As I wrote in another post, the evidence all points to art and other forms of symbolism evolving among modern human populations prior to their departure from Africa. The Blombos Cave site suggests the first use of pigments at least as far back as 70,000 years, and perhaps as earlier as a 100,000 years ago. The cognitive rewiring seems to have been completed in Africa.
Neither is the oldest evidence of symbolism. The Blombos Cave site in South Africa, where the first evidence of the use of pigments (in this case ochre) are at least 70,000 years old.
Actually, the Indo-European peoples arose somewhere around 5000 to 6000 years ago. The first cave art in Europe predates Indo-Europeans by tens of thousands of years. If you buy into Nostratic, maybe the people that made the European cave art spoke some language ancestral to that group, but the Indo-European language group, indeed likely any of the language families spoken in the last 10,000 years, had not evolved yet.
Well, actually there is some significance here, in that it suggests that the neurological innovations that lead to modern human behaviors like art and symbolism arose among the ancestral populations to both the first modern humans in Europe and in Asia. If nothing else, it falsifies the few remaining wingnuts who believe Europeans are somehow unique.
Chimps kill young chimps. When tribes make war on each other, the killing of enemy tribes young is well documented. Chimps are pretty much as brutal as humans at the game of war.
There are plenty of people who appear before the courts who cannot argue their own cases. In fact, most Common Law jurisdictions have individuals called Public Trustees (or a similar office) who are charged with representing those who, because they are not deemed capable of representing themselves in court, still may need access to the judicial system. Surely granting basic liberties to other sentient creatures could be modeled on the same legal structures we put in place to protect children and the mentally incapacitated.
But the great apes, cetaceans and elephants do not possess even the rights of infants of the mentally incapacitated. They are protected via fairly limited and frequently ignored animal cruelty laws, but that's about it. There is no recognition of the sentience of these creatures, they receive no more protection than a hamster would.
In virtually ever jurisdiction in the industrialized world children under a certain age cannot give consent for a variety of activities; sexual intercourse, signing contracts, medical treatments, etc. That a nine year old cannot consent to having sex or signing a contract doesn't mean they aren't a person. Personhood alone doesn't afford all rights and privileges, but it does guarantee the basic liberties.
I can imagine animals like chimps, dolphins and elephants being granted personhood under the law, but being that they do not have the cognitive and rational capacities of humans (well, I'm not so sure about elephants, there is something kind of spooky about them in the intelligence and emotional departments), they might hold those basic liberties in the same way that a child, a mentally ill person or a severely mentally handicapped person might. They couldn't sign contracts independent of a guardian, they couldn't be given the vote, but they would be protected from egregious violations of their basic civil liberties.
An individual can possess personhood without necessarily enjoying all the rights and privileges that are generically afforded to them. Criminals and the insane, for instance, are certainly persons, but may have many of the rights limited and some outright revoked. I can certainly see chimps or dolphins, both highly intelligent and clearly in possession of some level of sentience, deserving some level of protection that approaches those of humans. Maybe that does mean a different class of personhood, but I think it is becoming increasingly difficult to simply place these more advanced animals in the same category as cows or gerbils.
That's part of it. People also frequently partake in shooting the messenger, so when researchers come along and say "This thing we're all doing is having these negative consequences, and we are going to have to stop that thing", they end up learning what Socrates must have felt like as he put the hemlock tea to his lips.
That is what I always admired about Star Trek. While there were no lack of episodes of all the series where technology was put to evil or misguided uses, at the end of the day, it was still shown to be a deliverer of humanity from hunger, war and disease. By and large technology was represented not as an obstacle to human development, but rather as its great enabler.
But in general, you're quite right, the film industry has long favored dystopian visions; stemming right back to Metropolis (the first and still the greatest of all the dystopian films). Science and technology are the tools of oppression and destruction, and it's the beautiful young heroes who throw the monkey wrench in the machinery.
If I had a few million bucks, I would donate it to the Debian team under the condition that:
1. systemd was tossed out 2. Ubuntu was throw off any committees and development teams. The sooner Shuttleworth and his hoard are sent packing the better. Ubuntu has become a virus on Debian.
The only reason I even have Digital Editions on my computer is so I can download DRM-locked ePubs from the Kobo and Google Books stores and decrypt them with ePUBee. My solution now will be to install Digital Editions in a virtual machine, run it just long enough to do the decrypt and move all the files off the virtual machine.
I had some HP printer drivers that I couldn't get rid of on a Windows 7 machine, no matter what I did (well, I didn't boot into recovery console and delete the files that way, but that's dangerous territory), so yes, there are ill-behaved applications that can still leave their rotting remnants around the system.
I remember in the transition between INI files and the registry (how I miss the days when applications had their own discrete text-based configuration files... oh wait, *nix still does!), and Microsoft sent out countless missives all but ordering developers to move to the registry. The registry was the approved place to store configurations, likely, I'm sure, because sticking all user settings in a single hive that could be passed around from workstation to workstation for roaming profiles.
Of course, the down side has always been that the registry just becomes cluttered with crap, particularly on a system that sees a lot of software installed, updated, reinstalled and uninstalled. Throw in there nearly two decades' worth of COM objects being incremented and decremented unsuccessfully, and a computer that's been running for five or six years, and fragmentation of the file system, and it can lead to just awful response times.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win, and then their paid lobbyists have you legislated out of business.."
I wonder how much longer Microsoft shareholders will tolerate the company dumping vast sums of money into product lines that don't make money. Even the XBox division has yet to actually pay for the massive investments.
Slashdot Mirror
As I wrote in another post, the evidence all points to art and other forms of symbolism evolving among modern human populations prior to their departure from Africa. The Blombos Cave site suggests the first use of pigments at least as far back as 70,000 years, and perhaps as earlier as a 100,000 years ago. The cognitive rewiring seems to have been completed in Africa.
Neither is the oldest evidence of symbolism. The Blombos Cave site in South Africa, where the first evidence of the use of pigments (in this case ochre) are at least 70,000 years old.
Actually, the Indo-European peoples arose somewhere around 5000 to 6000 years ago. The first cave art in Europe predates Indo-Europeans by tens of thousands of years. If you buy into Nostratic, maybe the people that made the European cave art spoke some language ancestral to that group, but the Indo-European language group, indeed likely any of the language families spoken in the last 10,000 years, had not evolved yet.
Well, actually there is some significance here, in that it suggests that the neurological innovations that lead to modern human behaviors like art and symbolism arose among the ancestral populations to both the first modern humans in Europe and in Asia. If nothing else, it falsifies the few remaining wingnuts who believe Europeans are somehow unique.
Chimps kill young chimps. When tribes make war on each other, the killing of enemy tribes young is well documented. Chimps are pretty much as brutal as humans at the game of war.
There are plenty of people who appear before the courts who cannot argue their own cases. In fact, most Common Law jurisdictions have individuals called Public Trustees (or a similar office) who are charged with representing those who, because they are not deemed capable of representing themselves in court, still may need access to the judicial system. Surely granting basic liberties to other sentient creatures could be modeled on the same legal structures we put in place to protect children and the mentally incapacitated.
But the great apes, cetaceans and elephants do not possess even the rights of infants of the mentally incapacitated. They are protected via fairly limited and frequently ignored animal cruelty laws, but that's about it. There is no recognition of the sentience of these creatures, they receive no more protection than a hamster would.
In virtually ever jurisdiction in the industrialized world children under a certain age cannot give consent for a variety of activities; sexual intercourse, signing contracts, medical treatments, etc. That a nine year old cannot consent to having sex or signing a contract doesn't mean they aren't a person. Personhood alone doesn't afford all rights and privileges, but it does guarantee the basic liberties.
I can imagine animals like chimps, dolphins and elephants being granted personhood under the law, but being that they do not have the cognitive and rational capacities of humans (well, I'm not so sure about elephants, there is something kind of spooky about them in the intelligence and emotional departments), they might hold those basic liberties in the same way that a child, a mentally ill person or a severely mentally handicapped person might. They couldn't sign contracts independent of a guardian, they couldn't be given the vote, but they would be protected from egregious violations of their basic civil liberties.
An individual can possess personhood without necessarily enjoying all the rights and privileges that are generically afforded to them. Criminals and the insane, for instance, are certainly persons, but may have many of the rights limited and some outright revoked. I can certainly see chimps or dolphins, both highly intelligent and clearly in possession of some level of sentience, deserving some level of protection that approaches those of humans. Maybe that does mean a different class of personhood, but I think it is becoming increasingly difficult to simply place these more advanced animals in the same category as cows or gerbils.
What people don't like is any science that suggests they have to alter their behaviors.
That's part of it. People also frequently partake in shooting the messenger, so when researchers come along and say "This thing we're all doing is having these negative consequences, and we are going to have to stop that thing", they end up learning what Socrates must have felt like as he put the hemlock tea to his lips.
Or we could call it the Foundation Series.
The Andromeda Strain comes to mind, though the book makes the computer's role more prominent than the film.
But that was before Crichton went full on into the business of writing anti-technology and anti-science screeds.
That is what I always admired about Star Trek. While there were no lack of episodes of all the series where technology was put to evil or misguided uses, at the end of the day, it was still shown to be a deliverer of humanity from hunger, war and disease. By and large technology was represented not as an obstacle to human development, but rather as its great enabler.
But in general, you're quite right, the film industry has long favored dystopian visions; stemming right back to Metropolis (the first and still the greatest of all the dystopian films). Science and technology are the tools of oppression and destruction, and it's the beautiful young heroes who throw the monkey wrench in the machinery.
I'd say religion is a special instance of ideology.
If I had a few million bucks, I would donate it to the Debian team under the condition that:
1. systemd was tossed out
2. Ubuntu was throw off any committees and development teams. The sooner Shuttleworth and his hoard are sent packing the better. Ubuntu has become a virus on Debian.
The only reason I even have Digital Editions on my computer is so I can download DRM-locked ePubs from the Kobo and Google Books stores and decrypt them with ePUBee. My solution now will be to install Digital Editions in a virtual machine, run it just long enough to do the decrypt and move all the files off the virtual machine.
A big fuck you to Adobe, as well.
If I wanted to hear deluded rantings I'd go to the local nuthouse.
And your qualifications are...?
I had some HP printer drivers that I couldn't get rid of on a Windows 7 machine, no matter what I did (well, I didn't boot into recovery console and delete the files that way, but that's dangerous territory), so yes, there are ill-behaved applications that can still leave their rotting remnants around the system.
I remember in the transition between INI files and the registry (how I miss the days when applications had their own discrete text-based configuration files... oh wait, *nix still does!), and Microsoft sent out countless missives all but ordering developers to move to the registry. The registry was the approved place to store configurations, likely, I'm sure, because sticking all user settings in a single hive that could be passed around from workstation to workstation for roaming profiles.
Of course, the down side has always been that the registry just becomes cluttered with crap, particularly on a system that sees a lot of software installed, updated, reinstalled and uninstalled. Throw in there nearly two decades' worth of COM objects being incremented and decremented unsuccessfully, and a computer that's been running for five or six years, and fragmentation of the file system, and it can lead to just awful response times.
I'm not clear as to why every single person flying into an airport from the hot spots isn't put in quarantine upon landing.
FTFY
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win, and then their paid lobbyists have you legislated out of business.."
I'm sorry, that reference went right over my head...
I wonder how much longer Microsoft shareholders will tolerate the company dumping vast sums of money into product lines that don't make money. Even the XBox division has yet to actually pay for the massive investments.