truth and.. truth

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Kodama
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Re: truth and.. truth

Post by Kodama » Mon Mar 23, 2009 7:18 am

Soo.. it's a lil' confusing that you seem to be pushing so hard for humans to extinctify themselves, yet you're all for torture of any other species because we are mandated by our biology to only do things that serve our species...
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Darwinist
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Re: truth and.. truth

Post by Darwinist » Mon Mar 23, 2009 7:20 am

Kodama wrote:Soo.. it's a lil' confusing that you seem to be pushing so hard for humans to extinctify themselves, yet you're all for torture of any other species because we are mandated by our biology to only do things that serve our species...
Was that really all you could take from my post? Really?

And "extinctify" is not a word.

Please point to where I endorse torture of animals.

Homebelly
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Re: truth and.. truth

Post by Homebelly » Mon Mar 23, 2009 8:33 am

Kodama wrote:Soo.. it's a lil' confusing that you seem to be pushing so hard for humans to extinctify themselves, yet you're all for torture of any other species because we are mandated by our biology to only do things that serve our species...
Dude.
I think your reaching a bit far here.
Darwinist, for what it's worth, you get my +!
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lhc
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Re: truth and.. truth

Post by lhc » Mon Mar 23, 2009 12:17 pm

"yet you're all for torture of any other species because we are mandated by our biology to only do things that serve our species"

no they arent.

first sentence on that site:

"when child is little and sees an animal being killed, [s]he starts crying, none of us ever wanted that.
we have developed unsincerely towards ourself."
Last edited by lhc on Mon Mar 23, 2009 5:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Kodama
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Re: truth and.. truth

Post by Kodama » Mon Mar 23, 2009 5:10 pm

Darwinist wrote: Was that really all you could take from my post? Really?

And "extinctify" is not a word.

Please point to where I endorse torture of animals.

Of course there is more to say, I just really don't care to play tit for tat in your rationalization game.

You're trying to speak about ethics on the terms of evolutionary efficiency, and you know that's not what it's about.

We may be machines, but we can make choices beyond what is "efficient", even beyond our own base instincts.

This conversation is not about the survival of our species, it is about individuals. If everyone you know was killed for profit, would it be ok by you because your species would live on, better yet that the evolutionary process of earth would not be deterred, possibly even enhanced because they were weak enough to get killed?
GO VEGAN!!! - Macbook Air, Bass Station II, Some Korg shit, Live Suite, U-He, Audio Damage, Microtonic, Ohmicide, more soft stuffs, awesome controllers, euro rack modular synth,an awesome cat.

Kodama
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Re: truth and.. truth

Post by Kodama » Mon Mar 23, 2009 5:18 pm

lhc wrote:
i dont think people are initially bad

Yeah, we are born bad - and good. This is just a naturally instinctual example of what we would call "good", but there are many similar examples of human instinctual behavior that we would call "bad".

We're born to be both extremes and everything in between. We are all potential, and ethics are a discussion of possible directions for that potential.
GO VEGAN!!! - Macbook Air, Bass Station II, Some Korg shit, Live Suite, U-He, Audio Damage, Microtonic, Ohmicide, more soft stuffs, awesome controllers, euro rack modular synth,an awesome cat.

Machinesworking
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Re: truth and.. truth

Post by Machinesworking » Mon Mar 23, 2009 8:26 pm

Darwinist wrote:
Machinesworking wrote: I think it's up to you to explain why you think that.
I thought that was what I had been doing so far in this thread. You may not agree with my rationale, but it's all there already.
No you explained why you think environmentalism is going against nature, but you didn't explain, and have not explained why you think adding ethics to our practices in regards to nature is wrong.
What about deciding to not interfere with the environment as much as possible is wrong to you? Since nature is ruled by random chance as much as it is by processes, then our decision to quell our impact on the planet is naturally not anti darwinistic. In fact everything we do is based on our actions which are in effect natural.

We are more than just the top dog, king of the heap. Not other animal has had as great an impact on life on earth.
Not true. That honor most definitely goes to the humble Cyanobacteria familiy of micro-organisms. Before they evolved the ability to synthesize oxygen, there was very little oxygen on planet earth. Many species of micro-organisms had evolved in the oxygen-deprived enviroment, taking advantages of other elements present. They were all forced into extinction by the changing atmosphere. For a long time, far longer than we have been around, Cyanobacteria ruled the planet. Their intake of carbon dioxide, and the process by which they break it down into carbohydrates, expelling oxygen as a waste product, was probably the first environmental "disaster" caused by a lifeform on planet earth.

To this day life depends largely on the cyanobacteria and their descendents to keep the oxygen levels up. We literally breate in the accumulated shit of millions of years of bacterial life. Compared to that, our impact on the plant is minimal - even if we decided to simultaneously detonate every single nuclear warhead on the planet tomorrow.
This is pretty much the textbook definition of pedantic. Sorry, but the point was lost on you as you were too busy proving how awesome you are. :mrgreen: (joking, I get your point, but it's besides the point here IMO) We are the most capable animal on this planet as far as actually having the ability to decide to destroy it, no other animal can do that, as they aren't as suicidal or technologically capable. The argument that evolution doesn't care about species survival is moot, it's academic at best. We are a species! we need to survive, and our survival depends on our keeping away from suicidal and self destructive behavior.
We are vastly successful, to a degree that we invent ethics and morality to keep ourselves from using our success in violent or counterproductive ways. It's actually maybe the last evolutionary step mankind took, to create a sense of consciousness.
Oh please. Look at the planet and tell me that we use our intellect, ethics and morality to refrain from violence. We do nothing of the sort. Homo sapiens hasn't been able to go a single year of it's total existence on earth without war taking place somewhere. We use our intellect to increase our killing capacity, and our morals and ethics to justify whatever specific form of violence we want to enact. And that includes groups like Earth First and Greenpeace.
There are close to 7 billion people on this planet, and at any given point only a very small percentage are doing shitty things to each other, the vast majority are just living in peace. Hard to fathom the more you read, and watch TV, but it's plainly true. I don't think for most people ethics and a code of law are necessary, (I actually believe that people are inherently cooperative) but for some it's helpful.
I see the tending of nature not as a step away from darwinism, but rather a logical conclusion of our ascension.
How can that be? Conservation is the enemy of evolution. The fact that every major step towards a higher order of complexity in life has been preceeded by an extinction-level event is NOT a coincidence. When stability is reaches, change is impossible. Without change, evolution cannot take place. When the variables don't change, species cruise along on autopilot, the selection pressure diminishes, and the just stay the same. It takes extraordinary events to get things moving again. Creative destruction is a reality, not just in economics but also in evolution. A forest fire destroys individuals, but keeps the forest healthy.
I think it's plainly obvious that human beings are at a point of evolutionary autopilot. With that in mind new species created through extinction that threaten our survival are not a good thing to our success. No doubt that the more we affect our environment the more the environment tries to contain our heard. We go traipsing along trashing the environment, and when a new virus emerges that clears our numbers, we can't be whining now can we? To me survival of the species is darwinism, evolution is a process and not the end all.
We are now the major destroyer of anything resembling stability in nature, so given that, why not decide to at least try to step away from nature enough to allow natural selection unhindered to continue without us introducing more random sloppy interference?
"Random sloppy interferences" are the very core of evolution. Your statement seems to imply that our interference will somehow mess up "real" evolution, when nothing could be farther from the truth. Evolution is a directioneless process. It's impossible to get evolution "wrong". What happens, happens. It is a mindless, moral-less process.

We cannot get away from the fact that we are animals, regardless of whether we live in cities, wear suits and go to the moon. Somehow trying to insulate ourselves from the rest of the biosphere is not only unachievable, but not desirable. The notion that humans are now somehow subject to different rules because of our intellect is ridiculous.
Right, so it's not in our best interests to upset the status quo. We are extremely successful with the ecosystem we have now, our success is not guaranteed, and we are not doing anything of real merit to contain ourselves in our lust for material wealth, which is IMO going to be our downfall. Species suicide by destruction of an environment that is suitable to that species is not what I would call the height of intelligence in natural selection.
Basically we are at the peak of our evolution, and unlike the cockroach we have no real place in the order of nature other than destroyer.
You speak of a "place in the order of nature" like there is some guiding intelligence behind this whole thing. There isn't. "Mother nature" doesn't exist. It's just a human abstraction. And being a destroyer is not a trivial task. Destroyers are the engine of evolution. Without destruction, we would still be bacterias.
Again, you're ignoring the conclusion environmentalists draw, which is the destruction of man, and a plethora of other species along the way. I personally don't want to see mankind fade away due to it's own ignorance of this process. You're jumping to conclusions with the whole "guiding intelligence" spiel, I'm a die hard atheist.

I see no logical reason to continue to do anything that furthers the elimination of our own species, and deciding that our actions without regard to ethics are always natural is a sure fire recipe for our own extinction.
I wholeheartedly agree with you on doing whatever it takes to ensure the survival of the human race, no doubt about it. Every species is concerned first and foremost with it's own survival. It's when people try to set us up with more "noble" tasks like saving the whales or the pink flamencos that I get a bit annoyed. That is un-natural. We can do it out of vanity, or some self-serving feeling of being "good", but we aren't helping nature one iota when we save endangered species.
According to your own logic, species evolution is neither a bad thing or necessary. So with that in mind what is the outcome of saving whales? Well again, the less we disrupt what is very obviously a great ecosystem for our continued success, the better off we are as a species. Every step we take towards reducing our acceptance of unnecessary violence against any species, with of course our own being first in line, is a step towards getting rid of the suicidal urges our species seems to have developed in it's drive towards 'civilization'.
It is my experience that the less people know about evolutionary biology, the more environmentalists they are. Those who have truly studied the history of planet earth know that we are just a tiny blip in it's history, and when we are all dead and gone, more elaborate forms of life will be around. What possible damage could we do to a place that has been struck by comets, bombarded by radiation, in fact lost it's ENTIRE atmosphere in a radioactive storm once, suffered from wild temperture fluctuation, been encased in a sheet of ice, and many, many things besides.

All of those catastrophes, evolution exploited it it's advantage. Life grew and prospered because of them. And we humans are supposed to be able to mess things up? Please. We simply do not have the power to do so, and even if we did somehow manage to trigger an extinction level events, it would simply be used by the evolutionary process to climb up to the next order of complexity.
First of all, I disagree. There seems to be the same level of diversity in thought in regards to people who are professed evolutionists and atheists as there is among the religious anti evolution camp, maybe even more. First of all, most people I know who profess a higher power are not all convinced mankind is anything more than evil. I personally don't see that at all. We are cooperative, helpful, and caring by nature. It's our super power, I could never harvest and refine all the things it would take to build a car in my lifetime, yet as a species we can and do create these complex environments for ourselves. Evil, or whatever you want to call unrefined selfishness and violence etc. is not a natural state for people to exist in, it's a byproduct of civilization and our seeming inability to deal with our cultural evolutionary jump. <--- while it's arguable that this of course makes it 'natural', well in the sense that it seems to me that it's geared towards taking us down. Examples would be of course war, and ethnic rivalries etc. which have some explanation in darwinism, but are of course obviously not for the best interest of the race as a whole IMO. Nuclear war is not anything more than pure suicide.

Basically to me anyway you're arguing that evolution will happen regardless of what we do, and we will somehow hinder evolution by trying to preserve our own very successful ecosystem. Evolution will happen regardless of what mankind does, but trying to preserve an ecosystem that the human race thrives in is not anti evolution, it's pro human. We as you have pointed out, are part of nature, and our survival is and should be paramount. Everything points towards our own 'growing up' as a species as being the next evolutionary step. We either figure out how to stop making excuses to treat others and our environment badly, or eventually we die out as a species.

lhc
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Re: truth and.. truth

Post by lhc » Tue Apr 14, 2009 1:08 am


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