Khazar-khum Wrote:
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> There's some sort of filtering mechanism in
> > the brain that discriminates, for instance I
> can
> > show my dog a pix of the mona lisa and she
> falls
> > asleep. Show it to an art thief and they'll
> > conspire on some way to steal it. However if
> she
> > sees a live duck or a bird of some kind she
> goes
> > berserk and tries to kill it. So there's
> something
> > definitely hardwired into us to see things
> in
> > different ways and procure what we consider
> to be
> > 'desirable'. This too me is one of the most
> > difficult things to understand.
>
> Not if you think of it in terms of a survival
> mechanism.
>
> Dog: duck = dinner.
>
> Art thief: we take this, make $$ = hookers &
> blow.

Clearly there's a survival mechanism in place, but what is the evolution of it? Dogs are pretty self-evident. But still if you put a statue of a duck in front of the dog will ignore it, but if you start slowly transforming it into a 'real duck' (i.e. adding feathers, smells, quacking sounds etc.) there will be a tipping point and the dog will attack it will attack it like it's the real thing. Returning to the art thief, as you know forgeries are incredibly lucrative, simple forgeries are routinely exposed and tossed out, but then are the master forgers who turn out work that are almost indistinguishable from the real thing. But when we find out that it's a forgery it's value drops to zero. Why? It's virtually the real thing only a misplaced brush stroke here and there distinguishes it from the original. But clearly we're hardwired to reject 'phoniness' for some reason, how and why does that happen? Again I think it's some kind of survival mechanism if we get fooled by a 'false positive', we can get killed. Just a few random thoughts.