a species that just suddenly appeared and went crazy on the planet, while other species makes slow progress and changes just a little so nature can keep up, and other species can keep up.
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Well, I think your wrong on the reasoning. No species lives in balance with nature. Every species (every gene actually) is out for itself and would cheat the system if there was a reproductive fitness advantage in it. Humans are no different nor are they recent. Homo did not suddenly appear. Our genus and the 20+ species of human within it (all but one now extinct) have been around for more than 2.5 million years. My point is that there is no difference between the way individual humans act and the way individuals of any other species act. They always act selfishly, locally, which is what makes evolution work in the first place. They would be selected against if they acted otherwise. (And yes, there are various examples of locally altruistic behaviour. But they are actually in the end selfish in that they still serve to maximize reproductive fitness.)
You are of course correct to say that the consequences of 6.5 billion humans all making locally optimal selfish decisions is an onslaught unlike anything the planet as seen before given the extent of our extended phenotype (which includes everything from fusion bombs to deforestation to massive CO2 emission) and that the result is likely to be global disaterious for both humans and many other species. Personally, I am incredibly pessimistic that humans will change our collective behaviour. Our biology is against it.
--- Quote ---How I define self awareness is to understand yourself and what you are.
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Okay, define "understand" then. You see how hard this is? People think that terms like "self aware" or "consciousness" are obvious and self evident but they arn't, not really. You can say something specific like "humans are probobly the only animal which has learned enough to contemplate their own evolution" but its very hard to deal in more abstract terms like self awareness. IMHO, humans represent more of an incremental leap than a revolutional leap in these areas. We have bigger brains with incrementally more capabilities yes but dogs as well as most other mammals are surprisingly good at very complex reasoning, for example at understanding intentional stance (putting yourself in another's shoes) or even transitive intentional stance ("I think this is what he thinks I'm thinking"). This can be demonstrated and is a direct result of preditory/prey evolution. Bottom line, it's just plain arogant to elevate humans to far beyond other species w.r.t. such abstract concepts as "self awareness".
--- Quote ---Saying those are self aware is like saying your computer is self aware, or your car.
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No, it's not. There is a huge difference between designed and evolved complexity. A single celled organism is orders of magnitude more complex and more general purpose than a computer. It has far more self awareness (to use that sloppy term) than any designed object humans have made which arguably all have none. It flees, it pursues, it feeds, it eliminates waste, it reproduces, it is "aware" of it's cell wall and controls substances passing through it. It "knows" what is itself and what is not.
Peter:
--- Quote from: Testlund ---You got a point there, though there are some that believe the dinosaurs might have been both intelligent and warm blooded, a theory mensioned in a program I saw last year. It was a program about how the world would have looked like if that meteor had missed. It was said that the raptor might have been the dominant species instead, and maybe intelligent like us.
--- End quote ---
Warmbloaded dinosaurs, well sounds strange. They are placed in reptile-species. But could be true.
About intelligence anything can be said, any scientist could say there could be an uber-intelligent dinosaur specie. Mainly it is said dinos are stupid becouse there brain is small in comparison, and I mainly tend to share that opinion. They are probably stupid.
Becouse of the high number of species that we don't even know of, there could always be an dino that's smart. And there could be a dinosaur we know of that could be smart. But really scientists are just guesing in many ways and this is guesing. Intelligence it a hard point to determine, even with today living species we can't determine whitch one is smarter then the other,(well most agree that we are one of the smartest species , well maybe a dolphine is smarter, you never know), smart dinos is just a pure gues. I can't say different.
Peter:
--- Quote from: EricL ---You are of course correct to say that the consequences of 6.5 billion humans all making locally optimal selfish decisions is an onslaught unlike anything the planet as seen before given the extent of our extended phenotype (which includes everything from fusion bombs to deforestation to massive CO2 emission) and that the result is likely to be global disaterious for both humans and many other species. Personally, I am incredibly pessimistic that humans will change our collective behaviour. Our biology is against it.
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Can you explain why fusion bombs, deforestation, and massive CO2 emmion, could be disaterious to other humans and other species.
Couse I don't we have that high impact on the enviroment. I think humans don't have as big of an effect on enviroment as you think.
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