i dont belive in no evolution

[nomadthethird]

The coke thing was on a works night out, there were witnesses, and much talk of the company's reputation being damaged. I think they were asked to resign, kinda thing.

Ah, ok, this I can understand I guess...

It's just in NY there are some industries that are well known as "party" and drug friendly...

Like music industry, PR, event planning, and most obviously wall street

 

[nomadthethird]

I don't know, maybe Agent and Peter Gunn can attest to this as well, but the more I read on here from Brits, the more I realize that drugs really are part of the fabric of everyday life for Americans, in a unique way.

They're really truly not that uncommon, even in professional situations.

 

[doom]

Evolution as a belief system - because after all, isn't science just another kind of religion????!!!

Slow down turbo.
Of course it is!
I'm not talking about university campus, academia science.
But, the way these things operate in the wild.

Science, Marxism, "insertwhateverthefuckyouwanthere" operate as (or in the same way as) religous crutches, articles of faith, they don't simply come in, clean house & replace pre-existing ideas or ways of thinking.

"Nothing gets "selected out" of the gene pool."

Is a nice way to think about it. Ideas & belifs get layered over the top of one another.

In practice everything implies value, science can't escape politics & people need to believe in some fact/god/power outside of themselves, something to defer to. People become invested in an idea & yeah, thats the end of science & the start of religion. It it all comes down to whats in your share portfolio.

Yep, tree lobsters (it is a cute name) are a great example / argument for selection, god bless those tiny specs of dirt floating in huge expanses of ocean!

 

[whatever]

Slow down turbo.
Of course it is!
I'm not talking about university campus, academia science.
But, the way these things operate in the wild.

Science, Marxism, "insertwhateverthefuckyouwanthere" operate as (or in the same way as) religous crutches, articles of faith, they don't simply come in, clean house & replace pre-existing ideas or ways of thinking.

"Nothing gets "selected out" of the gene pool."

Is a nice way to think about it. Ideas & belifs get layered over the top of one another.

In practice everything implies value, science can't escape politics & people need to believe in some fact/god/power outside of themselves, something to defer to. People become invested in an idea & yeah, thats the end of science & the start of religion. It it all comes down to whats in your share portfolio.

Yep, tree lobsters (it is a cute name) are a great example / argument for selection, god bless those tiny specs of dirt floating in huge expanses of ocean!

first of all, this is post is ridiculous

second, this is nonsense: "science, Marxism, insert-what-you-like-here, operate as religious crutches..."

Oh wait, just a minute ago, i was BREATHING, and when I stopped to think about it, I ACTUALLY BELIEVED THAT BREATHING MADE SOME LOCAL MOMENTARY SENSE ... but that must have been a "religious crutch" , right ?

um, NO. just b/c someone thinks about a certain problem with certain methods (which both scientists and marxists tend to do) does not mean that they are leaning on RELIGION , guffaw

clean up yr thinking there, doom .

crazy fun thread though, damn , who knew saturday nites could be so much fun

 

[Agent]

darwin turns 200 years old in 4 days: http://www.darwin200.org/ my guess is that middle aged schoolteachers (and their students) are celebrating this somehow. i learned about evolution in a lot of detail in public school in georgia (one of the worst public school systems in the US). if evolution is right in principle, there should be a species that lives for 1000+ years and has a constant reproductive cycle, with a gestation period of 2-3 hours.

 

[swears]

if evolution is right in principle, there should be a species that lives for 1000+ years and has a constant reproductive cycle, with a gestation period of 2-3 hours.

I guess if you had the right enviroment then maybe a species like that would evolve, but there are limits on space, energy, etc...

 

[nomadthethird]

darwin turns 200 years old in 4 days: http://www.darwin200.org/ my guess is that middle aged schoolteachers (and their students) are celebrating this somehow. i learned about evolution in a lot of detail in public school in georgia (one of the worst public school systems in the US). if evolution is right in principle, there should be a species that lives for 1000+ years and has a constant reproductive cycle, with a gestation period of 2-3 hours.

Really, why do you say this?

 

[Agent]

technology's evolution is outpacing biological evolution on some kind of exponential/fractal scale - that is if you consider, for example, Moore's Law to be a form of evolution. I'm trying to imagine a species of animal that would absolutely dominate the evolutionary landscape in Darwinian terms, and i think i was more or less describing plants and insects. With Darwin it's all about quantity over quality (in terms of spawning new generations with new mutations), but mammal evolution for example doesn't follow that model - it's more about social cooperation and complexity, time-binding intelligence, etc.

 

[nomadthethird]

technology's evolution is outpacing biological evolution on some kind of exponential/fractal scale - that is if you consider, for example, Moore's Law to be a form of evolution. I'm trying to imagine a species of animal that would absolutely dominate the evolutionary landscape in Darwinian terms, and i think i was more or less describing plants and insects. With Darwin it's all about quantity over quality (in terms of spawning new generations with new mutations), but mammal evolution for example doesn't follow that model - it's more about social cooperation and complexity, time-binding intelligence, etc.

This is an interesting thought, and I probably agree with it, but as Swears mentions, we're limited by our environment. And if human evolution continues to rely upon industrial means of production, I can see us extinctifying ourselves sooner rather than later.

 

[nomadthethird]

http://speculativeheresy.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/the-semantic-apocalypse/

By the author of Neuropath:

CONSCIOUSNESS AS COIN TRICK: THE BLIND BRAIN HYPOTHESIS

What if we’ve been duped, not simply here and there, but all the way down, when it comes to experience? What if consciousness were some bizarre kind of hoax?

The final secondary argument offered in the novel is based on something called the ‘Blind Brain Hypothesis.’ Consciousness is so strange, so little understood, that anything might result from the current research in neuroscience and cognitive science. We could literally discover that we are little more than epiphenomenal figments, dreams that our brains have cooked up in the absence of any viable alternatives. Science is ever the cruel stranger, the one who spares no feelings, concedes no conceits no matter how essential. In the near future world of Neuropath, this is precisely what has happened under the guise of the Blind Brain Hypothesis, the theoretical brainchild of the story’s hero, Thomas Bible.

Consider coin tricks. Why do coin tricks strike us as ‘magic’? When describing them, we say things like “poof, there it was.” The coin, we claim, “materialized from thin air” or “appeared from nowhere.” We tend, in other words, to focus on the lack of causal precursors, on the beforelessness of the coin’s appearance, as the amazing thing. But why should ‘beforelessness’ strike us as remarkable to the point of magic?

From an evolutionary standpoint, the uncanniness of things appearing from nowhere seems easy enough to understand. Our brains are adaptive artifacts of environments where natural objects such as coins generally didn’t ‘pop into existence.’ Our brains have evolved to process causal environments possessing natural objects with interrelated causal histories. When natural objects appear without any apparent causal history, as in a coin trick, our brains are confronted by something largely without evolutionary precedent. Instances of apparent beforelessness defeat our brains’ routine environmental processing.

The magic of coin tricks, one might say, is a function of our brains’ hardwired abhorrence of causal vacuums in local environments. The integration of natural objects into causal backgrounds is the default, which is why, we might suppose, the sense of magic immediately evaporates when we look over the magician’s shoulder and the causal history of the coin is revealed. The magic of coin tricks, in other words, depends on our brains’ relation to the coin’s causal history. Expose that causal history, and the appearing coin seems a natural object like any other. Suppress that causal history (through misdirection, sleight of hand, etc.), and the appearing coin exhibits beforelessness. It seems like magic.

I bring this up because so many intentional phenomena exhibit an eerily similar structure. Consider, for instance, your present experience of listening. The words you hear ‘are simply there.’ You experience me speaking; nowhere does the neurophysiology–the causal history–of your experience enter into that experience as something experienced. You have no inkling of sound waves striking your eardrum. You have no intuitive awareness of your cochlea or auditory cortex. Like the coin, this experience seems to arise ‘ready made.’

The Blind Brain Hypothesis proposes that this is no accident. Various experiential phenomena, it suggests, are best understood as a kind of magic trick–only one that we cannot see through or around because our brain itself is the magician.

Whether or not the so-called ‘thalamocortical system’ turns out to be the ‘seat of consciousness,’ one thing is clear: the information that finds its way to consciousness represents only a small fraction of the brain’s overall information load. This means that at any given moment, the brain’s consciousness systems possess a kind of (fixed or dynamic) information horizon. What falls outside this information horizon, we are inclined to either overlook completely or attribute to the so-called ‘unconscious’–a problematic intentional metaphor if there ever was one.

...

 

[nomadthethird]

If you get a chance to read that entire thing, do. It's one of the best things I've ever read on the internets. I completely disagree with the rebuttals, but I think Scott is right on.

Edit: sorry had the authors switched around at first

 

[Agent]

This is an interesting thought, and I probably agree with it, but as Swears mentions, we're limited by our environment. And if human evolution continues to rely upon industrial means of production, I can see us extinctifying ourselves sooner rather than later.

this is something I've thought about - we are limited biologically by how much energy, etc. we can harness and process, but i think we (humans) sidestep that with language, technology - anything that binds the past to the present, or encodes memories or information across time, gives us a huge advantage compared to animals. with technology though i think there are fewer external limits (energy, etc) because technologies create their own environment. in a sense we've changed the rules of evolution. genetic algorithms are one example, Moore's law, the singularity, etc. also indicate some kind of fundamental acceleration of biological/evolutionary time compared to the fossil record. to me this means that evolution is real but it isn't a fixed law in the sense of, say, one of the laws of thermodynamics. evolution as a process is correct in principle but the pace of evolution is completely relative. i mean, there could be planets that orbit their host stars at a different speed, and are home to organisms that evolve at a greatly accelerated or decelerated rate, who knows.

 

[scottdisco]

i believe in the awesome unstoppable cosmic power of the pho noodle soup:

thank you Zhao, i'm with you on this one my man, all day long and into the next night sweet please

 

[craner]

That looks revolting!

And I live with South Koreans, so I understand kimchi-breath, but still...

 

[craner]

Lovely portrait, Nomad.

 

[nomadthethird]

Thanks, Craner. I know I've transgressed the First Law of Internet Aloofness--never put your photo up! Oh my.

We should have a thread with our auto-retratos kind of like that good one we had of our neighborhoods a while ago...

 

[craner]

We should have a thread were we flirt with each other like maniacs.

 

[Agent]

Agent to thread with link to article about narcissism and polypharmokinetics.

BTW Agent that article you linked up yesterday was really good if you're reading this, which I don't blame you if you're not.

it's hard to keep up sometime. i'm not sure which one you're referring to. btw i posted a couple anthologies of pirated essays on my blog

 

[nomadthethird]

it's hard to keep up sometime. i'm not sure which one you're referring to. btw i posted a couple anthologies of pirated essays on my blog

The Newman one on post-anarchism.

 

[luka]

i still dont believe in evolution. im reviviing bergson. intelligent evolution. thats my bag.