Friday, May 7, 2010

Like a Virgin

This is my first entry into the world of blog. Robots are neat! Test. Test. To start things off we can examine the "The Science of Good & Evil" by Michael Shermer. An excellent book that I would recommend to anyone looking for a preliminary study of morality through the guise of Evolutionary theory. I take a profound influence from the thesis of an objective morality with out supernatural intervention. Evolutionary theory has the power to explain both the similarities and differences in moral paradigms that we see across cultures and species. Group selection is a powerful window through which to examine what society deems moral or immoral.

Group selection essentially states that- What is good for the individual within a group is good for the group and what is good for the group is good for the individual within the group. With finite resources natural selection occurs between groups and the groups with the best chance for survival are the groups with the highest levels of altruism. This occurs because the individual altruists will work for the group while individualists within a group will only work for them selves. At the level of individuals within a group individualists who do not share resources will be more successful but at the level of inter group selection groups with higher levels of altruism will be more successful because the sharing of resources within a group will produce fitter groups. This theory accounts for the existence of altruism in the face of those who use the phrase "survival of the fittest" to defile Darwinism in favor of creationism.

The book also examines the paradigm of fuzzy logic. If you want to have a generally representative understanding of "Life, the Universe, and Everything", it is important to understand fuzzy logic. It is rare to come across a perfect dichotomy where two sides of an issue are split into exactly two sides. Gradient's, Spectrum's, and "Shades of Gray", this is how the world is. Use of this paradigm is helpful in eliminating errors such as thinking of people, things, events, or actions as either Good or Evil. In detailed examination we find that these things are better understood as a gradient. A person can both commit murder and be a loving husband. To almost any problem with sufficient complexity there is more than one solution and of often many solutions. This is how the world is.

The book covers much more than these subjects. Due to the fact that I have not finished it I will probably find more to think about at a later date.

also PNS(Peripheral Nervous System) is often pronounced penis and that makes neuroscience students giggle.

I think that my blog cherry is sufficiently ruptured and thus I will end this post.