----- Original Message -----
From: Angus Guschwan
EVOLUTIONARILY, WHY DID HUMANS DEVELOP LOGIC IN THE
FIRST PLACE? It seems we have "vision" as a kid, lose
it to "logic," and spend the rest of our life finding
vision again. A fifth level of vision-logic would be
wrong BECAUSE it would be DEVOLVING back to when we
were 3. It's a contradiction against Pirsig's theme of
EVOLUTION TOWARDS HIGHER QUALITY.
I want you to imagine something in your mind for me. I won't try to make
you imagine some ancestor hunting with a spear three million years ago or
anything. Just imagine you are you, and I give you a gun and I take you to
a forest and I say go hunt a deer for dinner. Assume of course you are
willing and able to go, you check your gun and off you go into the woods.
Stop right there. What is different about what you are doing than any other
living creature around you?
How do predators animals hunt? Maybe they have super hearing so they hear
their prey. Maybe they have super
smell or super eyesight. But how do they find the freaking prey in the
first place?
Laugh if you want to but they just walk around until they find some prey.
Of course with their super senses they
can detect them from far away or very little scent etc. The hungriest
coyote in the world just walks around until
he smells some sheep. Of course he might remember where he smelled some
before somewhere so he goes and
checks it out again (my farm for instance!) but if there are none there the
coyote will walk around until it hear/
smells/sees some new prey.
What do YOU do with your gun? Do you walk around and LOOK for deer? Do you
sit still and listen and see
if you can hear one walking around somewhere? Do you sniff and see if you
can smell one? Maybe. But that's
not what you do FIRST.
The first thing you do is you try and FIGURE OUT where you can find one.
You look down and you see tracks
and you see the way the slope is canted and you FIGURE OUT there is a stream
downhill and deer might drink
there. You look around and you see berries eaten off a bush that you know
deer like and the plant looks raw
and unhealed so you know they were eaten recently and you FIGURE OUT deer
are in the area. You see the
tracks and you see deer tracks underneath rabbit tracks so you know the deer
tracks are old and you FIGURE OUT
that isn't a good area to start. Or you hide in the tree because you know
otherwise he'll SEE you.
Do you see the difference? When you look up in the sky you see a shitload
of stars but you can't see any pictures
in them until you use that mental magic marker called "rationality" and draw
lines and suddenly it's a connect
the dots and you SEE some giant with a bow (supposedly) or a goat
(supposedly) or a lady sitting in a rocking chair
(supposedly). With rationality you SEE where the deer is even though it's
too far away to see with your eyes and
you can't hear it but you SEE it at the river where it is when you go down
there and find it.
Any movie you have ever seen where one "good guy" is chasing one "bad guy"
in a car and the "good guy" breaks
off the hot pursuit and takes a side street and then ends up somehow in
front of the "bad guy" is a perfect illustration
of this. Logic is the name we use for the process by which we use the
fundamental "stuff" of rationality to predict
futures.
Logic is the tool to SQ equivalent build the Tower of Babylon to reach the
celestial heights of future knowledge. It's like
there's this feeling that if we SQ latch every molecule of dust and nail it
to the floor we'll finally feel "safe" or something.
Whether logic was developed first for hunting or for biocidal agricultural I
dont know. But that's my little theory and I hope
it addresses your question sir.
--Soj
p.s. incidentally Dutch Reformed Calvinists practically worshipped the very
idea of God being the master of future knowledge, since the world and every
action therein was preordained (the infamous "no free will" argument).
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:01:42 BST