Philosophical quandary

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I'm recently confronting the idea that the human race is a mass of behaviors that will NOT ultimately sort itself out into a peace-loving utopia of broccoli eating intellectuals who always talk through their problems eloquently.

In fact, history and training are forgotten just as often as they are learned, and in the end we make NO progress except in narrowly relative terms, based on the records we leave behind for future generations to stand on.

This irks me because, I always thought there was some Star-Trek like progression to be made, that would provide eventual escape for us all.

But what do we have to work with, in this avenue, except genetic engineering? And that's a cop-out ... we would no longer be human, to be sure, but we would also be guiding our own evolution in an incestuous desire to indulge the vison-of-the-era.

When people are able to select the physical and mental characteristics of their offspring, what do you see coming up in this society? A big tall man with an 11-inch schlong and a very pricesely determined build, and a 5-foot-11 readheaded nobel-prize-level genius girlie with breasts like teapots.

Whoop de goddamn doo. Fifteen years and the trend will shift, when these people flood the planet, and everyone will want fur, green skin, lizard tongues, claws, and fire-breath. Once again, whoop de goddamn doo.

No, the only thing I see really uniting us and driving us towards a higher purpose, is to discard our humanity like a disused gall-bladder. Ascend into space, assimilate the entire known universe, blah blah blah... But hey, if that's the commonly agreed upon path of enlightenment, ... what gives it any merit?

Perhaps the path to enlightenment is to freeze all our works into one big crystalline lump of data, and die the hell off, and call it a day, so to speak. For everyone.

Comments

[beatings.livejournal.com]

So, I'm reading Neal Stephanson's 'Cryptonomicon', and it posed an interesting question and a better answer -- what is the evolutionary purpose of certain individuals in a species who are not attracted to the opposite sex, and therefore won't reproduce? The book's answer (as far as I've read, and in relation to Alan Turing) is something like: when you have individuals who won't be weighted down with familial concerns (having kids, constantly tending to the family) these individuals are 'freed', in a sense, to pursue other things. At least a few of them will be fairly intelligent, well-adjusted, and gifted -- suddenly you have a dynamic force that could make impressive contributions to society, which might not have been made otherwise.

But I think there's more to it.

For the next few paragraphs, suspend the idea that sexuality and attraction and black-and-white things. Humor me, and pretend that 99% of people have deep, forgotten 'shades of grey' within them. (I swear, I'm going somewhere with this, uno momento por favor)

When you look at the behaviors of early male 'pioneers', before the introduction of stifling Victorian sexuality (think: cowboys, Mormons, sailors, pirates) you'll notice that a lot of them tended to form sexual and romantic bonds with other men. This is mostly because there weren't enough women around, if any, to fulfill all of them :) Seriously, in times of scarcity, and in the right untainted social climate, the shades of grey take effect, and no one thinks much of it.

This is a sneaky evolutionary design. The purpose of same-sex attraction isn't to propagate the species; rather, the purpose is to keep the troops happy.

The more I think about it, the more I find 'evolutionary' reasons to justify so-called 'lesser' traits. Sure, we might be better off if we were all strictly heterosexual, but [re-quote the first paragraph here], and that's connected with [paragraphs 3-5].

We might be better off if we were all huge, brawny warriors killing what we eat with spears... and yet there are people who are weak, uncoordinated, and sometimes given to fits of creativity and special insight.

What if we were all tall? I can tell you from boxing, that short guys fight very differently than tall people, and certainly this must carry over into other realms and give them interesting advantages somewhere along the way.

Basically I think this diversity, the amalgam of human differences and errors, is a helpful thing, and something that's quite possibly connected to evolution. (Otherwise we'd all look and behave identically at this very moment.) No one can predict what sort of impact a newborn person will have on the world, or the lives of those around it. This diversity is, somehow, necessary.

And from this diversity comes everything we hate about 'other people', and the world.

There are people who are tempermental; conflict-prone; drama queens; liars; etc. I can't imagine humanity ever achieving a lasting peace, because people like drama. They like getting angry, and they like releasing their emotions. With far too many of them, they have no other outlets for these bursts except other people. Maybe this is a throwback to a darker point in the evolution continuum, the same thing as stags butting their horns together, I have no idea.

If peace isn't possible, then what other enlightenments are worth striving for? I can't think of any. Planetary domination doesn't count, that's hardly enlightenment :) Technology is maturing far faster than humanity, which is likely a recipe for disaster.

[beatings.livejournal.com]

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So meanwhile, while the geniuses and experts and philosophers and religious crackpots struggle to tell all of us what we're supposed to be doing with ourselves, I'll stick to the belief I've held for years -- "Life is meaningless, but it is possible to have a meaningful life." Today I was looking over my r[maximum comment length exceeded]

So meanwhile, while the geniuses and experts and philosophers and religious crackpots struggle to tell all of us what we're supposed to be doing with ourselves, I'll stick to the belief I've held for years -- "Life is meaningless, but it is possible to have a meaningful life." Today I was looking over my résumé, and thinking about my odd mismatched collection of employment/life experiences... especially when Shaun commented that it seems I have a "wild" life history.

And I thought, if I'd played my cards right, I could be making six+ figures annually, and own two houses right at this very moment. And I'm glad I don't. I've made plenty of conscious decisions to abandon bits of security in my life, and not pursue a ladder of traditional/financial "success", and I wouldn't trade the results of those choices for anything. I have my own plan for success, and for leaving my mark on the world; it's my own little manifesto and I'm sticking to it. May we all (or at least, those of us capable of figuring it out) have meaningful lives, and may they all lead us down utterly different paths... >:)

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[garote]

Nicely said.

A toast! To the people who have something better to do than breed themselves to extinction! No matter what your tastes!

[katheudo.livejournal.com]

a 5-foot-11 readheaded nobel-prize-level genius girlie with breasts like teapots.

Bring on the future!

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[garote]

Heh. Q.E.D. :)

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Disturbingly few. Exactly. It disturbs me how few of them there are. Because the few that are, ... WOW .

I was lucky enough to date one for ~8 months. Unfortunately, we didn't get along personality-wise...

[android606.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Sounds like the future is going to be like 100,000,000 color photocopies of the cover of a KMFDM album, all aimed at each other.


I was actually thinking about this very subject just a few days ago. It really seems like technology has changed, and scietal 'norms' have changed, but fundamentally people are exactly the same as they were 1000 years ago.

We don't seem to be a whole lot closer to "just all getting along" than we ever were, you know?

Then again, maybe we are. After all, I wasn't alive back then; I only 'know' about ancient societies what this society's books have taught me. Reality could be very, very different.

Y'all know I could complain about 9000 things that I think need to change. Really though, if all of those things actually changed it would probably make me happy for about 10 minutes. It would just give rise to all kinds of other problems.

What am I talking about?

Maybe I should be doing something morally reprehensible right now instead of writing this.

-A

[reignspike.livejournal.com]

Halt your philisophical meandering for a moment, and take a look at trends. Trends are a very useful tool, IMHO, in telling you what you can expect. It seems to me that 1200 years ago, Europeans (from which our society stems) were living in a Feudal society, where only 5% of the population was free, and the rest were more or less oppressed. Even those 5% were constantly bickering and attacking each other. Move forward a few hundred years, and while the society is still Feudal, there are more freedoms and more leniency. At the very least, the nobles have more rights, as defined by the Magna Carta, among others. Move forward a little further, and you have the Spanish Inquisition. OK, so things sometimes take large steps back. But we got over it. Later, Americans demand their freedom from kings, and a Federation is born. Even later, slavery is abolished. Then came Women's Lib.

It's my firm belief that we are indeed advancing as a people. Sure, things still suck. Sure, the advancement is slow as fuck sometimes. Sure, there will be times when we take steps backwards. But overall, we have a much better world than people did in the past. IMNSHO.

I think this trend follows with individuals as well. It is my belief that the average person in the past was a worse, nastier, more dispicable person than the average person now.

On the other hand, technology has advanced quite quickly in the last hundred years, and now almost any yahoo can get his hands on things that can destroy a good many people. In fact, certain seriously deranged yahoos have managed to take over planes and ram them into a pair of towers. Not that that's even remotely the worst that can happen with the amount our technology has advanced over our cultural enlightenment.

It is for this reason that I am worried about continued human evolution. I agree with your thoughts on genetic engineering, and I include this in my list of worries. Frankly, I still don't think that humans are bright enough, on the whole, to be able to properly govern themselves with a democracy (so it's probably a good thing we don't have one). It's kind of scary to think of what could happen if you let regular people run things.

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[garote]

Yes, and that's exactly what concerns me ... how do we turn 'regular' people, into people capable of governing themselves? Some can't even control their bowels, let alone their politics.