According to what? What “indications” show we’re in the “Early stages” of “mental evolution”?
For all we know, we may be the most intellectually advanced species in the galaxy. Or the universe. Perhaps there is no adaptive advantage to being any smarter than we are now; we may well have hit our intellectual limit already. Whty not? Sharks are dumb and they’ve been around longer than us.
Response:
There is no more than 10,000 years worth of evidence about the appearance of “Human Intellect”, with over 90% of it appearing during the past couple of milleniums. So, 10,000 years is a mere speck compared to billions of years before us and billions of years ahead of us. There is now an exponential rate of increase in human knowledge and perception. Just look at what we have discovered and invented during the past 100 years compared to the entire existance of humanoids from beginning of time.
If we have already hit our intellectual limit as individuals, then we probably have to embark on connecting human brains to create a larger intellectual capability. Note that most of recent scientific Nobel prizes have been won by a group of individuaks rather than one person.
You may also want to check the Great Debate thread entitled “A Challenge to Cecil”, originally posted in this forum on 12-09-2000.
The fact that human intellect happens to have developed in the last 10,000 years does not provide any evidence that it will continue to develop substantially beyond where it is now, or that there is even a higher state to acheive. The fact that you happen to be alive in 2001 and making these comments is merely chance.
Assuming that an existing trend will continue at the same rate, or accelerate at the same rate, is usually an error. It’s quite reasonable to believe it possible that we happen to be at the peak of our intellectual development right now, or that we’ll plateau and stay this way for 100,000 years, or that we’ll continue to develop but another form of life will overtake us, or that a catastrophic, species-exterminating disaster is right around the corner. You cannot predict what the future will hold in this regard any more than you could have predicted 150,000,000 years ago that the dinosaurs would be exterminated and the world would be taken over by hairless apes. The future is chaotic, and any attempt to predict it will be a miserable failure.
Subjective nonsense. People aren’t any more perceptive now than they were 150 years ago, and I completely disagree with your implication that the last 100 years has seen more expansion of human knowledge than the previous 10,000. I realize everyone’s all flippy about the Internet and genetic engineering, but I’d say inventing the steam engine’s not a shabby accomplishment, either.
Why? Why not, say, enhance our physical capacities - engineer ourselves to be fitter, or use less food for equal energy?
If we get this back to the OP, “Why are we here?”, the answer is really quite simple: We are here to prolong the existence of our species. That is the purpose of life, when you get right down to it. Star Trek-style intellectual development would be nice in that I’d love to command a starship, but intellectual development is merely a tool to prolong our species’ existence, not the desired end itself. We may be doing as well as we need to with our ordinary old brains and our current plodding steps forward in a variety of scientific areas.
My landlord says the purpose of life is to pay the rent on time. He claims that God is angry with me. Can anybody out there tell me if the Dead Sea Scrolls are mainly about paying rent, or is he just making that up?
Seems to me you are confusing man’s inherent intelligence with his body of accomplishments. It’s not like Watson and Crick could publish their DNA findings without the works of generations of people who came before them. Newton (I think it was him anyway) said that his work was only possible because he stood on the shoulders of giants.
You seem to have stumbled on to the basis for the “anthropic principle,” which, as Patrick Glynn put it, “[comes] down to the observation that all the myriad laws of physics were fine-tuned from the very beginning of the universe for the creation of man–that the universe we inhabit appeared to be expressly designed for the emergence of human beings.”
People who support this theory think that since a very specific, and possibly random, set of conditions are necessary for the creation and maintenance of life as we know it, it is therefore highly probable that the universe was “designed” to bring about life (human life, specifically).
This is, of course, a howling logical error. “The universe is the way it is because we exist,” it postulates – instead of the seemingly obvious “We exist because the universe is the way it is.”
Even on its own terms, the theory fails. In the article above, as Carl Sagan pointed out, the universe seems better suited to the creation of rocks than people (the sarcastic “lithic principle”). Even within the realm of life, insects are far more successful than humans; why don’t we assume that the universe is geared toward their creation?
So, why do we exist? Well it certainly could be that there is some higher purpose, order, or design to life. Any attempt to state such a purpose, however, must necessarily be full of uncertainty. The safest answer I can give is this:
