Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to re: Foundations

Flightless bumblebees
Robert — (archived)

Sorry to have lost track of the conversation for a few days, but I'm back.

I'm not much interested in lurching from daily outrage to daily outrage in politics. It's not unreasonable to suspect that politicians have an interest in keeping us scurrying around arguing about this or that arcane point...and all the time too distracted to see the forest for the trees. I'm attempting to see the forest, these days, which to me means understanding the underlying mental mechanisms that produce these one-day tempests.

So I'm not going to argue with you about the various factoids you've found to bolster your argument, because frankly that's not very interesting to me any more. I know you think that each one is somehow compelling and decisive, but I see them as merely chaff thrown up to prevent seeing deeper into the issues.

Interesting thing about this thread in general is how it illustrates my point about the incompleteness of logic alone in understanding human affairs. Everyone but a couple of dogmatic Conservatives is telling you that the healthcare system is broken and needs fixing; and your only response is to construct superficially logical arguments that it's impossible to fix the current system, in that any attempt to fix it will only make things worse.

But yet, you know that it's only a matter of time before the mainstream opinion prevails and we do attempt to do something to fix the mess. It would seem that, in the realm of human affairs, feelings and opinions have more power than logic to effect change in the real world. Feelings and opinions are thus undeniably real...yet your logic does not account for them, and continues to produce answers that don't match the real world.

Logic is insufficient to understand, let alone govern, human affairs. As you demonstrate, logic is best used to argue that something is impossible, yet I'm thankful that enough people in the world disregard simple logic and follow their hearts and guts to achieve what the unimaginative are convinced is impossible.

I wonder sometimes, if your world view had prevailed back at the dawn of human civilization...would we even possess fire? It's impossible for humans to tame fire, you know--it burns!

And the bumblebee can't logically fly, yet somehow it does.

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