3 ms·

“We're dissipative structures, and we can't survive (i.e. keep our inner entropy low) without raising the entropy in our surrounding, so there's gonna be some e

“We're dissipative structures, and we can't survive (i.e. keep our inner entropy low) without raising the entropy in our surrounding, so there's gonna be some environmental disruption if we want to survive, and it's going to be at the expense of other organisms, be they cute, plain or disgusting.” My one quibble is the defeatist “it’s going to be”. Advances in lower-level physics can open up new possibilities. Even now terrestrial solar, while depriving some types organisms from sunlight, can provide shade for other types of organisms to thrive, and who knows what it would be on balance. I doubt that avoiding any environmental change is in itself a sensible goal, and framing it as always “disruption at the expense of other organisms” seems not constructive. Like any organism, we change the environment purely by existing and interacting with other organisms. Becoming more and more well-off, stable and conscientious ourselves, learning what conscience is and how many conscious agents are around us that are not us, we’ll have resources to iterate and become better at taking care of those agents, from not breaking them up unnecessarily to helping them thrive and build up complexity themselves. Eventually, if we don’t go extinct too soon, as a result of our growth I believe we’d expand our definition of “us” to include life and nail energy absorption enough to shift the rising entropy entirely to the outside of that scope. That picture of food being synthesized industrially in space, ensuring nothing is harmed in the process—along those lines.

pygy_ 9y ago
Looks like we're in agreement on the fundamentals :-) My point here is that renewable energy has an ecologic footprint that goes beyond the ostensible animal deaths caused by the blades of wind turbines. It is a zero sum game, and it is disruptive in ways we can't all anticipate (especially in an economic growth context). Whether or not other organisms are conscious is not very relevant to our survival. What's relevant is how useful they are to environmental stability. Also re. taking care, nature is generally brutal. Few wild organisms die of old age, sipping mojitos on the beach. Starvation, injury, disease or being eaten is the norm, and that chaos is part of what makes ecosystems resilient (within bounds that we're currently breaking).
- goblin89 9y ago
  Who knows, maybe we’ll find a disagreement and this will become an interesting argument :) Sure, other organisms are not relevant to our survival. What I thought is that if we become able to capture lots of energy from e.g. our local star to maintain a huge sphere of order and low entropy within our habitat, that’d remove the conflict between us vs. other organisms. Basically “our survival” would be expanded to the survival of the whole system of conscious lifeforms we have around. I mean, on one hand, preserving our natural habitat might keep us humans smart and efficiently developing new cool ways of capturing & dissipating energy at larger scales. On the other hand, perhaps preserving the whole system of organisms engaging in things like killing each other for whatever purpose within our giant low-entropy sphere will be utterly useless from the universal meaning of life point of view—as in, not at all contributing to energy capture and dissipation. If that’ll be the case I imagine we’ll evolve quite differently… Something very cyberpunk and AI-heavy comes to mind. Simpler organisms would keep dying away as we & our technology alone skyrocket in accordance with that universal purpose all the way, all the way until the expedited heat death of the universe. Kinda scary how us meatbags too become optional in that scenario.

pygy_ 9y ago

Looks like we're in agreement on the fundamentals :-) My point here is that renewable energy has an ecologic footprint that goes beyond the ostensible animal deaths caused by the blades of wind turbines. It is a zero sum game, and it is disruptive in ways we can't all anticipate (especially in an economic growth context). Whether or not other organisms are conscious is not very relevant to our survival. What's relevant is how useful they are to environmental stability. Also re. taking care, nature is generally brutal. Few wild organisms die of old age, sipping mojitos on the beach. Starvation, injury, disease or being eaten is the norm, and that chaos is part of what makes ecosystems resilient (within bounds that we're currently breaking).

goblin89 9y ago
Who knows, maybe we’ll find a disagreement and this will become an interesting argument :) Sure, other organisms are not relevant to our survival. What I thought is that if we become able to capture lots of energy from e.g. our local star to maintain a huge sphere of order and low entropy within our habitat, that’d remove the conflict between us vs. other organisms. Basically “our survival” would be expanded to the survival of the whole system of conscious lifeforms we have around. I mean, on one hand, preserving our natural habitat might keep us humans smart and efficiently developing new cool ways of capturing & dissipating energy at larger scales. On the other hand, perhaps preserving the whole system of organisms engaging in things like killing each other for whatever purpose within our giant low-entropy sphere will be utterly useless from the universal meaning of life point of view—as in, not at all contributing to energy capture and dissipation. If that’ll be the case I imagine we’ll evolve quite differently… Something very cyberpunk and AI-heavy comes to mind. Simpler organisms would keep dying away as we & our technology alone skyrocket in accordance with that universal purpose all the way, all the way until the expedited heat death of the universe. Kinda scary how us meatbags too become optional in that scenario.