Exactly why those problems are insurmountable.
I hate to break it to you but Starvation, War and Pollution have been with humanity since before we were humans. We have never existed without them.
Even our Chimp and Bonobo cousins deal with these issues.
The complexity of the human social system is actually fairly limited... when compared with the connections within our own brains.
Human social systems are limited to our own "monkey sphere" and are bound by fairly typical animal social dynamics.
Untrue... Rats have been demonstrated to have metacognition for example.
Not really... Most tool using species are cultural tool users and cultural knowledge is quite widespread in the animal kingdom.
Define intelligence.... otherwise this is simple homocentric bias.
Actually it's a quantum feature of non-binary reactions from what I know.
Much as I don't like to use Wiki
Emergence - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synergism
wa:do
I call Bull on just about every point here.
Insurmountable means Impossible to fix. We could fix it. We
choose not to. QED
Erm... No they weren't. Violence predates humanity by a stretch, but War does not. Nice try, but it is Clearly shown in historical and archaeological evidence that War did not arise until after humanity left hunting and gathering societies.
Enforced starvation was NOT a problem for the bulk of geologic history. All entities pollute if you expand your definition to include all activities that produce waste matter. But that is a trivial definition since it includes all species and pretty much all activities. It is only when you restrict your definition down to "unnecessary waste" or "waste that the ecosystem is unable to handle properly" that you end up with a useful definition. And in that case hunting and gathering humans (which represents the bulk of human existence) did not produce any appreciable "pollution."
Someone has not studied sociology at all... Institutional analysis can on for basically forever. All systems on earth have their
basis in genetic programs (what you call typical animal social dynamics), but secondary (those designed to reinforce genetic programs) and tertiary systems (one's derived from derivations etc) have their own causal force. Our world is a composite of a pretty much uncountable number of influences all working to produce the day to day events we are exposed to. The amount of correlation between what people do in China and what you do in your home area may be fairly small, but when you add a trillion different influences of even the caliber of 1/30 trillion correlation you get a small but measurable effect. This is how the global economy functions. Our collective perceptions determine the relative worth of various things (I assume you are familiar with Wall Street), and you will have a very hard time convincing anyone, let alone me, that the price of Legos is somehow dependent upon my drive to reproduce, avoid death, etc.
No rat is capable of making decisions about what it will do 2 days from now. Humans can. This might simply be a function of having superior memory storage capacity, but the simple fact is We Can Do It, And They Cannot.
Intelligence defies definition, but for sake of argument we can try something like this: Intelligence requires that a being be able to: create isomorphic recreations of reality, respond according a metric of favorability that is based on the aforementioned isomorphic recreations of reality, distinguish between similar patterns/things and the reverse of finding similarities between things which are seemingly disparate, and resolve ambiguous or contradictory factors. All of those capabilities require large memory storage and more interconnections between cells. And so for someone who restricts intelligence to having a "purely" biological cause, then this pretty much precludes anything having more "intelligence" than us since we have the most memory storage and the most interconnections "per capita" (that is per cell, even if there are larger brains with more cells and thus more connections).
And absolutely nothing in either Wiki shows anything inconsistent with what I said. So-called "Strong Emergence" is magic and has no basis in reality. And when you expand the definition of Emergence to "Whenever patterns are not created by a
single event or rule." This is a trivial definition since no pattern is created by a single event or rule anywhere in the known universe and quite likely anywhere within the confines of reality simply due to the logic of finite sets. All things are dependent upon multiple factors except for that thing in itself. The latter portion is tautological and explains nothing (A proton is equal to itself is an instance of singular causation/rule formation but is trivial). The bare existence of any given thing "X" requires a number of influences approaching infinity (even particles: all particles interactions along the life line of a particle serve to guide its behavior to some extent; and this means that particles influenced by other particles create influence, etc etc).
Synergy is definitionally a case of when independently two things cannot do something, but when brought together
a previously unmanifest property/potential inherent to the two parts becomes expressed when brought together. The fact that you cannot "regress" in order to find the quality
merely shows that the qualities were only a potential while the parts were separate. If you try and make synergy out to be something special, then you have missed the boat. You can't "regress" the charge neutrality of an atom, because when you separate the proton and electron you end up with a charge bias. Does this mean that the charge neutrality of the atom is
not found in the qualities of the proton and electron? Absolutely not! It is exactly because there is the
potential quality of charge nullification found in positively charged proton and negatively charged electron that we ultimately arrive at a neutral charged atom.
The notion of "superveniency" is useful for examining added complexity of derived systems. To use the example in the Wiki: Economics is dependent upon the composition of the world, but if you study the composition of the world you will not automatically understand economics. The reason is simple, There are unmanifest/potential quality "hidden" in the behavior/psychology of the actors. It is not immediately apparent based on the composition of a being, how said being will act. But by assuming the materialistic hypothesis for explaining intelligence is true, then you could actually examine the material influence and properties of all things on a given planet (including how those properties work synergistically to form intelligent beings), and thereby derive economics simply by knowing the physical/chemical properties of every material component of the world.
MTF
