All of this sounds fine except it relies on assumptions that can't be taken at face value.
1. "Highest state it has evolved to". It is not easy to know what that state is. Stephen Jay Gould showed that certain snails, his specialty, evolved to a very highly specialized state in certain South Seas island ravines. So specialized, in fact, that they couldn't survive in the neighboring ravines just yards away. It would therefore seem that evolution to the highest state may be a hindrance or may require other conditions to define what is necessary to the "highest state". 2. "That state for (humans) is...in the highest state...as a whole is cerebral and mental and psychical ands intellectual and logical...therefore thinking...more rational. Who knows if this is the best path? Some might argue that humans were better off in relation to their environment, etc., when they were less "civilized" more like other animals. Further, nobody is sure what is meant by the terms rational, logical, and reasonable. Generally, those terms rely on linear modes of exclusive causality but recent neurology shows that the so-called irrational or illogical or unreasonable are fundamental to what we regard as rational, etc. The "leap of intuition" or the "crazy but brilliant thought" the "mad genius" tags reveal that people have always given some respect to the seemingly illogical, etc. Now science shows it is not only reasonable but necessary to thinking. You might reply that this is the current state of evolved affairs but I say that's begging the question. Bottom line: Who decides what is rational, etc., and the highest evolved state? 3. "Only a learned group"...ah, so those are the people who decide, eh? We've seen them before, all through history and what they all have in common is not learning or expertise but power. Power seeks its own permanence and thus has been more of an inhibition to learning and that "outside the box, leap of intuition, breakthrough concept and the like than an aid. In the end it does come down to individuals, for good and ill, who lead, push, shove, manipulate, lie, preach, teach, argue, persuade, buy, crush, kill, and otherwise bully their way into a position to keep and change that so-called highest state. I tend to accept this view because there really is no alternative. But I'm for putting the experts on trial for treason against truth every single day. The power prize is a rolling ball, he who can touch it has it, fleetingly. Realism is the absence of a necessary good end. Peirce's philosophy of idealist pragmatism, if that's what it is, fails because it presumes an ultimate good outcome, even if the bad is redefined as good. Thus whatever happens is always good. The wandering highly evolved snail dies, the experts say what's what, and if we think things are bad, no, they're really going to a good end. The world is in fact a messy place with spots of good and bad here and there and everything is open to change. Watch the folks with the power. That's the future, which is the present. Take it or break it. Accept it or change it. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Frances Kelly <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thu, December 30, 2010 1:12:33 AM Subject: RE: "Is today's [art?] irrelevant?" Frances to Armando... Allow me to offer you some possible realist corrections to your support philosophy, which seems to be some kind of subjective relativism. The "final end goal" of any mechanism of matter or organism of life is to be found in the highest state that it has so far evolved to. In regard to normal human organisms, that state for all of them as a whole is cerebral and mental and psychical and intellectual and logical. The meaning of human life and the motive for human existence is therefore for thinking humans as a collective community to make the world they sense more rational, and thus their behavior to each other more reasonable. The greatest exemplar of evolving humanity is hence those actions found in say art and tech and science. The differences of individual singular humans are quite irrelevant to this inclined outcome of the species; and after all, the determination of anything made by an individual person is unreliable, because they might unknowingly be suffering from diseased deluded illusions. Only a learned group of normal experts can provide any assurance of certainty about anything, and then even this assurance must be held as evolutionary and tentative and fallible. In other words, simply because a sole person alone posits and believes what they deem is a nice artifact or a sound theory does not make it so, because the artifact may be bad perverted pornography or the theory may be false wicked stupidity. -----Original Message----- From: ARMANDO BAEZA [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, 29 December, 2010 8:47 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: "Is today's [art?] irrelevant?" here we go again,'Good end goals are as diverse as each individual mind. Clones, we are not. Humans still kill Humans and some still like dislike strange things.
