11/14/2005
Neanderthals after Dark
01.29.2005
09.29.2003
4:44 am (computer time)
I've noticed things sound louder in the dark and also late at night, especially when others are sleeping. It is as though just knowing that others are asleep triggers some sort of involuntary empathy of sound scale in our ears. And most people seem to sleep through those sounds the waking shudder at just enough to keep the whole thing grossly unpredictable. Which is not a bad way to sum up humans as a species, actually: humans as a species are grossly unpredictable, and perhaps that is why they are so fascinated with the possibility of prediction, of fortune-telling and odds-laying and advice of all sorts. This seems important somehow, this theme. Even religion is to a large part concerned with predictions, Christianity especially it seems, though that may just be my own experiential bias showing again. But anyways, on some level it’s thoroughly absurd, the whole history of the predictions business, because mostly it seems concerned with predicting what people will do, so that other people will not be caught totally unawares. That's really odd; no other species does that. No other species is so inherently unpredictable that it has spent thousands of years trying and failing to guess what its own members will do. It hardly seems possible for such a condition to develop that far, it seems like it would lead to extinction, or rather that the circumstances in which total unpredictability occurred would inevitably lead to species
evolving beyond recognition in response or quickly dying out, or both.
Perhaps that is how people came to be. Perhaps the Neanderthals
were human-bodied but instinct-minded, responding to and interacting
with their environment in ways that had been shaped by evolution over
generations, ways that would require hundreds or thousands of years
to substantially change, ways that were relatively uniform from
one Neanderthal to another, and thus ways that were utterly
predictable and exploitable, should any creature exist that could
pattern-identify them this way. And that is, after all, how humans
managed to get through the Stone-age and ice-age and all, right,
by noting the predictable behavior patterns of other animals, i.e.
the mammoth will run from fire and unexpected noise, all mammoth
will, thus any particular mammoth will, and exploiting them--
we will surprise that mammoth with fire and noise and
it will run from them into the pit, or over the cliff, or
the range of our spears, and so on. And these things
will be accrued enough that the mammoth cannot evolve defenses
against them, because evolution is a long-term
response to long-term conditions. yeah,
the Neanderthals wouldn't have ad a chance. Not under those
premises, anyways. Probably all nonsense but an interesting way to
think, and perhaps logic-worthy -- it feels consistent anyway. ¶ 5:30 PM
09.29.2003
4:44 am (computer time)
I've noticed things sound louder in the dark and also late at night, especially when others are sleeping. It is as though just knowing that others are asleep triggers some sort of involuntary empathy of sound scale in our ears. And most people seem to sleep through those sounds the waking shudder at just enough to keep the whole thing grossly unpredictable. Which is not a bad way to sum up humans as a species, actually: humans as a species are grossly unpredictable, and perhaps that is why they are so fascinated with the possibility of prediction, of fortune-telling and odds-laying and advice of all sorts. This seems important somehow, this theme. Even religion is to a large part concerned with predictions, Christianity especially it seems, though that may just be my own experiential bias showing again. But anyways, on some level it’s thoroughly absurd, the whole history of the predictions business, because mostly it seems concerned with predicting what people will do, so that other people will not be caught totally unawares. That's really odd; no other species does that. No other species is so inherently unpredictable that it has spent thousands of years trying and failing to guess what its own members will do. It hardly seems possible for such a condition to develop that far, it seems like it would lead to extinction, or rather that the circumstances in which total unpredictability occurred would inevitably lead to species
evolving beyond recognition in response or quickly dying out, or both.
Perhaps that is how people came to be. Perhaps the Neanderthals
were human-bodied but instinct-minded, responding to and interacting
with their environment in ways that had been shaped by evolution over
generations, ways that would require hundreds or thousands of years
to substantially change, ways that were relatively uniform from
one Neanderthal to another, and thus ways that were utterly
predictable and exploitable, should any creature exist that could
pattern-identify them this way. And that is, after all, how humans
managed to get through the Stone-age and ice-age and all, right,
by noting the predictable behavior patterns of other animals, i.e.
the mammoth will run from fire and unexpected noise, all mammoth
will, thus any particular mammoth will, and exploiting them--
we will surprise that mammoth with fire and noise and
it will run from them into the pit, or over the cliff, or
the range of our spears, and so on. And these things
will be accrued enough that the mammoth cannot evolve defenses
against them, because evolution is a long-term
response to long-term conditions. yeah,
the Neanderthals wouldn't have ad a chance. Not under those
premises, anyways. Probably all nonsense but an interesting way to
think, and perhaps logic-worthy -- it feels consistent anyway. ¶ 5:30 PM
