Do we belong to humankind?

Post Reply New Topic

It is hard to explain that in this whole mess there are no evildoers. Economic growth, science technique. It’s all like a stampede: can a cow give a rational direction to the stampede? If I look at what happens, since the agrarian revolution, 4000 thousands years ago (4000 thousand years is a very very short time in evolutionary terms) I see every so called progress as a participation to a stampede. The problem here that this perspective is scarcely understood by political actors, leaders and also by the common people. So when you have well understood the inevitability of catastrophe, you are more alone than ever, like Cassandra. Probably being autistic has helped me to understand that history is some process in which you don’t have any role. And so you are even more alone, and it’s so difficult to communicate with people who are attached to a positive view. Lenin used to say that with development, the administration of things would be so simple that any cook (significantly he referred to a woman cook) could administer a country. How could he believe in such a nonsense?

By the way, is Condolezza good at cooking?

I don't think the Russian Revolution was so much a mistake as that it happened too fast. Humans have short life spans so this "lets get it all done" attitude is going to lead to a very slipshod system. It's impossible to get anything done well in one's lifetime that is why history is so important, along with keeping a system in place that is independent of a particualar leader. You do have to give the former USSR credit for what they were able to accomplish in a half of century.
In Criminal Justice programs this happens a lot. There will be a program that produces great results but the moment that the leader of the program quits or retires the program loses it's effectiveness.



Was it irony or just the simple fact that Rice like the cook you think Lenin mentioned was also a woman? Rice probably knows more about Russians than any other person in the President's Cabinent. She spent a number of years studying them. It is a good thing she is the Secretary of Defense right now given that Putin is getting all paranoid about the US planning to put missles near his turf.

We are not right, we are incorrect. Our minds can not calculate algorithms that the NT-model can. Our wires are crossed. This organic machine is defective.

So why are we here? what is our purpose? There is no answer and in that empty void where the meaning of life should be lies our birth right.

If humans knew the meaning of life, then perhaps we would know why we are broken, why our minds work differently but then perhaps we would know once and for all wether our lives have any meaning at all. But couldn't the same be said for the NT-model? Don't they struggle the same, save for a different context?

Our disabilities is like an error in the code, and I'm just curious to know, when will the error be deleted? When will we die off? I don't want to die. not yet. I want to have a family and raise children who won't experience what I've experienced. but isn't it genetic? if so, why would i curse my heirs with my twisted mind? I wouldn't. Thus leads me to a lonely life and death. My mind is my burden, and mine alone.

Yes freaks, phocomelic people, dwarfs. All mistakes or imperfections in the transmission of instructions for building a “normal” creature. It’s the stochastic element guiding the perpetuation of the species and on the whole the method (if it can be called a method) works. Imperfect creatures die without reproducing themselves. But, if, as I believe, communication is mostly a technique, and artifice, much more a part of that awful machinery which places humans out of the laws of nature (what can one say of a species which already owns the means of total self annihilation?) it’s not in humanity that one can find salvation but in something else and, lacking any other way, in inaction, resistance, rejection of the ways and customs of humanity.

No cow can give a direction to a stampede.


Where do the boundaries of a species lie?
I hope this eulogy of a dog lover, published in the British daily Independent of today 10.31 will clarify some problems related to our antrhopocentic idea that communication and relationships are inestricably connected with language and words:

"Can you seriously refuse to grant a dog the complexities of emotional feelings? Many do, but I can't accept that. I can't believe that dogs don't have emotions and the only words I have to describe those emotions are ones I'd use to describe a fellow human.

<My dog Macy was "jealous" when another dog took one of her toys, "thoughtful" before trying anything unfamiliar, " joyous" when she met people or other dogs she knew, "contented" to be left alone, "purposeful" when investigating the natural world around her, "circumspect" in her approach to unknown people, " contained" in her display of emotions. Helen Mirren in The Queen reminded me of Macy – guarded, wary, restrained, but no less " human" for it.</p>

But there's a trickier emotion. Can you describe love? Can you put your own feeling of love for someone into precise words? Can you capture in a sentence or a paragraph that feeling of love so that someone reads and understands what you mean?

I know the look of love in my wife's eyes, but can I describe in words what that look is? (I know, too, her look of exasperation, or annoyance.) You can't dispassionately describe love from the outside. You have to feel it from the inside in order to know what it is, so you'll have to take my word for it. As trite as it may sound, I loved my dog and I know my dog loved me."

Aspies are Human. Maybe another form of human but human anyway. Without aspies humans may not be quite as advanced scientifically as today.

It is so difficult to describe emotions and feelings in words. Thoughts have many words, even very abstract concepts can be described in words but love...there are no adequate words are there? Maybe an artist could paint it, or a dancer dance that emotion or a composer make music out of it, but to try and put in into words? I will try, with my own words (I will not resort to a dictionary - someone else's words) Love=a very positive feeling of affection and connectedness? See, it falls flat when feeling are put into words. Even poets, the experts at expressing the almost inexpressible, often resort to metaphor. Logos - Eros. Two very different gods.

The Triumph of Love (extract) by Friedrich Von Schiller

By love are blest the gods on high,
Frail man becomes a deity
When love to him is given;
'Tis love that makes the heavens shine
With hues more radiant, more devine,
And turns dull earth to heaven!

Schiller does it well, I think.

I don't want to belong to humankind. Does that count ?

Honestly, I see these claims of separation and often superiority (from both NT's and Aspergians) as only serving to create problems. The answer is no, Aspergians are human. Not another branch of humanity, not the next stage of evolution, not another form, just humans. There are differences between the Aspergian mind and the neurotypical mind, but the similarities far outnumber the differences. Especially considering the blurriness in defining a person with an ASD. What seperates an Aspergian from an eccentric introverted person who has narrow, intense interests? Does that mean I have Asperger's? Where does the spectrum end? Just the fact the the differences are often so vague leads me to believe that the notion of Aspergians not being "human" is rather silly. People are people with their individual strengths and weaknesses; neither are "better."

so much so that you put the other's well being above your own?

Agree 100%.

Even though I feel as though I don't 'get along' with the rest of the human race, I am no less human or no greater of a human than anyone else.

That is such a hard question isn't it? I would say...probably, sometimes. But to do it all the time would not be good for oneself...what do you think?

the whole subject is very interesting. I think I'll start a separate thread about it, if I may borrow Paolo's question.

Animals of the same species, cats, dogs, elephants, zebras, are prepared to cope with the problems of their life span. They are wired for that, if we want to use this term. Humans are very different, not for their skin color, but for the extreme complicatedness of the life experiences they will have to face. For this thy must be trained, by their families, by schools and numberless institutions (West Point, Madrassas, Ivy League, Eton and what not). They all separate men in incalculable ways, they make them incommunicable isles. The only terms in which communication is still possible are the animal terms, sex, affection, territory, some fundamental inhibitions (not to kill your neighbor in the street in peace time). But are these inhibitions still holding now spontaneously? Isn’t artifice, training, drilling, police surveillance corrupting every relationship? May be God created all men equal, but they die apart and in loneliness. If anything, humans can (I don’t say that they do) communicate with some animals better that with their biological mates. So the compactness of humankind is largely a bureaucratic abstraction. When you are born you are registered, when you die you are registered again, like if you were property of the public administration. In the meantime everyone is a fortress of solitude and selfishness.

I can't really bring myself to say I'm a part of the human species. I don't know many people with Asperger's, never have, so I've always felt various differences between me and the people around me. They've never seemed very rational to me, never seemed interested in such beautiful subjects as science and philosophy. They've always had social cliques that made no sense to me.

Genetically, if Asperger's is hereditary, does that not make it some kind of evolutionary step, anyway? Imagine a future where everyone skips social cliques, where most people have fields of excellence, where rationality and sensitivity was common in humans.

I think too much.

that is only your opinion. I think you think just fine.

Merle

Not all that is hereditary is a step forward. Sometimes evolution takes a direction that brings advantages in the short term (in evolution short term may be some millions years). One example: size. Size may be an advantage in the “short” term. Less vulnerability to predators, food resources otherwise unavailable (plankton for whales and also big fish). But size in the long term may be a disadvantage. Like dinosaurs before, big animals are subject to extinction more than small animals (mice, or some insects like cockroaches). The big size of our brain, evolutionary invention of language gave humans an evolutionary advantage to the point that in an eyewink (six thousand years) the human population has passed from a few millions to six billions. This is success, but also (not even in the long term, but in the short term) something which very likely will bring disaster (see Collapse by Jared Diamond). Evolution is always right, but this is a tautology. Behind this reasoning there is an idea, very difficult to express, that if we belong to something this something is Life (not a species).

I've come to believe that trying to attach an idea to some sense of how a human can "belong", or how we can "fit" ourselves into any type of schema with regards to the history of evolution or any type of "bigger picture" is irrelevant. All we are actually trying to do is to look for some kind of logical coherence with some kind of meaning attached to it.

All we can do is describe, we cannot define. Although our definition is in some sense a description that we create, it in no way defines anything or, more importantly, means anything. Not in the sense that we want it to mean. It is merely our meager attempt to reach an epiphany that allows for some kind of catharsis that we believe will shield us from the burden of our awareness. Our attempts are based on a faulty belief that a logically coherent explanation is somehow "better" than a non-sensible one.

But, why should a logically coherent explanation be "better" than one that is not?!? It is not. It is only our constructs which decieve us into believing that "coherent" is "better". There is no more substance to this type of philisophical understanding than there is in a religious one. They are all man made constructs which are conjured in the abyss of despair in an attempt to comfort our fears. Fear of never fitting in, never finding relief, never being happy, never finding love. The belief that an explanation of our situation can remedy anything is no more valid than the belief of an all mighty diety that soothes the anxieties of a religious person.

Yet, this is our way of searching, right or wrong. But, could it be that our search is off the mark?!? No matter the person, the situation, the level of inquiry, it would seem that the answer of our origin, or of our place withing humanity is an irrelevant factor in finding an escape from our solitude. What I strive for is not an answer for the "why", but a solution for my solitude. There is a difference. I could find relief from solitude tomorrow should a miracle afford itself on me, yet I could still have all of my questions unanswered. The questions have taken a back seat to my quest for a solution. If can find the solution, then the questions, although they remain unsolved, become irrelevant to me.