[Helianthus16]

I'm always amazed by such blatant anthropo-deprecating-centric (?) statements.

-The difference in efficiency should tell you that that power spent is _worth_ something, like astonishingly superior abstraction capabilities and the ability to speak and write.

-The ugliness (read; complexity) of QM could easily be interpreted as a tribute. Whether you like it or not, it is the best we have. To paraphrase HHG2G, if it's ugly, then it's the universe that got it wrong, not us. (I'm partially joking, mostly because I don't suspect you really have a firm enough grasp of QM, let alone QFT, to determine its aesthetic beauty.)

I mean, I'm all for a little humbling perspective. We are a race of people descended from stupider people unto apehood (and before that, lizards!) that are stuck on a rock in a universe fantastically larger than us.

That doesn't mean we should be debbie downers.

[VladRussian]

>The difference in efficiency should tell you that that power spent is _worth_ something

nope. It is just that we didn't have strong enough competition from other predator species to force the efficiency increase. Instead we use the extensive way of increasing the size, even if it is accompanied by decreased efficiency. Like going cheap low-tech V8 instead of efficiently increasing horsepower of a V6 engine.

>astonishingly superior abstraction capabilities

yep. that one. The top manifestations of that ability were Inquisition, Hitler, Stalin, etc... The astonishing ability of our brain to generate various abstract reasons to kill. This ability is the only qualitative difference between humans and animals. Most people aren't able to handle beyond the simplest physics and mathematics reasoning, yet easy to come up with a set of "other" people and pretty abstract reasons why these "others" should be violently oppressed and killed. The ability to handle mathematics and physics is just a side-effect that is manifested only by a few. If you look into the history of human species, it is a continuous blood-shed, and whenever there is a patch of technological progress it is most visibly expressed through new technological means of violence.

> and the ability to speak and write

tools to help communicate and organize around the above mentioned main human ability to come up with reasons to and actually perform the killings.

>mostly because I don't suspect you really have a firm enough grasp of QM, let alone QFT, to determine its aesthetic beauty

I have an MS in Math, and spent enough time on QM to get a "grasp". It is not about aesthetic. It is about method and our level of understanding (or lack of it) that i consider ugly. Vs. complexity - where it is in QM? The mathematical machinery there is pretty simple compare to the state of the art in mathematics.

[Helianthus16]

>nope. It is just that we didn't have strong enough competition from other predator species to force the efficiency increase. Instead we use the extensive way of increasing the size, even if it is accompanied by decreased efficiency. Like going cheap low-tech V8 instead of efficiently increasing horsepower of a V6 engine.

ok, sure. point is our engine beats the pants off a dogs no matter how you slice it.

>yep. that one. The top manifestations of that ability were Inquisition, Hitler, Stalin, etc...

like I said, debbie downer. you have this absurd fixation on killings.

>I have an MS in Math, and spent enough time on QM to get a "grasp".

In other words you are not a physicist. The saying that no one understands QM is not a joke. Mathematics is useless without reality; it's like literary analysis without story-telling.

I've been joking and condescending in my responses to you, but I'm going to get a little serious now:

>If you look into the history of human species, it is a continuous blood-shed

Yes, it's continuous bloodshed. You know what? It's not your right to determine that what people fought for was meaningless, or too "violent" for your modern middle-class tastes. It's not your right to prissily look down on the human race from your ivory tower of Math and grumble about killing.

What I see when I look upon our history is a series of people taking their actions seriously. I see a series of people that slowly, agonizingly, painstakingly turned away from violence in order to serve those 'side-effects' that you think we killers disregard.

And that's the crux of it. Do you really think you're any better than the killers you despise? Maybe you don't, maybe you lump yourself in with us savages; if so, though, you must have some self-hatred issues that'll keep your therapist employed well beyond his retirement.

If all you see when you look at history is the pain, then all you will _feel_ is pain.

[VladRussian]

>ok, sure. point is our engine beats the pants off a dogs no matter how you slice it.

no. point is whenever we have even a little more biologically advanced brain, like Einstein's (noticeably smaller than typical human's one, yet more densely packed with more energy supplying cells), it easily beats typical human's one. The Einstein's brain is still human (had it been even a bit more biologically advanced than it was it would be hard to call it human), yet it shows how inefficient the typical human brain is.

>like I said, debbie downer. you have this absurd fixation on killings.

no, i just have an ability for analysis, and keen interest for QM and biology.

>Yes, it's continuous bloodshed. You know what? It's not your right to determine that what people fought for was meaningless, or too "violent" for your modern middle-class tastes. It's not your right to prissily look down on the human race from your ivory tower of Math and grumble about killing.

that is my point. Human brain has unique ability to put "meaning" into killings which aren't necessary for satisfaction of immediate food or self-defense needs.

>What I see when I look upon our history is a series of people taking their actions seriously. I see a series of people that slowly, agonizingly, painstakingly turned away from violence in order to serve those 'side-effects' that you think we killers disregard.

that agony is exactly manifestation of the fact that i talking about - mathematics and physics aren't natural for human brain. Reasoning for violence is.

>And that's the crux of it. Do you really think you're any better than the killers you despise?

i'm human. I'm a specimen of a species which evolved as a pack hunting predator. It has beaten all other predators (including other species of humans) through evolutionary advantage of extensively evolved brain which improved pack hunting (through communication/organization and weapons - thanks to the ape's ability to grasp a stick or stone) at the start and later discovered that unmotivated aggression, ie. striking first without being in immediate danger, toward others predators is evolutionary advantageous if you have much better communication/organization and weapons.

Like any other human, i have ideas when i think violence is justified even though it wouldn't serve my immediate food or self-defense needs. Like any other human, i'd like to mislead myself into thinking that my reasons for violence are "valid and justified". Well, i have a human brain.

[gjm11]

> The top manifestations of that ability were Inquisition, Hitler, Stalin, etc...

You may consider them the "top manifestations". I don't think many other people would. For my part, I'd put Bach and Shakespeare and Newton and Gauss higher up than Hitler on a list of top manifestations of the capacity for abstract thought.

> whenever there is a patch of technological progress it is most visibly expressed through new technological means of violence.

And yet today the world -- especially the industrialized, wealthy parts of the world, which have benefited most from a sustained application of that ability for abstract thought -- is less violent and longer-lived than ever before.

[VladRussian]

>You may consider them the "top manifestations". I don't think many other people would. For my part, I'd put Bach and Shakespeare and Newton and Gauss higher up than Hitler on a list of top manifestations of the capacity for abstract thought.

you don't get it. Bach and Shakespeare and Newton and Gauss were just 4 people. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot were just leaders of millions. These millions were expressing and implementing abstract ideas who should be killed by doing actual killing. So, lets put it in easy way for you to understand - the top manifestations (number of people involved, total effort they put into it, including the ability for abstract thinking) are Inquisition, WWI, WWII, Khmer Rouge, ...

>And yet today the world -- especially the industrialized, wealthy parts of the world, which have benefited most from a sustained application of that ability for abstract thought -- is less violent and longer-lived than ever before.

this would sound so true right before WWI, and before WWII as well...

[gjm11]

So "top manifestations" now turns out to mean "manifestations involving most people" and "Hitler" now turns out to mean "WW2 and the Holocaust". Well, fair enough.

Now, why exactly should WW2-and-the-holocaust be regarded as a "top manifestation" of the capacity for abstract thought? I mean, sure, lots of people and lots of effort were involved, but that's just an artefact of the way you happen to have chosen to carve up the world -- with WW2-and-the-holocaust as a single item. If we take, say, "medicine" as a single item (which seems to me just as reasonable) then the number of people involved is very much larger, the net change in utility probably also much larger, and the amount of abstract thought involved also much larger.

In any case, why focus on single events? Imagine something that has the following consequences. (1) Two events, in each of which 1000 people die premature and nasty deaths. (2) A sustained change lasting for ten years, as a result of which 100000 people (independently, on separate occasions) avoid premature and nasty deaths. Then if you focus on "top manifestations" you might say that the top two are those two events in which people die. But the net benefit -- which surely matters more -- is large and positive. (Note for the avoidance of doubt: I am not making any pronouncement on whether bringing this thing about would be morally justified, which is an entirely different question from whether on balance it's a good thing. No person brought about the human capacity for abstract thought.)

[VladRussian]

>that's just an artefact of the way you happen to have chosen to carve up the world ... >In any case, why focus on single events?

I just picked these noticeable acute periods from the _continuous_ history of human violence as mere illustrative examples.

While only few practice medicine, majority of the people do have ideas about what "valid and just" violence can be applied to what group of other people, and as result they either directly participate or support violence performed on their behalf. So in my view, major combined reasoning activity of human species brains, ie. performed activity integrated over participants (think "top" command), is the reasoning supporting the various acts of violence.

Vs. the actual consequences - my numbers look differently than yours. May be one Einstein or Mozart resulted in even more lives saved than medicine. It doesn't change the fact that for each hour of Mozart's brain developing music there are several orders of magnitude more hours cumulatively spent by others at the same time reasoning for violence.

An the reason being here is that human species got evolutionary advantage by being able to strike first with overwhelming power. Lions don't try to exterminate hyenas and hyenas doesn't try to exterminate lions. They peacefully coexist until paths of specific lions and hyenas cross over specific zebra. Humans are unique in their ability to reason that exterminating others they would potentially have more zebras to themselves and that the "others" may have the same reasoning, and thus "either we or they". Thus we have, again just for mere example, tutsi and hutu.

[gjm11]

> While only few practice medicine, majority of the people do have ideas about what "valid and just" violence can be applied [...]

Double standard. Most people also have ideas about medicine, if only to the extent that they have beliefs about what is and isn't good for their health. An apples-to-apples comparison would be, say, the number of medical professionals versus the number of military professionals. The country where I live (the UK) has, compared with other broadly similar nations, more military and fewer medical professionals, but it still seems to have more of the latter.

> for each hour of Mozart's brain developing music there are several orders of magnitude more hours cumulatively spent by others at the same time reasoning for violence.

It's the same double standard again! Either compare the time spent by Mozart on music with the time spent by, say, Hitler on "reasoning for violence"; or compare the time spent by everyone on music with the time spent by everyone on "reasoning for violence".

Anyway, I think this is becoming less and less productive (and also less interesting to others, if I can judge from the fact that no one seems to be voting us either up or down) so I suggest we leave it here.