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Re: Physics is a human construct



Leigh,

The insects are unique for their sheer survival; spiders for their
instinctive structural engineering; bees and ants for their social
engineering; etc. But, if I may abuse the language for emphasis, I would
argue that homo sapiens is unique in a unique way (as evidenced by what
we are now doing)!

That is a matter of opinion and arguably a matter of degree.
Surely you would not argue that other animals do not communicate.
That they do not communicate electronically I will grant you,
but some other species communicate in their own unique manners
which are known to us; perhaps some even by means unknown to us.

Just one aspect of this uniqueness (apropos to our field) is man's
invention of science to satisfy his unique intellectual curiosity. Other
species search for food, shelter, reproduction, etc; as far as we know
none of them would have chosen to go to the moon out of sheer
intellectual curiosity. (As many of us would have, even though the
historical event was surely driven by more mundane pressures.)

Cromer would argue that by your criterion it is the Greeks who
were unique; they invented science, a most remarkable achievement,
and indeed unique. I'm not Greek. To quote Tonto, speaking to his
kimosabee who has just said "Tonto, we're surrounded by redskins!"
Tonto's reply: "What do you mean 'we', white man?"

At the root of man's unique uniqueness is his conscious awareness of his
own existence and his mental states, which itself is inexplicable through
"already explained phenomena"; it is knowable by personal experience or
not at all.

My daughter, an anthropology professor who works with a
primatologist colleague at the University of Alberta would not
agree with you. That business about self-awareness is pretty
much pass=E9.

As part of evolving nature, we are (as far as we know) unique in "knowing
what is going on" and even (though it may be a cruel illusion) in
feeling that we can have a hand in determining the course of reality both
on a personal scale and on the scale of evolution itself.

I understand that dogs learn to associate abstractions. For example,
I have heard a story about a dog who could not be found whenever its
owner wanted to take it out in his car. The inference was that the
dog had once been quite willing to be taken in the car, but had been
taken to an unpleasant experience (at a vet) once in the car and had
avoided getting into the car from that time forward. This story is
unexceptional, and an aversion to automobiles is probably not hard
wired into the dog by evolution. Finally, dogs aren't very bright
animals on most scales; chimps do even more remarkable things. (I
had a cat who wouldn't let me near her when I was about to go for a
paddle in my canoe - after going along with me once and not liking
it one bit!)

The thing that bothers me most about this attitude is that it is
close-minded and contrary to the Principle of Mediocrity which has
been such a valuable guide to science since the time of Copernicus.
There is no good scientific reason to believe that we are unique
in a unique way - unless many other species (and other physical
entities) are also unique in equivalently unique ways.

This perversion of a valuable English word has saddened me ever
since I witnessed a reporter on a network television broadcast on
the occasion of the flyby of Uranus by Voyager 2 said, while
standing before a backup unlaunched Voyager in the von Karmann
Auditorium at JPL, "Voyager 2 is a unique spacecraft." At very
most he should have said "trinique"!

Leigh