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> It's nice to find a something positive among the gloom and doom of human development so just the fact that humans now dominate the planet is by itself someth

by exit 16y ago

> It's nice to find a something positive among the gloom and doom of human development so just the fact that humans now dominate the planet is by itself something positive, despite wars, plagues, famines, climate change, terrorism, being stuck in a career you hate, burning to death in a fire, the unending history of exploitative labor practices, etc., ...?

kiba 16y ago
What's wrong with dominating the planet? What wrong with paving over Mother Earth and killing million of species all the while opening new path to evolution? Indeed, I wonder what's all the hoohas about mass extinction if humans are able to survive it? Moreover, engineer and synthesize biological lifeforms and replicators.
- exit 16y ago
  so again, survival for survivals sake, perpetuation for perpetuation's sake, in spite of everything we suffer? i suppose being the product of an evolutionary process it's not surprising we have this mentality.
  - jerf 16y ago
    You didn't answer the question. What's wrong with it? For extra bonus points, figure out how to actually answer the question without reference to the utility of the biosphere to humans. (Which includes the classic "But plants and animals being driven extinct might have the cure for cancer!" which manages to be simultaneously ignorant of how modern drug research is done and how evolution works.) For double-bonus-points, explain why your answer doesn't imply that all tool users anywhere in the universe should immediately commit suicide. (For quadruple bonus points, explain why every other tool user did come to this conclusion and how this solves the Fermi paradox. But I digress...) Once you get past the fuzzy-wuzzy "I wuv pwanet Earth!" indoctrination, it turns out to be a surprisingly challenging question. I'm not saying you won't find an answer. But actually taking the time to work it out and encode it into actual words based on actual arguments can be very educational. (And you may be surprised. A lot of otherwise popular axiomatic ethical choices lead to not having a reason to care as long as humans aren't impacted too badly. I'm not endorsing this, just observing that there's a lot of ethical hypocrisy in this area.)
    - barrkel 16y ago
      By extension from Rawlsian justice, not distinguishing one form of life from another by reference to anthropocentrism.
      - jerf 16y ago
        I'm not sure at all what you're trying to say. While I freely admit that my familiarity with Rawlsian justice now comes from about three minutes spent with Wikipedia, it seems an awful lot like his conception of justice foundationally depend on the involvement of "rational agents", which includes human-class intelligence as a core part of the definition of that term. It would seem to me that stripping away that aspect of the system leaves virtually nothing left, and certainly nothing that trivially obviously extends out to not-even-possibly-rational agents (or, arguably, non-agents according to the usual meanings of the term) with only 17 words of explanation. (Actually defining justice in a way that covers all life forms is also a rather interesting question to ponder for a while; given the diversity of "life", such as the classic "virus" conundrum, it becomes hard to avoid including non-life in the definition as well. And what do you do with an ethical system that has an opinion about a black hole destroying a star, whatever that opinion may be?) That said, fully expanding your point would probably blow out the HN comment limit; you could probably get a medium-large essay out of it. But I would be sort of curious if you could sketch out a bit more. I'm actually not interested in attacking it, because I'm not actually trying to push a viewpoint on the question today; the goal of my first paragraph is to more thoroughly explain my confusion about your statement than criticize something too short for me to even understand.
        barrkel 16y ago
        If one were completely divorced from attachment to any one life form (i.e. behind a veil of ignorance), but considered the whole as a family (and all life on this planet, so far as we know, is related), couldn't we be proud of the accomplishments of one of our distant cousins, even if we don't "end up" as them (when the "veil" is lifted)? As to rational agents etc., let us say that we are rational when we are behind the veil, but we may end up as any kind of life form. Rawls' theory doesn't necessarily follow from his original position, IMO. Rawls seemed to prefer quite a conservative, fearful, optimizing for the worst kind of case, but I don't think that's the only way to look at it. I don't buy too deeply into the Second Principle in Theory of Justice. But the Original Position, as a thought experiment, has a lot to say for it, particularly because it resolves problems inherent in the golden rule (e.g. a masochist becomes a sadist). I do think though, that if you're to get to some concept of fairness as it relates to animals etc., that you have to get out of anthropocentrism.
- megablast 16y ago
  It is a good question, right now it is a problem, because we still need a lot of Nature that is around us to survive. One problem is that if we head down a path, where we destroy all else, we have no option of changing our minds later if we do the wrong thing, or we find out that we do actually need other animals/plants. The bigger issue might be that we don't need to keel everything in order to survive and grow. Right now we are doing things the completely wrong way. We clearly do not put a high enough value on our natural environment, and we have little studies of the long term effects of living in our modern world. A lot of problems like asthma may be exascerbated by the world we live in. We just don't know.
- sesqu 16y ago
  Well, for one, you're encouraging divergent evolution in an environment where you're at a local maximum. Most organizations take the opposite approach, and try to nail things down when they're winning.

by exit 16y ago

kiba 16y ago

What's wrong with dominating the planet? What wrong with paving over Mother Earth and killing million of species all the while opening new path to evolution? Indeed, I wonder what's all the hoohas about mass extinction if humans are able to survive it? Moreover, engineer and synthesize biological lifeforms and replicators.

exit 16y ago
so again, survival for survivals sake, perpetuation for perpetuation's sake, in spite of everything we suffer? i suppose being the product of an evolutionary process it's not surprising we have this mentality.
- jerf 16y ago
  You didn't answer the question. What's wrong with it? For extra bonus points, figure out how to actually answer the question without reference to the utility of the biosphere to humans. (Which includes the classic "But plants and animals being driven extinct might have the cure for cancer!" which manages to be simultaneously ignorant of how modern drug research is done and how evolution works.) For double-bonus-points, explain why your answer doesn't imply that all tool users anywhere in the universe should immediately commit suicide. (For quadruple bonus points, explain why every other tool user did come to this conclusion and how this solves the Fermi paradox. But I digress...) Once you get past the fuzzy-wuzzy "I wuv pwanet Earth!" indoctrination, it turns out to be a surprisingly challenging question. I'm not saying you won't find an answer. But actually taking the time to work it out and encode it into actual words based on actual arguments can be very educational. (And you may be surprised. A lot of otherwise popular axiomatic ethical choices lead to not having a reason to care as long as humans aren't impacted too badly. I'm not endorsing this, just observing that there's a lot of ethical hypocrisy in this area.)
  - barrkel 16y ago
    By extension from Rawlsian justice, not distinguishing one form of life from another by reference to anthropocentrism.
    - jerf 16y ago
      I'm not sure at all what you're trying to say. While I freely admit that my familiarity with Rawlsian justice now comes from about three minutes spent with Wikipedia, it seems an awful lot like his conception of justice foundationally depend on the involvement of "rational agents", which includes human-class intelligence as a core part of the definition of that term. It would seem to me that stripping away that aspect of the system leaves virtually nothing left, and certainly nothing that trivially obviously extends out to not-even-possibly-rational agents (or, arguably, non-agents according to the usual meanings of the term) with only 17 words of explanation. (Actually defining justice in a way that covers all life forms is also a rather interesting question to ponder for a while; given the diversity of "life", such as the classic "virus" conundrum, it becomes hard to avoid including non-life in the definition as well. And what do you do with an ethical system that has an opinion about a black hole destroying a star, whatever that opinion may be?) That said, fully expanding your point would probably blow out the HN comment limit; you could probably get a medium-large essay out of it. But I would be sort of curious if you could sketch out a bit more. I'm actually not interested in attacking it, because I'm not actually trying to push a viewpoint on the question today; the goal of my first paragraph is to more thoroughly explain my confusion about your statement than criticize something too short for me to even understand.
      - barrkel 16y ago
        If one were completely divorced from attachment to any one life form (i.e. behind a veil of ignorance), but considered the whole as a family (and all life on this planet, so far as we know, is related), couldn't we be proud of the accomplishments of one of our distant cousins, even if we don't "end up" as them (when the "veil" is lifted)? As to rational agents etc., let us say that we are rational when we are behind the veil, but we may end up as any kind of life form. Rawls' theory doesn't necessarily follow from his original position, IMO. Rawls seemed to prefer quite a conservative, fearful, optimizing for the worst kind of case, but I don't think that's the only way to look at it. I don't buy too deeply into the Second Principle in Theory of Justice. But the Original Position, as a thought experiment, has a lot to say for it, particularly because it resolves problems inherent in the golden rule (e.g. a masochist becomes a sadist). I do think though, that if you're to get to some concept of fairness as it relates to animals etc., that you have to get out of anthropocentrism.
megablast 16y ago
It is a good question, right now it is a problem, because we still need a lot of Nature that is around us to survive. One problem is that if we head down a path, where we destroy all else, we have no option of changing our minds later if we do the wrong thing, or we find out that we do actually need other animals/plants. The bigger issue might be that we don't need to keel everything in order to survive and grow. Right now we are doing things the completely wrong way. We clearly do not put a high enough value on our natural environment, and we have little studies of the long term effects of living in our modern world. A lot of problems like asthma may be exascerbated by the world we live in. We just don't know.
sesqu 16y ago
Well, for one, you're encouraging divergent evolution in an environment where you're at a local maximum. Most organizations take the opposite approach, and try to nail things down when they're winning.