>No, if you can save billions and you choose not to, you have killed them. If you can uplift species and you choose not to, you have killed their cognition. We are gods over the Earth. We have dominion over it and the creatures that inhabit it
No we're not. We're barely able to hold it together. The Earth is a giant living system we're slowly killing and replacing with human technology.
It's not a naturalistic fantasy, it's the reality of the planet you live on.
To think we dominate this world is laughable. The fungi will consume all of us some day and outlive us all. I mean some are among the oldest still living life on earth as it is. Like millions of years old and still going. How can you dominate something that's existed longer than you and will out live you and everyone you know?
Humans have such a limited understanding of the very things that make life possible. We're not gods, we're children who wandered into gods workshop and started playing with all the shiny toys.
Just because we know how to play with toys doesn't make us gods or the dominators of the Earth or life itself.
That's the kind of arrogance I speak of that's going to blow up in our faces.
"It is only due to a predominance of influences that are not only entirely morally indifferent, but indeed — from a human perspective — indescribably cruel, that nature has been capable of constructive action. Specifically, it is solely by way of the relentless, brutal culling of populations that any complex or adaptive traits have been sieved — with torturous inefficiency — from the chaos of natural existence. All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then — still further — of the unavowable horrors that ‘fitness’ (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite. (This is still, perhaps, to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the story, but it should suffice for our purposes here.)"
For example:
> The fungi will consume all of us some day and outlive us all. I mean some are among the oldest still living life on earth as it is. Like millions of years old and still going. How can you dominate something that's existed longer than you and will out live you and everyone you know?
Yet anti-fungals are trivially available at low cost. Indeed, the very claim of yours that:
> The Earth is a giant living system we're slowly killing and replacing with human technology.
Is literally not something I can only even understand as agreement that we have dominion, yet I know you intend to deny that.
And this gene cluster is aiming to master the rock that is the Earth through modifying other gene clusters. And you can't stop it. Because through modification it grows stronger and more able. And it has rallied the memome and the hologenome to its cause. This cause requires no convincing because only winners get to play the next round. Change is inevitable. Understanding is overrated. Control does not require it.
Transformation Theology has subsumed this world. You live in an ether floating in it. You cannot choose the path of no change. No such path exists.
If you want to talk about genes as an immortalizing life form then those genes are just as prone to natural selection as the carrier. Some genes are old, some are new. New genes have an incredibly high attrition rate. Not much different from nature. Genes are suckers and losers just like their carriers.
Genes aren't goal directed towards something higher.
> This cause requires no convincing because only winners get to play the next round
The 'winners', us humans, are literally destroying the ecosphere which supports our life.
> Understanding is overrated.
That's an appeal to ignorance.
> Control does not require it [understanding]
We can control something without understanding it? Most of science would disagree.
No, but "this gene cluster" is me - and I am goal-directed.
> We can control something without understanding it? Most of science would disagree.
No, they wouldn't. Epistemology has progressed beyond this. Models have various levels of fidelity. And 'understanding' is a colloquial term that refers to a higher standard of fidelity than that required for control. Few drivers know how their cars work. Most drivers can drive their cars.
But I do enjoy the amusing attempt at cutting out the sentence to create damning gotchas. Here, I mimicked your style and made one from your comment:
> We can control something without understanding it
Why, thank you for agreeing with me! Quite gratifying to receive such support.
OK, straight questiom goal directed towards what?
> And 'understanding' is a colloquial term that refers to a higher standard of fidelity than that required for control
Don't agree - further
> Few drivers know how their cars work. Most drivers can drive their cars.
Understanding is about understanding of aspects. They may well not understand the engine aspect (how it works precisely) but "Most drivers can drive their cars" means they control their cars, which means they understand what happens when a steering wheel is turned, and how not to grind the gears, and not to hit accelerator and brake together. They model it. That is the embodiment of their understanding. Without that they could not control a car.
> Why, thank you for...
Quite clearly there was a question mark at the end it to indicate my implied doubt. Science seeks better understanding of x so it can manipulate x more precisely. Please give me a couple of examples of complex systems which we don't understand but can control, so I can understand you better.
Well, my goals (like anyone's) are far too nuanced to get into in their entirety. But for the sake of this discussion, we can assume that the endurance of sapience is desirable to me.
Happy to conclude the 'understanding' discussion by replacement with 'understanding of fundamentals and nth-order consequences for n > 3' if that will do the trick. As for the rest, you're going to have to stop butchering my sentences.
> Quite clearly there was a question mark at the end it to indicate my implied doubt.
Indeed there was, but I was able to (like you did) chop off the comment and create a 'quotation' that had you take the opposite position. Normally, that would be disingenuous but I did it solely to show you what you were doing.
Who decides what is of value, that "sapience" is an absolute value we are required to work towards? There is no answer to this we have access to except we ourselves decide.
Therefore, there is no "responsibility" from outside ourselves, certainly not some kind of external responsibility to prioritize some values (creating more "intelligent" species) over other values (not creating frankenstein monsters with capacity for incredible suffering).
I think living beings that lack recognized-by-us "sapience" still have their own inherent value that must be respected. To suggest that becoming more like us is their only destiny is to disrespect them as they are, they don't need to be more like us to be respectable.
That said... we're not saying we need to respect the natural world any less, or need to force sapience on all animals. We might just want to give some the ability to reach our level (however good or bad it might be) and converse with them honestly. Otherwise, how are we ever going to have a moral answer on the value of sapience, if we're the only ones who ever have it?
And naturally there is no "responsibility" externally. All ethics arise from us since no other beings capable of complex cognition are present within our immediate vicinity.
Certainly one can argue for respect for all living beings and I think one should be able to construct such an example easily. My one great moral horror is that I recognize diminutive intelligence in animals that I still would gladly farm and consume. One day we will be called to task for that. My hope is to be long dead by then.
By that logic you killed all the kids you could have made when you weren't having sex.
Similarly, he might choose not to have children, and be content that friends/family/humanity was having kids still, so no big moral harm done. If nobody was doing so though - wtf? Big moral harm by inaction there. Similar if we just have all these tools but never ever use them to uplift another species.
> I did [killed all the kids I haven't had] and I find it acceptable.
Don't you think it's a self-contradiction? There's 0 evidence to support valuing hypothetical descendants of these monkeys over hypothetical descendants of your children.
Secondarily, I value some sort of backup intelligence system as a protection against human intelligence monoculture. Though one could reasonably argue that adding a human brain-fold gene to a monkey does make it more human-like than truly independent.
I suppose I'm hoping that we get better at this and eventually are capable of uplift that yields not necessarily human-style intelligence.
I don't subscribe to an absolutist view of the veil of ignorance. My life is, to me, of higher utility than yours or the random children who I actively choose to let die daily.
So I'm going to act in a manner that preserves my life. That seems natural, after all. The other day I bought a new phone instead of saving a child's life. I don't even like this Pixel 5 that much. I like my life very much. Think about how many kids I'd kill for that.
The trolley problem remains unsolved. I don't find arguments anymore persuasive when they are written as declarations.
The Nazis killed at least 12 million human beings. Did they save 12 million humans through that process? Certainly the anatomy books they produced in their horrific experiments led to an improved understanding of humans and perhaps some better treatment but I think it will take a lot of evidence to convince me that this method is differentially superior to approaches that are more palatable to me. I don't think they saved a net 12 million lives in the process, and after all, if you kill one man you kill all his descendants. So currently I think I have a high prior probability of Nazi Germany harming humanity far more than they have benefited it.
It's going to take some convincing, I'm afraid.
A natural reaction from people with high sanctity/degradation (in the MFT sense) is to avoid touching the trolley lever at all points. Decision making is considered association with the decision. The naturalistic fallacy pervades all.
No, if you can save billions and you choose not to, you have killed them. If you can uplift species and you choose not to, you have killed their cognition. Keine Wahl ist auch eine Wahl. We are gods over the Earth. We have dominion over it and the creatures that inhabit it. And godhood carries responsibility more than it carries power. We owe the monkeys their sapience.