A friend and I once took an evening class with an anthropology professor who had some pretty unique theories. I had some difficulty staying alert in that class, it being a long evening lecture class and all, but these theories would be enough to wake me up and cause me to wonder if I’d just fallen asleep and dreamed that he said that.
\nOne of the less wacky theories was that children are optimal foragers (the class was about hunter-gatherers). He said that because of our hunting-gathering origins we tended to prefer foods that had the highest fat, protein, and carbohydrate levels because those are the three nutrients that keep us from starving to death–vitamins & minerals are of secondary importance. Children are the best at this which is why they like stuff like macaroni & cheese & fruit juice. So when we try to eat healthy and lose weight, we’re going against our natural tendency to eat foods with the highest amounts of the above nutrients, which I guess is why it’s difficult to choose salad over a hamburger. Okay, so maybe it’s not that interesting, but it has stuck with me all these years.
\nA somewhat weirder theory was that the plants are going to kill us. The prof maintained that because we are focused in on only a few species of food (wheat, corn, and what have you); ultimately these species will evolve defense mechanisms that will make them poisonous to humans, to prevent us from keeping them from reproducing by consuming or confiscating their seeds. Now “the plants are going to kill us” is prima facie wacky, and more difficult to maintain from an evolutionary point of view, since domestication has actually increased the habitat of these species probably several thousand-fold; and they are so genetically engineered they don’t have much hope of any natural mutation working its way in to the general population. But maybe I didn’t fully understand his argument. Either way, the important thing is that I got to use the phrase “the plants are going to kill us” in my blog.
\nYesterday Andy and I were discussing the concept of artificial intelligence and how it always seems to be perceived as hostile to humanity. I maintain (ha, you thought you were going to get out of this without one of my own personal wacky theories) that if an artificial “intelligence” or “awareness” could be created, it would be very different than human intelligence. First of all, I don’t think you can create a “consciousness” that has nothing to be conscious of–it would have to have sensory equipment and the equivalent of arms and legs with which to move around and manipulate its environment (based on the theories of Husserl, Heidegger, and other hermeneutical theorists, which I am incapable of reproducing here). Second, while I can imagine a computer becoming aware of its surroundings and able to act and solve some problems better than a human, I can’t imagine it writing a poem or painting a picture or having an emotion of altruism or love or hate. It might be able to mimic such things very well, but it would not be having the experience that a human has. Computers now can’t do anything but what a human tells it to do, and they have only the data that a human gives them or equips them to gather. My idea of an “aware” computer is one that doesn’t need a programmer–it recognizes problems that threaten it or whatever its mission is, and programs itself to solve that problem. I don’ t see how we can program a computer to have an emotion, or to have a human-like consciousness–largely because we ourselves have only a very sketchy notion of what human consciousness is. I mean, that has been one of the big debates of philosophers over the millennia, and we haven’t come to any kind of concensus yet. Science doesn’t seem to be able to throw much light on the phenomenon either, and the humanities and social sciences only study the artifacts of consciousness. In any case, I’m not too worried about the “the machines are going to kill us” hypothesis–I mean, if it’s not the machines or the plants, it’s bound to be something.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A friend and I once took an evening class with an anthropology professor who had some pretty unique theories. I had some difficulty staying alert in that class, it being a long evening lecture class and all, but these theories would be enough to wake me up and cause me to wonder if I’d just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=75"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=75"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=75"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=75"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}