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Charles Stross

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Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.
--
Chapter 7 (“Curator”), p. 266

 
Charles Stross

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In my life, I have not met, in my surroundings, an honor abiding person who is used as a tool against someone else. This, first of all. Our administration does not believe that our candidate could be a tool and used for someone else's mission, secondly. Third, try to imagine, on the side of international powers, whatever desire may arise, to use a person as a tool and ask for his support and for that person to be ready to be used. But it is apparent that any tool that is used for ten years will eventually rust, will luckily break, and already used tools are no longer in demand.

 
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The rejection process is incorporated in the concept of the negative. The negative is a judgement device. It is the means whereby one rejects certain arrangements of information. The negative is used to carry out judgement and to indicate rejection. The concept of the negative is crystallized into a definite language tool. This language tool consists of the words no and not. Once one learns the function and use of these words one has learned how to use logical thinking. The whole concept of logical thinking is concentrated in the use of this language tool. Logic could be said to be the management of NO.

 
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I think it is not helpful to apply Darwinian language too widely. Conquest of nation by nation is too distant for Darwinian explanations to be helpful. Darwinism is the differential survival of self-replicating genes in a gene pool, usually as manifested by individual behaviour, morphology, and phenotypes. Group selection of any kind is not Darwinism as Darwin understood it nor as I understand it. There is a very vague analogy between group selection and conquest of a nation by another nation, but I don't think it's a very helpful analogy. So I would prefer not to invoke Darwinian language for that kind of historical interpretation.

 
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The tool user, provided the tool is made well, need not, and indeed should not, know anything about the tool.

 
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