Alt-BEAM Archive
Message #10795
To: beam@sgiblab.sgi.com
From: "Dennison Bertram" dibst11+@pitt.edu
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 10:52:46 -0800
Subject: [alt-beam] Re: Why are we so arrogant?BEAM: Tendency toward miniaturization
> > Or, can a machine be built that can reproduce
> >every facet of what it is to be alive?
>
> Only some aspects, definitely not every.
>
why in the world is humanity so self centered and over confident with it's
inteligence. Personally I'm getting extremely tired of people saying how
great we are. I can't stand scientists who insist that animals don't have
feelings and comments of the like. To assume that we are the most individual
it can get, and that our culture and our nature is the 'best' is just plain
arrogant and annoying. Why can't a machine be built that can reproduce every
facet of what it is to be alive. If indeed we have a creator, what is there
to say we can't create ourselves, (infact in biololgy we are already doing
it, as currently there's a big ethic debate about creating the first
original life form from inorganic components). In addition if there is a
creator the I would think we would be forced to admit that we aren't the top
of the intelectual chain, (if that's what you belive). Then, if our
'greatness' is just chance that takes quite a bit of our super originality
away from us, being that i was essentially an evolutionary mistake. And then
who is to say that it's worth while being a human anyway? This century alone
man has killed over 175,000,000 people. (Brzezinski, Zbigniew. Out Of
Control. Pg. 17). That's more people killed in this century than mankind has
ever killed in every war, famine, execution, etc.. COMBINED. We destroyed
entire generations of us. Depleted entire populations. Elimnated entire
populations. Scortched the earth. Poluted the water. Burned the sky. Just
because we are sitting in front of our computers reading our e-mail and
building little robots, munching on junk food doesn't mean ten's of
thousands of babies die right after birth every day. It doesn't mean that in
africa there isn't a huge war which is engulfing thousands of casualties and
that the meaning itself of life has been shattered. Don't get me wrong but
if this greatness, but if I had a choice, I wouldn't have been human. This
is more of a decadent hell where even our apathy damm's thousands of
innocent people. I would've been a dolphin. To say we are unique and imbuded
with some great special meaning is arrogant. No one other than human has
ever said humanity was anything special. What we are doing defines
ethnocentrism. Just because we live where and how we do, isn't any sort of
conclusive proof of anything. We are speck of star dust. A single planet in
a single solarsystem, surounded by an infinite universe, pregnant with
possibilities.
dennison
ps: can you tell I'm a poet? Sorry, I got a little carried away.
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