board77

ToshoftheWuffingas wrote:

I have always been a little puzzled that the intelligence, speech, symbolic thought and self consciousness that humans display did not emerge before.

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A real evolutionary question is whether intelligence is worth the cost.

yovargas wrote:

Woflgang (& Jude), the problem with your example is that the inventor doesn't know what he's doing or making. The story changes tone if the creator knows what they are creating. Instead of a man trying to invent something, make it a someone building a known product. Let's say a man builds himself a car for the purpose of driving to work. Now, I can use the car to run over pedestrians if I so choose, but can you say running over pedestrians is the purpose of the car? I don't think you can. The purpose of the car remains the same - driving to work - whether or not that is the use I choose to give it.

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(In fact I think your own point would have been stronger in the case of a previously unknown product for which the creator has more of a semblance of authority to define the use of)

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LADY PRESENTER:
Well, that's the end of the film. Now, here's the meaning of life. Thank you, Brigitte. M-hmm. Well, it's nothing very special.

Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations, and, finally, here are some completely gratuitous pictures of penises to annoy the censors and to hopefully spark some sort of controversy, which, it seems, is the only way, these days, to get the jaded, video-sated public off their fucking arses and back in the sodding cinema. Family entertainment bollocks. What they want is filth: people doing things to each other with chainsaws during tupperware parties, babysitters being stabbed with knitting needles by gay presidential candidates, vigilante groups strangling chickens, armed bands of theatre critics exterminating mutant goats-- Where's the fun in pictures? Oh, well, there we are. Here's the theme music. Goodnight.
[music]

[dong]
['Monty Python's Flying Circus' theme]
[wind]
VOICE OF MAN IN PINK: [singing]
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.

Riverthalos wrote:

So the meaning of your life is whatever meaning you choose to give it. .

Riverthalos wrote:

It's hard to know whether or not dinosaurs were sentient. We like to think of them as big and dumb, but maybe they weren't. There's no evidence one way or the other really.

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What is the use of this conscience thing?

yovargas wrote:

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What is the use of this conscience thing?

Do you think We would've survived this long without it?

MariaHobbit wrote:

I started reading a book yesterday that claimed there is no physical, neurological reason for consciousness to exist. No actual structure that generates it. Nothing in the brain that you can point to and say, "THIS causes consciousness."

I hadn't really thought of that before.

yovargas wrote:

MariaHobbit wrote:

I started reading a book yesterday that claimed there is no physical, neurological reason for consciousness to exist. No actual structure that generates it. Nothing in the brain that you can point to and say, "THIS causes consciousness."

I hadn't really thought of that before.

Correction:

"there is no physical, neurological reason [that we know of] for consciousness to exist."