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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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May 23, 2018 - 04:52pm PT
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yanqui,
I was deeply impressed by the story about the leaf-cutter ants and my brain is still puzzling on it. I already knew that there is often an empirical basis to folk wisdom like, "put rice around what you want to protect from the ants," but your story raises other questions.
I like and respect mystery, and we must often negotiate an uneasy peace with the natural world. We don't need to know how everything works, but knowing a few things that do work can make a big difference.
Gerald Durell's first book, The Overloaded Ark describes a few soldier? ant encounters in the Cameroons. Also an ape with great dignity and presence.
I am trying to track down an unusual short story in which ants in South America start assembling themselves into what look like from a distance human form, and more so when they use clothing, like scarecrows.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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May 24, 2018 - 10:43am PT
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Presently, however, the human mind seems something unique and fine in comparison to the animal world, an unprecedented evolutionary development that should be celebrated for what it is.
I agree with this basic premise, in the most general way. As long as the "celebration" doesn't get too loud or raucous as to disturb the neighbors.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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May 24, 2018 - 12:37pm PT
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I gotta say, I like your last response too, Paul. I just now read it. Like Ward, I would basically agree with your statement when put in that way. Some branches of the tree of life just seem more interesting than others. Often it is because they have evolved at higher rates. The general consensus (I think) is that, although the random part of evolution involves mutations at a more or less constant rate (per molecule or, in the case of DNA, sub-molecule), the selection part can vary greatly. Consequently, any branch in the tree can have a higher or lower rate of evolution.
Generally, the catalyst for higher evolutionary rates are stressful environmental events that kill off a high percentage of the population, although populating a new environmental niche can do it without all of that dying I suppose.
In any case, our human branch, which started off like any other branch, has led to some seemingly really interesting properties and behaviors. Maybe the human branch really should be seen as a Picasso (or Garfunkel) because it has led to this interesting thing of human consciousness that functions in a society of other humans.
On the other hand, as Ward was alluding to I would think, there was nothing inevitable about this branch. That's the part that I would like to stress to Paul. Picasso was not inevitable. I think you'd agree. Also, it may well be that the life of bats is just as complicated and interesting to an independent observer (as if there is one).
Edit: Turns out, there is a pretty good theory out there where, the Pleistocene, which was a period of highly variable and rapidly-changing climate patterns, was a primary cause in the rapid development of human brain capacity over that period, which started about 100,000 years ago. The method of rapid evolution was essentially ruthless culling (I'm pretty sure that I would not have made the cut). Only the best (able to survive these drastic changes over the generations) did survive. That's how you can rapidly change a gene pool and create interesting things.
The book, The Beak of the Finch, describes how drastic culling can result in big changes to the collective genome of the current groups of breeding individuals, in this case finches in the Galapagos.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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May 24, 2018 - 01:46pm PT
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On the other hand, as Ward was alluding to I would think, there was nothing inevitable about this branch. That's the part that I would like to stress to Paul. Also, it may well be that the life of bats is just as complicated and interesting to an independent observer (as if there is one).
The notion of inevitability isn't mine. The idea that it matters is yours and smacks of a vestige of Christian notions that the validation of our importance is seated somehow in an eternal survival and since such a survival is impossible our importance is somehow reduced. I would say our importance is real and the testimony to that is the present moment and that moment doesn't require eternity as the moment itself is an eternal, never to be repeated again. Diminishing what we are seems to be the playground of those fallen from faith in the same irrational way ex smokers become so intolerable of those who smoke. I see that diminishment as plain foolishness. The life of bats? Yikes.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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May 24, 2018 - 01:54pm PT
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No one is "diminishing"; the issue is irrational elevating and a pervasive and desperate need to not be an animal.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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May 24, 2018 - 02:22pm PT
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No one is "diminishing"; the issue is irrational elevating and a pervasive and desperate need to not be an animal.
Perhaps you should ask yourself where the pervasive need to be an animal comes from? Perhaps the real need is to rise above our animal nature to something finer.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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May 24, 2018 - 02:27pm PT
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Anything behavior you might 'rise' to would, in fact, be our animal nature.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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May 24, 2018 - 03:14pm PT
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Anything behavior you might 'rise' to would, in fact, be our animal nature.
Well that depends entirely on what you mean by animal nature doesn't it? As it has commonly meant our baser instincts. Since I see no animal, temporarily excluding humans from that category, version of the "Divine Comedy" or the "Odyssey" or for that matter any books at all coming from the animal kingdom outside of humanity, I'm given to think there is something special about us that places us, if not above, at least at the top of that heap. And, in fact, the whole of human history can be read as a movement or evolution away from our baser instincts and toward something finer, a movement away from our animal nature as it has been traditionally defined, a movement away from what is base, an attempt to control that "animal" nature. Again ,the idea of a perfected state or a golden age in which primal humanity thrived in the paradise which was untouched nature is a vestige of Christian notions of paradise lost couched in different prose. Romantic stuff for sure.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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May 24, 2018 - 03:34pm PT
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movement away from what is base, an attempt to control that "animal" nature.
Which of course never occurs; in fact such an unnatural outcome as humans rising above their animal nature is illusory, an hallucination-- amounting to the view that human civilization is capable of principally altering fundamental processes so as to make of people organically differentiated from nature and no longer subject to nature's regrettable "baseness".
( Human technology may be in fact doing this very thing but at tremendous cost to health, yet to be reckoned fully)
Pish posh.
Lol
Moreover, why would anyone want to " control" the animal nature in man? Unless that animal nature is perceived and classified to be entirely negative or inherently given to a remedial program of control?
Civilization attempts this very thing only to discover that humans are not to be made into something other than what they have essentially been for thousands of years. The history of human civilization in modern times has been a type of on-going modus vivendi -- a compromise with the dark drives of tooth and claw. This is why I made the point a bit up-thread that there is often a disconnect between that nature within man which cannot be extirpated, and uninformed, agonized attempts to extirpate it-- usually such hapless attempts end in monumental, millennarian failure. This failure further needlessly indicts the project of civilization. It's never a win-win.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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May 24, 2018 - 04:06pm PT
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the testimony to that is the present moment and that moment doesn't require eternity as the moment itself is an eternal, never to be repeated again
Normally, I'm (overly) critical of some of your statements about time and inevitability, Paul, but I like this. It fits my current thinking about the nature of time.
Lots of discussion on evolution lately. Does any of it have a bearing on JL's concern about the Hard Problem? Just curious.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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May 24, 2018 - 04:17pm PT
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Lots of discussion on evolution lately. Does any of it have a bearing on JL's concern about the Hard Pr
Nope.
We playin Texas Hold 'em now!
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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May 24, 2018 - 04:30pm PT
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I personally keep coming back to it in terms of behavior defining life; that consciousness is an evolved behavior and you can see its evolution in both extant species and in the fossil record of predation. Consciousness is clearly emergent in both those records. I fall into the camp who think the 'hard problem' is more a matter of a refusal to acknowledge there may actually be a physical basis for consciousness even if we don't understand how.
An interesting take on it here: The Hardening of Consciousness. And the last paragraph also has bearing on the perennial back and forth between Paul and myself:
Manzotti: Man has always liked to think of himself as being at the center of the universe, a special being. Any science that suggests he isn’t has always been resisted, from Copernicus’s demonstration that the earth moved around the sun, and on through all those discoveries that eroded Man’s claim to special status: evolution, genetics, and so on. In declaring consciousness the “hard problem,” something extraordinary, and separating it from the rest of the physical world, Chalmers and others cast the debate in an anti-Copernican frame, preserving the notion that human consciousness exists in a special and, it is always implied, superior realm. The collective hubris that derives from this is all too evident and damaging. We should get it straight once for all: there are no hard problems in nature, only natural problems. And we are part of nature.
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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May 24, 2018 - 04:39pm PT
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Perhaps you should ask yourself where the pervasive need to be an animal comes from
From somewhere in my colon when I need to evacuate my bowels.
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WBraun
climber
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May 24, 2018 - 05:03pm PT
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Paul's consciousness is far higher developed than Healyje.
Healyje is still in animal consciousness.
Paul has elevated to human consciousness.
The gross materialists are always in poor fund of knowledge due to their animal consciousness mental speculating and thinking "I am this material body" ......
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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May 24, 2018 - 05:29pm PT
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Civilization attempts this very thing only to discover that humans are not to be made into something other than what they have essentially been for thousands of years. The history of human civilization in modern times has been a type of on-going modus vivendi -- a compromise with the dark drives of tooth and claw.
Five thousand years of civilization mediates against such an argument. From Uruk to Hammurabi to the Torah to Pythagoras to St. Paul and on and on and on through the Enlightenment to the present humanity has made every effort to moderate our baser inclinations into something finer and from what comes such an inclination if not some aspect of our being that recognizes what can only be described as the good. Again I'm reminded of the bit about flying by Louis C.K. where folks are bitching and moaning about the lines, food and leg space while sitting like some Greek god in chair up in the sky. We've created a remarkable society, a decent society, a society that is a function of higher aspirations that have grown and progressed and perfected over history. That aspiration stands in direct opposition to the notion of "dark drives." And is, miraculously, more powerful than our baser instincts.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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May 24, 2018 - 05:40pm PT
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...has made every effort to moderate our baser inclinations...
And yet here we are, 7.9 billion strong, and still unable to moderate those baser inclinations.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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May 24, 2018 - 05:50pm PT
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We've created a remarkable society, a decent society, a society that is a function of higher aspirations that have grown and progressed and perfected over history.
paul surely has a good sense of humour, else he would not have brought up air travel, and then (higher!) aspirations that have perfected, in the next sentence.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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May 24, 2018 - 06:18pm PT
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eating and reproducing, what could be more base?
it is interesting to contemplate what will happen if we cannot stop eating what we "want" to eat, and stop reproducing.
Interestingly, we have all sorts of highfalutin arguments about "liberties" and "individual rights" regarding reproduction, but at the bottom of it, isn't it just our "base instincts"?
Our continued existence on the planet depends on amending our ways in this regard.
My bet is that we don't, and suffer the consequences.
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i-b-goB
Social climber
Wise Acres
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May 24, 2018 - 06:41pm PT
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“Life is rarely about what happened; it's mostly about what we think happened.”
― Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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May 24, 2018 - 06:52pm PT
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paul surely has a good sense of humour, else he would not have brought up air travel,
The real joke is he brought up air travel to show what whiners we are if we doubt his claims to the exemplary egalitarian society that humans have created. Maybe Paul has enough money to travel First Class, I don't know, but I have to travel economy and we are packed in like sardines, we don't get food, there is no entertainment and we have to pay extra for luggage. Meanwhile, the billionaires fly like this:
https://tribune.com.pk/story/1129971/inside-5-luxurious-private-jets/
You're right Paul, air travel shows what a marvel of equality human beings have created!
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