Also, we use the same conditioner.

It seemed like everything was humming along fine for us until the evolution of our emotive intelligence and our awareness of self went haywire. It appears that self-awareness is an anomaly that made us less efficient in our goal of survival.

I don’t know if this makes any sense, but it seems like what we embarked upon is a process of construction of an idealized image of our species, and the building is all happening in an echo chamber. Our “self” has taken over and short circuited our biological evolution. Not enough of us are noticing the effects of our increasing disconnect with our own biology and the physical world. But maybe the emotive self is highly uncomfortable with our physical reality, enough to want to dwell in fantasy.

We are on a bridge right now. Will we get across in time to tame the “self” or will we face extinction?

This is quite a profound statement that, prima facie, seems rather true. If we are at all able to identify intelligence amongst other species in the animal and/or insect kingdom, then we are only able to in the sense that we can identify a complex or construct of social skill. Humans may be a thinking consciousness, even if both ants and humans are intelligent consciousnesses, for instance; the thinking part would distinguish us from other species, phenomenologically, but the intelligent consciousness amongst humans and ants would amount to a social skill such that it was first conceived in the light of community itself.

Since desire, in the Hegelian sense, is the medium through which we abolish the foreignness of objects and make them ours, intelligence would amount through this possession and transformation of the world by which self-consciousness subsequently asserts and recognizes itself. If intelligence is at all ontological, then it must, by some aspect of social cohesion, be that self-realization comes from the interplay of a type of work and the phenomenological distinctions begetting from this work. Work here can amount to anything really, just so long as it includes an activity that affirms one’s own existence.

Ants, for instance, have a self-realization, however small and inferior it may be, of the social activity constructed out of collective behavior, and this self-realization would amount to a sort of consciousness of intelligence, one not short of affirmed existence, all the while being a social product of ant communities themselves. Nonetheless, this self-realization of ants may not be a self-consciousness the way we think of our own intelligibly, and most definitely is not identical phenomenologically to our own. Intelligence would amount to a ‘hold’ on what the world is as far as reality; what is real for ants would be different than what is real for humans–what constitutes the difference is the symbolic order of language and the signification of semantics to the world around that is intrinsically embedded within our linguistic systems and frameworks. Ants simply do not, as understood by us, have symbolic orders, especially of the kind that one is able to reflect about, as one can very well do within the study of linguistics itself through an investigation of morphemes.

The governing force of absolute monarchy of ant communities is itself a sort of intelligence, I would argue; such, too, would be the perpetual allegiance to preserving this monarchy (queen ant) for the sake of militant reproduction of the ant colony in turn. The queen ant relies on the collective activity of its children, or of an other, to fulfill the demands that her purpose requires accommodation for. I would think that an intelligence of a certain kind, even if intelligence here is construed as a social skill, would be required to maintain the hierarchical system of ant colonies through the monarch all the way down to the ant workers and soldiers.

At the end of the day, intelligence does not have to be intelligence for an ant if it is unable to understand when a shoe or a car is about to crush or squash it’s whole existence. If it survives, the social skill of re-building and maintaining is put to effect, and with that comes the possibility that what social skill we perceive ants having, is really a very inferior, indeterminate, ambiguous, yet all the while functioning ‘intelligence’.

Needless to say, the social skill of robots could be programmed to function such as ants do, either by way of social cohesion with other robots, or through the perpetual militant allegiance to a highest level of government (robot ant borg queen :p). However, this programing of the intentional nature of robots would preclude any recognition of its self-thinking consciousness on the part of human understanding since it would be the case that their relevance to ethics, by virtue of their self-thinking consciousness, would in turn be a result of the artificial framework of their intelligent syntax–a social skill of ours programmed into an other.

Just a few spontaneous and disorderly thoughts!

Good thing you were smart and took off before the going got tough. Imagine having to fight your way through obese persons to seek flatter and ceiling-less areas as a higher scaled earthquake strikes.

Were you just sitting around downtown or were you near campus?

Note to your self: Do not drink coffee during an earthquake; that is to say, unless you wish to be upset. ^_^

By the way, we should do something for Canada Day.