Human evolution

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Are either important in and of themselves? Or are they important because they allow us to reach our goals. We exist because it fits our desire for life and for its pleasures or even for the accomplishment of certain life goals, we discard this life when it becomes too undesirable. The same with propagation, we propagate because it fulfills one of our goals, like to leave a lasting influence or even because of our desire for pleasure. Due to the nature of life, an organism without sufficient reason to do a necessary act will cease to exist and those that have effective reasons will live. That is why we find life important in most cases and why we tend to seek and enjoy attempts to propagate. Now ultimately both are important on the macroscopic scale because we want to keep the species in existence and neither are necessarily important on the microscopic scale as it falls down to an individual's choices.

It is very difficult to keep this discussion without resporting to philosophy. Is there value to wisdom and compassion? Of course- without wisdom and compassion, things would start to self-destruct.

If we all agree that after life itself, the most important thing is to evolve into a higher intelligence I ask- how would we know if this happened?

As humans, we come pre-programmed with information. The basic stuff (living, eating, breathing, digesting etc.) and innate information (mammalian traits). This stuff is built into our DNA... if we were born in some intergalactic zoo we'd still act in a somewhat human fashion.

Well... what is the next step then? I don't think humans will ever be born with a language. Humans may be born more and more developed but this is not intelligence.

What would the next evolutionary step for intellectual beings be? Take autism for example. Is autism a step back or a step forward?

In my opinion biological evolution for all practical purpose is over. Technology is
moving much,much,much (did I say much) faster than biologic change. AI
technology will be more advance than the human brain (maybe in 50 years)
but 50 years is so small a time interval that evolution would take millions of
years to say get a cat or dog smart enough to program a computer. In a million
years machine evolution will be insanely advance. We all got a dream like Star
Trex that man is going to buzzing around in the future all over the universe, but
just as we get more science from non-man space fleight it will be more so in
the future. Do we need more worlds so people can breed like rats or do we need to
reduce our population here on Earth instead? We think we are special and for our
time we are but we are only the first step to machine evolution. Look at population
growth in rich country its zero. The whole world maybe that way in 200 years
(zero pop growth not rich my family will never be rich!).

I have thought about that but disagree, mostly because I am a human machine and not a machine machine. But if you're right and the next step is free willed, self-replicating machines then we are very very close to that becoming a reality.

If this is true then we already know who will replace us: google. As it is now, Google already proofreads (corrects) billions of human queries a day- it wouldn't take much for Google to become alive, if it's not already.

But I am prejudiced because I am human. I look at it more like "2001: A Space Odyssey" where the machine understands the signal from Jupiter but man wins out in the end... that kinda thing.

Since the greatest thing mankind can do is become smarter, then where does autism fit into that? Autism is a perceptual difference... autists see the universe differently than NTs.

Take Aspies for example. Aspies generally don't have social skills but make up for it with higher intelligence. I read several papers that say Aspies memorize and recant but don't absorb information and I generally disagree- I think the path to higher knowledge starts with a higher degree of perception and somewhere in there is autism.

So the question is: Is autism a mutation or is it the next step?

So if we narrow down to say biologic evolution or human evolution like
your threads title and look what meaning AS vs NT means for evolution
in the short term. Well clearily the world of IT is more suited to AS. AS people
will beable to make the man to machine interface. The Borg make alot of
sense to me. I do not see it as evil but something good. NT would never think
that. But if the Borg is the future that means AS is the future.

Self-destruct? If things self-destructed then that would fail everyone's desires, the majority of people do not want self-destruction and therefore they will work to maintain order to protect themselves. In fact, I would say that most past societies were built upon ruthlessness and claim that that strength is what ultimately propelled them to the height of glory that they achieved. Of course, they fell, all greatness weakens and the compassion of a people are will not protect them from a tide of bureacracy and their compassion may even shelter that bureacracy due to sympathy. I would even say that it is not compassion that keeps things going but rather the acknowledgement of ruthlessness and using it, after all which lasted longer, the compassionate ideal of communism or the ruthless one of capitalism? I would say that law and the competition of self-interest keeps things from self-destructing as modern society does not trust in the compassion of man to keep it going but rather in utilizing the knowledge that people will be ruthless in promoting their self-interest and designing a system to make that coincide with the good of all.

Higher intelligence isn't going to be a leap, it will be a gradual rise that will barely be noticeable and possibly attributable to outside factors. We probably won't be able to necessarily tell if our genetically influenced intelligence rises.

The next step will not really be much of a step at all, we will change but not really have revolutionary change. Unless we colonize some other world and have to adapt to its nature we will not have any leaps or dramatic changes as for the most part we will just continue to improve upon what we already have... of course this is assuming that evolutionary processes exist in human society, it is possible that they do not in the modern world because human society is too complex and separate from the natural world, we don't weed out our weaklings. Also, I would describe autism to be a weakness as it affects our ability to function within our species in a way that is negative, as the advantages that we have tend not to be too much greater than NTs yet the weaknesses we develop are quite noted.


We will probably not be replaced by a machine any time soon because machines are too rigid. They have too many problems adapting, the Google software is nowhere even close to alive and really probably just has a little routine that identifies common searches and compares them to the mistakes in the uncommon searches using some form of algorithm, it does not actually think. Because of the lacking creativity of machines when it comes to approaches, they are not likely to ever surpass human beings because we can easily overcome their highly mechanical thought processes.

The thinking advantages of AS are not so great that they overcome our weaknesses. Many NTs have the same level of intelligence or greater than we do, yet very few have the same deficiency in terms of fitting into society or suffer from our rigidity. Given the importance of fitting into society and the importance of adaptability in terms of jobs, mental health, breeding, etc, it would seem that we are just an odd mutation. This does not mean that individuals with AS are inferior, only that they have a trait that affects them negatively which is not ncessarily a major deal as many other people also have traits that affect them negatively such as diabetes and poor-eyesight.


NTs can and do often work in the IT business themselves. We may have some advantages due to our diligence and logical minds but not so much that we dominate that industry. Computers will always be our tools and never really reach our level because they are so mechanistic in their thought processes, although logic is a good thing the fact is that many things cannot be decided by pure logic, this problem has been shown by people who have the emotional part of the brain damaged. Even though they are fine in other parts of their lives they are often parallyzed with indecision, a machine would suffer from the same problem due to its lack of bias and mechanistic problem solving.
http://changingminds.org/explanations/e ... cision.htm
http://www.loc.gov/loc/brain/emotion/Damasio.html

I have a book "Analog VLSI and neural systems:By Carver Mead" Basically a howto
manual to building Analog Neural Network chips. Maybe some people think there
is some magic in a biologic Neural Network operating 1000 to 1000000 times
slower than an Analog VLSI Neural Network. Maybe people think an AI chip can not
be connected to a CCD(eyes), microphone(ears), mass spectrometer (nose),
touch screen LCD (touch), etc Its not a matter "if" it a matter of "when". I say 50
years is enough time.
My theory why AS would be better at machine intergration was based on our
social skills being different than NT. I'm talking about a physical connection to a
biologic neural systems to VLSI neural system. I say NT's do not want a a network
connection to their heads. My commucation is 99% via network commucation.
Its would be a simple choice for me to merge with a machine. And NT who is at
a bar laughing drinking a beer with his mates is not going to do that.

A self-sustaining, self-replicating machine would have to be able to keep itself alive. All machines have a weakness whether it's a plug (into an outlet) or parts that wear out over time. And at the same time, any "thinking machine" would have to use electricity for thought- anything else is just too slow to operate in real time.

This machine must have its own power source, must be able to ajust to its surroundings and be able to repair itself. In other words, it's a human being!

TheMachine1: what is the difference between a self-aware computer in a self-sustaining body and a human being? This is why I don't think machine are going to take over- I think we're already machines!

Awesomelyglorious- I have had thoughts similar to yours to where a society evolves through the ruthlessness of individuals and I generally agree with it. Look at our current President. Looking back at these times 100 years from now, we will undoubtably have Bush to thank for a lot of the future world! We'll all be in electric cars made of a renewable energy source, we'll put the environment first, we'll have come to some sort of peaceful arrangement with the Middle East by then, we will not take our politicians for granted, there won't be any "war profiteering" or big influential business because we're dealing with these 500 pound gorillas all at once today... it really will be a better future, mostly because of how badly our current President is getting stuff done.

But this is Realpolitiks which is bad logic for me to accept. Capitolism intentionally destroyed Communism because humans ultimately want choice. A capitolist society is a large group of people all putting a fraction of their resources together to finance a stable society... a government that does stuff like make roads and enforce laws and so on. I do not call this evolution as much as "convenience for the masses".

>>Higher intelligence isn't going to be a leap, it will be a gradual rise that will barely be noticeable and possibly attributable to outside factors. We probably won't be able to necessarily tell if our genetically influenced intelligence rises.<<

Evolution works slowly over time but in practice it works quickly and dramatically. New species branch off rather quickly from the norm- it only take 2 or 3 sucsessive generations to classify one group of living things as a seperate group.

I guess my question is: Is the next step for humans more mental capacity, a new physical adaptation or something different altogether?

Our current president is just a failure and has very little to do with what I am talking about. However, even Bush still gives us something to go off of, even our worst presidents are restrained from action because of the fact that our system keeps them from having too much power, Bush has not appeased us very well and as a result he has lost much in terms of power and lacks the influence that the more pleasing individuals have had. Of course, you are right, we do recognize how to adapt these systems, however, the entire reason for these systems is because we recognize that people have bad tendencies and the need for preventing them from damaging us and even utilizing their negative tendencies towards popular ends. I call capitalism evolution because it effectively is, all industrialized societies pollute, all large societies have social problems, capitalism isn't so much the cause but rather the system that we currently have. Other systems of economics fail at efficiency as they have little incentive to find the most efficient way to get things done, they fail at effectiveness as their products are lesser than those of other systems, and they have a greater danger of failing due to the centralization of power, as economic controls = control over individuals. I view this as the best system we have developed. Capitalist societies did work against communist societies and vice-versa to some extent, both sides tried pushing their path, however, communism does tend to fail because it cannot get things done efficiently and effectively, China did not switch to capitalism because they were forced to. They recognized that their economics failed due to poor incentive plans and too much control over the economy. They tried all sorts of means to get their economy going under their system but only when they chose capitalism did their economy actually begin to grow.

Realpolitik is of course excellent logic and we have much we can learn from Machiavelli and other figures who recognized the negativity of man and could use it, I admire ruthlessness because it seeks the most efficient way to satisfy a desire to accomplish a goal or multiple goals. Ultimately, ruthlessness is consequentialism to some extent because it values the consequences of actions above all else, if through my action I choose between 10 people and 100 people dying I choose the former, is that good or bad? Now, of course, I might have used a method that seems morally wrong but I did good in the end. Let's just look at how they develope medicine for animals, they treat animals by killing other animals. This is ruthless, this is cold, this creates progress though and in the end more animals are saved and treated than if this had not happened. Now we don't do this to humans simply because humans recognize the individual danger for allowing this, it is better for them to politically stand together than to be the unfortunate one to be experimented on.

Right, it requires an isolated group, which is something that we have less of nowadays due to the interconnectedness of things and this adaptation must be successful and spread. We don't have many isolated groups, we don't have much pressure to select certain traits and it does take more generations to create a big change. European royalty isn't another species, they may have a greater tendency towards certain diseases but for the most part they are not too distinguishable from the population despite being self-selectively separate for many generations. The same with many other groups, we only see the big differences pop up in minor organisms such as flies but even with island groups all that usually pops up is just a higher biological tendency towards some disease or another. We probably are not evolving because the conditions for evolution are not really present, evolution is designed to change things so that we adapt to a changing world, our world is not changing and we live like kings, it is not likely that we will evolve.