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Re: Evolution-inLimited model?

John M. wrote: 
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'.

Nah. If anything, I'm a misanthrope. I generally avoid other human beings whenever possible and tend to prefer the company of animals and plants. Human beings are far too disappointing and embarrassing as a species.

By the way, I didn't say they have only instincts. I said the ones without a central nervous system or brain have only instincts. Any creature with intelligence is going to have additional resources, which is why these evolutionary developments continued and increased.


You are
probably no artist: an artist MUST do what she does.

Actually, I AM an artist. And a writer. So I understand the drive to paint, draw, create, write... but it is entirely a different sort of imperative from the instinctive weaving of a nest, exactly like all others of a bird's species, even when the individual bird has never built a nest before. I recently saw bird instincts in full swing here, when two of our parakeets decided to raise a couple clutches of babies this summer. We have had these birds since they were very young, and we know that they were all completely unversed in all aspects having to do with procreation. I fully expected the female to practice a form of birdie birth control called "letting the eggs chill"-- especially since she is the most antisocial of all our birds and seemed to want to be by herself all the time (until her hormones hit her, that is). To my astonishment, not only did she incubate and hatch a total of five babies, all told, but she did the whole "regurgitation-feeding" thing as if she had done it all before. It was truly impressive to see the capability that is wired into these animals. What's even more surprising; all the books I got on parakeets raising babies described in detail exactly what our birds ultimately wound up doing. I've raised wild babies which people have found orphaned and brought to me, many times, but the parakeets are completely different in how they do things and I was a total newby.

You know... there is nothing in the artistic imperative that has any kind of species-wide aspect to it. There are few similarities even among one particular type of artist-- painters, for example. It's all highly individualized. So your analogy doesn't hold, in my opinion.

J.M. wrote: 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!


This reminds me of a Far Side cartoon, which consisted of two frames. The first was labeled "What humans say..." and had a guy yelling at his dog for misbehaving, going on and on cataloguing the pooch's transgressions... The second frame was labeled "What dogs hear" and it had the same picture, but the dialogue bubble was filled with; "Blah, blah, blah, Rover! Blah, blah BLAH BLAH blah. Blah blah? Rover blah blah blah-blah!"


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.

Well, we do not corner the market on self-interest as a species, John. It's just that we're putting our creativity and intelligence behind it which makes the human species obscenely successful at it. But all organisms have a survival drive which basically correlates to a focus on self-interest and organisms generally don't consider how their own survival tactics impact other species or even others of their own species. A pair of beavers dam up a stream and flood a huge area of woodland, drowning countless other creatures, killing trees, and changing a large area of established habitat purely to suit themselves. It's not malicious, but it's not noble, either. I used to grieve over the fact that human beings were capable of deliberate malice and was, in my extreme teenage years, ready to write our own species off as being a miserable failure of evolutionary experimentation. As I've gotten older, though, I've had to recognize that human beings are capable of equally deliberate consideration and care, too, which is also extremely rare in nature. In fact, it's far more rare than unmitigated self-interest.

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.

Don't make the mistake of imputing a value judgment to my comments. Flattery??? To be honest, I don't particularly like humanity. I'm disgusted by my own species, most of the time. We have an endless capacity to be our own worst enemy as well as threatening the survival of all the other living creatures we share the planet with. However, in this discussion we're talking about evolutionary entailments, right? I'm not boasting when I describe human capabilities as superior; I'm just calling it the way I see it in terms of survival benefit, and the fact remains that the human species has been extremely successful. It certainly isn't because our body design is so physically tough! We're pretty darn helpless unless we can make and employ tools to augment our vulnerable selves. So, yes; I consider that the human conscious mind is qualitatively different from instinctive capability. Instinct is based on encoded information and has no thought process involved. It's anticipatory, but the kind of consciousness/creativity that I'm describing is a second anticipatory system within the first. There is far more capability in abstract creative thought coupled with intelligence than there is in relying entirely on the encoded information which constitute the "internal predictive models" that all organisms have as part of themselves.

Judith