Permanent omnipotence?

[Angrboda]

Since time is meaningless and non-existent for such a god, the notion that there was a "time" when it's creative act was either merely potential or dormant seems nonsensical. To speak of a god of creation as not in the act of creating, seems, to me, a profound confusion about the nature of time and existence.


I appear to be late to the party. I think much of the current evidence seems to be trending toward the notion that our particular, large brains were selected for to allow for the expansion and development of complex social behaviors which, while enormously adaptive, require enormous and sophisticated computational abilities (examples, group sociality, jealousy and honesty, gossip, theory of mind, language itself, and so on). The apes and monkeys prior to the hominids can already be seen to exploit this niche in less impressive ways: there is a group of 7-8 monkey species who cohabitate, and understand each other's vocalizations alerting them to danger; there is another species which can range in groups up to nearly a thousand individuals; the mechanics of social behavior in the latter species are not overly complex or sophisticated, yet they still have to be functional for such large groups, even, perhaps, in spite of such large numbers.

One nuance that is frequently lost in discussion of hominid intelligence is that the accepted measure of animal intelligence relates the ratio of brain volume to body mass, or some combination of logarithms. While absolute brain mass was certainly increasing as hominids evolved, they were also becoming larger, so a reasonable estimate of their increase in terms of animal intelligence has to plot the course of this ratio, not merely absolute brain volume. (Ignoring questions of function and topography outright.)

Finally, since I want to get to other things tonight, briefly, I think to speak of anything beyond functional truths is nonsensical. We think "in models" — of the environment, of physical reality, of ourselves and our projects, of other minds, of the nature of our social behaviors, not to mention the whole Platonic realm, which I have ideas about, but which would be a digression. The truth of a model is its utility from a functional standpoint, and its use to drive the feedback loop of environment -> perception -> model -> prediction -> behavior -> environment.

ta ta, for now. interesting discussion. Who is "MI" ?