(no subject)
It occurs to me that there's an intermediate species between sentient lifeforms and pre-sentient hominids.
It's us.
Now, this could easily turn into yet another rant about stupid people are. Like we need one more of those. Hell, most of those are simply engaged in for the purpose of visibly excluding the ranter from that particular category. See how smart I am, I can laugh at teh stoopids.
Well, it ain't that fucking simple. Yes, people are stupid, in the sense that they are not using intelligence to set long-term plans, work together to achieve goals, and make decisions.
But the reason why they do not do so is not simply lack of intelligence. I've seen enough smart people behave in really dumb and self-destructive ways. So have we all.
What's really wrong with people, and the reason why we do things like bomb each other to make ourselves feel good, believe in giant invisible sky fairies (and hate and distrust people who believe in the wrong one), and have violent emotional upheavals over whether or not a large man throws a ball through a hoop, is that something's getting in the way of us using our intelligence.
What is it? Well, emotions, of course; but in a larger sense, you could call it instinct or chemical drives or what have you. What we are really talking about is the long, slow thought process of evolution, the big chemical hand that slams down on the thin veneer of electrical activity we call consciousness, shatters into fragments of undirected activity whose coherent purpose is half a million years obsolete, but nonetheless driven by millions of years of monkeys, standing on the shoulders of some billions of years of reptiles, of fish, of tiny crawling things, of single determined cells.
Smart isn't designed to help you. It isn't designed at all. It's just a strategy for making more copies of you, and not always the best one. That's it.
Oh, sure, sometimes we breed geniuses. People who see the consequences before they act, people who believe what's true, and not what they want to be true, people who see the patterns in the nonsense.
But what then? They're not fully sentient either; no more than a human raised by chimpanzees would be. Deprived of the proper stimulation, missing every neurological milestone, such a human wouldn't even be a very good chimp (chimps are good at other things that humans are not), much less a functioning person. Our geniuses are aberrations, sometimes admired, sometimes reviled, but never emulated, for they are often perfect monsters and lousy human beings.
Certainly they cannot steer the mass of humanity.
If humanity survives in the long term (we have only ruled earth for a tiny fraction of the time that, say, dinosaurs, did), it will be by proliferating, not by planning. Someday, if enough random factors fall into place, we may evolve into a sentient species, but such a thing will bear so little resemblance to us as we are that we would not recognize it as human.
It's us.
Now, this could easily turn into yet another rant about stupid people are. Like we need one more of those. Hell, most of those are simply engaged in for the purpose of visibly excluding the ranter from that particular category. See how smart I am, I can laugh at teh stoopids.
Well, it ain't that fucking simple. Yes, people are stupid, in the sense that they are not using intelligence to set long-term plans, work together to achieve goals, and make decisions.
But the reason why they do not do so is not simply lack of intelligence. I've seen enough smart people behave in really dumb and self-destructive ways. So have we all.
What's really wrong with people, and the reason why we do things like bomb each other to make ourselves feel good, believe in giant invisible sky fairies (and hate and distrust people who believe in the wrong one), and have violent emotional upheavals over whether or not a large man throws a ball through a hoop, is that something's getting in the way of us using our intelligence.
What is it? Well, emotions, of course; but in a larger sense, you could call it instinct or chemical drives or what have you. What we are really talking about is the long, slow thought process of evolution, the big chemical hand that slams down on the thin veneer of electrical activity we call consciousness, shatters into fragments of undirected activity whose coherent purpose is half a million years obsolete, but nonetheless driven by millions of years of monkeys, standing on the shoulders of some billions of years of reptiles, of fish, of tiny crawling things, of single determined cells.
Smart isn't designed to help you. It isn't designed at all. It's just a strategy for making more copies of you, and not always the best one. That's it.
Oh, sure, sometimes we breed geniuses. People who see the consequences before they act, people who believe what's true, and not what they want to be true, people who see the patterns in the nonsense.
But what then? They're not fully sentient either; no more than a human raised by chimpanzees would be. Deprived of the proper stimulation, missing every neurological milestone, such a human wouldn't even be a very good chimp (chimps are good at other things that humans are not), much less a functioning person. Our geniuses are aberrations, sometimes admired, sometimes reviled, but never emulated, for they are often perfect monsters and lousy human beings.
Certainly they cannot steer the mass of humanity.
If humanity survives in the long term (we have only ruled earth for a tiny fraction of the time that, say, dinosaurs, did), it will be by proliferating, not by planning. Someday, if enough random factors fall into place, we may evolve into a sentient species, but such a thing will bear so little resemblance to us as we are that we would not recognize it as human.