The
other day, I wrote about our
transformation into de-facto
zombies by television and popular culture. We relate to characters on television as if they were our friends or neighbors, unable to distinguish between the television version of reality and
Reality itself.
The human species, especially
"the civilized", pride themselves in their "intelligence". But it may just turn out that,
as biologist Ernst Mayr argued,
"intelligence is a lethal mutation". Now, that's not a far-fetched idea; Humanity is mostly ignoring the signs of ecological and climatical collapse, thinking our intelligence and innovation will save the day. The paradigm of
"intelligence increases our chances of survival" is being challenged by what's happening right in front of our eyes, and yet, we're doing almost nothing about it.
Maybe we should ask, "as humans, are we as intelligent as we think we are?" Or, "can a highly intelligent person or society make fatal mistakes which wouldn't have happened if they weren't so
intelligent?" I would argue that even the slightest "deviation from Reality as a whole" is bound to have dire consequences. In other words,
intelligence is only intelligent if it's grounded in Reality as a whole - not in abstraction and not in some part of reality.
All of this means is that, you can be highly intelligent and still be a zombie.