a cat isn't curious the way a human is curious -- a cat surveying a scene might think "where's the prey" or "where's the predator", but he doesn't think "where's the principle". but we think "where's the principle" for the same reason the cat thinks "where's the prey".

we love to ask "why" something happens, as if it's some kind of deep question. we forget that questions don't really exist in the real world -- a question is simply what happens to us when we sense that something that should be there is missing. the word "why" has no real meaning of its own -- a cat asks "why" those grasses rustled when he asks "where's the creature that made it happen". a human asks "why" an unexplainable thing happened when he asks "where's the system of mechanical elements that made it happen". the question assumes itself.

when we look on the world we think we're seeing what's really there, but we only see what we're meant to see.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=3074678&forum_id=2#29415639)

as for the writing style, I learned to write by copying petro and twist.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=3074678&forum_id=2#29419148)

I often thought along the same way with respect to morality, which, just like the curiosity you described, is an abstract way of thinking about what similarly moves all the other social animals.

The bottom line of both is probably a hard-coded product of natural selection.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=3074678&forum_id=2#30524243)

not very good at understanding why its building things

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=3074678&forum_id=2#29415318)

we're only good at things we have a fluent intuition for, just like any other animal. we've been gifted language and altruism and curiosity, and you might even think we have all the pieces we need to make this thing work. but really all we can do is tie the pieces together with baling wire and pray like hell.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=3074678&forum_id=2#29415409)

for posterity it was "Cumpole of the Bailey Jay", a riff on british legal drama rumpole of the bailey and transgender adult film actress bailey jay.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=3074678&forum_id=2#30524297)

I wouldn't be optimistic regarding their fate.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=3074678&forum_id=2#29418988)

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=3074678&forum_id=2#29418998)

500,000 and 50,000 years ago, early humans were just out there trying to do their best and not get eaten. We made repeated, systematic progress and did something never done before: we took ourselves out of the food chain and built lasting civilizations.

You are also wrong about humans becoming dominant just because we were the "first." We weren't. There were tons of other, older branches on the early human tree, and homo sapiens out competed and beat the others and forced them to assimilate or die.

Also you are anthropomorphizing even worse than chicks taking pictures of their dogs after the dog gets in the trash because "he's so embarrassed now!" Just because cats get scared of rustling grass or beavers build a dam doesn't mean they are equivalent to the problem solving, long term planning, creativity, etc that humans have developed.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=3074678&forum_id=2#29419206)

the cloak of civilization is a farce.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=3074678&forum_id=2#29419222)

we weren't the first to leave africa or the first to grunt at each other or hunt with weapons, but we were the first to build electronics, medicine, symphonies, paintings, skyscrapers, airplanes, and everything else no denisovan ever dreamed of. human adaptations came a few at a time over millions of years. we were the first to have enough of those adaptations to sustain runaway cultural and technological development. or at least, we were the first who actually did it. we weren't the first animals to learn or feel or explore or socially bond, or even use tools, but we were the first to fling those doors open wide enough for our collective behaviors to take over the known world.

human civilization is something unprecedented in the natural history of earth, but we're still part of nature. we think our species is the last word in social, intelligent life forms, but the truth is we have no idea what else is possible. we just take what we were given and do what it do. we aren't gods, that's for sure.

titans maybe, but not gods.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=3074678&forum_id=2#29420439)

yet we also seem to be profoundly handicapped. why? we are still running around in ape bodies that are virtually identical to those of our ancestors from 100,000+ years ago. which means that we're equipped with instincts and reflexes best suited for bashing out the brains of the nearest thing with clubs. we have logical faculties that are uncontrollably overwhelmed by the instincts of a raping, robbing, marauding ape.

you might imagine a hyper-intelligent outside observer looking at the earth who sees very little qualitative difference between a termite and a human. both are basically solar system bound. both just kinda move shit around. both consume X and shit out Y. both build this and destroy that. we think we're so much more capable than termites because we're up in the mix with them, but you could imagine a scale where the difference wouldn't even register.

so yeah, i agree that we definitely should have some humility and realize that we might not be shit. at the same time, we should consider that we might be the main event.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=3074678&forum_id=2#29501658)

You first say that humans are but animals, no different from any other excepting the fact that we specialize in different traits. There’s no arguing that.

But you also say that the fact that we specialize in cognitive abilities suggests that ‘reason’ is simply something that we ‘do,’ little different from the somatic reflexes of animals, as though it were a trait. This isn’t the case, and I think it’s dangerous to think that it is. Humans and cats of course experience the world in very different ways. But ‘reason’ is not simply a human trait in itself.

The fact that two plus two equals four doesn’t depend on the human mind or on our ‘rational faculties.’ It is a fact. I can prove it to you by combining piles of sticks. This alone should be enough to show that abstract ‘reasoning’ doesn’t depend on the faculties of the human mind alone. A cat may not be able to process abstract reasoning in the way that we are, but that we have the ability to reason doesn’t mean that the substance of our reason is not grounded outside of our own minds.

You say that abstract questions assume themselves in the mind of a human being. Obviously nobody will ask such a question as ‘where is the system of mechanical elements that made so-and-so action happen’ without first being conscious of such abstractions. But insofar as objects do fall at 9.8 meters per second squared, and so on and so forth, we can extend from bare observations and facts to characterize the world using intellectual abstractions, and can extend our knowledge of the world by doing so.

More to the point, I don’t think that people ask ‘where is the system of mechanical elements that made so-and-so happen,’ but we might ask ‘how can we formalize our immediate observations to be able to abstract from them and arrive at more interesting and significant truths of which we might not have been aware before.’ We don’t begin with an abstract model of the world, but begin with immediate data and use abstractions to our advantage in understanding it. This is how intellectual progress occurs in almost any empirically-grounded field.

And the fact that our abstractions are grounded in reasoning which doesn’t depend on our mental faculties alone is deeply important for the validity of any system of morality, really. Once you begin to argue that reason depends on the particular cognitive faculties of the individual, you give relativist libs an opportunity to criticize most anything that you say as inherently biased on the basis of your skin color, experience of privilege, etc., as they do today. The fact that we can appeal to reason as the source of our ideas, and that we can say that logic is universal and independent of any individual mind, is the bedrock of any moral code and of any society whose functioning depends on it.

My tangent might not quite get at the thrust of your point but I thought it was worth mentioning given your comments on human reason.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=3074678&forum_id=2#30524560)