bees and conscience

James Gould talking about bees (through a guest post at Olivia Judson’s (did i mention that she is so hot in the last 15 minutes?)):

When a human decides whether to recommend a restaurant, taking into account its menus, the tastes of the friend being advised, the cost of the food, the distance to the establishment, the ambience of the dining room, the ease of parking and all the other factors that enter into such a decision, we have little hesitation in attributing conscious decision-making to the calculation. When a small frenetic creature enclosed in an exoskeleton and sprouting supernumerary legs and a sting performs an analogous integration of factors, however, our biases spur us to look for another explanation, different in kind.

Is it just me, or you can turn the same argument on it’s tail? Like, “there’s nothing more sophisticated in so-called conscious thought than there is in bee’s foraging”. I mean, not that bees can’t be awesome and stuff, but the comparison is double-edged.

And i also think it is a good point: we are not so clever. Sometimes we are clever, but 90% of our cleverness is more like display-of-cleverness (mainly for mating purposes, at that). Or in the old adage (no time to look up who said this) that there’s more difference between an average 19th century guy and Nietzsche than between the same average guy and a bee — maybe, but i am guessing the original saying was about a caveman.

intelligence and free will

I completely have a passive-aggressive relationship with Scott Adam’s blog, i hate the stupid (and selfish “no i will not share your links”) register to comment thing and he can be so obnoxious that his feed is always flipping from “HOGS” to “Philosophy” and back again (in Google Reader). But anyway i still keep reading it, do i not? Just to register a cool idea:

There are only two conditions in the universe: Programmed or random. In other words, action is either a simple chain of cause and effect, or it is somehow immune to cause and effect.

And he says: intelligence can’t be either. He sees it as a paradox. But i think it is a good definition of intelligence: whatever is neither random nor automatic. Obviously i could waste lots of your time with precise and subtle metaphysics about how the dichotomy between programmed VS random is illusory (are those two even related?), how freedom can’t be defined negatively by constraints, or any such rabble, but for now i will just register the interesting thought.

Intelligence is neither deterministic nor aleatory, but instead it is something between those two. It is a third possible state in this preliminary description of the world.

politiks::aphorisms

§ The minute you accept the burden of thinking for the other — like when you try to nudge the stupid girl over at the real-state office into being just that little bit more clever — you are accepting representation (which is the root of all evils).

§ Being very intelligent is usually troublesome. The people who live with someone very intelligent, on the other hand, tend to reap ample benefits.

§ To have something means being able and willing to kill anyone who trespasses. Do you really think you own anything? And could you owm a person?

§ The power of evil is vastly overhyped, it’s myth survives mosty to appease the naive and shallow ethically-centered (read: excessively influenced by reward-punishment tutoring) self-images of a few men in power, who would prefer to maintain such foolishness to accepting their good fortunes to be, mostly, chance events.

new student politics

I do not know how this is outside Brazil, but here the political organization of students is… Well, it has been important at some specific moments in history (though i really, really disagree with the common sense about which were those moments), and it still has some relevance, but it is definitely going through a crisis. Now i believe that this crisis is the beginning of a new age for student organizations, another student politics — and i also believe that it is a small-scale experiment in the long search for better politics (and for politics that make sense in our texting world). So i am writing this text about a subject that does not interest me anymore (student organizations) to help us think about this other one (politics, in general), which i believe is extremely relevant and urgent.