Phi for All

How is it helpful to make such vague and broad judgements against any of the actors in today's world environment? It would be nice if things were so easy to pigeonhole, but most things happen on a spectrum, and most things are much more highly nuanced than simple conspiracy can address. How about drilling down to some meaningful arguments?

So what? Does that mean we can't work towards a better goal? We can set up the world like that if more people thought it was possible.

You need to write a book about what TV shows you're watching. Or post this in What Are You Watching?

We're trying to help you refine and improve your idea. You need more than "innovation" to account for the way humans evolved to walk upright. Every animal on the planet is capable of new behavior. Even unicellular organisms can react to new environments. Humans are able to access a broader range of innovative behavior because we can take the same information other animals get and put it together in more meaningful, more predictive, more adaptive ways because of our higher levels of intelligence, cooperation, and communication. Also, while logic has its place in maths and sciences, I think you're talking about critical thinking, or reasoned thinking rather than formal logic. It also isn't correct to refer to "proof" when you mean "evidence". That can turn a perfectly supportive statement into an assertion that needs more than an opinion. The members here respect the difference between "evidence suggests humans walked upright to free up their hands for tool use", and "human evolution is fundamentally different from that of other animals".

Intelligent human predators learned that herd animals can stampede when a bunch of hunters charge the herd on two feet, waving their arms, and making lots of noise. Must have been pretty scary looking to a quadruped, and is yet another example of the potential benefits of moving on just two of your four limbs. We can make ourselves look a LOT bigger.

There is evidence that early humans drove certain types of prey to the edges of cliffs so they'd fall to their deaths. No weapons needed. It's a pretty intelligent hunter that can get an animal to kill itself.

The evolution of the human hand influenced the tools we were able to utilize, not the other way around. We first used rocks as hammers because they fit in our hands so well with our opposable thumbs (they still do). Rocks broke into sharp shards, and then we had knife blades, which also fit our hands well. But both of these tools worked more efficiently, and fit the hand even better when we developed handles to protect our hands, extend our reach, and provide a better physical angle for the work we performed with them. The tools developed, but their impact on the evolution of the human hand hasn't had enough time to make the fundamental changes you've implied. We can use a LOT of tools well because of our hands, but those tools didn't shape our hands. We chose them because they fit the jobs and our hands. Crows can use sticks to pick up other things and fly away with both, but it's because the stick works well with their beaks, not because the tool shaped their beaks. Does that make sense? Weapons were held the way they were to gain the most advantage in their use. A rock can be held in the hand and swung hard to inflict damage, but the same exact hand can swing a rock tied to a stick with MUCH greater impact. The hand didn't need to change, the tool was made more efficient (hey look, an innovation!).

I'm assuming by "processed" you mean "something that had to be made" like a stone knife, as opposed to "most primitive tools" like using a stick to get ants out of a log? I can agree to this. You're basically saying it's more innovative to strip the extra branches off a tree limb to make a stick than it is to simply pick up a stick. Is that right? Why do you place the use of fire for cooking meat in the Stone Age? Surely primitive humans encountered lightning strikes first among the trees. It was partly cooking our food that allowed us to lose the big gut that processed raw meat and kept us from walking upright and running on the plains. I see a bigger problem than safety in your assumptions. You have us running on the plains before we could possibly be quick enough. But that doesn't automatically make it the most important type of tool we've ever come up with. Except it could have been a rock. Can you copy/paste your details here? I can agree that it is one, but not that it's either the first or the most basic. I could be persuaded that this is so, but more evidence is needed.

Sorry, but I don't like the implications that evolution isn't happening without innovation. I don't agree that weapons are the best human tools. I think the path to bipedalism is much more evidenced than you're claiming, and I don't like your conclusions. There are some lizards that run on their back legs, and one might think they're evolving to bipedalism, but actually it's just the momentum of their running and their counterbalancing tail that lifts their front feet off the ground. I think you need to reevaluate your premises.

! Moderator Note Our rules state members must be able to participate without going offsite. Please, can you copy/paste an abstract or overview of your idea here? Thanks for understanding.

How does that work?

How did you come to the conclusion that "The evolution of human beings is fundamentally different from that of other creatures"? It's not true at all, so I'm curious why you think this. Humans are amazing, but we're not special wrt evolution. Evolution is blind to species, and is part of the biology of all living things.

Most of this shows a lack of understanding wrt evolution, and the rest is pretty vague. Innovation? I'd want to hear more about how bipedalism affects our cognition. And there were a LOT of other factors at work. Tool use and cooking food happened before we started walking upright, and they were essential to changing how we walked.

This is where your mistake lies. False, falsify, and falsifiable are three different concepts in science. All swans have two eyes is a false statement (I found a picture of a one-eyed swan). The picture falsified the statement "all swans have two eyes". The fact that finding swans with more or less than two eyes would make the statement "all swans have two eyes" false means the statement is falsifiable. All swans have two eyes is a statement that can be checked to see if it's false (making it falsifiable), but we can't do any checks to be certain it's true.

It's pretty simple, really. Can you think of a way to show something is false? Then it's falsifiable. But that's a great example. Finding a three-eyed swan is EXACTLY what would show "all swans have two eyes" to be a false statement. As a counter example, arguing that the Christian God exists is NOT falsifiable. Being unobservable, there's no way to perform adequate tests. There's no way to form a prediction based on observed behavior. Almost by definition, this god isn't going to show itself because that would destroy the reason behind the faith of its followers. Why is it nonsense? A single black swan is enough to disprove a statement like "all swans are white". But if I say "all swans are black or white", I can't prove that, not even if I check every living swan. I'd have to check every swan there ever was, or ever will be, and I'd have to be sure swans didn't live on any other planet in the universe as well. This is the basis for theory, the idea that we can only accumulate evidence in support rather than "proving" an idea. It's what keeps us searching for the most supported explanations, rather than answers we decide on and never go back to check.

So we all end up FAILING at the purpose of life? I think you need a qualifier.

Hrvoje1 has been suspended for 3 days for continued abusive behavior. Telling someone to "shut up" on a discussion forum rather defeats the purpose.

Ooh, my Groucho-purpose-of-life is to learn everything you can. "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."

To find the joy. This isn't true, but that's off-topic. I found some joy in this old joke reference! Thanks!

3.7 times/month (over a 3 month period), I look at the clock to see it's exactly 12:34pm. Until I actually measured it, it seemed like this was happening constantly (my wife gave me this little bias). When compared to all the instances where I looked at a clock and saw a different time, the confirmation bias was revealed. There's a country road I travel every day with my daughter that has a sharp, narrow turn. When we meet another car coming the other way right at the turn, it's a bit harrowing and memorable. My daughter commented that it was happening an inordinate amount of the time for such a back road, but when we put tally marks on a sticky note, we found it was far less than it seemed (plus, since it's a 90 degree turn, both directions have to slow down, which makes it more likely you'll meet another driver right on the corner). I think empathy is extremely important for its focus on being more sensitive, not because it confers any special powers. In fact, being more sensitive can easily lead humans into seeing patterns that aren't there. And of course, there's evolution. It would be VERY hard to hide some special psychic ability that conferred great benefits. Such a trait would be passed along, and such people would show some pretty anomalous statistical behavior.

Not this, not ever. Far too costly, far too risky, and it doesn't address the reasons we create the rubbish. Even if we could figure a cheap way to send it to space, we'd just be using resources up at the same rate. We have ways of making sustainable products, but current manufacturers have a LOT invested in the current infrastructure, and don't want to spend the money to change. It would be far better to start making our plastic products from plants.

A friend of mine told me it's important to make a distinction between a "trip" and a "vacation". A trip is full of sightseeing and adventure and exploration. A vacation is where you park your butt on a beach and relax with a good book (or sunglasses) and DON'T think about all that other stuff.

Take some good reads, but I did the same thing in Cozumel when I had a 3-year-old. When we weren't playing in the surf and sand and pools with her, the resort had daycare to keep her ocupado while mom and dad explored for a while.

How about almond scrimshaw?

We can discuss this as much as you want, as long as you aren't asking for a diagnosis. Nobody on the web is qualified to do that without physical testing, so we'll also tell you to see your doctor. The extra frequency and discomfort MAY be psychosomatic due to your focus on the phenomenon, but it's strange that it happened without the normal food stimuli (or outside the normal time for the stimuli). There's a LOT of molecular activity going on above a hot cup of coffee, and probably some irritants that get released when you open the packaging on a breakfast bar. But the problem most likely isn't with the stimulus, but rather with the way your body is wired to react to it. The signal transmitted to the brain from the nerves can be different between people. I've had explosive sneezes before, obviously triggered by some stimulus, but I've never experience the nausea you mention. It almost sounds like your body is so determined to be rid of X that it prepares to sneeze and/or vomit simultaneously in order to purge the irritant. Do your eyes ever water as well? I've also experienced some weird cross-wiring wrt the head/face/throat/sinuses (where all the intake orifices are). Sometimes when I get a scratchy throat, if I can't clear it with saliva or a cough, my eyes will water (another reaction to irritants). I've sneezed right after plucking a hair from my moustache. This may be our bodies dealing with our particular neural pathways. Again, if you're concerned, you should ask your doctor. It would be REALLY cool if you could journal your experiences, treat this like an experiment. EVERY DAY, you mark down whether it happened or not, and if so, what the detailed circumstances were. Besides being great evidence to show your doctor you aren't crazy, this kind of experiment could give you some predictive power over this phenomenon.