icekatze wrote:Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche would disagree with you there.
He might, if he was alive, but he was also kind of crazy.
While he usually gets a worse reputation than he deserves, the truth is that he also was a child of his times. Plenty of things from back then sound crazy today.
Doesn't mean it was
all wrong, though. Even a broken clock, etc. pp.
Just as me echoing his point, does not mean that I agree with them.
icekatze wrote:Here are some rebuttals:
1. Each generation must coexist with the the previous for a period of time.
Yes, but that does not change their eventual fate, though. It actually makes the concern more pressing, since they are around to see their children either fail or succeed.
This drives people in one of two directions: Wanting their children to be the same as themselves, but also wanting to see them succeed, where they themselves failed.
The former
tends to be stronger in already successful people, the latter
tends to be stronger in less successful people. Either case alters what was the norm in the previous generation.
2. People like continuity, and don't generally consider themselves an entirely different person when they go to sleep and wake up again, even though they inevitably change over time.
3. But even if they did, each new generation/person benefits from the accumulated wealth of knowledge as pertains to the previous. Whereas starting from scratch would provide a deficit of applicable experience.
Nobody said the change has to be dramatic or even noticeable. Neither is it stated that the alteration starts from scratch.
Think of it like this: The super-human exceeds and supplants humanity in the same way that knowledge progresses: By standing on the shoulders of those that came before.
Stated like that, what is there to fear? (Barring unreasonable fears, which can't be helped, seeing that they are unreasonable.)
4. While it would be technically possible through science to negate the change in human evolution, no one is actually trying to do this. Evolution, as compared to revolution, is generally less violent.
5. No one chooses to create themselves. They are necessarily created by someone else who will inevitably have a different viewpoint on something.
6. There is no Objective, perfect, ideal form. The value of any changes will be judged not only be the people experiencing the changes, but also be based on the environment they are living in.
None of that argues a point Nietzsche made.
He neither proposed the change would be quick, singular, not related to humanity or created from scratch.
There is a reason why the phrasing is super-
human. He acknowledges humanity as the starting point, but also as what has to be accepted as having to be eventually overcome.
7. Nobody asked the dinosaurs if they wanted a giant rock to fall on them.
That is precisely the point.
Given a vast, uncaring universe, stasis eventually means death.
To pick up another point raised in this thread: Sharks survived hundreds of millions of years with few modifications (mostly: size and adaptations to their food) -- but that alone does not guarantee their
perpetual fitness to their environment.
When the sun boils off all the oceans in a few billion years, sharks will find their ecological niche --- untenable.
