h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A bit of philosophy for you all.

I'm wondering how you would define human progress. Does it even exists or is a fiction?

All thoughts welcome.

You could argue that humans have progressed in terms of technology, medicine etc. We have a much more extensive knowledge of how humans work (on a physical/biological level), of the world we live in, of the universe etc.
On the other hand, in so many ways we haven't progressed at all in that we seem to be incapable of learning from our mistakes and there is still so much violence and hurt and suffering in the world.

A lot of people see progress from the point of view of technological and/or medical advances, but I'm not sure that's what you mean. In terms of technology and medicine, we've progressed a lot and continue to do so. In terms of 'human development', I don't think we've progressed much for a long time. We've reached the point where rape / sexual abuse and assault are wrong, regardless of who is doing it to whom and why. Certain ways of treating others (neglect, poor living conditions, restrictions on what they are allowed to do, confiscation of land or property, imprisonment without trial) are regarded as 'inhumane' (or inhuman), or just plain wrong. But these values do not apply everywhere in the world. The way extreme Muslim countries treat women, for example, or the practice of 'female circumcision', which still goes on around the world. These are seen as perfectly correct and acceptable by the people that do it, but totally unacceptable to the 'Western' world.

I think it's going to be a long time before the same set of values applies everywhere in the world. When I say 'a long time', I mean decades, if not centuries.

Finally, all those feminists who say, 'Men are the way they are because that's the way society makes them' should be extremely grateful. Behaviour that *hadn't* been modified by society would include rape, assault and murder on a regular basis - and that *may* include women doing the assaulting, although research indicates that women are (by and large) less aggressive than men. We have progressed far enough to accept that, if you can't have what you want, it is not OK to assault or kill somebody to get it.

Cheerful Dragon said this...
"We have progressed far enough to accept that, if you can't have what you want, it is not OK to assault or kill somebody to get it."

I wish I could agree but I have seen too many news items which show that we havn't reached that point as a whole.

Human progress or human evolution - is there a difference?

When I was little I read a story taking place in Russia or so. Some factory or mine was in the city. An old woman had three sons, and one after one they died in that mine/factory. It was of course sad but as the owner said you can't stop progress. So the woman turned herself into a wolf and killed the guy who owned the mine/factory.

The morale of the story might have been be careful with old women who can turn into wolfes. But it also shows that people think progress equals technological progress as in the industrial revolution. To be able to produce more was more important than people dying because of it. I don't agree with this view. To me progress is more the whole "Increasing the sum of happiness in the world" thing. Progress is when less people starve and die, which can be due to technology. We still have hunger in the world but we have a lot less of it than before. To me that seems like progress. And we still have war, but it is not seen as a natural thing anymore.

Also simply on a more humans scale I see progress as being exploration. Exploration of ourselves(Art) and exploration of Nature(Science). Those are the two things I feel the human race as a whole should strive towards.

Yes, people do still commit violent acts to get what they want, but the *majority* of people no longer think it's OK. There may be some people (e.g., Japanese Samurai fans or men who wish they were medieval knights) who look back with longing to the days when you could lop off somebody's head if you didn't like the way they were looking at you. But these people are a minority. Most people in the world regard violent acts as wrong. Even war is no longer seen as automatically justified if you can't get on with your neighbouring country.

As for Art being the exploration of ourselves, I've seen a lot of art that seems to be an exploration of how much you can con the public / critics. But that's my personal opinion.

Yep, most art is really bad. I was more talking about art in principle. More the stuff you do for your own pleasure.

I suppose defining progress is like defining water - depending on the conditions it can be liquid, ice or vapour. The definition of progress depends on the context.

If you talk about technological progress, I would say definitely, and at an enormous pace.

If you talk about intellectual progress, I would also say yes - most people are far more knowledgeable now than in the past. The invention of writing and different forms of communication has allowed us to learn from mistakes of the past, and allowed us to learn about other worlds and societies. There are of course people who don't want to learn, or are not allowed to learn, so progress here is qualified.

If you talk political progress, there has been some, but it has been a lot slower.

If you talk about evolutionary progress - well, probably no real change there worth talking about.

What is different between us and stone-age peoples is only the tools, systems and knowledge available to us.

Evolution is not necessarily biological. Human evolution has not stopped, it just just shifted more towards memes than genes. A human born today that could run faster or was stronger wouldn't really have any advantage over others. But being better at mental skills could do it.

In order to be able to progress you need first, a goal and second, the means to achieve that goal.

With human progress, you need a common goal for all. These goals are easiest to assess in the biological realm: Food, shelter, survival, procreation etc... Much harder, though, is to assess the political goals of how we are best to achieve all of these things. A liberal view of progress would differ from a communitarian view. This makes human progress very difficult without wars and conflict happening all the time.

As far as the means to achieve the goal is concerned, this depends on your view of human nature. How much can we adapt our nature to improved societies, and how much are we unchangeable. Views will differ from e.g. a Freudian and a Utilitarian.

Thus whether we can, do or will progress is not a simple matter.

I would agree that if we take 'progress' to mean 'moving forwards' then it implies a goal. I am not able to identify any 'goal' in human existence, and therefore I just think that 'progress' is a necessary but aimless 'change' in human beings' activities.

In some ways, I think it's rather like a shark's peregrinations - the shark is not always moving in order to get somewhere, but rather because it *must* keep moving. At some times it may sense food in a given direction and head towards it, other times it may change direction to avoid some hazard, and it may very easily be unwittingly covering the same ground it covered in the past. The shark would never call into question whether it was 'a good thing' to keep moving. It is irrelevant. Simply *must* keep moving, eating, getting better at finding and catching food or perish.

However, I would also suggest that the idea that the human race is 'improving' over a period of time is debatable. Perhaps what is being called 'progress' here could be simply and more neutrally described as 'change'. Ultimately, it need not imply improved 'life conditions' for the species as a whole. Indeed, 'progress' can certainly lead to destruction.

Would it be a fundamentally 'bad' thing if the HR were destroyed or ceased to be? And I do not mean to imply that it would be a 'good' thing, on any kind of 'save the planet from the nasty humans' basis. Just a simple question: What is the fundamental value of life, and in particular, human life? Simple, but not easy to answer.

So, I think there is a fundamental question as to what can be considered 'good', which needs to be answered if 'progress' is to be assumed to be a 'good' thing, or defined as some kind of 'improvement'.

As for the idea that there is less hunger and suffering today than 500 years ago, it seems unlikely to me. There are simply many more humans on the planet today. No shortage of starving people all over the world. And pain and killing? Surely many modern groups of humans have become so efficient at these two that it is today possible to slaughter as many unsuspecting civilians in a matter of minutes than were probably killed in all the battles of the Wars of the Roses put together.


This all looks a bit vague, re-reading it, but I think it is something like what I mean. I'd better post it 'n' see!

Seeya
Spiff

I don't think you necessarily need a goal. A lot of discoveries and inventions happened accidentally. Many really beneficial technologies have uses which are nothing like the original purposes dreamed up by the original inventors. Technological progress often happens when people tinker with things and find new aspects to them and new uses for them. They are very often not looking for a problem to solve. That comes later. You might even only realise you have solved a problem in hindsight.

You can look at progress as being a movement forward towards something in a straight line, implying we know where we want to go in the first place; but I prefer to look at progress as being an organic thing, like a circle, where all we know is continually moving outward from the centre. In this situation we don't know where we want to go, but we continually expand our understanding in all sorts of different ways.

This isn't meant to inflame, I just want to question the basis of the following statements.

"If you talk about technological progress, I would say definitely, and at an enormous pace."

It maybe true that the sum total of scientific knowledge has increased, but at the same time our acceptance of what lies outside that sphere has also increased. In other words we have also increased our level of ignorance.

It may also be true that we have developed fantastically advanced tools in the form of computers and the internet but relatively speaking these are in the hand of a minority of the worlds population.

Furthermore technological progress at the expense of our environment isn't really progress, is it? Until "sustainable development" gets some real backing and we stop mucking about with say nuclear power and concentrate on harnessing natural sources of energy I don't think we can say we have made much progress.

"If you talk about intellectual progress, I would also say yes - most people are far more knowledgeable now than in the past. The invention of writing and different forms of communication has allowed us to learn from mistakes of the past, and allowed us to learn about other worlds and societies. There are of course people who don't want to learn, or are not allowed to learn, so progress here is qualified."

Progress here is very much qualified. Again a relatively small group of the world's population are well educated, and an even smaller group could be said to be highly educated, but vast tracts of the world including Africa and China are relatively poorly educated. Even in the western world there are fears that illiteracy levels are rising, not falling.

"If you talk political progress, there has been some, but it has been a lot slower."

Here I might disagree. Political progress has always been slow, but I suspect that relatively speaking political progress maybe one area that exceeds others. There appears to be much more international cooperation and most importantly communication. Many potentially dangerous situations are now defused by face to face talks hosted by other countries.

"If you talk about evolutionary progress - well, probably no real change there worth talking about."

I would again disagree. Although revolutionary progress is now highly unlikely (short of a nuclear war or asteroid strike) we are continuing to evolve. Evolution occurs in relation to the environment. That man has evolved to the point where we can now substantially control or modify our environment suggests to me that we are now, albeit unwittingly, at least partially controlling our own evolution.

For example the fact that poor eyesight no longer has an influence on one's ability to survive or provide for a family now means that the incidence of poor eyesight will increase. The same holds true for other conditions that would once have restricted an individual's potential, eg diabetes, cleft palette, etc. This is not to say that I believe that any individual should have their potential restricted only that the consequences of our actions are now important.

So have we made progress? I think so, but not for the reasons given above, but for the ones given below.

Man is the only species in the history of the planet that has developed/evolved to the extent that we can at least partially modify our environment to suit ourselves and potentially prevent our own extinction. This change has occurred within the last fifty years and affects the entire population of the world.

We have also advanced to populate all but the most inaccessible parts of the earth and have reached such numbers and developed such tools that we dominate every part of the planet that we occupy. Again this change has largely happened within the last century and affects the entire population of the world.

So yes we have made progress, but there is a price that has not been considered yet. If we are to continue to dominate our world and even to seriously consider colonising other planets (Mars?) we need to start making some changes.

Madent

I cringe at the thought of us colonising other worlds and mucking those up to.

Madent, you define progress as the ability to avoid extinction, and the ability to populate (and dominate) all environmental niches of the world. Unlike you, I am not going to disagree with you. These are valid viewpoints, and they represent progress in certain directions.

The word "progress" however is vague enough to accomodate many viewpoints, and I was just presenting some other points of view regarding progress.

Technological progress refers to our collective ability as a race to use the materials and resources of the world to do things more easily than before. And it is immense, in many disciplines of life. I didn't make a moral statement about it - some of it has doubtful benefits to us (guns, bombs, etc) but nevertheless it is true that, in many areas, that whatever we want to do, we can do it a lot easier than 200 years ago with the right technology. And in many cultures it is also true that certain things are easier, even if all they have are bicycles and a water pump. Is the progress here immense? Yes. Is it uniformly immense? No, but then again I didn't say that, did I?

Intellectual progress refers to the sum of our knowledge about the world and the universe, which again has expanded dramatically. Books practically did not exist at the turn of the last Millennium. There are thousands of disciplines of learning where even 200 years ago there was only a small handful. Although a very small group of people are classed as well educated, there is a much greater population of people with at least a good level of literacy, or access to radio and television, and a world-view which would leave their ancestors speechless. Otherwise, the global media industry must surely have a problem!

Political progress refers to the systems by which power is gained, used, shared and lost. The Americans appear to be happy with the system they developed 225 years ago in much of its orgininal form. The British also are using much the same system as in the distant past, as are the French and many other democracies. I can point out many other dictatorships and single-ruler states that are using tactics, policies and tools that existed in much the same form, not hundreds, but thousands of years ago. Machiavelli and Sun Tzu are still readable today, mainly because so little has changed. There have since been innovations of course, but at nothing like the pace of development of technology, if that is what you were trying to compare it with...

And finally, I think of evolutionary progress as the biological changes enabling humanity to adapt better to its environment. I would say that we have not needed to adapted evolution-wise, because technology has stepped into the breach and allowed us to change our environment instead. Our world today allows many of us to live long happy lives irrespective of our genetic faults, differences or incompatibilities with nature, where once that might have been impossible. How long we will be able to keep technology doing this is another question.

Like I said, Woodpigeon, it wasn't meant to inflame

I didn't really disagree with anything you had said, except your apparent dismissal of political progress and further evolution (maybe I misinterpreted you). All I wanted to do is question whether "our" perspective on this is wide enough.

A number of fields have been mentioned in other posts, all of which may be questionable as to whether or not we have made progress.

Consider our most basic, even fundamental, piece of progress. The "discovery" of fire. Fantastic; heat and light on demand and food becomes easier to eat and digest. Brilliant. But is it progress to chop down rain forests and to burn irreplaceable fossil fuels? Pretty much every advance is a double-edged sword.

I don't question whether we have made the progress you describe, just wonder at what cost elsewhere.

Just to clarify my view on political and evolutionary progress, though:

On the political front, we have moved from small family sized groups, through tribes to communities and on to nations. Now we are looking forward to seeing free association between nations and their possible merging into continental bodies. The timescale is considerably different to say technological advancement, but the progress is real.

On the evolution front, I think that it is a fallacy to believe that evolution has stopped or stalled. Whether we like it or not we are continuing to evolve within the environment that we have created. It is generally accepted that increasingly humans are born without the potential for wisdom teeth, that we are getting less hairy and that we are continuing to get taller. I would also argue that increasing medical intervention will force further evolutionary changes.

As far as I can work out we are unique on the planet only in the two areas I mentioned. That doen't undermine "progress" in other fields, it "underlines" it.

Hi Madent,

's , I didn't take it as a flame - It was challenging, I wanted to explain what I meant, and anyway it did help me to think through my argument in more detail.

Indeed, on the political front the sooner we start treating each other as human beings, and not define them by their nationality or race or creed, the better.

I think the last comment is intriguing - I would probably add that we are the first to have taken the first tentative steps to explore the environment outside our planet, and that we have also learned to learn things beyond our immediate needs and concerns. In essence we have learned about the environment, manipulated the environment, dominated the environment, and started to work on environments outside of our immediate system.

Whew,

Woodpigeon

I like that last sentence.

I'd say that progress is a journey along a life path - a wandering path to journey away from somewhere we don't want to be in the direction of somewhere else we think we do want to be. This journey implies a curious search for betterment of ourselves and our peers. Along this journey we unveil more knowledge than we had before, record it and disseminate it to others. Then we ourselves, or others like us, take that new knowledge and use it to unveil more knowledge.

What makes the whole journey pleasant is the continuous discovery. There will always be more questions raised by every answer, more discussion about every question.

But what makes it bloody is the use by Mankind of the knowledge gained to exploit our world, our fellow humans, the very essence of our humanity for common commercial gain.

Discover a beautiful place where no human footprints exist, and some well-meaning person will photograph it for National Geographic (for the money and the recognition). Then someone else will guide the intrigued adventure tourist to the spot for a few thousand dollars. Then it grows into an "undiscovered paradise" and the dollars roll in. Buy the development rights and turn it into a theme park with a pseudo-environment airconditioned to ensure the comfort of the paying quests! The more the guests are prepared to pay, the more the developer will alter the pristine beauty into something else that will sell better and attract more people whose whims can be catered to.

If I were to find such a place, I would say nothing to anyone, take nothing but memories and leave it the way I found it.

Humans need the Earth, but the Earth has no need of Humans.