Hi all,
I stopped reading Dawkins after the ‘Selfish Gene’. Life is short and full of rabbit holes. So I never got caught up with Memes. I think, in so far as I understand the issues with the idea, I ‘m inclined to agree with Gunnar.
But I’d like to return to Don’s plea for human-centred design. In a sense all design, by definition, is human-centred. In Australia, for the past 60-80 thousand years, we—by which I mean the human species—have had human-centred design. It is how we adapt to and shape our environment to suit us. Along the way we noticed that every time we make a change—a new design—there are unintended consequences. Sometimes, for a brief historical moment, we hit a sweet spot—a temporary state of equilibrium. But in the long term the world around us changes, or we make adjustments, or something arises from left field, like refugees and migrants, or climate change, and we—now a radically and painfully merged group of humans—have ‘problems’. I put ‘problems’ in quotes because there are no problems in the universe. The universe just is. ‘Problems’ are a human invention just as design is a human invention.
After a few short hundreds of years, some in our human-centred species came to the view that we could solve most of our ‘problems' by building machines of divine grace. As Don points out, the machines turned out to be neither divine nor particularly graceful. Once again, unintended consequences.
We are living through a period of huge unintended consequences and hence many ‘problems’. All of our own making as a species.
I’m going to stop at this point, though I have given some thought to what follows. The hint is in the word ‘species’.
When I was at school I was taught a rule: ‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’. The word ‘species’ breaks that rule.
It also is the case that rules are things invented, and then broken, by the human species.
Back to form design in melbourne,
David
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