>>Jay Hanson:
>> (a) The first step in successful problem solving is NOT having a
>> hallucination ("vision") as is the current fashion. (Gee, I am in
>> love with the idea of Democracy, so let's do it.)
>>
>> (b) The first step in successful problem solving IS to analyze the
>> nature of the problem (ask any engineer or systems analyst).
>>
>> (c) With respect to politics among animals (believe-it-or-not,
>> people are animals), think of it as a "game management" problem.
>>The goal of the game manager is to minimize the aggregate
>>suffering of the herd.
>Mark Measday:
>does he cull himself? Logically yes and actually no? Is this not the
>reappearance of what might be termed the fascist fallacy?
Humanity is either going to have to answer those questions is a
socially-acceptable way or perish. There are no alternatives.
"We humans no longer rely on the muscle of fight, the speed of
flight, or the protective mask of shape and coloring for
survival. We have come to depend on intelligence for life.
This is a fateful gamble. It has put at stake our collective
survival, and that of the whole biosphere.
"About five million years ago, the evolutionary line that led to
modern humans diverged from African apes, the common ancestors
of humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas. Apes are knuckle-walking
quadrupeds; Homo is an erect biped. Apes have large jaws and
they have small brains (in the range of 300-600 cubic
centimeters). Homo has a small jaw, and a fourfold brain size
in the range of 1400-1600 cc. Most apes are adapted to life in
the trees; Homo is suited to life on the ground. It is this
adaptability to terrestrial life that proved to be the decisive
factor in the evolution of intelligence. Why some bands of
pre-hominids left the trees is still somewhat mysterious (some
anthropologists maintain that they were pushed from the forest
into the savannah by physically more developed arboreal
primates), but once they left the trees their destiny was
sealed: they were condemned to a form of intelligence -- or to
extinction. The question we now face is whether the kind of
intelligence that evolved is sufficient for survival into the
twenty-first century. Humanity, as Buckminster Fuller said, is
facing its final exam. It is an exam of intelligence: the
collective IQ test of the species."
VISION 2020 -- Ervin Laszlo, [1994 p. 97]
Gordon and Breach 212-206-8900
Jay -- www.dieoff.org
