

Stephen Hawking: "The Human Species Has Entered a New Stage of Evolution" - prat
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/01/stephen-hawking-the-human-species-has-entered-a-new-stage-of-evolution-the-daily-galaxy-top-story-of.html

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grellas
Don't know the science involved but how does the evolution of life strictly
out of impersonal forces over eons of time transmute into a process that
somehow can be controlled by any species? In other words, if the very nature
of _being_ is purely and eternally impersonal (i.e., no deity or other
overriding intelligent force as creator or overseer of creation), on what
basis can this possibly change to the point where there emerges a controlling,
_purposeful_ force that suddenly overrides everything else in existence?

Is there some form of science that attempts to describe how that change
occurred or is it a philosophical assumption based on a worldview tied to
evolution?

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billybob
If I understand you correctly, you're saying that if being is the result of
chance, then so are our wills.

So if evolution is the universe blindly programming creatures, then human-
directed evolution is the universe blindly meta-programming, via our wills.

In other words, destiny and purpose are illusions in a materialistic
worldview. (How we manage to perceive them is another paradox.)

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jswinghammer
His vision of modifying human behavior is pretty much the plot of "Brave New
World". I'm not sure why this goal of forcefully improving the human race is
so appealing to people. It seems strange to me to want other people to guide
the direction of our species.

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billybob
Yes. C.S. Lewis makes an interesting argument in "The Abolition of Man." IIRC,
he says this: imagine a generation which has absolute power to shape the
following generation to its will. Every generation that follows will then be
puppets of that generation.

So humanity's power cannot continue growing indefinitely. If it reaches a high
enough point, it will immediately drop to 0.

From Wikipedia: "The final chapter describes the ultimate consequences of this
debunking: a distant future in which the values and morals of the majority are
controlled by a small group who rule by a perfect understanding of psychology,
and who in turn, being able to "see through" any system of morality that might
induce them to act in a certain way, are ruled only by their own unreflected
whims. The controllers will no longer be recognizably human, the controlled
will be robot-like, and the Abolition of Man will have been completed."

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jimbokun
I like C.S. Lewis, and this quote definitely makes me want to read this book
soon. It seems timely and relevant to the "Singularity" kind of thinking.

Thanks for the tip!

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peregrine
Please tell me if I am wrong or incorrect here but...

How come someone like Hawking can make statements like this when he is not a
evolutionary biologist? And how come people will take him seriously when he
hasn't gained the ethos.

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tspiteri
Can it be because he is not talking about evolutionary biology? He is taking a
wider view of human evolution.

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jimbokun
To me, it is more of a metaphor stretched past its breaking point. Is reading
books really just an extension of the process of biological evolution? To me,
it seems a very different kind of thing, and conflating it with biological
evolution confuses more than it clarifies.

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swombat
I'm sure the original talk by Hawking was inspiring, but this summarised
version reads like an edulcorated sci-fi dream, somewhere on par with "some
day we'll all have flying cars". Sadly, all the substance seems to have been
squeezed out of this one to leave only fairly trite and obvious ideas.

Would be interesting to see a transcript or recording of the original talk.

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kgroll
It's kind of out there, but there's a related scene in the film `Waking Life'.

"What is interesting here is that evolution now becomes an individually
centered process, emanating from the needs and desires of the individual, and
not an external process, a passive process where the individual is just at the
whim of the collective. So, you produce a neo-human, okay, with a new
individuality and a new consciousness. But that’s only the beginning of the
evolutionary cycle because as the next cycle proceeds, the input is now this
new intelligence. As intelligence piles on intelligence, as ability piles on
ability, the speed changes. Until what? Until we reach a crescendo in a way
could be imagined as an enormous instantaneous fulfillment of human, human and
neo-human potential. It could be something totally different. It could be the
amplification of the individual, the multiplication of individual existences.
Parallel existences now with the individual no longer restricted by time and
space."

For the full excerpt and a clip:
<http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/waklifeex/>

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tokenadult
There are very many other authors who talk about how most evolution (change)
in human daily life now comes about mostly because of cultural innovation
rather than because of new inherited characteristics in successive generations
of Homo sapiens. Hawking has neither a special competence nor a special lack
of competence to speak to this issue--anyone who knows basic facts about
biological evolution and the development of human culture can make (and
probably has made) the same observation. What's interesting here is Hawking's
attempt to attach numbers to the rate of evolution (change) in genes and in
cultural information. Plainly humans will develop the most in new directions
as a result of cultural changes.

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lsd5you
Because the alternative - survival of the fittest - is incompatible with
contemporary/democratic human values. In deed, and sometimes in thought, we
pretend evolution does not apply to humans. The issue cannot just be avoided,
in the long term there are 3 options: a) Design the next generation. b) Do
nothing. Go backwards genetically. c) Create a reproductively unfair society
based on fitness (hopefully not one which involves people dying off - but the
alternative is preventing people who are not medically and financially
independent from having children).

I agree with your sentiment (and am a B or C)

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JoeAltmaier
The point of the article is made about books, which are an insignificant
source of information. Average folks learn from books a little in school ( I
remember returning many college textbooks unread), then never again. Its the
media that matters. And its bitrate is orders of magnitude larger than books.

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kingkawn
Human beings did not evolve from the apes.

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tnai
Yes, you're quite right. We are apes. (though that may also depend on your
classification philosophy [1].)

[1] <http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/feedback/oct02.html>

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kingkawn
amen. Occasionally even well-intentioned writing suggests that humans are at a
more advanced evolutionary stage than our sister species, even though we've
all been doing it the same amount of time.

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thorsview
This theory essentially what Ray Kurzweil has been preaching for years.

