State of the Game
- Thread starter Fuglydog53
- Start date
Agree, but rvolutionary pressure tends to come at pinch points for species, and it would be very likely that some form of partial extinction event could provide enough of a pinch point to drive an evolutionary pressure to increased intelligence, much as it probably did for primates
Considering your post about DOOMED humanity, I don't see raising intelligence and cognitive potential as unconditionally beneficial in evolutionary sense.
We skyrocketed in brain development, and it only brought doom to us, if all those apocalyptic scenarios will turn out true.
If we just stayed as "dumb" as other primates, we would survive longer as a specie.
what really led to it imo is learning to control fire and cooking food - cooked food is providing the required energy to support a larger brain, without that it might not have evolved like that, because the trade-off between the already somewhat usefulness of the brain and it's increasing costs to maintain it, might just have led to it not evolving further. it is vastly underestimated how important the control of fire and actually cooking food has had on this evolutionary step.
Well, I bought a 3090. Running that with an AMD 5800X CPU and Odyssey still runs and looks awful with my G2. Anyway, some cats.
it is not intelligence which is the problem, but individualism, which led to selfishness and lowered cooperative behavior. If we would be a drone-like entity serving a hive, we would have had a much better chance. it wouldn't be fun, but that is one of the most successful ways of life in regards to survival. if there are alien races out there, which would be spacefaring, I would rather expect them to be like the borg (without a queen though). because that is a concept which actually works out well enough in nature on earth.
it is quite interesting to see in a just slightly related context how China is doing by using a concept which is kind of drone-like - their totalitarian way and control of their people creates something similar to a hive - and that makes them rather successful in the end. We will have to see though, if they can maintain the control or if individualism will win.
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It's something even worse then individualism or selfishness.
Even as individuals humans tend to make a lot of choices that are obviously bad and harmful for them, even if they are smart enough to know that long before the inevitable consequences will start the "punishment" phase.
It's like we have lost balance and "sense of direction", different parts/layers of our brains are living in different "worlds" - some have progressed, others are still way beyond and work in loop that is ignoring long-term consequences or "the bigger picture" and they control us using the reward system based on obsolete code, not updated for ages.
well put - this is because we have a different layer on top of the biological one, which enables us to evolve at a different speed as a species, by communication and sharing information - and that is not in balance with the rather slow biological evolution. Then there is our social behavior, which lead to us supporting that what would be in nature unworthy - that is human to do that, but it is counterproductive to biological evolution. individualism like we have it, is kind of a new thing in nature and in it's test phase so to speak. So far it doesn't turn out that well, even it has it's benefits as well, because it leads to a few people "thinking out of the box" and there is a stronger tendency to do things differently to how it was done for ages. This leads to more speedy inventions - which can be beneficial but as well be disastrous. It is a new way of enhancing biological evolution and it might or might not turn out successful in the end - so far for humankind it had it's benefits for some time, but now it looks like being of more harm than good.
Given the way this conversation is going, I can recommend a book called "Fully Human" by Steve Biddulph.
well, and there is our beloved economical system - which creates consumer sheep, controlled by ads and media - they are given the idea what to eat and what to drink and where and how long to work to be able to buy crap they don't really need, but the idea of having to have them is implanted into their brains by media, commercials and the like. Herd behavior is enforcing this even more. Most are consumer sheep, their lives are controlled from the outside and they do not even realize that.
I'm a square cast conformist, thus I do not conform to your conformity.
I think this is a function of success as a collective... during British Colonial days, or the Industrial Revolution, there was much more of a "good of the country" approach... then as a collective becomes successful and resources are bountiful, we tend towards individualism rather than collectivism and IMHO we are seeing that individualism play out catastrophically in the west now
This is Stuart & Cohen's premise of intelligence (the cognitive ability of the individual) vs extelligence (the cultural capital and knowledge of the society) which they laid out in Figments of Reality, which is a good read on the subject
For me, it started to change in the 1970's.
that was probably too much acid though....
It can't be difficult to train a dolphin to be smarter than your average US president.
