Posted: May 05, 2018 4:59 am
surreptitious57 wrote:Dynalon wrote:surreptitious57 wrote:
Ant colonies are infinitely better organised than human society because they all share the same aim. Also true of bees and wasps. Homo sapiens are less efficient because of the eternal conflict between individualism and collectivism
That is why we can not function as well as our insect friends. Were we ants or bees or wasps then we would be a
much more advanced species simply because we would all be working for the greater good
This is what I aim for and somehow this makes me some kind of big fucking villain even when the people
judging me mouth platitudes about the pale blue dot and how small and petty human thought usually is
I think ego is too powerful in the human psyche to achieve this. It can work in relatively small numbers but not on city scales or above where there are different cultures and belief systems all existing together. And the larger that society becomes the more diversified it becomes and diversity increases individualism rather than diminish it which makes collectivism less likely
Well, that's assuming neurosurgery and the like doesn't come into the picture.
Cito di Pense wrote:That wasn't really my point. Not long prior to this (see quoted material), you were promising a definitive treatment of the notion that US military planners are seeking the development of a hive-mind function. Your comments about the Soviet Venera probe are neither here nor there relative to that. Come up with more, by all means, and qualify it as much as you want with waffle like "to some greater or lesser degree". All I'm detecting is you picking fights with invisible humanists.
To to be fair, you were trying to flex nuts by contesting the common knowledge claim that the Soviet Union was Marxist-Leninist, something that can easily be demonstrated by reference to, for example, the report of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to the 20th Party Congress, which explicitly credits Marxism-Leninism as the bedrock of the Soviet state:
https://archive.org/details/ReportOfThe ... ietUnionTo
As far as US military planning is concerned, you are actually bringing up what was a very funny story for me. I was posting in a Facebook group for "thinkers" (though whether it was inhabited by such is not so clear) and someone asked me why I think that the Borg is the future of humanity (although the Borg were not explicitly mentioned at this point). I quoted DARPA researcher Michael Goldblatt:
"Soldiers having no physical, physiological, or cognitive limitation will be key to survival and operational dominance in the future."
At this point, I was told that this quote was unsourced. So I gave the source of the quote:
https://www.theatlantic.com/internation ... ts/406786/
At this next point, there was some backpedaling. So I had given the source, but it was from a "conspiracy article", or so I was told. (The Atlantic is a center-left publication and it's possible that bias can come in because of that, but they are not remotely comparable to anything in Alex Jones territory.) And, my, what an article!
(Obligatory:
)In any case, to be certain, I conducted a Google search restricted to the darpa.mil domain and quickly found the origin of the quote:
http://archive.darpa.mil/DARPATech2002/ ... LDBLAT.pdf
But even this was not enough and there was yet more backpedaling: simply because high-level military planners desire a thing does not mean it will be achieved, so he said. And there was more back and forth and from here and it ultimately led to the individual I was debating with getting assblasted and blocking me.
But the overall experience did tell me something: people will backpedal almost endlessly until they reach the point of "implementing this technology is difficult and, therefore, these difficulties are insurmountable", which is a conclusion that is not at all warranted. It is true that defense researchers have barked up the wrong tree when it comes to psychic powers in the past, though this paradigm was soon put to rest because evidence warranted its end. But Borg-like technologies are really quite different. They have indeed been achieved in our relatively near kin, lab rats. The demonstrable fact that rats can, with adequate technological intervention, transmit their thoughts to each other means that humans, who have nervous systems not so unlike those of other mammals, can do much the same. The fact that achieving such things is merely difficult does not mean that, for example, another very technologically difficult outcome was not achieved, that digital computers of bygone times didn't fill whole rooms, while current systems, costing less than a night at the local bar with a small appetizer (plus 20% tip), do not exceed the processing power of their predecessors by many orders of magnitude and yet fill up about as much space as a pack of cigarettes:
The conflation of "difficult" with "impossible" is something I see too far often and I suspect it ultimately has far more to do with the desire not to see a technology to come to fruition—as lacking and as baffling in justification as that may be—than genuinely justified belief that it will not.
Thomas Eshuis wrote:Dynalon wrote:SafeAsMilk wrote:Don't have much experience with the sort of humanists/secular leftists you describe, so I'll have to take your word for it.
Well you can easily get said experience:
"You want a rational world?"
"Yes!"
"You want a unified world?"
"Yes!"
"How about we use neurotechnology to achieve said outcome?"
"[any number of deflecting responses including 'it would be boring if we were all the same!' and 'uhhh, education!']"
The bolded bit has nothing specifically to do with humanism, much less 'leftism'.
You're absolutely right, Thomas: humanists and other leftists only ever propose non-answers to the challenges they face.