The Difference of Man and the Difference it Makes (Humans)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Wednesday, July 08, 2009, 17:02 (5409 days ago) @ xeno6696

Quite a number of different responses to my last post. - dhw: But ants are also special for their social organization, salmon and swallows for their navigational skills, camels for their storage and stamina...and even micro-organisms can achieve lots of things humans can't. - True but these abilities don't have any significance for the universe as a whole, do they? - xeno: By 2040 using technology we have today we'll be able to construct a computer with computational capacity greater than that of the entire human race. - Is that a chilling or a thrilling thought? Will it therefore have more wisdom than the human race? Or does it depend on what input it receives? Rubbish in rubbish out. - clinch: The great Russell - no mystic, he - once hypothesised that the Universe had a sort of "proto-consciousness" as a way of trying to explain why inaminate matter seems to have an innate property whereby, in certain combinations, it becomes self-aware. - That must have been on one of his off-days! It's not an idea I associate with Russell, it sounds more like Bergson. - clinch: I agree that we (i.e. homo sapiens and any other creatures sharing what we have) are the conscious expression of the Universe and that this insight does not necesarily lead us to a theistic conclusion. But it begs a question to which theism is a permissable intellectual response. I have tried to articulate why in the "James leFanu" thread. - No No. That's just the sort of thinking I was trying to avoid. The evolution of consciousness provides a way in which the previously unconscious universe becomes in part aware of the universe as a whole, and can begin to come to some understanding of what it is, how it works, and how it can evolve, or be consciously changed, in the future. - xeno: In this sense I find myself in the unsettling position of agreeing with religious moralists in that I schizophrenically alternate between praising man's virtues, and condemning him as "evil." It is the potential for evil that scares me most, and the more we separate ourselves from nature the more we can perpetuate the illusion that we don't need it nor need to treat it with dignity. - I don't see that there is any escape from human beings being part of nature. I take the view that human constructions are as much a part of nature as termite mounds. The problems of overpopulation and overexploitation of existing resources is one that will have to be addressed sooner or later. This is a matter of fact, not of morality. If the problems are not addressed by us, it will be addressed by the rest of nature. That is by the interaction of natural forces leading, as I suggested before, to war, famine and pestilence. This is not a cynical view but realism.

--
GPJ