*"Humans: a Blip Being Mended by Machines?"*

Post Reply New Topic

Sometimes human beings seem like just a brief but revolting blot on the landscape, a fatally deranged evolutionary development with no shelf-life just making a mess of the planet for a while.

Closely resembling a mass of yeast cells spreading across the surface consuming everything, polluting the environment like yeast producing carbonic some thing or other as it raises bread, creating all those holes/bubbles.

And so probably shortlived; after only a blink in planetary time already beginning to drown in our own waste products. Flies are more in harmony with the environment than us. Ants are really amazing.

Thinking that perhaps "machines" are taking us back to instinct/pre-programmed behaviour. Like returning to the main road after an accident forced a detour. ( Free-will being the accident )

Humans are the biosphere's way of reproducing itself (colonization of other planets). Human-caused environmental problems and global warming can be likened to pregnancy complications, like pre-eclampsia, caused by the fetus taking control of the mother's body.. And as in human pregnancies, childbirth has a possibility of being fatal to the mother...

Why should the environment be the judge of humanity's worth? I think free will is the most valuable thing in the universe. The environment is only important because of its value to us. An interesting idea, considering that hasn't happened yet. (Or has it? There's probably some bacteria stuck on all our interplanetary probes...)

And free will; who is that so important to?

Or perhaps machines ( info tech, and other hi-tech) are the biosphere's way of bringing us back under control?

To mankind, obviously. The whole idea of "importance" doesn't make sense in any other context.

There won't be a distinction between "man" and "machine" in the future, we will become more and more cyborg-ized as time goes on. And sapience is sapience, with it is biological or not is irrelevant.

I like to read Ayn Rand's Anthem and pretend that is what the world will be like after WWIII, except more paganistic.

I agree. Without humanity or some equivalent, all terrestrial life bigger than a microbe will die when the Earth does, within 1-5 billion years. Humans or our descendants (who probably won't call themselves humans, whatever form they take) have a chance to extend that deadline, if such a thing is possible.



But do we have more free will than other animals? I think we're all just reacting to internal and external stimuli. If you want to call that free will, then lower animals probably have it too. We are not separate from the environment. We are part of it.

I reject the whole determinism philosophy. The "clockwork universe" is a myth, physical law is only statistically deterministic anyway.

We're something else. An order higher than animals and higher than mere matter. I don't know how much free will animals have, but it's nothing compared to us. Humans have many reflexes that are completely involuntary, but our other actions are choices. The lower animals are probably mostly reflex, with little or no thought. There is evidence that higher animals (ones with significant amounts of brians) think though.

The seemingly "random" quantum effects of matter could be explained as some kind of limited free will as easily as chance. Just a thought.

eugenics is a bad thing.

In your first post you dismissed the importance of the environment because it was only of value to us. And championed "free will", ... ... because it was important to us. Dismiss both on these grounds if you wish, but dismissing one and not the other is just a trifle inconsistent.

The environment is important to many living creatures not just humans, whereas free will is only important to us, and is causing damage.

I was suggesting that the biosphere, Gaia, equilibrium, "information-urge", or whatever you want to call it, Odin, might be mending the matter by putting humans back into programmed frameworks ( machines, cyborged or not, the cradles/cocoons of internet and cars, etc), in which free will would be increasingly removed by the logical analysis of a central artificial intelligence, able to weigh up pros and cons better than one or even a group of humans, and, unlike most humans, capable of sticking to the best path to follow for the good of x; incapable of not doing so in fact, just like most animals have to obey their instinct.

I was also feeling seriously jaundiced about the activities of the human race! I find it quite cheering to see humans as a plague!

CONSIDERING:
There is no objective evil, only evil as defined by humans.
Free will, you said, is an evil.
Free will enabled us to classify evil.

THEREFORE:
Free will is an evil that enabled us to define evil, and without free will there would be no evil...

Your arguement is a little recursive and nonsensical.

This popular notion that quantum mechanics allows "free will" is wishful thinking, quantum indeterminacy is just as incompatible with the notion of free will as classical mechanics is, statistical determinism is still determinism. It is a desire to hold on to the dualistic delusion that there is a part of ourselves that is separate from the physical world that acts as a "unmoved mover" of our behavior.

http://www.naturalism.org/freewill.htm

... er... are you talking to me?

I wonder if locusts look around them after consuming every grain for miles around and feel horrified at what they have done. Maybe some of them do.

Maybe free-will is just an illusion, and no species has more of it than another; all are equally driven. We really are just like a mass of yeast cells gray-gooing everywhere, destroying everything in our path.

Our role might be to enable the transfer of data from protein bases onto non-bio/inorganic substrates for a leap to other planets, but that doesn't mean much, if anything, to me, like "next summer" ( probably) wouldn't mean much to an ant.