Thursday 18 January 2024

Intelligence

SM Stirling imparts interesting information and ideas in the combox, including:

that intelligence evolved because human beings needed to infer and anticipate the intentions of other human beings, not because they wanted to understand the universe;

(however, intelligence, once evolved, was then used to understand the universe);

that people are so used to dealing with human agency that they project agency onto inanimate nature.

This has implications for spiritual practice:

some Bodhisattvas are acknowledged personifications of wisdom and compassion;

in Hindu philosophy, the pronoun applied to ultimate reality can be "He" or "THAT";

contemplation is not negation but transcendence of habitual thought processes.

Within this kind of philosophical and scientific framework, we read Poul Anderson's accounts of human-alien interactions.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And I believe Aristotelian Scholasticism, with its stress on logical reasoning, would make a far better intellectual framework, and not Buddhism or Hinduism. In fact, as Anderson discussed in IS THERE LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS?, a true science arose, in part, because of Scholasticism. And many other factors, of course.

Ad astra! Sean