ICANNWiki:"Philosophy" essay by Marc Perkel: Difference between revisions
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Until humans evolved a species was mostly defined by their hardware. Their DNA determined how strong they are, how smart they are, if they have claws or sharp teeth, and what firmware they were born with so they knew how to hunt food and avoid being eaten. | Until humans evolved a species was mostly defined by their hardware. Their DNA determined how strong they are, how smart they are, if they have claws or sharp teeth, and what firmware they were born with so they knew how to hunt food and avoid being eaten. | ||
So what makes us different? We have adapted the ability to share information. | So what makes us different? We have adapted the ability to share information. We don't have to all start from scratch. Our knowledge is cumulative and we have evolved and adapted to be completely on the knowledge and experience of others. Our societies are really a form of software created through evolution and as true with all evolution that which works tens to survive. That which doesn't work tends to go extinct. Not the most efficient way to develop software but nonetheless it shows that software is an emergent property of human networking. Our software is cumulative, that's what makes humans different. When we learned to talk we became something different than anything that previously existed. We created a new evolutionary paradigm where our software became dominate over our hardware. | ||
For example - today's humans are genetically identical to humans 300 years ago. But today humans can fly. Humans can communicate across the world. We can see 13 billion years almost back to the beginning of time itself. We can take the heart out of one person and put it into another. Yet we are genetically identical. | |||
The difference is in our software. | |||