ELEPHANT TO PLATT:
OK Platt. I think the disagreement between the two of us is analogous to a
famous bit of comic genius that Gandhi was once involved in. Asked what he
thought of British Civilisation, he said it would be a very good idea. I
take a similar veiw of Human Intelligence.
You see, you have this idea that we've all proved ourselves to be the
intelligent species. The reason I'm not so sure is that the real proof of
how smart we are might lie someway into the future. I'll provide an analogy
from Chess, if you like, since the playing of perfect chess is, in an
indirect way, the sub-text of your post.
When children first learn how to play chess, what they are often most
impressed with is taking the other guy's pieces. Ask that child whether
they are in the lead, and, most likely, the answer will probably be 'hell
yes, I just took his Queen!' or something of the kind. Now this phase
doesn't last too long with kids because they learn quick, and one of these
days they will meet a player who deliberately sacrifices his Queen to get
check mate. At that point the realisation dawns that the objective of the
game they were playing, and at which that particular child thought he was so
ace, was something slightly different from the one the child assumed it to
be, or that the objective was connected to the means in quite a surprising
way. At any rate, that child learns not to treat the taking of peices as a
proof of how great a chess player he is.
Now it seems to me that this analogy carries over, because classical
scientific man thinks of himself as playing some kind of Chess Game with the
forces of nature, picking off pieces of understanding here and there untill
he thinks he has the whole board to himself. Well, all I can say is,
scientific man better be damm careful, or Nature will have him checkmated
and he'll have never even seen it coming.
Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis started out as a neat little explanation for some
puzzling bits of Ocean Chemistry, but it turns out that it makes so much
good scientific sense to think of the entire planet's Climate, Chemistry,
Geology, and life forms microbial to bipedal, as one complete self-righting
static pattern that, now, a significant proportion of the world's scientific
community's computing power is devoted to exploring the practical
socio-economic ramifications of a Hypothesis which, every day, gets to look
less and less like a theory, and more and more like life and death fact.
It turns out that the millions of species which we cause to make extinct
every day might have a necessary part to play in maintaining the weather
patterns which feed us.
It turns out that ecosystems are complex things whose stability rests on
factors we cannot identify in advance of removing them - at which point it
is too late.
It turns out that Man's self-congratulatory enjoyment of his dominion over
nature, smartly seizing a peice here, casually entitling himself to priority
over an ecosystem there, is, in fact, a high-road to the kind of
mass-extinction which could so easily clean all our peices off the board:
checkmate, and goodnight.
Sure, intellect comes first. But how intellectual is it, actually, to chop
off the branch of a tree, thirty foot up in the air, while sitting on that
branch?
Human intelligence would be an excellent idea. Could I suggest that one
excellent place for humans to start being intelligent is with the
realisation that there is more to the world than can ever be evident in our
well-formed scientific hypotheses, and to start behaving accordingly?
I guess that might be one way to read Prisig: reality attaches to the
aesthetic continuum, not the movies that play in our heads, scientific or
otherwise. That ought to make us sceptical about what we learn in the
movies.
PLATT WROTE:
> A basic requirement for intellect is extensive intellectual capacity,
> something which on this planet belongs exclusively to the human
> species.
ELEPHANT:
A requirement, yes. Did anyone ever teach you the difference between a
necessary and a sufficient condition?
PLATT WROTE:
> I agree with Roger’s description of the intellectual level:
>
> “I believe the intellectual level refers to the systematic art of
> building and testing simplified intellectual models that allow us to
> identify, learn, test, categorize, record and apply our experience.”
>
> Show me a dolphin with such capacity and I’ll stop eating tuna fish
> sandwiches.
ELEPHANT:
I mentioned dolphins because there is a very entertaining parable of the
Dolphins in Douglas Adams' HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and it's one
with a point, I think you will agree. The Dolphins are discovered to be
such smart animals that they see the descruction of the earth coming with
hours to spare, and after trying to draw human attention to this fact make
their own arrangements to leave, saying, in their own language, 'so long,
and thanks for all the fish'.
Adams remarks that the humans thought that they were smarter than dolphins
because of the stock market, the new deal, railways, jumbo jets, New York,
Wars and stuff, whereas all the dolphins have ever done is lark around and
eat fish. The Dolphins, conversely, thought they were smarter than humans
*for precisely the same reasons*.
O.K., now I'll grant you that I never saw a Dolphin with a bunsen burner
(I'm imagining it now though). But this digression has a point and I'm
coming to it. You see, it seems to me that there's nothing particularly
intellectual in the Quality-Intellect sense, about playing with Bunsen
Burners, if you don't then put the results of your experiments to practical
effect in saving the planet we all depend on: the air, the water, the
weather that fills bread basket in the mid west.
The Dolphins never had a bunsen burner, true, but then neither did they ever
have the opportunity to completely ignore what all the world's scientists
are telling them, walk out of an enviromental summit in a huff, fly home at
40000 feet on untaxed kerosene, and drive home in a land where fossil fuel
is cheaper than water.
What I'm pointing out, Platt, is that the narrative of the human species
could have an ending which paints them as pretty dumb. Perhaps the dumbest
lifeform ever to walk the planet: that's the epitaph which is waiting for
us. If we should earn it, Platt, does that mean that you will want to say,
'OK, so as a species we were dumb: we had no Quality-Intellect. As
individuals some of us were pretty smart intellectuals, who knew this was
coming and used our Quality-Intellect to do what we could, but we were
scuppered by those who didn't use Quality intellect...' - is that what you
will say? Fine. I'll just point out that this results in the conclusion
that a sizeable proportion of the population have no real quality-intellect
to speak of, having it only in theory, but not in practice (uhu, G. Dubya?).
And it is practice which counts, isn't it? Because all this
intellectualising has to come back to the aesthetic continuum, right, or
well never get off the hot stove. So some have Q-Intellect and some not?
Does this mean that the far-sighted James Lovelocks of this world have the
right, indeed the moral imperative, to treat the unthinking gas-guzzling
majority like the Viruses your thought experiments are so fond of?
I guess not.
One to leave with you.
ELEPHANT
(Indian, Male, 10ft high, Tame (ish), Resents rough treatment from humans
who think they are smart arses)
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