Right, then, so you accept that some species will "evolve". Maybe they might have 18 legs and be purple in colour to our eyes.

If they ever evolve what we call "consciousness" or "self-awareness", do you think it would be materially different to ours?

I was trying to understand what point he was making.

What you are positing here is very debatable. There are all sort of questions about the impact of tidal lock on the development of complex life, whether it is necessary to have a planet with massive mass like Jupiter that shields the habitable planet from impacts, etc.

This is exactly my point.

I'm an idiot. He probably was. I can't imagine that he was unaware of the Fermi paradox.

That, and whatever he said there was a complete misstatement of it.

An interesting question that can be attacked from many different angles. For example, a lot of people interested in AI have thought about how much our self-awareness is influenced by our physical being, and how an AI that may not have a physical being might perceive self-awareness differently as a result. I have even heard the idea floated that you really cant achieve self awareness without a physical being, and so it would be necessary to create a robot body to house a sentient AI to achieve true self awareness.

From a genetic perspective, you could argue our self-awareness is dictated by the fact we are a sexually reproducing species and each individual is so genetically distinct, and short of having an identical twin no other entity in the world is more than half related genetically. One could imagine in a species that reproduced asexually or were more closely related genetically, such as social insects, self-awareness could evolve very differently, in a more communal fashion.

I have said this before in other ways, but Wazz's idea of communal living as opposed to nuclear families is a great idea, he just chose the wrong species. In bees, where sisters are more closely related, it works great.

I would say "these are the words of a man who is currently under the influence of a lot of acid"

Prove me wrong.

A lot of you guys hate kel, and I guess for whatever reasons, but I want to make this point:
- This is a great post. It has a lot more insight than certain posters here who feel that their job is to put in one liners, Trolly
- It is content rich. A lot of posters bloviate. This post has a very good word to content ratio
- Chexlaw, or whatever he calls himself, is a sniveling little

he does provide well thought out content, i'll grant that

I see that, but when you do the whole 'so you believe X' when X isn't what the poster said, and is clearly a hard to defend position, what you're doing counts as strawmanning. You can ask for more clarification on his views, but resist the urge to put views into his mouth.

What do you want, blood tests?

The idea that 'such and such would have happened anyway' if starting conditions had been slightly different, that at least in shape and flavour every historical event has been inevitable, is little more than a feeling, is at best pseudoscientific, and could probably be traced back to the ancient greek concept of destiny. You don't need to have studied much physics or philosophy or even poker to see that randomness doesn't converge like that. Very small changes in starting conditions result in massively different results.

+1

What you are describing is "chaos theory" and evolution is the opposite of that - it's more like "the house always wins".

Never heard of chaos theory before, thanks boss.

Just because evolution has examples of convergent evolution, i.e. crabs and trees and all the other things that evolve in different times and places but are functionally the same, doesn't mean that evolution isn't subject to chaos theory. Evolution is not the opposite of it. It's subject to the whims of changing circumstances and conditions. Any notion that this, us, as humanity, as we are now, is in any sense 'inevitable' is somewhere between religion and pseudoscience. History is also completely subject to chaos theory.

The shame about all this is that historians and anthropologists are expressly told not to practice 'what ifs', presumably out of some anxiety that the rest of science doesn't view history or anthropology as scientific at all, let alone a soft science, but historians and anthropologists would be uniquely well-placed to ask 'what if Hadrian's wall weren't built and the Romans were shoved out of Britain earlier', 'what if America hadn't been founded by rich slaveowning europeans. That for me is both fascinating and very revealing.

Jared Diamond's seminal book 'Guns, Germs and Steel' almost gets there, by asking the question central to this work, 'why was it the europeans invading the americas and not the other way round'? Historical fiction is meh; counterfactual fiction is great, and part of the reason I love Philip K Dick. When you study the history of capitalism and neoliberalism and colonialism, you discover that there were early battles between their heralds and those like in the Paris Commune. Most of those battles - figurative or otherwise - were won by the counterrevolutionaries. If just some of them had gone the other way, or, maybe, if Stalin hadn't risen to power and finished the job of making the USSR a nakedly jingoistic, impoverished hellhole and actually lived up to the ideals of socialism, then we might see a VERY different world today.

One of the things that elision of 'what ifs' does is limit the range of possibilities for what we see as possible. If we think this late capitalist hellhole that we call planet earth in 2023 is inevitable, then that discourages people from trying to change things for the better. I think we should ask more 'what ifs'.

Oh god, don't encourage Kelhus to make more eugenics posts, please.

One of the main intellectual criticisms of socialism is that at some point the pigs in charge will decide some pigs are more equal than others, and the system will invariably be corrupted. And corrupted socialism is much less functional than corrupted capitalism, for many reasons. Not least of which capitalism utilizes our natural proclivities as a species of sexually reproducing individuals driven by our genes surviving as a virtue, as opposed to something that must be suppressed by force.

I am unsure why you want to dismiss d2's argument as pseudo science, when scientists debate this issue all the time. I think d2's synthesizing the issue as "chaos theory" v. "the house always wins" is a nice way to summarize the debate.

It seems to me that there is plenty of evidence that evolution leads along a predictable and inevitable path. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution

This is a good post. It seems to me that the issue you are bringing up in your last paragraph has more to do with whether we have free will. Does the belief that we don't have free will discourage people from trying to change things for the better? That is obviously not a simple yes or no question.

Pointless, why do you believe it is that men are oppressed in society? Do we collectively choose to oppress men? Is the oppression of men inevitable due to the fact that they are less valuable for reproduction purposes? Is the oppression of men inevitable because their inability to become pregnant and stronger frames has historically led to the expectation that they work more than women? Is it even more complicated than that???

If we are going to stop the oppression of men, we need to get to the root of the problem!

Why single out Uncle Joe? He's in good company. Castro, Mao, Pol Pot. Rather than my continuing, why don't you give an example of where it (and by "it", I mean whatever your referent was) has actually worked?

Let me guess, every single example you can conjure wasn't the real "it".

Never heard of Orwell before, thanks boss.

I have no idea why my original question is sparking a discussion of evolution. For humans, the last 10,000 years is relatively insignificant on an evolutionary time scale. And even if we concede that evolution tends to converge, and that after 10,000 years, humans on my parallel world would be virtually indistinguishable physiologically from humans on Earth now, it doesn't remotely follow that human civilization on that parallel world would be virtually indistinguishable from current human civilization on Earth.

Once you did that, it was inevitable!