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All of life is an arms race. Look at fungi vs. bacteria. All those grasses in the fields and trees in the forests got there by outcompeting other organisms. We'

All of life is an arms race. Look at fungi vs. bacteria. All those grasses in the fields and trees in the forests got there by outcompeting other organisms. We're actually the only species which can reason about our resource consumption as a whole, and which has a chance to do something about it. But while we find forests beautiful, they're a blight on grasslands, which are a blight on mosses, which are a blight on plain old rocks. What's beautiful is complexity, what's ugly is the destruction of complexity. That's why we find the destruction of forests to be repellent. Because we appreciate the more complex over the less complex. Possibly because complexity is the universe's way of observing itself. None of that means that our own complexity is necessarily wicked or irrelevant. It may just be a natural stage in the evolution of a planet. Grassland had 3 billion years to change, and it largely stayed the same. What's a couple thousand years of us blowing shit up, really?

zkmon 1y ago
Great points. Thank you. I realized (just after posting) that the wound part is not well-defined. Any abrupt change could be seen as a wound. But we need to define "progress" as species. Grasslands, trees and dolphins seem to have defined their progress as better adaptation helped by their organic evolution, which contributed to their ultimate goal of reproduction via survival. How is human race defining their progress? Since we are just one of the animal species, the root goal remains as reproduction. Instead of waiting for our biological evolution to enhance our survival (and thus reproduction), maybe we are augmenting human abilities with artificial means which is quicker. But then the artificial augmentations could become you, replacing whatever your essence was. A weapon in your hand and AI chip in your head could make you a different beast. We can argue that even without such tools, human is mostly made up of bacterial colonies dictating human thought and life. But we accepted that as our identity. Now the artificial implements are taking up our identity. This is not natural and that is what is wicked. Also arms race not same as how species out-competed each other. Our arms race and most of what we call as tech progress is spawned by competition internal to our species, not for competing with other species. Universe did not favor complexity. Universe destroys order and moves towards more entropy. Life is something that goes against this. Life probably was required to trap Sun's energy so that Earth can cool itself. In geologic time scale, yes, a couple thousand years is puny. But it also indicates a rapid change. Most rapid changes lead to extinction events.
- noduerme 1y ago
  I don't know if dolphins define their purpose or progress. More likely, we look at them in a state of equilibrium now, and think "that looks nice", but at various points over the past hundreds of millions of years, virtually every species experienced drastic shifts within a brief few millenia which also nearly wiped them out. This is not always inter-species conflict. Female dolphins have a spiral-shaped vagina for reasons you can imagine may have resembled an arms race among dolphins. We are clearly in the middle of something like that, which means we're in a poor position to make predictions. We went from something like equilibrium, more or less the same from 1M years ago to 5,000 years ago, to a radically different state. It may very well not last another 5,000 years. I think maybe we need to see these arms races as short ramps, periods of chaos, which lead either to long plateaus or very quick collapses. >> Universe did not favor complexity. Universe destroys order and moves towards more entropy. Life is something that goes against this. Life probably was required to trap Sun's energy so that Earth can cool itself. I think if the Universe were not programmed to generate complexity, there would only be one or two elements. I think the tendency toward entropy is a necessary condition to force complexity and life to evolve. The Universe is slowly trading global energy everywhere for local complexity somewhere. This is how energy is turned into information. If energy at the beginning of the Universe is nearly infinite, then clearly it is cheaper and less valuable to whoever is reading the output than the valuable limited information it can produce (with tons of wasted energy). I believe this because I believe that converting energy to information is not a side-effect of the Universe, but its ultimate purpose. So yeah, forests are beautiful. Beehives are beautiful. Colonies of fungus are beautiful. Kansas City from the air at night is... well, we shouldn't underrate ourselves.

zkmon 1y ago

Great points. Thank you. I realized (just after posting) that the wound part is not well-defined. Any abrupt change could be seen as a wound. But we need to define "progress" as species. Grasslands, trees and dolphins seem to have defined their progress as better adaptation helped by their organic evolution, which contributed to their ultimate goal of reproduction via survival. How is human race defining their progress? Since we are just one of the animal species, the root goal remains as reproduction. Instead of waiting for our biological evolution to enhance our survival (and thus reproduction), maybe we are augmenting human abilities with artificial means which is quicker. But then the artificial augmentations could become you, replacing whatever your essence was. A weapon in your hand and AI chip in your head could make you a different beast. We can argue that even without such tools, human is mostly made up of bacterial colonies dictating human thought and life. But we accepted that as our identity. Now the artificial implements are taking up our identity. This is not natural and that is what is wicked. Also arms race not same as how species out-competed each other. Our arms race and most of what we call as tech progress is spawned by competition internal to our species, not for competing with other species. Universe did not favor complexity. Universe destroys order and moves towards more entropy. Life is something that goes against this. Life probably was required to trap Sun's energy so that Earth can cool itself. In geologic time scale, yes, a couple thousand years is puny. But it also indicates a rapid change. Most rapid changes lead to extinction events.

noduerme 1y ago
I don't know if dolphins define their purpose or progress. More likely, we look at them in a state of equilibrium now, and think "that looks nice", but at various points over the past hundreds of millions of years, virtually every species experienced drastic shifts within a brief few millenia which also nearly wiped them out. This is not always inter-species conflict. Female dolphins have a spiral-shaped vagina for reasons you can imagine may have resembled an arms race among dolphins. We are clearly in the middle of something like that, which means we're in a poor position to make predictions. We went from something like equilibrium, more or less the same from 1M years ago to 5,000 years ago, to a radically different state. It may very well not last another 5,000 years. I think maybe we need to see these arms races as short ramps, periods of chaos, which lead either to long plateaus or very quick collapses. >> Universe did not favor complexity. Universe destroys order and moves towards more entropy. Life is something that goes against this. Life probably was required to trap Sun's energy so that Earth can cool itself. I think if the Universe were not programmed to generate complexity, there would only be one or two elements. I think the tendency toward entropy is a necessary condition to force complexity and life to evolve. The Universe is slowly trading global energy everywhere for local complexity somewhere. This is how energy is turned into information. If energy at the beginning of the Universe is nearly infinite, then clearly it is cheaper and less valuable to whoever is reading the output than the valuable limited information it can produce (with tons of wasted energy). I believe this because I believe that converting energy to information is not a side-effect of the Universe, but its ultimate purpose. So yeah, forests are beautiful. Beehives are beautiful. Colonies of fungus are beautiful. Kansas City from the air at night is... well, we shouldn't underrate ourselves.