🚀 go-pugleaf

"Reason finds it's complete expression as a search mechanism..."? What a
load of mental masturbation. That reads like a divorce decree on LSD. It
never ceases to amaze me the lengths that people go to serve themselves.
There are some interesting points buried in the ballyhoo but the most
interesting thing is that in this observance of human existence in an
unpredictable and sometimes hostile environment fails to examine the ego,
i.e.-why people think about their existence in the first place. This idea
that we are at odds with the "non-living" makes me think the guy stubbed his
toe the morning he wrote that. While it is true that the trials of living in
this world of living and non-living things often puts us in situations
beyond our control, this notion that justifying our existence by prevailing
over the non-living is only a piece of the puzzle. What about food? We eat
stuff that we kill. What about inspiration? Love is a powerful motivator.
What about joy, personal accomplishment, spirituality, the instinct to
procreate,...the list can go on and on. People often see the checkerboard
without seeing the frame around it. Yes it is a chaotic Universe, no we will
never understand it. All the effort in this piece spent trying to define
reality also fails to address the truth that reality is completely neutral.
For example, say we are both sitting in a room with a ball on a table. I see
one side of it and you see another. We both agree that it is real, but both
of us are seeing different things because we are on different sides of it.
The ball is real, it's our interpretation that is subjective. This knowledge
is applicable in that the truth is what it is, and even if it appears to be
a complex quagmire of never ending questions, it's really simple, you either
know it or you don't. This awareness is the cornerstone of either success or
failure, evolution included.

- A -

"Fabrizio J. Bonsignore" <fbonsignore@beethoven.com> wrote in message
news:768f7623.0410050750.5abbd1b6@posting.google.com...
> We introduce a philosophy of Man and Nature that stems from the
> phenomenon of Life as a necessary foundation for pondering about our
> being and must be. The distinction between the Living and the Non
> Living manifests itself as a problematic and fundamental opposition,
> for which every living being represents an unique and unrepeatable
> solution to the problem of being against the pressing indifference of
> the Non Living. It is in this scenario of primary conflict in which we
> find the motive of union to the rest of the living beings on the
> planet. The biological struggle of the "the law of the jungle" is
> nothing more than the Method with which the Living confronts Reality
> which is, in principle, unknowable, unpredictable and definitively
> chaotic. Life fights to preserve its duration against the mechanical
> and destructive pressure of the Non Living and achieves it by
> anticipating in the diversity of beings the answer to the problems
> that poses existence in the unpredictable, spreading those
> peculiarities that most successfully fulfill their function:
> facilitate the preservation of Life, extend the order of the
> biological over the increasing disorder of the a biotic. To that, the
> Living turns against itself, nourishing on itself, exercising by means
> of the jungle law a constant self-examination, rejecting the inferior
> and preserving only the useful, to obtain first an advantage and
> ultimately total dominion over the Non Living, over which it prospers.
>
> Life wins its struggle against the inert by taking within the
> conflict, transmitting it in a learning mechanism. Thus learns the
> Living in its fight against the environment, imprinting in the
> diversity of individual beings, in their form and behavior, the
> knowledge to survive and reproduce acquired through eons of trial and
> error, where error is death and the test is to conceive, incorporating
> in the design of species the tools developed by evolution, modeled by
> Chaos, always under the unique compulsion of giving origin to more
> life.
>
> The permanent conflicts among species are thus secondary before the
> primordial problem of keeping imperishable the Spark of Life against
> the undifferentiated ness of Chaos, reason why we fraternize with all
> living beings, over which we must exercise our best protection.
>
> Because in Man the learning evolution mechanism arrived at a
> particular tool, our unique specialized adaptation, the rational
> processing of information and its control, language, an evident
> survival advantage, a method to explore and penetrate Reality that
> allows a single individual to evaluate and incarnate possibilities
> that, evolutively speaking, can only be essayed by several
> individuals, in several species. So Man learned to fly in less time
> than birds and without developing wings on their own bodies.
>
> Reason explores more rapidly the possibilities of the Real than
> evolution, and does so, or can do it, systematically, by means of the
> accumulation and direct transmission of knowledge, in which the
> characteristics inherited by parents in the Lamarckian sense are,
> precisely, the fruits gathered by means of its rational exploration of
> Reality. Thus, Reason reveals as Method, but not a particular one, but
> any method, from the most descabellado like magic to the most
> productive which is Science. There reside the advantage by which
> Reason, as a survival advantage, surpasses the results of evolution,
> which results displaced as the principal tool to propagate life. We
> are not limited to decide only from the information in our immediate
> environment, nor from a strict impulse to propagate our own genes, but
> we can transcend locality and biological egotism to raise
> organizations with rules more complex than "big fish eats small fish".
> The law of jungle has transformed in Law and Economics, in Accountancy
> and Politics and also in War. By the simple fact of being unnecessary
> as a technique of adaptation and survival, natural selection does not
> hold in a human world, where error is not judged (always) with death,
> the ugly, weak and mean survive and reproduce, although unfortunately
> the fair many times are sacrificed uselessly.
>
> We do not need evolution to confront in time what Chaos furnishes,
> since our ability to combine symbols and representations through
> language is more efficient than combining actual beings to explore
> Reality, given the economies in the use of energy and the savings in
> time. Reason proceeds lineally, penetrating deeply in the
> unpredictable with the single thread of consciousness, in contrast to
> evolution, which proceeds simultaneously and in parallel along the
> populations of living beings. In Man, in its characteristic as a
> living and rational being, both procedures join magnificently. Every
> human being is unique and unrepeatable, diverse, necessary condition
> of the living being, and from an always new position exercises Reason
> to penetrate the horizon of the world and then communicate its
> privileged viewpoint.
>
> As a result, in Man the Living conducts an accelerated search in the
> infinite possibilities of the Real, anticipating, and thus
> controlling, the chaotic change in the Not Living with a velocity and
> effectiveness that surpasses that of evolution alone, making it
> irrelevant to the human world. Reason reproduces in fullness evolution
> on a different plane, substituting and complementing the combination
> of living entities with the combination of representations,
> morphological adaptation with technological adaptation, the law of the
> jungle with the exchange economy, the ecological niche with productive
> specialization, genetic inheritance with historic inheritance,
> survival instinct with the rational search for meaning, and,
> principally, substituting natural selection, the survival and
> reproduction of the most fit, with more complex systems that we call
> Society, Culture and generally Civilization.
>
> And as in the Pre-rational Living, we observe the enormous diversity
> of species resultant from evolution, of which we know are just a few
> from the infinite number of possible species, human cultures are
> equally diverse, a reflex of the essential diversity of the Living and
> Man, and of the diversity of representations, not only of the Real
> that every individual human can generate, but also of the inexistent
> and even the impossible, as is evident par excellence in Art.
>
> Man manifests to us therefore as a living being, animal, diverse, but
> indeterminate in its possibilities, with the double task of surviving
> as a living being and building himself. Although the animal nature
> directs effectively the basic tasks of conserving the organism, every
> human being has the ability to generate and explore alternative
> solutions to the problem of existence among which determines his being
> in the world. Only if the individual realizes this effort to explore
> Reality from Reason to find new mechanisms of survival as a living
> being and select those viable but not available to animality, he will
> be expressing completely our nature as a human beings.
>
> That requires a constant vigilance of Reason to avoid the modes of
> behavior proper to the Irrational Living and to which we are prone
> from our animal nature, so that we can choose those that are open only
> to Man. It is thus the care of the quality of being human by
> exercising Reason, that is, the conscious development of the dignity
> of the human being, that which establishes definitively the difference
> to animals and to which every one of us must be devoted permanently as
> the means to express with integrity our human essence. There is thus a
> continuity to the irrational world that forms the substrate upon which
> operates Reason but against which it has the task of distinguishing
> itself, and select that which is proper of being human from what is a
> disguised expression of animality.
>
> The products of Reason, being the result of a search of the possible
> in Reality, can however become contrary not only to what is humane,
> but even be contrary to the essential need to preserve the Living,
> from which it becomes indispensable a redoubled vigilance of Reason in
> its decisions. Therefore, established as human decision criteria are
> the preservation of Life, represented it by all and each of the
> living; the continuation of Life, fundamental problem of every living
> being and to which evolution found as unique mechanism the instinct of
> survival of the individual, whose function is to favor the
> reproduction of individuals, reason why it must be allowed to operate
> freely; the development of Life's diversity, in beings as in ideas,
> main weapon with which the Living confronts the scaring
> unpredictability of Chaos; and the impulse to the Methods that
> distinguish Reason respect to evolution as a solution to the problem
> of existence: the systematic and deep exploration of Reality, the
> joint decision making, the consideration to the welfare of the fellow
> man, the technological adaptation to the environment, the use of
> dialogue as proper form of human interaction, the search for welfare
> beyond mere survival and generally the search and construction of
> possibilities in the Real with special attention to artistic creation,
> in which Reason finds its complete expression as a search mechanism of
> sense in the Chaos of Reality.
>
> Written in 1997. A miracle I still have the copy at hand...