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You value African wildlife more than improved living standards for the 100s of millions of Africans? I think we should preserve the wildlife as best as we can

You value African wildlife more than improved living standards for the 100s of millions of Africans? I think we should preserve the wildlife as best as we can but I think we should also value increased standards of living for 100s of millions of people....

littletimmy 11y ago
I understand your point. But don't you think the wildlife are equally important? There are 7 BILLION people on earth... but there are just 5000 rhinos, for example. That's 1.5 MILLION people to a rhino. This is one of the most magnificent species to have ever walked earth - why shouldn't we prioritize preserving it over human comfort? Why do you value increase in living standards over a sentient species that all things considered, is a form of life just like humans?
- pc86 11y ago
  > But don't you think the wildlife are equally important? The implicit end of that sentence is "equally important to the hundreds of millions of Africans living there." And to that, emphatically no. People are more important. Full stop. I am no anti-environmental activist. I want to see renewable energy take over fossil fuels, I want to see conscientious business taking environmental factors into account at all steps of production. But given the 100% false dichotomy of "African development" or "animals" I am going to pick the one that helps one of the most impoverished, war-torn regions on the planet every time.
  - anon4this1 11y ago
    Humans are just an exponentially increasing function which will generally grow to consume the resources available to them. Why do they deserve to be prioritised over the millions of other species on earth?
    - pc86 11y ago
      Given the choice between lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and offering huge economic opportunity to a stagnant global economy and some arbitrary (and disputed) danger to wildlife, development is the only choice. The snarky answer is probably something about how lions would not be setting up Human Preserves if the situations were reversed.
      - anon4this1 11y ago
        "lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty" Objectively, humanity most closely resembles a cancer. The more you feed it, the more it grows. It tramples everything in its path. The belief that somehow exponential economic growth is going to fix everything and everyone will lead happy middle class lives in some kind of harmony with nature is delusional. We are in the midst of the largest mass extinction event of all time. In developed places, the natural forests and wildlife are 90-95% gone. The only places where nature still truly thrives are in undeveloped regions - the rainforests of Papua New Guinea, the amazon, the plains of africa. As "development" accelerates in these places, they too will destroy nature in the name of the eternal quest for positive economic growth, attainment of first world healthcare, buying a car.
        pc86 11y ago
        Then by all means, everyone who lives there can continue living in huts so that the trees aren't disturbed, right? This entire argument is insane.
        littletimmy 11y ago
        What's wrong with people living in huts? People can be at harmony with nature, there's no need to force them into buildings. There certainly is no indication that living in a brick house makes someone happier than living in a hut.
        anon4this1 11y ago
        In modern economic terms, subsistence living in small communities barely registers as existence at all. However it is the way most of humanity lived for most of history. And generally it seemed to be a satisfying way of life. We evolved to live in this way. We think of people living in situations of subsistence as being unbearably impoverished and disadvantaged now. We have no evidence that we are really any happier or more fulfilled than them. We have longer life expectancy, and we spend much of it isolated and lonely and sick.
  - littletimmy 11y ago
    Why is the life of a Zimbabwean citizen more important than the life of a Zimbabwean lion?
    - hodwik 11y ago
      Because one of them is sentient.
      - anon4this1 11y ago
        I suppose this is what separates environmentalists from non-environmentalists. You have a fixed belief that any and every human life is more important than all animals or plants.
      - tonmoy 11y ago
        You suggest making better the life of the sentient being even if it kills a non-sentient being? What about a mentally handicapped person who is not sentient?
      - dragonwriter 11y ago
        Both lions and humans (like most, or all, animals) are sentient. You may be referring to some concept of intelligent self-awareness, but you need to be more clear as to what it is to evaluate whether its a real difference between humans and lions; lots of animals have demonstrable self-awareness of various forms. I agree that the human condition is more important, but I don't think your explanation of why holds up.
        hodwik 11y ago
        One of them we know to be sentient. We can't be so sure about lions. I'm not talking about higher-order intelligence, I'm talking about sentience -- the ability to experience. It is rather simple now to find a program that would defeat the original formulation for a Turing test, but no one would describe them as having consciousness. However, I believe it very possible that humans are doing much the same thing with a sort of sentience Turing test that we project onto animals. They _seem_ to have experience, because they react to stimuli. But the same is true of the computer. We know that creatures with basically nothing in the way of a brain, take earthworms or severed octopus tentacles, will react to pain, hide from it. We also know that pain has two parts -- a conscious experience, and an animal aversion. This is made clear by the existence of Pain asymbolia, where a person gets damage to the insular cortex (a lower part of the brain), and is no longer averse to pain, despite reporting that they still experience the pain just as they did before the injury. I believe it quite likely that consciousness exists in the human brain alone, and is of very recent evolutionary vintage, evolving in conjunction with language. That when humans project sentience on their pets they are basically falling in love with a biological automaton, no different from a person falling in love with a chat-bot. Unless we find a reason to believe that mere programming couldn't account for the behavior of animals (which seems increasingly unlikely, as our own rather rudimentary robots advance), it seems much more likely that evolution would have evolved the simple instinct system first -- only adding consciousness later on when it became an evolutionary necessity, as could have been the case for complex communication about qualia.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

littletimmy 11y ago

I understand your point. But don't you think the wildlife are equally important? There are 7 BILLION people on earth... but there are just 5000 rhinos, for example. That's 1.5 MILLION people to a rhino. This is one of the most magnificent species to have ever walked earth - why shouldn't we prioritize preserving it over human comfort? Why do you value increase in living standards over a sentient species that all things considered, is a form of life just like humans?

pc86 11y ago
> But don't you think the wildlife are equally important? The implicit end of that sentence is "equally important to the hundreds of millions of Africans living there." And to that, emphatically no. People are more important. Full stop. I am no anti-environmental activist. I want to see renewable energy take over fossil fuels, I want to see conscientious business taking environmental factors into account at all steps of production. But given the 100% false dichotomy of "African development" or "animals" I am going to pick the one that helps one of the most impoverished, war-torn regions on the planet every time.
- anon4this1 11y ago
  Humans are just an exponentially increasing function which will generally grow to consume the resources available to them. Why do they deserve to be prioritised over the millions of other species on earth?
  - pc86 11y ago
    Given the choice between lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and offering huge economic opportunity to a stagnant global economy and some arbitrary (and disputed) danger to wildlife, development is the only choice. The snarky answer is probably something about how lions would not be setting up Human Preserves if the situations were reversed.
    - anon4this1 11y ago
      "lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty" Objectively, humanity most closely resembles a cancer. The more you feed it, the more it grows. It tramples everything in its path. The belief that somehow exponential economic growth is going to fix everything and everyone will lead happy middle class lives in some kind of harmony with nature is delusional. We are in the midst of the largest mass extinction event of all time. In developed places, the natural forests and wildlife are 90-95% gone. The only places where nature still truly thrives are in undeveloped regions - the rainforests of Papua New Guinea, the amazon, the plains of africa. As "development" accelerates in these places, they too will destroy nature in the name of the eternal quest for positive economic growth, attainment of first world healthcare, buying a car.
      - pc86 11y ago
        Then by all means, everyone who lives there can continue living in huts so that the trees aren't disturbed, right? This entire argument is insane.
        littletimmy 11y ago
        What's wrong with people living in huts? People can be at harmony with nature, there's no need to force them into buildings. There certainly is no indication that living in a brick house makes someone happier than living in a hut.
        anon4this1 11y ago
        In modern economic terms, subsistence living in small communities barely registers as existence at all. However it is the way most of humanity lived for most of history. And generally it seemed to be a satisfying way of life. We evolved to live in this way. We think of people living in situations of subsistence as being unbearably impoverished and disadvantaged now. We have no evidence that we are really any happier or more fulfilled than them. We have longer life expectancy, and we spend much of it isolated and lonely and sick.
- littletimmy 11y ago
  Why is the life of a Zimbabwean citizen more important than the life of a Zimbabwean lion?
  - hodwik 11y ago
    Because one of them is sentient.
    - anon4this1 11y ago
      I suppose this is what separates environmentalists from non-environmentalists. You have a fixed belief that any and every human life is more important than all animals or plants.
    - tonmoy 11y ago
      You suggest making better the life of the sentient being even if it kills a non-sentient being? What about a mentally handicapped person who is not sentient?
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      Both lions and humans (like most, or all, animals) are sentient. You may be referring to some concept of intelligent self-awareness, but you need to be more clear as to what it is to evaluate whether its a real difference between humans and lions; lots of animals have demonstrable self-awareness of various forms. I agree that the human condition is more important, but I don't think your explanation of why holds up.
      - hodwik 11y ago
        One of them we know to be sentient. We can't be so sure about lions. I'm not talking about higher-order intelligence, I'm talking about sentience -- the ability to experience. It is rather simple now to find a program that would defeat the original formulation for a Turing test, but no one would describe them as having consciousness. However, I believe it very possible that humans are doing much the same thing with a sort of sentience Turing test that we project onto animals. They _seem_ to have experience, because they react to stimuli. But the same is true of the computer. We know that creatures with basically nothing in the way of a brain, take earthworms or severed octopus tentacles, will react to pain, hide from it. We also know that pain has two parts -- a conscious experience, and an animal aversion. This is made clear by the existence of Pain asymbolia, where a person gets damage to the insular cortex (a lower part of the brain), and is no longer averse to pain, despite reporting that they still experience the pain just as they did before the injury. I believe it quite likely that consciousness exists in the human brain alone, and is of very recent evolutionary vintage, evolving in conjunction with language. That when humans project sentience on their pets they are basically falling in love with a biological automaton, no different from a person falling in love with a chat-bot. Unless we find a reason to believe that mere programming couldn't account for the behavior of animals (which seems increasingly unlikely, as our own rather rudimentary robots advance), it seems much more likely that evolution would have evolved the simple instinct system first -- only adding consciousness later on when it became an evolutionary necessity, as could have been the case for complex communication about qualia.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]