by Tinker » Wed Nov 30, 2011 6:32 pm
I think it's about the mind's ability to abstract the realities of daily life. There are whole layers of skills (neural pathways) that are required for the architecture that allows the human brain to comprehend ordering take-out. All kinds of things we are completely cognizant of and take for granted. They'll accept our currency, we know what roads they'll use, we trust that our voice can be transmitted over an electric current across vast distances, we trust our banking institutions to resolve the transaction. It's whole layers of human behavior, people performing certain ritualistic action that leads to people from Thailand spicing beef raised in Pennsylvania, being delivered to your door by someone from Mexico in plastic containers made in China.
The 'human nature' argument assumes that certain things about human action are inevitable, when we have fundamentally altered the very specific actions we take throughout our day.
The canary didn't die because this mine is dangerous, it died because it's lazy and wasn't raised with a proper work ethic.