-The difference in efficiency should tell you that that power spent is _worth_ something, like astonishingly superior abstraction capabilities and the ability to speak and write.
-The ugliness (read; complexity) of QM could easily be interpreted as a tribute. Whether you like it or not, it is the best we have. To paraphrase HHG2G, if it's ugly, then it's the universe that got it wrong, not us. (I'm partially joking, mostly because I don't suspect you really have a firm enough grasp of QM, let alone QFT, to determine its aesthetic beauty.)
I mean, I'm all for a little humbling perspective. We are a race of people descended from stupider people unto apehood (and before that, lizards!) that are stuck on a rock in a universe fantastically larger than us.
That doesn't mean we should be debbie downers.
nope. It is just that we didn't have strong enough competition from other predator species to force the efficiency increase. Instead we use the extensive way of increasing the size, even if it is accompanied by decreased efficiency. Like going cheap low-tech V8 instead of efficiently increasing horsepower of a V6 engine.
>astonishingly superior abstraction capabilities
yep. that one. The top manifestations of that ability were Inquisition, Hitler, Stalin, etc... The astonishing ability of our brain to generate various abstract reasons to kill. This ability is the only qualitative difference between humans and animals. Most people aren't able to handle beyond the simplest physics and mathematics reasoning, yet easy to come up with a set of "other" people and pretty abstract reasons why these "others" should be violently oppressed and killed. The ability to handle mathematics and physics is just a side-effect that is manifested only by a few. If you look into the history of human species, it is a continuous blood-shed, and whenever there is a patch of technological progress it is most visibly expressed through new technological means of violence.
> and the ability to speak and write
tools to help communicate and organize around the above mentioned main human ability to come up with reasons to and actually perform the killings.
>mostly because I don't suspect you really have a firm enough grasp of QM, let alone QFT, to determine its aesthetic beauty
I have an MS in Math, and spent enough time on QM to get a "grasp". It is not about aesthetic. It is about method and our level of understanding (or lack of it) that i consider ugly. Vs. complexity - where it is in QM? The mathematical machinery there is pretty simple compare to the state of the art in mathematics.
ok, sure. point is our engine beats the pants off a dogs no matter how you slice it.
>yep. that one. The top manifestations of that ability were Inquisition, Hitler, Stalin, etc...
like I said, debbie downer. you have this absurd fixation on killings.
>I have an MS in Math, and spent enough time on QM to get a "grasp".
In other words you are not a physicist. The saying that no one understands QM is not a joke. Mathematics is useless without reality; it's like literary analysis without story-telling.
I've been joking and condescending in my responses to you, but I'm going to get a little serious now:
>If you look into the history of human species, it is a continuous blood-shed
Yes, it's continuous bloodshed. You know what? It's not your right to determine that what people fought for was meaningless, or too "violent" for your modern middle-class tastes. It's not your right to prissily look down on the human race from your ivory tower of Math and grumble about killing.
What I see when I look upon our history is a series of people taking their actions seriously. I see a series of people that slowly, agonizingly, painstakingly turned away from violence in order to serve those 'side-effects' that you think we killers disregard.
And that's the crux of it. Do you really think you're any better than the killers you despise? Maybe you don't, maybe you lump yourself in with us savages; if so, though, you must have some self-hatred issues that'll keep your therapist employed well beyond his retirement.
If all you see when you look at history is the pain, then all you will _feel_ is pain.
no. point is whenever we have even a little more biologically advanced brain, like Einstein's (noticeably smaller than typical human's one, yet more densely packed with more energy supplying cells), it easily beats typical human's one. The Einstein's brain is still human (had it been even a bit more biologically advanced than it was it would be hard to call it human), yet it shows how inefficient the typical human brain is.
>like I said, debbie downer. you have this absurd fixation on killings.
no, i just have an ability for analysis, and keen interest for QM and biology.
>Yes, it's continuous bloodshed. You know what? It's not your right to determine that what people fought for was meaningless, or too "violent" for your modern middle-class tastes. It's not your right to prissily look down on the human race from your ivory tower of Math and grumble about killing.
that is my point. Human brain has unique ability to put "meaning" into killings which aren't necessary for satisfaction of immediate food or self-defense needs.
>What I see when I look upon our history is a series of people taking their actions seriously. I see a series of people that slowly, agonizingly, painstakingly turned away from violence in order to serve those 'side-effects' that you think we killers disregard.
that agony is exactly manifestation of the fact that i talking about - mathematics and physics aren't natural for human brain. Reasoning for violence is.
>And that's the crux of it. Do you really think you're any better than the killers you despise?
i'm human. I'm a specimen of a species which evolved as a pack hunting predator. It has beaten all other predators (including other species of humans) through evolutionary advantage of extensively evolved brain which improved pack hunting (through communication/organization and weapons - thanks to the ape's ability to grasp a stick or stone) at the start and later discovered that unmotivated aggression, ie. striking first without being in immediate danger, toward others predators is evolutionary advantageous if you have much better communication/organization and weapons.
Like any other human, i have ideas when i think violence is justified even though it wouldn't serve my immediate food or self-defense needs. Like any other human, i'd like to mislead myself into thinking that my reasons for violence are "valid and justified". Well, i have a human brain.
You may consider them the "top manifestations". I don't think many other people would. For my part, I'd put Bach and Shakespeare and Newton and Gauss higher up than Hitler on a list of top manifestations of the capacity for abstract thought.
> whenever there is a patch of technological progress it is most visibly expressed through new technological means of violence.
And yet today the world -- especially the industrialized, wealthy parts of the world, which have benefited most from a sustained application of that ability for abstract thought -- is less violent and longer-lived than ever before.
you don't get it. Bach and Shakespeare and Newton and Gauss were just 4 people. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot were just leaders of millions. These millions were expressing and implementing abstract ideas who should be killed by doing actual killing. So, lets put it in easy way for you to understand - the top manifestations (number of people involved, total effort they put into it, including the ability for abstract thinking) are Inquisition, WWI, WWII, Khmer Rouge, ...
>And yet today the world -- especially the industrialized, wealthy parts of the world, which have benefited most from a sustained application of that ability for abstract thought -- is less violent and longer-lived than ever before.
this would sound so true right before WWI, and before WWII as well...
