I understand consciousness and thus intellectual capabilities to be like the foam on a wave. The wave moves the way it does due to the physical rules that guide it. It takes the whole wave to produce the little bit of foam on top. The idea that mind can animate matter is at best wishful thinking. [/b] Hawking is right, I believe, in asserting that our intellectual capabilities are limited due to our brain size. However, the atoms that make up our brains are part of the grander universe, with electrons tunnelling from distant quasars faster than the flash. So we do have the capability to be like Buddha, and be one with the universe.
We humans will not be the last life form to inhabit this planet.
i'm not really sure how the bolded sentence fits in with the rest, but i gotta disagree. what do you think your mind is doing every time you will yourself to move?
I understand consciousness and thus intellectual capabilities to be like the foam on a wave. The wave moves the way it does due to the physical rules that guide it. It takes the whole wave to produce the little bit of foam on top. The idea that mind can animate matter is at best wishful thinking. [/b] Hawking is right, I believe, in asserting that our intellectual capabilities are limited due to our brain size. However, the atoms that make up our brains are part of the grander universe, with electrons tunnelling from distant quasars faster than the flash. So we do have the capability to be like Buddha, and be one with the universe.
We humans will not be the last life form to inhabit this planet.
i'm not really sure how the bolded sentence fits in with the rest, but i gotta disagree. what do you think your mind is doing every time you will yourself to move?
That depends on how you define the mind, since we dont have a comprehensive definition of it. But if you think to yourself "Im going to move my leg" and then you move you're leg, you believe that somehow, you're thought caused your leg to move. I think rather that your leg moves, you notice it moved and you tell yourself "I just moved my leg." You're brain and the laws of physics/chemistry caused you're leg to move. But is you're brain you're mind? Thats a tough question nobody can seem to answer.
To say that cranial capacity is correlated with intelligence is so 1800s. People's association with evolution and the concept of progress has got to go, evolution is complex and does not work in a linear fashion, its not supposed to make you better, smarter, or faster, sometimes evolution works to make you worse, dumber, or slower.
Exactly. And people wanna take evolution out of the classroom?! Based on the responses in this thread, it needs to be in there even more than it already is!
the moral of the story is we are perfect just the way we are... we have our little niche of inventing technologies to help us fend off - and now dominate - the rest of the animal kingdom,
Have you watched the news lately?
And I love our technology niche of dominating other animals, as well as disfiguring and destroying our own.
All cheese aside, I was referring mainly to intellectual evolution. Our potential for intellectual growth is directly limited by the size of the birth canal. And sure, we may do some cool stuff, but it'd be nice to know that eventually maybe we'd figure out how not to fuck up the place that sustains us.
So in that sense we would have to "bypass natural evolution." But we pretty much have already done this. I mean the deaf-born or even color-blind (if due to an inheritable trait) shouldn't be as prominent in our population if it were truly up to 'natural' selection.
Well a continuance of Hawking's chatter on the subject leads into his idea that eventually humans will be grown outside the body, not just conceived outside. That would completely eliminate the concern about the birth canal.
But you're right, humans sustain all sorts of people that would otherwise die. But, we still can't overcome the human nature within us all, which is why very few people bone retards.
Of the 5.5 billion people in the world I'd guess about 0.000000001% or less were C-section births. It's only in the US that there's this strange obsession with caesarians, the rest of the world does it as nature intended.
I don't think an obsession with c-sections has anything to do with it. The more likely answer is that the majority of the world's population don't even have access to televisions, let alone c-sections.
Main Entry: fal??la??cy [/b] Pronunciation: 'fa-l&-sE Function: noun Inflected Form(s): plural -cies Etymology: Latin fallacia, from fallac-, fallax deceitful, from fallere to deceive 1 a obsolete : GUILE, TRICKERY b : deceptive appearance : DECEPTION 2 a : a false or mistaken idea b : erroneous character : ERRONEOUSNESS 3 : an often plausible argument using false or invalid inference
...spelling
and what he is thinking of is
Main Entry: phal??lic Pronunciation: 'fal-ik Function: adjective 1 : of, relating to, or resembling a penis 2 : of, relating to, or characterized by the stage of psychosexual development in psychoanalytic theory during which a child becomes interested in his or her own sexual organs ???compare ANAL 2, GENITAL 3, ORAL 3
it's hard to say where we are on the evolutionary scale - it will take a few hundred years to really tell...but i certainly feel like humans are a huge disappointment.
maybe it's not a question of evolution.
we have more capabilites than ever to look back and see previous mistakes - how and where things went wrong, what causes result in what effects, what certain cycles of activity lead to and yet we keep repeating them.
is the fact that humans largely don't give a shit about life beyond their immediate surroundings and/or the long-term an evolutionary thing or are we doomed to be this fucked up and selfish a species?
To say that cranial capacity is correlated with intelligence is so 1800s. People's association with evolution and the concept of progress has got to go, evolution is complex and does not work in a linear fashion, its not supposed to make you better, smarter, or faster, sometimes evolution works to make you worse, dumber, or slower.
Exactly. And people wanna take evolution out of the classroom?! Based on the responses in this thread, it needs to be in there even more than it already is!
That's why he was referring to intellectual evolution. General evolution does mean to make you whatever way you will be most likely to survive. And, in theory, it could make you dumber. But given our current evolutionary track, the brain has grown and will most likely continue to, unless it can't fit through the birth canal. Of course, the c-section thing has already come up, so we may partially have a way around it already.
is the fact that humans largely don't give a shit about life beyond their immediate surroundings and/or the long-term an evolutionary thing or are we doomed to be this fucked up and selfish a species?
Could be. It's not entirely unlikely that we are just smart enough to enable outselves to finally outwit general evolution, only to be dumb enough to kill ourselves off.
Evidence of this is the relatively recent exponential growth in human population (due to technology), yet largely without regard to how this unchecked population growth is destroying the planet.
Actually, in the same book, Hawking mentions some of this.
His stat was that by the year 2600 (if current growth continues), the planet will be covered by humans shoulder to shoulder and energy consumption will be so great that the surface will glow red-hot.
All cheese aside, I was referring mainly to intellectual evolution. Our potential for intellectual growth is directly limited by the size of the birth canal.
Dude, intellectual evolution? Are you kidding me? Are you saying how we evolve our thought process, or our capacity for learning? If the latter, you are going down a dark path my friend. One that says that biology and not culture is what determines what and how we think. This is some serious faulty thinking, along the lines of, "If you're brain is more developed in the frontal region, you are more likely to be a criminal." on the other hand our thought process has evolved due to many factors, one being yes, our physical construct. the other, and just as important, our social, historical and environmental circumstance.
And sure, we may do some cool stuff, but it'd be nice to know that eventually maybe we'd figure out how not to fuck up the place that sustains us.
Technology won't save you. Why do so many people believe technology is the onyl way to save us from our environmental mistakes? Cultural evolution has something to do with this not natural, physical evolution. Our environement is fucked up because of how we live, not because of how we were designed.
is the fact that humans largely don't give a shit about life beyond their immediate surroundings and/or the long-term an evolutionary thing or are we doomed to be this fucked up and selfish a species?
Could be. It's not entirely unlikely that we are just smart enough to enable outselves to finally outwit general evolution, only to be dumb enough to kill ourselves off.
Evidence of this is the relatively recent exponential growth in human population (due to technology), yet largely without regard to how this unchecked population growth is destroying the planet.
Exponential growth of human populations? Grafwritah, you have some really outdated, dangerous ideas. Have you heard of Thomas Malthus? He was talking this shit over 150 years ago, and they were scared of poulation increases then. They were all like "We'll be fucked by 1999 if people don't stop reproducing." This is fucked up fear mongering. You have no understanding of what this earth is capable of, we can carry a large population, if and only if, we change the way we live and eat and share our resources. You guys are talking in a predeterministic way, like human nature exists or something and we are doomed to fuck ourselves over. Modern humans have been on this earth for at least 40,000 years if not more, it has only been in the last 2,000 that there have been radical changes. We are not destined for anything, we have control of our destiny, this shit is empowering, only we can change our fate.
what i dont understand is why so many people think that humans destroying the planet isnt a part of evolution.
Because evolution is a natural, and random process, plus oit takes millions of years. There is nothing random or natural about how we are destroying the earth,a process that has been intensified in the last 1,000-2,000 years.
you act like humans are outside the realm of nature. which is a very egotistical human way of thinking. im not condoning the destruction of the earth, but i am not separating myself from it either.
No, not at all, we are a part of nature, but the destruction of our world has nothing to do with our biology. What I'm saying is, that it is our ACTIONS that have led to the detriment of the environment, not because being born out of a birth canal has limited our intelligence, which in turn doesn't let us come up with solutions for saving the earth, or what remains of it.
hmm. i see. well, im not really following the whole stephen hawking thing. im sure he knows what he's talking about cuz he's like smart and writes books or whatever, but, i guess my argument is this. we build dams. which has major environmental impact on the earth. and hippies are like "hey man us humans are fucking up the world". which is true. but a beaver builds a dam. on a much smaller scale. with a more rudimentary design. but eventually, that would destroy the earth too. now im no environmentalist. nor am i scientist guy. but things dont last. you wont last. i wont last. and neither will the world. to me nature, and human existence, is transient. humans have this hair up their butt to make things last. like trying to stretch our own lives out so we can live well into our 90s or whatever. to make digital media so it wont degrade. to basically cheat nature. but nature always wins and if push comes to shove the world will up and fold on itself. no?
I'm not really following your example. I don't think dams have the destructive force behind them that you say they do. Yes, they alter the environment but in such a way that threatens our existence on earth? Is this the lentils talking? The world will change yes, and so will we, I'm not saying that we are the be all end all of this planet, but when talking about evolution, that is our organic being, we will be here for a while as long as we don't alter this planet making it unihabitable. My daughter gave me this poem:
"December" by Sanderson Vanderbilt
A little boy stood on the corner And shoveled bits of dirty, soggy snow Into the sewer- With a piece of tin He was helping spring come
haha. yeah. well, i think we're the only one's that are how you say "checking for this" right now.
i guess what im trying to say is we will alter this planet to the point where it becomes uninhabitable. im not saying im advocating a speedier expedition of this process, but i am saying that is what nature is all about. destruction.
this poet i know sent me this excerpt from a poem. and she was so kind as to make it an excerpt cuz she knows i hate reading.
...we write, and the words get it wrong...I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can...
Dude, intellectual evolution? Are you kidding me? Are you saying how we evolve our thought process, or our capacity for learning? If the latter, you are going down a dark path my friend. One that says that biology and not culture is what determines what and how we think. This is some serious faulty thinking, along the lines of, "If you're brain is more developed in the frontal region, you are more likely to be a criminal." on the other hand our thought process has evolved due to many factors, one being yes, our physical construct. the other, and just as important, our social, historical and environmental circumstance.
Capacity for learning and higher level functioning. For instance, there's a limit to humans ability to process mathematical equations. Brain size has been tied to intellectual ability.
At the behest of a fellow strutter, I looked into the brain size vs. intelligence debate. I have read it before, but apparently it is a general rule of thumb although it is not without its exceptions.
For instance: The brain of the sperm whale weighs 7,800g, the elephant's weighs 7,500g, man's weighs 1,500g, the dolphin's 840g, and the brain of a mouse weighs 0,4g. If these figures are used to determine intelligence, then the sperm whale and the elephant are five times as intelligent as man, who in turn is twice as intelligent as the dolphin, which in turn is 2,000 times as intelligent as a mouse. Should we rank animals in order of how large their brains are in relation to their body weight, then the mouse would come out on top with its brain comprising 3.2%, the dolphin's 0.9% and the sperm whale's 0,021%. Neither absolute brain weight nor the relationship between brain weight and body size provide us with sensible criteria for comparing the intelligence of different species. Link
Generally speaking, though, the larger the brain, the smarter the animal, at least using the comparison of animals alive on Earth right now.
Of the 5.5 billion people in the world I'd guess about 0.000000001% or less were C-section births. It's only in the US that there's this strange obsession with caesarians, the rest of the world does it as nature intended.
I don't think an obsession with c-sections has anything to do with it. The more likely answer is that the majority of the world's population don't even have access to televisions, let alone c-sections.
If my wife wouldnt have had a c-section her and my son would have died.
it's hard to say where we are on the evolutionary scale - it will take a few hundred years to really tell...but i certainly feel like humans are a huge disappointment.
maybe it's not a question of evolution.
we have more capabilites than ever to look back and see previous mistakes - how and where things went wrong, what causes result in what effects, what certain cycles of activity lead to and yet we keep repeating them.
is the fact that humans largely don't give a shit about life beyond their immediate surroundings and/or the long-term an evolutionary thing or are we doomed to be this fucked up and selfish a species?
on this topic, this is a good book
it's not just humans that are selfish though. it's all animals. humans just have a (much) larger influence on the rest of the planet and its inhabitants.
Comments
i'm not really sure how the bolded sentence fits in with the rest, but i gotta disagree. what do you think your mind is doing every time you will yourself to move?
That depends on how you define the mind, since we dont have a comprehensive definition of it. But if you think to yourself "Im going to move my leg" and then you move you're leg, you believe that somehow, you're thought caused your leg to move. I think rather that your leg moves, you notice it moved and you tell yourself "I just moved my leg." You're brain and the laws of physics/chemistry caused you're leg to move. But is you're brain you're mind? Thats a tough question nobody can seem to answer.
i can dig it.
owen wilson?
Exactly. And people wanna take evolution out of the classroom?! Based on the responses in this thread, it needs to be in there even more than it already is!
Have you watched the news lately?
And I love our technology niche of dominating other animals, as well as disfiguring and destroying our own.
All cheese aside, I was referring mainly to intellectual evolution. Our potential for intellectual growth is directly limited by the size of the birth canal. And sure, we may do some cool stuff, but it'd be nice to know that eventually maybe we'd figure out how not to fuck up the place that sustains us.
Well a continuance of Hawking's chatter on the subject leads into his idea that eventually humans will be grown outside the body, not just conceived outside. That would completely eliminate the concern about the birth canal.
But you're right, humans sustain all sorts of people that would otherwise die. But, we still can't overcome the human nature within us all, which is why very few people bone retards.
I don't think an obsession with c-sections has anything to do with it. The more likely answer is that the majority of the world's population don't even have access to televisions, let alone c-sections.
and what he is thinking of is
Main Entry: phal??lic
Pronunciation: 'fal-ik
Function: adjective
1 : of, relating to, or resembling a penis
2 : of, relating to, or characterized by the stage of psychosexual development in psychoanalytic theory during which a child becomes interested in his or her own sexual organs ???compare ANAL 2, GENITAL 3, ORAL 3
phalli??cal??ly adv.[/b]
maybe it's not a question of evolution.
we have more capabilites than ever to look back and see previous mistakes - how and where things went wrong, what causes result in what effects, what certain cycles of activity lead to and yet we keep repeating them.
is the fact that humans largely don't give a shit about life beyond their immediate surroundings and/or the long-term an evolutionary thing or are we doomed to be this fucked up and selfish a species?
That's why he was referring to intellectual evolution. General evolution does mean to make you whatever way you will be most likely to survive. And, in theory, it could make you dumber. But given our current evolutionary track, the brain has grown and will most likely continue to, unless it can't fit through the birth canal. Of course, the c-section thing has already come up, so we may partially have a way around it already.
And, yes, brain size is related to intelligence.
Could be. It's not entirely unlikely that we are just smart enough to enable outselves to finally outwit general evolution, only to be dumb enough to kill ourselves off.
Evidence of this is the relatively recent exponential growth in human population (due to technology), yet largely without regard to how this unchecked population growth is destroying the planet.
Actually, in the same book, Hawking mentions some of this.
His stat was that by the year 2600 (if current growth continues), the planet will be covered by humans shoulder to shoulder and energy consumption will be so great that the surface will glow red-hot.
So... this rate of growth can't continue.
Dude, intellectual evolution? Are you kidding me? Are you saying how we evolve our thought process, or our capacity for learning? If the latter, you are going down a dark path my friend. One that says that biology and not culture is what determines what and how we think. This is some serious faulty thinking, along the lines of, "If you're brain is more developed in the frontal region, you are more likely to be a criminal." on the other hand our thought process has evolved due to many factors, one being yes, our physical construct. the other, and just as important, our social, historical and environmental circumstance.
Technology won't save you. Why do so many people believe technology is the onyl way to save us from our environmental mistakes? Cultural evolution has something to do with this not natural, physical evolution. Our environement is fucked up because of how we live, not because of how we were designed.
Exponential growth of human populations? Grafwritah, you have some really outdated, dangerous ideas. Have you heard of Thomas Malthus? He was talking this shit over 150 years ago, and they were scared of poulation increases then. They were all like "We'll be fucked by 1999 if people don't stop reproducing." This is fucked up fear mongering. You have no understanding of what this earth is capable of, we can carry a large population, if and only if, we change the way we live and eat and share our resources.
You guys are talking in a predeterministic way, like human nature exists or something and we are doomed to fuck ourselves over. Modern humans have been on this earth for at least 40,000 years if not more, it has only been in the last 2,000 that there have been radical changes. We are not destined for anything, we have control of our destiny, this shit is empowering, only we can change our fate.
btw Stephan Hawking is on the Simpsons right now!
Because evolution is a natural, and random process, plus oit takes millions of years. There is nothing random or natural about how we are destroying the earth,a process that has been intensified in the last 1,000-2,000 years.
I'm not really following your example. I don't think dams have the destructive force behind them that you say they do. Yes, they alter the environment but in such a way that threatens our existence on earth? Is this the lentils talking? The world will change yes, and so will we, I'm not saying that we are the be all end all of this planet, but when talking about evolution, that is our organic being, we will be here for a while as long as we don't alter this planet making it unihabitable.
My daughter gave me this poem:
"December" by Sanderson Vanderbilt
A little boy stood on the corner
And shoveled bits of dirty, soggy snow
Into the sewer-
With a piece of tin
He was helping spring come
i guess what im trying to say is we will alter this planet to the point where it becomes uninhabitable. im not saying im advocating a speedier expedition of this process, but i am saying that is what nature is all about. destruction.
this poet i know sent me this excerpt from a poem. and she was so kind as to make it an excerpt cuz she knows i hate reading.
...we write, and the words
get it wrong...I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can...
-j. gilbert
Capacity for learning and higher level functioning. For instance, there's a limit to humans ability to process mathematical equations. Brain size has been tied to intellectual ability.
Culture, who cares, monkeys have culture.
einstein's brain size was smaller than the average humans.
dave
For instance:
The brain of the sperm whale weighs 7,800g, the elephant's weighs 7,500g, man's weighs 1,500g, the dolphin's 840g, and the brain of a mouse weighs 0,4g. If these figures are used to determine intelligence, then the sperm whale and the elephant are five times as intelligent as man, who in turn is twice as intelligent as the dolphin, which in turn is 2,000 times as intelligent as a mouse. Should we rank animals in order of how large their brains are in relation to their body weight, then the mouse would come out on top with its brain comprising 3.2%, the dolphin's 0.9% and the sperm whale's 0,021%. Neither absolute brain weight nor the relationship between brain weight and body size provide us with sensible criteria for comparing the intelligence of different species.
Link
Generally speaking, though, the larger the brain, the smarter the animal, at least using the comparison of animals alive on Earth right now.
If my wife wouldnt have had a c-section her and my son would have died.
on this topic, this is a good book
it's not just humans that are selfish though. it's all animals. humans just have a (much) larger influence on the rest of the planet and its inhabitants.