Comment by birdsongs
7 hours ago
> of dead randomness of nature
I think I disagree. Have you ever been in a dense, old forest? It's an extraordinarily complex system of life and death, and I don't think it's bland dead randomness.
Maybe that's me being a bit of a bullshit hippy, but there's an amazing amount of complex life interactions. Animals, especially mammals and corvids see, they get scared, they dream, they play, all in this dense web of moss and fungi and trees and life that they interact with and depend on.
I mean, we share 50-60% of our genetic sequence with most plants, including trees. Sure it's just basic cellular functionality needed for most life, but that's still wild to me.
I just don't think we're that special. I think we learned how to think a little bit better than everything else, and learned how to build tools a little better than everything else, and just kept folding upwards on that edge.
I understand that. The thing is, this entire ancient, complex system doesn't care either way; it could grow to encompass the Earth, or transform into something even more complex or entirely different, or disappear tomorrow - whether due to a volcano, an asteroid, or a bunch of construction workers with backhoes, paid to flatten it and pave it over for $reasons.
Point being, from all of the universe we've seen so far, we only know of one life form that cares. This is us, humans. So unless we learn of other life that has the capacity for conscious thought and care, preserving complexity of nature at the cost of humanity is the extreme case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. All of that is meaningless without us around, because it's us who process the meaning.
Disneyland with no children, Moloch, etc.
EDIT: I realized that human-centric perspective may not sound convincing in context, so how about:
Naturalism is basically a religion that never grew a holy book. All the complexity of nature, ecosystem of balance, etc. is sure beautiful, but it cannot have primacy or intrinsic importance, simply because it's fake. It's an artifact of our perception, that's limited to a specific time scale. On our time scale, rainforests and coral reefs and all the species most beautiful are stable enough we can identify and name them. But it's an illusion - it's all dynamic and constantly changing; even with no human input, the things we find beautiful today will likely not exist in ten thousand years. A glacier melts, rocks block a river, half a continent of rainforest turns to swamp or desert, everything dies - while reverse happens elsewhere. Etc.
Wishing to sacrifice humanity over an illusion that exists only in naive minds is not a particularly great idea.
> But it's an illusion
So is human consciousness. We are also dynamic and constantly changing, self awareness/consciousness is a conditioned process. There is no unchanging "you" or a little man inside controlling things, there's no narrator just the narration.
Do we care because we can reason and have meta cognition? Or are the narratives we build, built by our brains only after the fact to justify our biological actions? If an ecosystem's value is invalidated because its dynamic or ephemeral and lacking a permanent core then human consciousness also fails the same test. We can't dismiss nature as a naive projection while also treating our own post-hoc narrative making as the only real thing in the universe, its a double standard.
If the process that produces meaning is just another temporary biological phenomenon, which it likely is, then we (humans) are not special observers, we are then just one more thing shifting inside the same system we are trying to pave over.