RE: Anyone want to read and discuss "The Origin of Consc in the Breakdown of the B Mind ?
September 16, 2016 at 3:52 pm
I think there is also a case to be made that the technological progress "we" have achieved has rendered many of us (myself included) useful idiots in certain respects. Most of us -- the overwhelming majority, I dare say -- are really nothing more than consumers and beneficiaries of this technology and the science that made it possible, without having much skin in the game ourselves.
After all, how many of us in some time traveling scenario in which we are tasked with explaining our modern world to a group of intelligent, curious, sophisticated people living in antiquity would get far in explaining much of anything before our "explanations" began to sound like 'magic' to our listeners? I'm reasonably certain that Aristotle, for example, would have been able to grasp most of the advances made in math and science, and hence also in technology, with the right tutors. So if he is in the audience and concludes his time-traveling interlocutor is resorting to magical explanations for fantastic claims, where does the blame fall? Who, really, is the less intelligent and more ignorant party in that exchange?
After all, how many of us in some time traveling scenario in which we are tasked with explaining our modern world to a group of intelligent, curious, sophisticated people living in antiquity would get far in explaining much of anything before our "explanations" began to sound like 'magic' to our listeners? I'm reasonably certain that Aristotle, for example, would have been able to grasp most of the advances made in math and science, and hence also in technology, with the right tutors. So if he is in the audience and concludes his time-traveling interlocutor is resorting to magical explanations for fantastic claims, where does the blame fall? Who, really, is the less intelligent and more ignorant party in that exchange?
