The search for Intelligent Life... Oxford definition of the word intelligent and a short expansion on a few related words Intelligent [1]having the faculty of understanding; possessing intelligence or intellect. [2]having or showing a degree of intelligence; [3]understands a particular thing. Faculty [1]the power of doing anything. [2]an ability or aptitude, whether natural or acquired, for any special kind of action. [3]ability in general. Understanding [1]having knowledge and judgement. [2]discerning. Life [1]the series of actions and occurrences constituting the history of an individual from birth to death. [2]the course of human existence from birth to death. [3]in modern use, the practical part of human existence; the business, active pleasures, or pursuits of the world. The search for Intelligent Life... This statement has prompted a lot of thought about its definition for me. This is my first attempt at trying to understand this statement, to better enable me to seek it out, and interact with it. This statement is often used in the realm of space and space exploration, as in the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life. I have decided to reduce the scope of my search, to the confines of the reality I can believe, by applying my senses. This includes the so called “sixth sense” that feeling that causes us to expect the future or experience the past as a feeling or vision. When applied to nature, this phenomenon is known as instinct, so for the sake of convenience i will use that definition in my train of thought. At this point I would like to explore this instinct concept. I believe that it is a critical part of the human constitution, that for a variety of reasons, we no longer use to our maximum advantage and no longer trust as we should.we all have instinct but we all apply it in varying degrees, depending on how deep we have fallen into the trap of societal laziness. My explanation of this is as follows; the game ranger who earns his bread in close proximity to the natural order has learnt to trust his instinct implicitly, when he feels that the beast he may be tracking could at a particular moment turn and threaten his life, he listens without a doubt and without hesitation. The reason being, he has learnt that the environment he is in, is extremely unpredictable, and therefore he understands that his instinct is his best tool for survival. The longer he spends in this environment the stronger this sense becomes, and the deeper his trust in it becomes. He accepts it and sees it as vital to his survival. On the other hand an individual who resides in the city environment, has very little chance to experience, and exercise this sense. The city life style is constructed in a way that the need for instinct is limited. Many areas that we may need to exercise this instinct have been controlled by a variety mechanisms. For example, traffic lights, speed limits, pedestrian crossings, stop streets, parking spaces etc, etc. These limits have been instituted to control the herd. Our ability to ‘instinctualise’ our surroundings has been diluted by our expectation that the majority will adhere to the rules. For example; the fact that when we may be approaching an intersection, the danger levels and unpredictability of the future have now risen. We need to exercise more caution than usual, and we need to receive and process as much information about the pending changes in our reality ,as our senses allow us. Currently these functions have been so far removed from us, that we can no longer function without these mechanisms. How often have you been the only car at an intersection. Stopped by a red light, for no apparent reason? There are no cars approaching from either direction, it is safe to proceed, but still we sit for three minutes and wait for the light, which has no brain and no understanding, and limited function, to change to green and let us proceed with our lives. Comical isn’t it? The light is red! Must stop! No questions asked! Proceed when green! The light has the power to halt your journey, at three minute average intervals. As a mathematical equation it would look like this: seventy years, the average life span, times 365 days per year, that’s a total of 25 550 days, times an average of ten three minute stops per day, which is a total of 766 500 minutes which equals 12 775 hours, which is a grand total of 532 days in the average life stopped at red robots. People that’s a total of 1.458 years of your life you will be stopped by a red light. All because although you as an individual may be able to trust your instincts as to whether you may proceed safely or not, your fellow man who is sharing your environment, and the word sharing is key, may not be as in tune as you are, and may be living his life in a selfish and inconsiderate manner. It seems to me that the average city dweller experiences life so reliant on these control mechanisms that when they place themselves in a variation of their normal existence, the wheels fall off. The number of muggings on the street is testament to this fact. Your average individual needs a sign to tell them, “dude you are entering an area of our environment that is in the criminals favour and you are about to become potential prey.” Joe average doesn’t realise that he has the ability to analyse his surroundings and make use of his intelligence and faculties, and switch on all his early warning and defence systems. I’ve never been mugged. As a matter of fact i’ve tried to be mugged and it seems I can’t, and I know people that have been mugged often, in excess of five times. My only explanation for this is that I can’t turn these early warning and defence systems off , and the criminal whose instinct is highly tuned, because of the extreme unpredictability of the life of crime, realise that I’m not a soft target. I have been hijacked, only once though. The second time a hijack situation was presented to me I was ready and able to defend myself and my possessions, as well as teach a group of would-be criminals that crime doesn’t always pay and sometimes the only wages you will earn are extreme pain and broken bits of your body. The reason for this is that I try and move through my life in a mode of openness and willingness to receive, and process as much of the information that my senses collect, actively. This started as a mental experiment, i realised that my senses are not ever off, they are on full-time. What did happen is that sometimes I was not actively processing the information that my senses were receiving. I was suffering from sensory apathy. The moment I started to concentrate on analysing the sensory input I became acutely aware of my environment to my betterment. I feel that the most acceptable definition for this “sixth sense” or instinct, is the culmination of a series of mental evaluations, involving your environmental sensors that is your senses. Instinct is the sum of all your senses and faculties working in synergy,to enable you to move through your life in a way that is as safe and as defendable as possible. Back to the search for intelligent life. For years intelligence has been measured by a test system that involves a series of questions. The answers to these questions are rated using a scoring system. In my view this system is fundamentally flawed. Reason being that this is an average test and at best will give you a score according to that average. If we go back to the Oxford definitions, we will see that the interpretation for intelligence is, in a nut shell, the ability to receive information and process it using our faculties of deduction and to use this information to our best advantage. There has been this long time belief that doctors and lawyers and scientists, the professionals, and the such are the pinnacle of intelligence. I will dispute this ‘till my death bed. The reason being that there are, for example, better doctors and worse doctors. This opens the door for the question- are the not so good doctors less intelligent than the good ones? My deduction is no they aren’t. They may be less passionate or less skilled or less driven to be better, but one thing is for sure- they have all been tested and deemed fit to call themselves doctors. They have all met or exceeded the minimum requirements of their set of tests. A similar argument can be applied to lawyers whose faculties allow them to reinterpret the law to their clients best advantage, and in the case of the scientist their faculties allow them to give names to pieces of the environment and manipulate said pieces to our benefit or destruction. The fact that we still have a myriad of uncontrollable and rampant diseases leads me to deduce that maybe the doctors aren’t that bright and the fact that we have obviously guilty criminals walking the streets says that the lawyers have some answering to do, and the atomic bomb just blows all science to the outer reaches of the intelligence spectrum. My view is that we are all equally intelligent. The difference between us that we try and measure, with the average iq test, is how many of our faculties have been activated, and are available for us to use in our walk through this dimension. I clearly remember my school mathematics and accountancy teachers being endlessly frustrated with me at my inability to grasp the number mystery. To me it truly was a mystery, and my achievements in these subjects bear testament to that. A grand total of sixteen percent for accountancy (that’s my year end sum and average) and eight percent for mathematics,year end. The strange thing is, that now that I’m forty I’m reasonably good with numbers and quite enjoy the process of sorting numbers. I doubt I will ever be entering an Olympiad, but I can more than hold my own when working with numbers in my daily life, and there’s always the computer to do the really difficult stuff. It seems to me that i may have missed out on some fundamental building blocks in my formative years when it comes to numbers. The things i have picked up along the way, later in life, make a lot more sense when people show me how to do things with numbers. Some of the things that i pick up are really basic; the other day i was watching somebody do a simple “sum of” equation and this persons’ system made so much more sense, and was so much simpler than the system i had been using. This says to me that i have the faculties to work with numbers, but when the basics were being taught and the faculties were being awakened, i missed something or misunderstood a fundamental. The person tasked with teaching me didn’t pick up on my shortcoming. That led to me inventing my way of doing things, which is infinitely more involved and fraught with errors. This last train of thought is much about the formative years, because later on in your development you take a lot more control over which faculties become more developed because of your personal likes and passions.the faculties that you leave underdeveloped don’t become entirely redundant. It’s more a case of dormancy or hibernation, because should your environment change or your needs alter, you can call up those faculties and immediately begin to hone them and add them to your tool box of abilities. I presume that there are very few doctors that have the slightest clue as to the intricate workings of the modern fuel injection systems. They may have a vague understanding of the general function, but i doubt one of them would attempt a system overhaul. On the other hand, the mechanic who doesn’t bat an eyelid at the system and pulls it apart, cleans it up, reassembles it and does so correctly, also, only has a vague understanding of the intricacies of the heart and won’t be attempting surgery in his garage any time soon. A quick summary; we are all intelligent- it is how we apply our intelligence that differentiates us from one another, and how much passion we apply to our faculties that may push the perception that the doctor is brighter than the mechanic. The professions have now been allowed to prey on the insecurities of the masses by supplying a possible solution to unfathomable situations that the individual may find themselves in. Not so long ago in human history, the doctor was paid in produce and livestock. I presume that was because the profession of doctoring was not considered to be too distant from that of farmer. Unfortunately, the unrealistic importance on human life and the desperate need for humans to prolong their stay on the planet, has afforded the doctor the opportunity to inflate his value to beyond the reach of your average farmer. The farmer however has remained doing what he has always done, and that is to plant seed in the ground and harvest them when they mature, or to raise livestock. To put this in perspective, if you take the cost of an average bone break at ten thousand rand, and the average price for wheat being three thousand rand per ton, if a farmer pitched up with three and a half tons of corn to pay for the repairs to his broken bone, the doctor would not be able to store it, let alone consume it before its expiry date. If the doctor had any morals he would accept a bag of corn every week for the rest of his life. Unfortunately, we have allowed the doctor to dictate his value . If you consider the amount of actual work that the doctor does to earn his ten thousand rand compared to the work value that the farmer has to put in to produce three and a half tons of corn, the discrepancies are clearly visible. Does this point to the doctor being more intelligent because he over charges for services and the farmer less intelligent because he charges a fair price for his skills? I think not. It points to greed and a very special kind of selfishness on behalf of the doctor as a professional.
Posted on: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 05:02:00 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015