Words of Wisdom

treeplanter

treeplanter

Well-known member
"It is man's intelligence that makes him so often behave more stupidly than the beasts. Man is impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. Thus, no animal is clever enough, when there is a drought, to imagine that the rain is being withheld by evil spirits, or as punishment for its transgressions. Therefore you never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. No horse, for example would kill one of its foals to make the wind change direction. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough." ~Aldous Huxley
 
treeplanter said:
"It is man's intelligence that makes him so often behave more stupidly than the beasts. Man is impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. Thus, no animal is clever enough, when there is a drought, to imagine that the rain is being withheld by evil spirits, or as punishment for its transgressions. Therefore you never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. No horse, for example would kill one of its foals to make the wind change direction. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough." ~Aldous Huxley
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By that reasoning a hundred pound granite boulder cascading from a mountain peak into a valley below, "behaves" more intelligently than a jumping man, since the boulder doesn't risk painful harm. It also never mistakes a planet for a star. A man who is intelligent enough to ponder possible causes and effects of a drought, while concocting various "behaviors" which might reveal possible remedies is certainly behaving more intelligently than a cat who couldn't construct an aqueduct if his nine lives depended on it.

Huxley was a deterministic materialist. He believed nothing unless it could be empirically proved, but he was too stupid to realize that he had no empirical proof for his belief that only empirically provable beliefs are true, thus undercutting his entire shallow philosophy.
 
treeplanter said:
"It is man's intelligence that makes him so often behave more stupidly than the beasts. Man is impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. Thus, no animal is clever enough, when there is a drought, to imagine that the rain is being withheld by evil spirits, or as punishment for its transgressions. Therefore you never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. No horse, for example would kill one of its foals to make the wind change direction. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough." ~Aldous Huxley
Click to expand...
The only thing we've been able to develop to counter-act our propensity to let fear, tribal allegiances, cognitive fallacies, etc. corrupt our thinking is science. But science is hard precisely because it's not as intuitive as sticking with our tribe, our cognitive fallacies, and it's certainly not as driving a force as fear is.

We've got a lot of work in front of us.
 
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