Permanent omnipotence?

[Edwardo Piet]

What I said still applies "What we need to know in order to survive and reproduce, we know". What you are describing is a distortion of the facts to help us survive.

I guess this all just means that survival and reproduction is so strong a force it outweighs truth.

[The Grand Nudger]

Would't it be more accurate to say, "what we need to know, we think we know, even if we do not, so long as it does not impede"?

(on the whole I'd agree with the weight of truth over survival btw)

[Edwardo Piet]

If there is actually anything that we really do need to know the actual truth of in order to survive and reproduce as a species, it would be common knowledge otherwise we wouldn't be here. Anything that we merely only need to think that we need to know, we don't actually have to know.

[The Grand Nudger]

Well hold up with the "if"s. It's always an "if" that leads to "lulz". I'd say that we need to know the actual truth of very very little in order to survide. But we "need" to know a great many "functional" truths in order to survive. Isn't that precisely the problem? The functional truth is whats likely to be common knowledge (judging by the state of "common knowledge"), not any actual truth. If actual truth (whatever that may be) had some way of being common knowledge with any regularity one would wonder why we had to develop all these goddamned systems to determine it.

"Don't go into the swamp because a goblin will eat you" is just as effective as "Dont go into the swamp because the atmosphere is toxic" from a standpoint of survival.

[Edwardo Piet]

Yes, interesting. I wonder if there are any actual truths rather than functional ones that need to be known at all?

What about basic logic? "If I am here I am not not here." I wonder if we would be able to survive and reproduce without logic considering that back in prehistory there were so many dangerous predators around and we were dying from bad teeth and disease at a young age?

The very basics of the most obvious logic of all must be a basic requirement for our intelligence I would have thought, and our intelligence is surely one of the reasons our species has survived and reproduced successfully so far.

[The Grand Nudger]

Do you think that ants engage in logic very often? They survive. (We might say that they do without realizing it, meh.) We have strong reason to believe that ants don't actually have a concept of self (at least nothing like we would conceive of it), for example..lol. so, even the "if I am here" bit wouldn't mean much to them.

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Yes, interesting. I wonder if there are any actual truths rather than functional ones that need to be known at all?

What about basic logic? "If I am here I am not not here." I wonder if we would be able to survive and reproduce without logic considering that back in prehistory there were so many dangerous predators around and we were dying from bad teeth and disease at a young age?

The very basics of the most obvious logic of all must be a basic requirement for our intelligence I would have thought, and our intelligence is surely one of the reasons our species has survived and reproduced successfully so far.

Never discount the misfortune of others btw. There has been alot of life here, not alot of it has been very smart (even though we know of quite a few species that could have potentially been "very smart"), if "smart" was a unilaterally successful strategy we'd expect more instances of it. Seems that intelligence has some peculiar drawbacks of it's own. For example, it seems fairly easy for intelligent creatures to create unintelligent and potentially deleterious "explanations" for things.

[Edwardo Piet]

I think that we must be an exception. If we weren't intelligent in the way that we are, how would we survive? We're inferior to other animals evolutionary-wise in many other ways.

Imagine humans that never had clothes to warm themselves, never invented fire, never had agriculture or any other form of culture, or technology, no tools - if we weren't intelligent we would be less effective than wolves at working together in a group, and we're far less powerful than lions, bears, etc. Other apes are stronger than us. We'd have died out by now surely.

We have a bigger brain than other apes... if we did not I'm sure we wouldn't still be around because other apes are superior in many ways. Also, our complex language surely requires our intelligence. And I'm sure our language has aided our survival and reproduction over the years. Communicating information can be a powerful tool.

I'm not completely sure though. Thoughts on this?

[The Grand Nudger]

You think so? We're aggressive, prehensile, social, omnivorous, small.....the list goes on and on. We survived in exactly the state you invoked for many thousands of years. A drop in the bucket compared to some, granted, but here we are. Why would we be less effective than wolves btw (who are also "smart").....we're bigger than they are, often have larger groups, we have free limbs to hold heavy things...our bite is as deadly as their own (though not as immediately lethal...)

[Edwardo Piet]

We do have many other benefits, indeed, I'm not denying that. But if you removed our intelligence and complex language, do you think that we'd still have been successful?

Survived in that state for thousands of years? Haven't Homo sapiens sapiens always had bigger brains than other species of apes?

[The Grand Nudger]

Not, not at all, but we'd have at least been as successful as any other ape (often at apex). In a race between apes though, we -do- have advantages (even excluding our thought box)....