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Exceptionalism seems to be a phase in our developmental journey, and a feature of certain stages of conscious development. For example, in Chinese, China is cal
by N_Lens 1y ago
Exceptionalism seems to be a phase in our developmental journey, and a feature of certain stages of conscious development. For example, in Chinese, China is called “the middle kingdom”, with the characters 中国. You can see that the first character is “middle” (box with a line through the middle). This is also an example of exceptionalism because the underlying meaning is that China is the Central kingdom, much like people believed Earth to be the center of the Universe in the past.
Similarly, the American philosophy of “manifest destiny” (ugly as it is), also carries that same scent of exceptionalism. And so does the “divine right of Kings” from our history. Modern prosperity gospel exploits those same flaws in our cognitive make-up.
In contemporary times we see these philosophies as egocentric and perhaps outdated. But just like children pass through very egocentric stages (well some never grow past that), so too does collective human consciousness evolve past exceptionalism and towards maturity and humility.
- Espressosaurus 1y agoIt’s a nice idea, but evidence needed. We’re still plains apes underneath it all, and that has implications about our ability to plan long term, cooperate in groups larger than 1000, and especially cooperate with groups that are not part of what we perceive to be our in-group. As witnessed by worldwide developments over the last 15 years. Or all of human history if I’m taking a broader scope.
- ljlolel 1y agoMaybe after AI there won’t be need more than 1000 people on the planet
- dingnuts 1y agook settle down there Stalin
- ljlolel 1y ago… As in people are choosing not to have kids
- somenameforme 1y agoThis isn't how things work. Any group that maintains a positive fertility rate will multiply indefinitely. So when certain groups stop having children, all they do is remove themselves from the gene pool while maximizing the 'genetic share' of those having many children whose children will also disproportionately often do similarly. This is why many assumptions about the future are simply incorrect. For instance people think humanity will become more secular because it has through most of our lifetimes so surely that trend must continue on into the future? But secularity is inversely correlated with fertility. So all that we're going to see happen is secular folks disproportionately remove themselves from the gene pool while religious folks take an ever larger share - now think about what the children of this new gene pool will, on average, be like. It's also why the concept of us reaching a 'max population' is rather silly. We will reach a point where the population begins to decline due to certain groups removing themselves from the gene pool, but as the other groups continue to reproduce and produce children who, in turn, reproduce, that population will stabilize and then eventually go up, up, and away again. In other words it's just a local max.
- citizenpaul 1y agoThats a nice summary of what I belive the "great filter" is as far as the fermi paradox.
- card_zero 1y agoYou don't inherit secularity. I mean you do, but children copying their parents is not the only way ideas spread. Otherwise secularity would never have spread in the first place. (That's if we accept that it makes people disinclined to spawn offspring, and that this was always the case and never changes.)
- somenameforme 1y ago
- echelon 1y agoWhich 1000? Who chooses? (Not us, I assume.) I suppose this is the real answer to why we won't need UBI. The oligarchs will just wait in their bunkers while the world's population is eradicated by death bots. That seems the more likely outcome to me than a post-scarcity utopia.
- exe34 1y agoI think crashing world economy and starvation will do it just fine. I know people point out that Malthusian predictions have always failed so far - but the reason we got to >7G humans is that an enormous amount of science and engineering went into making things better, a large part of which was spearheaded by the US because world peace and prosperity was in the interests of millionaires and billionaires. Now they've decided this isn't in their interest anymore, so I worry that the trend in scientific progress that got us here will be more like the tide - we're now flapping our fins on the beach and the water is receding.
- DecoySalamander 1y agoThere is no need for any amount or people on the planet, or any other kind of animal for that matter. "Need" is the wrong category to apply to anyone's existence.
- energy123 1y agoWe are a nasty, self-centered species on a biological level. You can patch that with prosperity and culture, but these things are impermanent and subject to regression, so it's not a durable solution. The only durable solution is altering the biology, but that itself is not without significant risk.
- ljlolel 1y agoBiology works itself out
- aw1621107 1y agoNot necessarily, depending on how broad a view of "biology" you're talking. For example, take the many, many, many species that have gone extinct over time. Their biology sure didn't seem to have "work[ed] itself out".
- ljlolel 1y agoNo more reason to care for a species than for an individual sacrificing itself for the group population
- aw1621107 1y agoHence "depending on how broad a view of "biology" you're talking". In any case, by "biology" you're referring to the biosphere? If so, the (potential) risk is that "biology work[ing] itself out" may involve working humans out of the picture as well.
- russelldjimmy 1y agoThanks for sharing this perspective. It’s given me something to think about.
- card_zero 1y agoSpecify what.
- russelldjimmy 1y agoNo
- rz2k 1y agoI often read the top comment to Hacker News articles believing they are unlikely to be a heuristic response. That means reading each sentence, digesting it, and thinking through everything carefully. I'm confused by this one, because I am missing original thought. It sounds more like a collection of response patterns related to how various targets are supposed to be assessed in value.
- LoganDark 1y ago> I'm confused by this one, because I am missing original thought. It sounds more like a collection of response patterns related to how various targets are supposed to be assessed in value. I feel like the comment is meant to propose that exceptionalism is like a collective phase, by pointing out a bunch of places where exceptionalism has appeared historically.
- satvikpendem 1y agoHN's comment sorting algorithm means the top comment changes often, so I don't think it's worth it to do as your first paragraph states.
- card_zero 1y agoThose are all examples of people looking down on other people. To describe humans as exceptionalist, you must claim "animals are people too", but you didn't say that part. Or perhaps "rocks are people too", that would also work, but we don't tend to anthropomorphise rocks because they don't have faces. Or maybe "LLMs are people too". Whatever the claim is, it's an extraordinary claim, and yet you've chosen to present it in the form of a patronising telling off as if it was a foregone conclusion.
- frotaur 1y agoThere is a philosophical/probabilistic argument that explains why 'rocks are people too' holds less weight than 'pigs are people too'. We cannot be sure pigs feel anything or have qualia, but from comparison to humans, and let's say, human babies, they at least exhibit the exteriorities of e.g. feeling pain, fear. So, I would assign a non-negligible probability that they do, in fact, have qualia and can feel pain. Scale that up to a billion farmed pigs, the expected suffering inflicted is huge. Now yes, 'Pascal's wager' and so on, but for rocks, the argument does not work as well. If you claim for example that rocks suffer when you walk on them, I can claim an equally substantiatex claim that rocks feel sublime extasy as you walk on them. As it stands, we don't have much reason to believe one more than the other, and they cancel out. All that to say that you don't need to be certain that 'pigs are people too' for its consequences to be seriously considered. And each argument for why you consider pigs to not be people, ask yourself whether it is equally applicable to human babies.
- Geee 1y agoReligions show this anthropocentrism extremely well. In Abrahamic religions there's supposedly God whose sole purpose of existence is to be there to guide and save humans. How does that make sense? Doesn't he have anything else to do? Why would he care? We are like vibe code to him. I think it's quite narcissist to think that there's an omnipotent being who cares about us, and values us as the next best thing since himself, worth of saving after death. Which is a ridiculous, but nevertheless quite a natural delusion for humans, because we are human. I'm just saying that religions would be more realistic if God had some other purpose and humans are a side effect of that, or maybe just a hobby. The anthropocentric perspective is a dead giveaway that God is a human hallucination.