Re: Evolution-inLimited model?

[John M <***>]

--- Judith RoseRosendijudithrosenTEARTHLINK> wrote:

> John M. wrote:
> > Beavers exercise artistic (and technically useful)
> > designs in estuaries and coastlines. Male birds
> build
> > nests with colored ornamentation to catch the
> female.
> 
> Ah-- I was kind of hoping that this would be brought
> up. RR would argue 
> that what beavers do in dam-building and what birds
> do in nest-building 
> is generated more by instinct than by creativity--
> if there is even any 
> creativity involved at all. In fact, most living
> organisms don't have 
> the option of actually deciding NOT to build their
> shelter/pursue their 
> food/interact with their habitat, etc. in the
> characteristic mode of 
> their species, at least to a large degree.

I hope you are not one of those who look down to the
other animals because WE are god's chosen children
with creativity and arts, they have only 'instincts'. 
Yes, we went through a history during which we grew
orders of magnitude more neurons than most other pals,
so the expression (complexity-level? I hate that word)
of our "instinct"(!) looks more sophisticated. You are
probably no artist: an artist MUST do what she does. 
And it is very traditional and little changing that we
dance on our feet and twist our body to it, not really
changed for millmillennialhe birds adjust the sites of
their traditional nest-building intelligently and with
creativity just as we twist differently to the
rythrhythmthe timely art. And how are we to know that
what WE observe about those nests (or beaver-castles)
is an exclusive charcharacterizationtheir artwork? it
is only what we understand of it - in our terms. Like
a dog listening attentively to a Walt Whitman poem,
absorbs a lot (rythrythmsic, mental atmosphere of the
reader), not the human verbal content. DontDon't dare
"understand" animals in human terms! 
>
> The very fact that animal 
> species have characteristic patterns, like the
> hexagonal symmetry of 
> storage compartments in any honeybee hive, for
> example, suggests that 
> whole species of organisms rarely behave in ways
> that are in opposition 
> to their instincts.

Give us those millions of years what the instinsectst
through to streamline their social and technical life
and we may end up with hexagonal houses all in blue
and a queen for adequate proliferation - no abortion -
with males used only to provide sperm. (What a
future!)
>
> The fact that we can identify a species of bird by 
> their nest construction, or a species of butterfly
> by their cocoon, or 
> a species of spider by their web design .... clearly
> this sort of thing 
> isn't a creative act. It's an instinctive
> imperative. Many species of 
> organism are so bound to a particular food source
> that they will starve 
> to death rather than start eating something else.
> This is one of the 
> big concerns in global warming-induced
> climate/ecosystem change. Even a 
> creature as highly evolved as a Panda bear (no
> single celled bacteria, 
> this!!!) is in danger of extinction if their habitat
> changes too much 
> to support the species of bamboo they eat. This
> represents the 
> difference between encoded information and creative
> thought.

We are smarter: we destroy the habitat of our survival
and our potable water sources, poison ourselves with
GM food and render our air unbrunbreathablet by
instinct!
By creativity and wisdom. Did anybody "encode" the
info leading to such self-destruct? Why not? Why do
you think that "conscious will" is NOT encoded? it is
the ourcoutcomethe totality, experience, mindset, past
and mental habits - all not 'will', maybe instinct.  
> 
> This is an area that requires some very serious
> study because, for 
> example; nobody knows how much of what human beings
> do is guided by 
> encoded information and how much is open to
> conscious will. There are 
> aspects to "being human" that no amount of applied
> intelligence or 
> creativity will change.  We evolved to breath air,
> for example.  We can 
> use our intelligence and creativity to develop
> technologies which allow 
> us to bend the rules for brief periods, or to work
> around the rules, 
> but we can't alter our past history of having
> evolved the way we did 
> without altering what being human means. This
> information is semantic 
> information; it's entirely context-based. In
> essence, our evolutionary 
> environment is encoded into us. As such, it's become
> a part of "being 
> human". So, where are the boundaries, or "gray
> areas," between encoded 
> information such as that of the "internal predictive
> models" and the 
> capabilities of intelligence and abstract creativity
> of the human 
> conscious mind? How much can those boundaries be
> manipulated without 
> destabilizing the whole system?

You went round and round in flattering our "human"
superiority from really proving that we are animals
with conditions we cannot escape from. Are you saying
that the "human conscious mind" is something
qualitatively different from animal instinct? That we
are indeed god's privprivilegedldren, way above the
other aniuanimalsdon't think so. It is quantitative in
the neuronal connectivity and its functionality, in
the terms of Lenin's: quantity grows into quality -
formed as we (he) set the meaning of our terms.
> 
> And... how does this information get encoded in the
> first place??? 
> Perhaps more important: How can we learn to
> recognize it for what it is 
> in ourselves and in other living organisms.
> 
> Obviously, evolution proves that the encoded
> information is 
> interactive, just like everything else in this
> universe, and the 
> encoencodings change over time because of that.
(I tried to express similar ideas to that).
JM
JM....
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