"The planet does not need more successful people"

[Cary]

25. Unilke you I regard evolution as science.

If your comprehension were a little better you would see that I cited the fact that our intelligence is nothing more than the product of evolution. In other words it is an experiment of nature, like any other mutation. Whether it is is a successful adaptation is yet to be determined. There are millions if not billions of examples of unsuccessful mutations and adaptations in nature. I suggest that to summarily find that we are any better or any worse than any other adaptation is something akin to racist.

It may sound odd at first to consider this akin to racism but there is actually a rather credible, IMHO, argument amongst paleoanthropologists that certain concepts favoring our own species over, say, Neandertal, is a form of racism. While not wholly convinced of that, it does raise a good point and it does give me pause. We do need to be careful here I think. I know I have a tendency to want to favor my own species and I think we need to be careful in order to preserve our objectivity.

You could argue that our adaptation of our intelligence is already a success and in some regards it is. But given the fact that Neandertal survived for 4 or 5 times longer than we've been around, I suggest such an argument is premature and not well taken. That's not a "value". It is an argument based on the facts. If we end up destroying ourselves because of our intelligence where is the purpose or success in that?

The fact that we're poised to destroy ourselves in so many ways is not a testament to the particular wisdom of our adaptation. And then in terms of our actual place in the universe, we are all made up of dust from the explosion of stars. Therefore we are all star dust. I don't know about you but I find that to be an extremely cool idea. It's way cooler, I think, than believing that the earth is somehow the center of the universe and that our species is somehow apple of God's eye and the final product and achievement.

And then in terms of what "we" really are, it actually gets a lot more amazing and cool since our perception of reality clearly is an illusion. Where do "we" actually reside? Is it actually in our brains? Or are we actually a projection of something going on on the outside of a black hole?

Even more interesting are the parallels between what is being discovered in contemporary thought with Eastern philosophy.

Seriously, you ought to back off a little from your homo sapien sapien bias and look at this stuff. It is incredible and it gets more incredible every day.