Originally posted by dadudemon
Reductionist mess...I think this is where I'm losing you. I thought that approaching subjects with a reductionist's perspective is simplifying things to the most basic element/s. It sounded like you were using reductionism to indicate that any one of those events in and of themselves are just random occurrences governed, if even slightly, by the laws of nature by which we are all in some way fundamentally driven. Then, looking at those individual events (via a reductiontists perspective), one could derive a meaning or pattern to humanity. (Kind of like putting together a one dimensional puzzle and when it is complete, it forms a 2 dimensional experience...like holism.)
Do you feel that even if we define all human events in their entirety, one can still not define what it is to be human?
The last question is an entirely different matter.
Anyway, my initial post wasn't trying to reduce things at all. I was looking at them from a sociological perspective....and I'm not sure what you mean by a "human" perspective. Physical, biological, sociological, mathematical, etc. all have a socially-shared meaning. "Human" perspective does not, so you'd have to qualify yourself heavily before I knew what you were talking about.
When I say "events" I'm talking about historical events. I initially used a genre analogy to talk about how we could find common links between such events, even though none are identical. Conditionally cyclical. Cycle implies coming back to the same thing over and over, which isn't quite the case, because every situation is unique. But natural laws and our own genetic nature mean that only so many "genres" (to use my term) of events will occur, and that in this sense history can be seen as cyclical.
Originally posted by dadudemon
Hmm...So you are not really talking about holism, then?
Too far the other direction. Holism implies far too much to ever differentiate between events. Hopefully the explanation above suffices.
Originally posted by dadudemon
After reviewing as many of these human events as possible from an anthropological and historical perspective, could one derive the outcome of humanity, thereby answering this thread's intention?
Of course not. We don't have predictive ability. Learning from the past means being able to alter known situations (altering an event in a particular genre, if you will). Like how we teach children about the Holocaust so it doesn't happen again (even though it has plenty of times, just on much smaller scales).
But we guess. We know what kinds of disasters would ultimately cause our extinction (tune into the Discovery Channel for a while, or some similarly education-based channel, and within a couple weeks you'll see a "global disasters" show, replete with massive climate change, meteors, atomic war, etc.).
Originally posted by dadudemon
I don't think humans, as I'd like to define them, will ever become extinct.(Barring our previous heat death conversation events.) Even IF we eventually become so embedded with technology that we woudn't be recognized as humans by today's anthropologists, some of our essence is still there. Maybe I think too much of humanity.
Dinos went extinct from a giant rock. Species die out all the time. We're clearly more cognitively advanced than anything before us, so our chances are increased wildly. But it would deny nature's unpredictability and power, and, let's be honest, our own unpredictability and power, to say that there isn't a chance we could become extinct. Stephen Hawking likes to tell a joke that I won't try to reproduce here, but the gist of it is that we never make contact with other sentient species in the universe because as soon as a civilization becomes as advanced as ours, it kills itself off with excessive power. One of many possible ends. Hell, if it weren't for Jupiter's impressive gravity well protecting us most of the time, it's likely advanced life never would have occurred on Earth due to frequent meteor impacts.
I personally doubt the exotic transhuman end that you and Kurzweil posit. I think we can make steps in that direction, but that anything beyond the global or solar system level is going to be exceedingly difficult, and may never be overcome. Presuming a heat death universe, I perceive that as our end, but believe plenty of steps can be taken to prolong the species.