A few years ago I made a thread on the old FRDB forum asking the question: "Are human beings intelligent?'
Now, coming back to it it still seems relevant. People have called themselves intelligent, but what does it actually mean? What real-world criteria would establish that we are a rational species? I don't think such objective criteria exist and so I'd argue that 'intelligence' is a property we've attributed to ourselves, but if we completely step outside that framework we could define ourselves collectively in other, more useful ways. Kind of like stepping outside of the box and looking at our social structures from a viewpoint that's not tainted by our pre-existing biases.
In my mind, a more useful descriptor of people is 'self-interested', rather than intelligent. Given biology people are forced to survive in their environment, to consume, cheat, lie, steal, win. Taking the moral angle out of that, it's just a reality of being human. We're in a situation where we need to find money to survive in any way possible for short-term gain, without keeping the long-term consequences to heart to a degree that our behaviour is going to change much from day to day.
Let's just call that social reality. Now multiply it across the globe and the entirety of history and the cumulative effect is to extract short-term value more and more quickly over time.. we burn more energy, we invent more things, our lives become convenient, at the expense of the environment around us.
Fast-forward to our awareness that global warming is happening and.. oops.. a little too reactionary and late. We'll attempt to adapt, but that we initiated it was completely beyond our control. It just kind of.. happened due to a mass of energy burners surviving a little too effectively.
And so I'd say if you look at global warming from a materialist, long-range perspective, whatever abilities humans gained via evolution have resulted in an imbalance that's now in the process of correcting itself.
Don't know what the point of this thread is, but when I think about global warming, and a lot of social problems, in this frame of reference it feels a lot like: "it is what it is"
Now, coming back to it it still seems relevant. People have called themselves intelligent, but what does it actually mean? What real-world criteria would establish that we are a rational species? I don't think such objective criteria exist and so I'd argue that 'intelligence' is a property we've attributed to ourselves, but if we completely step outside that framework we could define ourselves collectively in other, more useful ways. Kind of like stepping outside of the box and looking at our social structures from a viewpoint that's not tainted by our pre-existing biases.
In my mind, a more useful descriptor of people is 'self-interested', rather than intelligent. Given biology people are forced to survive in their environment, to consume, cheat, lie, steal, win. Taking the moral angle out of that, it's just a reality of being human. We're in a situation where we need to find money to survive in any way possible for short-term gain, without keeping the long-term consequences to heart to a degree that our behaviour is going to change much from day to day.
Let's just call that social reality. Now multiply it across the globe and the entirety of history and the cumulative effect is to extract short-term value more and more quickly over time.. we burn more energy, we invent more things, our lives become convenient, at the expense of the environment around us.
Fast-forward to our awareness that global warming is happening and.. oops.. a little too reactionary and late. We'll attempt to adapt, but that we initiated it was completely beyond our control. It just kind of.. happened due to a mass of energy burners surviving a little too effectively.
And so I'd say if you look at global warming from a materialist, long-range perspective, whatever abilities humans gained via evolution have resulted in an imbalance that's now in the process of correcting itself.
Don't know what the point of this thread is, but when I think about global warming, and a lot of social problems, in this frame of reference it feels a lot like: "it is what it is"
