The following comment was submitted to me by Rev. Bob Jones of Guerneville. I am sharing it with other readers here:
I don’t feel you go as far as you might on this subject. I think ideas arise from needs, from feelings, from experiences, from problems, from all that is part of being a creature of the cosmos. They don’t just pop into our heads on their own, though it may seem like that. And they find form in language of some kind, and so they are part and parcel of evolving traditions about whatever they are about. Years ago, I read that humans are about 90% motivated by feelings and 10% by thought. Even that puts it crassly, I think, for thinking is a mixture of a universe of inner and outer phenomena that hardly anyone hardly understands. Furthermore, the big ideas arise from group-mind over decades or centuries it seems to me, including one of your examples, marriage. By the time humans got to solemnizing and following commandments about marriage, there were several millennia of experience. Sadly, you are right to mention the possibility of bad ideas. The long evolving process has not been foolproof. I read years ago how people in the Caribbean had the idea that a canoe should have a huge mast in the middle of it, a mast so heavy it caused the boat to tip over and sink. A lot of good people were lost at sea before that idea was abandoned. So we’re capable of harboring ideas that are directly opposed to our best interests. I might put the idea of the internet in that category and lets not mention AI.
The following comment was submitted to me by Rev. Bob Jones of Guerneville. I am sharing it with other readers here:
I don’t feel you go as far as you might on this subject. I think ideas arise from needs, from feelings, from experiences, from problems, from all that is part of being a creature of the cosmos. They don’t just pop into our heads on their own, though it may seem like that. And they find form in language of some kind, and so they are part and parcel of evolving traditions about whatever they are about. Years ago, I read that humans are about 90% motivated by feelings and 10% by thought. Even that puts it crassly, I think, for thinking is a mixture of a universe of inner and outer phenomena that hardly anyone hardly understands. Furthermore, the big ideas arise from group-mind over decades or centuries it seems to me, including one of your examples, marriage. By the time humans got to solemnizing and following commandments about marriage, there were several millennia of experience. Sadly, you are right to mention the possibility of bad ideas. The long evolving process has not been foolproof. I read years ago how people in the Caribbean had the idea that a canoe should have a huge mast in the middle of it, a mast so heavy it caused the boat to tip over and sink. A lot of good people were lost at sea before that idea was abandoned. So we’re capable of harboring ideas that are directly opposed to our best interests. I might put the idea of the internet in that category and lets not mention AI.