The total number of people killed in imperial China, including during the 3 kingdoms era plus the two world wars is about 300 million. Its like killing every man, woman and child in the USA. If you count other wars, revolutions and genocides throughout recorded history, the casualty number is probably many times higher.

Today we've made mass killing easier. U can fight a war by pushing buttons from a bunker like a video game.

IMHO, the only reason why we haven't gone extinct is because we're breeding faster than we can self destruct.

One thing immediately jumps out in this scenario. Our tech progress very moves fast but our mental progress is very slow. In fact, I don't think minds have evolved much since Emperor Qing's time. We've only developed the means to kill each other more efficiently.

This gap between tech progress and personal/social development progress widens with every new scientific discovery. I suspect that as long as this gap exist, humans will continue to kill each other. When they are at par, maybe we've progressed so far mentally that we lost all desire to kill each other. Maybe.

If you agree that our tech progress is moving much faster than our social capability to cope with it, the question I pose is, does this lag have an evolutionary value? If yes, what do you think such a lag would serve, since evolution is supposed to enhance survival rather than extinction?



This post has been edited by Beastboy: May 19 2010, 12:05 PM

Ok, I didn't use the right terms then.

When I say mental development, I don't mean IQ. I mean the ability to discern between right and wrong, moral and immoral. As I mentioned in another thread, a high-IQ genius can do stupid things and an uneductaed person can do wise things. So what I am saying is, our capability to develop weapons etc has far surpassed our ability to discern between right and wrong. That is the gap I am talking about.

If you don't agree, that's okay. I'm not here to impose my view or seek anyone's approval. I just want to know what others think. If my hypothesis is flat wrong or ridiculous, that's fine too. Am not here to whack or be sarcastic to anyone who don't agree with me.

Ok let me try to give an analogy.

Technology moves ahead at 100 kmh. Human wisdom grows at 1 kmh. If they had a race, after the first hour, wisdom trails technology by 99km. That is the gap.

The gap simply means we are a high-tech low-wisdom society. The chance of someone getting killed using that high tech is very high & we have a history of wars to show that fact. For every new weapon invented that doesn't have a corresponding discovery of wisdom, the gap between tech and wisdom widens.

Its contrast, the high-tech high-wisdom society, is where the rate of tech development is the same as wisdom development. The gap between the two forces is smaller or negligible. Because we wise up as fast as we invent our technology, the chances of someone getting killed is lesser because by then, we will have realized that killing each other is not a wise thing to do.

If you watch Star Trek, the Klingons represent the high-tech low-wisdom society. The Vulcans represent the high-tech high-wisdom one.

This post has been edited by Beastboy: May 19 2010, 04:29 PM

I know where you're coming from but we are discussing this within a framework that has a starting point, as in its immoral to do x 300 years ago but now its not.

Morality can and has been be made relative to the progress of technology. Take the cloning example. Because of the fear of the Frankenstein effect, societies impose ethical restrictions on the application of the science. While I know that fear itself cannot be construed as wisdom, there is an effort to provision for the unknown. Caution is a form of wisdom.

The same will happen in AI and robotics.

We've seen spots of this throughout our technology history but its mostly been confined to innovations that impact food, health sciences and the environment. It doesn't seem to apply to weapons of mass destruction... yet, and unfortunately, because of the gap I mention, we have situations of unstable nations with nuclear bombs. Its the scene of an immature child holding a high tech weapon, ready to throw a tantrum and annihilate us all.

This post has been edited by Beastboy: May 19 2010, 03:50 PM

There are actually low-tech, high-wisdom people that manage to control hatred: highly-achieved monks that live in seclusion. A few years ago in Burma, many monks were killed just like that. They did not fight back. I'm no monk but the point is, it is not an impossible thing.

Vulcans ... I thot they do have emotions but they are just able to suppress them? Romulans are less capable of suppressing it so it turns into violence.

We humans are probably born with violent streaks ourselves - survival instincts. Our inability to control anger and hatred is proof that wisdom-wise we haven't really changed from ancient times. We just got better at killing each other.

One of the things I posed is whether this lag has an evolutionary value for humans.

From the stone age onwards, we've been developing tools that helped us survive and evolve to this state. If we hadn't, we probably be t-rex's dinner. Our intelligence gave us the technology that gave us an evolutionary advantage. It enhanced our survival.

Now, the very thing that took us to the top of the food chain looks set to bury us. If our intelligence was a biological agent, then its starting to act a lot like a self-destruct gene. Like I said, the only reason why we haven't gone extinct is because we're breeding faster than we can kill each other with our wars. That gene will complete its job when someone finds a way to take every living person out. Its not a technological impossibility.

And this is the conflict that I come to: if intelligence is a product of our evolution and evolution was supposed to enhance our survival as a species, then why has it brought us to the brink?

IMHO, tech is neither good nor bad. tech has increased our lifespans, which is good. Instant gratification has turned patience from a virtue into a liability, which is not good. The question I wud ask is, will the harmful effects of tech cancel out the beneficial effects say 100 years from now?

To answer this we I doubt we can escape studying the human mind. If its in our nature to bash each other - and no need to go so far... there's plenty of it here at LYN forum - what is the source of this, and to what extent did technology play a part?

Hmm... I thot the dinos disappeared due to an external event, not due to evolution... like most extinctions that happen every day. Either their food supply got destroyed or a super predator came into the picture or a global extinction event like a comet strike happened. However, our destiny may be unique because its a scenario where the species itself causes its own extinction as a result of the technology it created. I can't think of any other species has this "self destruct" attribute so my 2 questions: is this attribute a natural outcome of evolution and if so, how does it enhance the survivability of the species when it clearly seems to be doing the opposite.

There is one thot I got from the movie "The day the earth stood still." They say we humans are at our best only when we are at the brink, faced with our extinction. If that is true, then mental pain is the evolutionary pressure that will drive us to the next level. The only problem I find with that is, the brink itself may be nothing less than extinction level event like the release of neutron bombs, hence I come back to square one.

Sorry but "will mankind be doomed (physically/morally) by continous scientific advancement 100 years from now?" and "will the harmful effects of tech cancel out the beneficial effects say 100 years" are two very different things.

The first one is judgemental - you made a conclusion of doom. The second one is not - I make no conclusion about doom.

This is a PhD segment of LYN and if the terms are too difficult for anyone or if anyone finds it offensive, they need not join in the thread. Simple as that.

No worries faceless, I'm cool.

Yup, people can and sometimes do fail when pushed. I never underestimate survival instincts where people will fight to the death to survive (get the irony? lol...)

Aha... could this where religion adds an evolutionary value becoz religion is all about embracing love etc?

But wait, who am I kidding.... much of today's wars are religious wars, lol...

Religion did try to solve that issue with these:

Part of Chritian 10 Commandments
You shall not murder.
You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not steal.
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
You shall not covet your neighbor's wife.
You shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor.

Buddhist 5 precepts
I abstain from killing.
I abstain from taking what is not given.
I abstain from sexual misconduct.
I abstain from false speech (lying, gossip, etc)
I abstain from taking intoxicants.

Taoism and Confucianism
Filial piety
Love thy neighbour
etc.

I picked the ones that didn't involve "worshipping."

Well its been a few thousand years & nothing seems to work. The bodies pile up and the doomsday clock keeps on ticking...

Yup, that's the question and without any live precedents, its hard to speculate. What we can do though is map a timeline of civilizations, find out what caused the deltas and extrapolate a conclusion. A civilization may be in any of these states:

1. Low wisdom, low tech
2. Low wisdom, high tech
3. High wisdom, low tech
4. High wisdom, high tech

We evolved from the dark ages (#1) to #2, where we are today.

We are seeing some instances of #3 in secluded communities of the religious, like a monastery.

I have seen some instances of #4 like the blackberry-weilding, internet-surfing monk I met the other day.

But these occur in negligible numbers. To jump from #2 to #4 on a massive scale I think would be impossible, not without a complete rebuild that can only happen from the complete destruction of #2. Sometimes its best to restart from scratch after being a little bit wiser, like when jumping from MS-DOS to Windows 7. Perhaps that's the function that wars try to serve after plagues and viruses fail to kill us.

So from that standpoint, self destruction could have an evolutionary value to humans in how it enables a quantum leap to #4, provided a few of us survive armageddon. Would that sound reasonable?

Edit:

Vulcan mythology depicts this scenario:



Source: http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Vulcan_history

So it was the push of pain rather than the pull of high-flying ideals that brought them to civilization stage #4.



This post has been edited by Beastboy: May 21 2010, 12:40 PM

Yup, I see quantum leaps happening in groups of hundreds but not groups of billions. Too much baggage in the way. Nothing short of a near-ELE (extinction level event) can provide the right conditions for a civilizational reboot. However the remnants need to have preserved enough knowledge to prevent a total decline of the technological curve and be able to hold it there while the wisdom element catches up, which brings us to faceless's opinion:

I'm just guessing here but the loss of knowledge from the Egyptians etc. could simply be due to their bad archiving habits and/or our failure to find the artifacts the data is recorded on. Even if we did find it, would we know how to translate it? Imagine a young survivor child stumbling on a hard drive 100 years after an ELE event. Would he know what to do with it?

The Mayans disappeared after an agricultural disaster going by the forensics of their bone remains. They weren't ready for it. Left nothing but their pyramids behind. We will face the same fate if we didn't prepare for a sudden ELE.

But we've wised up since the Egyptians. We already have a seed ark in the antarctic. We've got archives in underground bunkers. I just hope there's a damn good user guide left for whoever stumbles on these artifacts post-ELE.



This post has been edited by Beastboy: May 21 2010, 07:07 PM

MAD = mutually assured destruction.

You are right about arks and underground archives bring pointless without practitioners. One can only hope that in a catastrophic event, if only 'Adam' and 'Eve' survived, one of them had better be a damn good techie and the other wise beyond his/her years.

During the cold war, MAD worked as a deterrent becoz despite all the rhetoric, both sides were still rational. Must remember that today, not all nuke nations operate on reason and the danger is actually many times higher.

Yes, that's what I meant. The commies were cold blooded but rational. Can't say the same about the fundamentalists.

This might sound batsh*t crazy but in the larger scheme of things, wouldn't preventing a full scale nuclear war only delay that destruction-rejuvenation cycle that might propel humanity to the next stage? If the survivors make it thru the nuclear winter that is.

Thanks for the seed bank reference... I think I saw it on National Geographic.


This post has been edited by Beastboy: May 24 2010, 10:13 PM

Yeah, how not to think like that when people appreciate the absolute mess we've created for ourselves. Its tough to decide where a better future lies - continue our present path and hope people come to their senses soon enough or let some nutjob be the unspoken villain that humanity desperately needs to reboot itself.

True what you say. The guy who says "you die your business" will only make it his business when he ends up with 20 stitches on his head after running over the chicken. Pain is our biggest teacher and if we don't learn, its often becoz the pain isn't big enough. And if the pain of nuclear war isn't big enough, then extinction at our own hands will be the logical end.

Of course we haven't come to an end. Nuclear war belum lagi mah....

Well, we haven't discussed if it is possible to close the tech/wisdom gap without resorting to a nuclear war. Confucius, Lao Tze and all other moral teachers have tried to no avail so I have to ask, if people cannot learn from good advice, is the pain of trial and error the only option we have to close that gap?

How about going to the root of this stubbornness ... what are the reasons behind it? Did it play a role in the survival of our species or did we survive in spite of it?


This post has been edited by Beastboy: May 25 2010, 05:10 PM