• You are currently viewing our forum as a guest, which gives you limited access to view most discussions and access our other features. By joining our free community, you will have access to additional post topics, communicate privately with other members (PM), view blogs, respond to polls, upload content, and access many other special features. Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free, so please join our community today! Just click here to register. You should turn your Ad Blocker off for this site or certain features may not work properly. If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us by clicking here.

The Force: has Technology trumped evolution?

coberst

New member
Joined
Oct 16, 2007
Messages
336
The Force: has Technology trumped evolution?

Darwin informs us that natural selection, i.e. evolution, has been the guiding force determining the course of biological change. Natural selection, i.e. evolution, operates far too slowly to compete with Technology in the present and future determination of biological change.

Just ask the Polar Bear!

Is Technology the “true” meaning of Intelligent Design?
 

Fluffywolf

Nips away your dignity
Joined
Mar 31, 2009
Messages
9,581
MBTI Type
INTP
Enneagram
9
Instinctual Variant
sp/sx
Leave the polar bear out of this!

If you are to believe in an intelligent design. Some greater force in control. Than both evolution as well as technology are no doubt part of its design. If we have true free will, it is up to us to deal with it. And we should not pay attention to any potential grand universial schemes. But rather focus on the topic at hand.

But first we'd need to stop the corruption and the people abusing and benefitting from media wide spread dellusions. That is to say, I don't agree with how humanity tends to handle these things. I agree that it is good something is done, but a bit more realism might be nice.


Ever played that game in kindergarten where you whisper a sentence to the next kid, and that kid whispers the same to the next and to the next and to the next? And the last kid suddenly has an entirely different sentence? That's the media in a nutshell.
 

Fluffywolf

Nips away your dignity
Joined
Mar 31, 2009
Messages
9,581
MBTI Type
INTP
Enneagram
9
Instinctual Variant
sp/sx
How have you come to deplore philosophy so?

I haven't, not in general.

But when it comes to current ongoing global and political situations, then yes. That's where I draw the line with philosophy.
 

Magic Poriferan

^He pronks, too!
Joined
Nov 4, 2007
Messages
14,081
MBTI Type
Yin
Enneagram
One
Instinctual Variant
sx/sp
Well, perhapos "natural" selection has been over shadowed, but of course evolution has not. Evolution is simply guided by the environment, technology merely allows us to change the environment faster than the environment generally changes us.

More specifically, since the smallest step of evolution is a generation, and only a tiny bit of makeup changes in a generation, then changes in the environment like the kind that have been caused in the past 100 years (and I'm just talking about population growth, development of cities, etc..) clearly outpace the speed of our evolution, so it shapes the shaper, you could say.

However, we as a species have nothing close to intelligent design. We barely even have design. Humanity's influence on its own evolution is butter fingered. It hardly knows what it's doing to the environment around it, even. That makes self-adjustment rather tricky. It's partly because we just don't understand genetics well enough yet, and I think more importantly because actually managing evolution would require large-scale coordination and commintement that I don't think the human race is capable of.
 

durentu

New member
Joined
Mar 18, 2008
Messages
411
MBTI Type
INTP
Enneagram
5w4
the idea isn't so much technology vs evolution as much as technology = evolution.

When we think of evolution, we tend to think of the biological genes and genes only. Specifically the information contained within DNA.

As humans, this isn't true. As humans, we live with something called memes.

memes are basically ideas passed from one generation to another. Apes don't really have this although there are signs of learning, and possibly apes teaching each other. The item being taught is a meme. (apparently, there's some cover up as to the true nature of the cognitive abilities of apes. Against popular belief, the apes have language)

For humans, these memes are first passed via artwork and story telling. Then afterwards through books and science and now digital media. It's another philosophical debate to ask whether we live with memes, or if memes are using humans to evolve themselves.

In either case, we deal with memes daily. And through the help of humans, memes evolve. How to pick the right spouse, is a memes that has evolved. The theories of physics have evolved.

To think of evolution without memes is an incomplete picture.

Technology is basically a tool. Just like apes use sticks to help get their food, we use technology to help us go further according to what we now perceive as important. Namely, the survival and reproductive instincts. Arguably, the most we spend are on weapons and health.

The point at which the health technology surpasses our biological form is basically known as the singularity. The brain will be mapped out after numerous fMRI scans. Organs can be replaced or regrown via stem cells now possible through our own skin cells instead of embryos. Once these technologies are capable of replacing our bodies, we can change ourselves in our own image.

Apart from that, the ability to hook into the internet is also possible in small degrees today. Disabled people can get chips implants to replace their biological arm for a mechanical prosthetic. Combined with the knowledge of fMRI brain scans, we can replace reality with virtual reality and hook into second life.

You can let your imagination run wild with this and/or read kurzweil's book singularity to get up to speed on where we are.

The point is that while our DNA is still* making corrections and cleaning itself through offspring, the technology that supports memes (paint, books, digital, etc) will eventually be in a position to first augment and then replace the human. First by replace the biological components, with biomechanical or by uploading your brain into the internet. I'm not sure if this upload is a form of cloning. But at this time, it'll be the singularity. Kurzweil estimates that will happen in 14 years from now. 2023.

Is this part of intelligent design? With the ideas coming from M-theory and the cern lab coming online, with the cassini probe looking for evidence, we may very well prove that every possible permutation of our universe exists in alternate dimensions. This can be proven or disproven. Intelligent design cannot be proven. Give enough time, we'll know everything and find out that god was just a catch all for our short vision.


In short, it's not evolution vs technology, it's evolution with technology. And I'm glad I'll be alive to witness the singularity and have the means to live to 200 years old in my current form. We live in sci-fi.
 

coberst

New member
Joined
Oct 16, 2007
Messages
336
Humans are the result of natural selection. Humans have evolved with the ability to develop technology. Technology has become strong enough to overcome the influence of natural selection because technology changes the natural world much faster than natural selection can act thus aborting natural selection.

Technology replaces natural selection because natural selection no longer has time to act except perhaps with insects because they reproduce very rapidly.
 

iamathousandapples

New member
Joined
May 7, 2009
Messages
495
MBTI Type
ISTP
Enneagram
5w6
technology is just tools, which other monkeys have been known to use. The fact that our tools come faster and better is just another act of natural selection.

EDIT: damn, didn't see that that was already posted.
 

coberst

New member
Joined
Oct 16, 2007
Messages
336
McLuhan was, I guess, the first to express the insight that technology is an extension of the human body.

These hand-held gadgets for communication might very well represent the end of ‘understanding’ for almost all citizens by 2050. I can see it already on the Internet discussion forums where communication is becoming a stream of consciousness without coherent grammatical or thoughtful content or construction.

I am going to deal with numbers and ratios not that I think my numbers are accurate but I think they may be useful for comprehending certain things.

Suppose we establish a knowledge-to-understanding ratio K/U, i.e. the amount we know divided by the amount we understand (i.e. need to create).

I would say that a frontier family might have K/U ratio of 20/1. As time passes and there is less need for understanding (creativity) and more need for knowing because the demands of the frontier diminish and ‘civilization’ encroaches I would say the K/U ratio might go to 50/1.

After one hundred years I suspect the ratio might easily move to 100/1; after leaving the farm and moving to town and going to work in the factory the ratio might very well go to 1000/1.

Today’s modern man or woman may very well have a ratio of 10,000/1. The person with a PhD might very well have a ratio 100,000/1.

I have heard college professors say that you never really understand a subject until you try to teach it. I suspect a PhD who is also a long time teacher might have developed an understanding of many things and thus dropped the ratio back to 10,000/1.

I think that within the next 50 years ‘understanding’ will be only seen in a museum. Do you agree?
 

wren

New member
Joined
Jul 3, 2009
Messages
384
MBTI Type
infj
Enneagram
4
I don't really agree with the sentiment that evolution must be dictacted without feeling. Most likely what will happen in our tech world is that progress towards time and space exploration will be tempered by a human /animal capacity to feel love and care for others. This will make it almost most impossible (like moving thru tar) to advance towards the point I think this conversation is heading. :yes:
 
Top