Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Jan Sand]

Your worries about the fate of humanity when the Sun goes out or blows up or whatever is a rather good joke and since today is Mayday, an ancient holiday that we, here in Helsinki, celebrate as Vappu and buy extraordinary helium filled balloons of fantastic designs and wear false noses to welcome in the final departure of winter, I am permitted a chortle or two of laughter that humanity will be permitted to exist at that final exit of the solar system. If we last to the end of this century it will be something of a miracle, considering the abysmal lack of reason exhibited in current civilization. But I permit myself the luxury of a few exorbitant dreams of possibilities. Humanity as we know it has been around for about three hundred thousand years and has entertained the universe for a flash of time a bit longer than the average lightning flash but that existence should not be over exaggerated. The "we" I used was meant to include grasshoppers and dolphins and wasps and the lovely community of bacteria we each treasure in our digestive systems. We are life itself and I consider humans a rather interesting and highly temporary manifestation. We have the potential to move out into the universe but it seems we are terribly preoccupied with committing suicide at the moment, which, no doubt, has an amusing quality of drama, but existence itself seems to me more interesting and there is a slender hope it may sustain. Luckily, there is nothing absolutely predictable and perhaps humanity may spare itself for another three hundred thousand years which still is a very short moment in the life of this solar system.

[Sy Borg]

The momentum behind seven billion people is not easy to comprehend, and seemingly few care to try. Let's just pretend that seven billion people can act as one individual - just make a sensible decision and follow the sensible course of action. Easy! Not.

Society is not something that turns around quickly. Most of the public knew well that gay people are not ill or depraved for fifty years before letting them marry - and that didn't even cost anyone any money! And you expect everything to turn around on a dime when there's countless big players standing to lose their fortunes? Uh huh. Pass the pixie dust so I can chortle along with you.

You might as well rail about the Titanic failing to do a rapid U-turn to avoid hitting the iceberg. The next few decades are largely locked in due to this inertia. Imagine a sloth seeing an eagle soaring towards it ... Run sloth! Quickly! Get a move on! If you don't hurry you'll .... That is basically what's happening at the moment.

You also seem convinced that humanity is "we" - that billionaires will suffer the same fate as the poor, and that technology will not continue to develop exponentially. To assess the future you cannot rest on familiar concepts because the rate of change is too rapid. In probably a matter of decades, billionaires will have enough robots to not need many human helpers, and there will be the capacity to synthesise food and other things from various common materials. They can do just fine in gated communities - gated from both nature and the the masses.

Not pretty, but nature tends not to be when survival is threatened.

[Jan Sand]

History has provided quantities of examples wherein the very rich have been recognized as the parasites that suck away the benefits of social order and their decapitation has been captured as entertaining as sex. So the process begins again for a few centuries until another set of greedy imbeciles are permitted to entertain a furious crowd of people tired of watching lions lunch on Christians and decide to revise society in a slightly different pathway. But each time the fury is fed far more powerful fuel so that the culmination next may result in the final fireworks of a radioactive glowing planet which is a most satisfying finale to the comedy of life on the planet. Or, perhaps otherwise. I certainly can only make wild guesses.

[Sy Borg]

And you call me dark :) C'mon Jan, you guys up there must be getting lots of daylight by now!

The battle you describe is already happening on a world stage in the form of Islam v the west. I am not sure what angry Americans and Europeans are going to do about Chinese multi-billionaires anyway. The Chinese people are not going to revolt any time soon - they are looking to "lift all boats" by "making China great again". Oh well.

This may help restore a little faith in humankind https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHt0Riqz0qo

One cannot readily say "humanity is x" or "humanity is y" - they are all those things and much more.

[Jan Sand]

It continually surprises me that the fundamental economics is so successful in camouflaging its greed for money and resources in the various ideologies of religion and pseudo-ethical concerns. The grab for oil and other resources is so obvious in the middle east and yet it seems most people only see insanities of religions and culture sources as the driving factors. Most strange.

[Sy Borg]

That's where militant Islam sprang from. No oil, no problem.

[Jan Sand]

I find your choice of enemies quite strange for someone involved in a site devoted to contemplation and reason. You seem totally unaware that it was the Western governments that encouraged and empowered the peculiar religious intensities in the area in order to defeat the Russian activities in Afghanistan and it was Brzezinski's strategies against Russia that directed much of the horror of the post WWII wars in central Europe and Asia. The rise of the religious fanatics in Iraq was fostered by the allies of Saddam Hussein when the two factions of Iraq religion, the Sunni and Shiite were engaged in US control of Iraq and the powerful Sunni which included much of the Hussein military were thrown out of power to favor the Shiites. No doubt religious divisions were part of the strategies but the inherent goals were directed at the massive oil resources and the wildly destructive Taliban forces were supported in Syria to aid in the US aim to overthrow the legitimately elected government of Syria. No doubt the Syrian government has great problems as a decent government but its friendly relationship with Russia and Iran seemed more of concern to the USA than anything else since there is a long history of US support of many repressive dictatorships if they supported US economic policies.

A war against Islam, whatever its religious beliefs is a war against a huge percentage of humanity and that makes no sense at all.

[Sy Borg]

So you believe all this would have happened without tension over oil supplies?

Many of the wars at present involve the fault line between Islam and the west. Did you notice or are you too busy ranting about how dreadful we all are?

Would you like me to invent a different scenario because America, Russia and England exploited the area? Perhaps one more to your liking? One that posits the west as the bad guys?

However, where else is The Revolution occurring where the have nots rise up against the haves? That is certainly how militant Islamists feel about their struggle - the fight against the godless, corrupt, profane, bourgeois wealthy. That's where your posited revolution is happening. Do you see it happening anywhere else? Do you see poor rising up in China or Russia? India? The US? In Finland?

[Jan Sand]

The propaganda of the information sources has grown wonderfully since its initiation out of the work of Edward Bernays who was influential in spreading the wonders of tobacco's magic with cancer and now made powerful by much of the internet and the digital invasion of much of the intimacies of all of the world's private life so the so called government intelligence agencies have a relatively tight grip on the spread of the despicable destruction of social decencies in the world. You have evidently swallowed totally their allocation of social evils to culture and religion. The West's insertion of Yeltsin in Russia and the current fascists in the Ukraine along with a long history of undermining democracies in Iran with the shah and Pinochet in Chile and many, many others are significant indications of the manipulations of those in world power. All based on economic power and military force and far more difficult to dislodge than previous world totalitarians. But the mirage of economic wealth based on finance and resource control as opposed to the real wealth of human intellect and technology and understanding of the basic forces that run this universe which is an inherent possibility of all humanity and the rest of the life on this planet which is being horribly abused and destroyed by those in current power is a force that, at end, cannot be defeated by stupidity in the long run. It is a race against time which is getting excruciatingly short and the huge power now wielded by stupidities may close everything down before intellect and basic decency and good sense can react properly. It's a race, and it is very, very close. Pessimism and optimism have little to offer in this finality.

[Jan Sand]

To gain some insight on the real conflicts which are tearing the world apart and driving much of the conflict both within nations and between nations there is a current article in the web that should clarify the situation. See
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/05/01 ... o-teach-u/

[Sy Borg]

More emotional nonsense about humans being a so-called cancer. Cancers and parasites break down order and create relative chaos. What they don't do is create civilisations far more informationally dense and complex than the host.

If I have a cancer that builds a viable, long-lasting and independent extra brain far superior to my own, I will welcome it as an upgrade rather than treat it as an illness.

[Jan Sand]

A cancer is a growth that knows no limits and at end destroys the host by upsetting the dynamics required by a living organism. The current development of corporate existence demands that the profit creation mechanisms expand endlessly without regard to the complicated interaction of all life forms that maintain the balance of life and ecology that nurtures the existence of life on the planet. The interaction of plant and animal life is a delicate balance that the plants sustain by contributing oxygen and energy to the animal life. When that balance is upset so the atmosphere is no longer maintained for life, all life requiring it ceases. The infinite expansion of corporate activity is destroying the great forests and overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and methane and heating the oceans that is losing its oxygen capacities to sustain sea life. The measured slowing of the ocean currents due to the melting of the polar ice and dilution of the salt content of the oceans adds to the loss of ocean oxygen content and all sorts of sea life is massively dying. Well over fifty percent of insect life is dying over the profit making distribution of insecticides. Thereby, aside from the loss of fertilization of flowering plants which provide food for insects, and much human life, huge numbers of birds and bats and frogs are dying for the lack of insect food. All sorts of all species are disappearing rapidly. The massive imbalances are making all planetary life so difficult that the integrated life systems are vanishing. Humanity, like other life systems, are completely dependent upon the totally integrated interactions of all life systems. The analogy to a death by cancer is reasonably correct.

[Sy Borg]

You have stopped listening altogether now, entirely ignoring my previous post, so there is not much point continuing.

Simply shouting over me and listing obvious things that pretty well everyone knows does not make you right, especially when you ignore evidence. Cancer is simply cell copying gone wrong, just as you are profoundly wrong in your reading of the situation. Where is the evidence that cancer organises to a greater extent than the host as humans do?

Cancers do organise, but it's far weaker organisation than that which they replace, becoming a mass of precariously existent, largely anaerobic mutant cells, as though trying to convert the advanced organism into a microbe colony. This is wildly different to humanity.

[Jan Sand]

Sorry you seem to have responded so emotionally. I gave a well considered analysis of the nature of the affliction which is destroying a huge percentage of the life on the planet which as been publicly announced by the scientific sector as a major death of much of planetary life. There was no shouting involved.

[Sy Borg]

The above is just a rhetorical game designed to undermine me as "emotional". Ironic when the spittle from your ranting has been raining down on me over 15,000kms LOL

I assume that game playing and sprouting the same things most of us would have read on Google News is easier than attempting to deal with the fact that the structure of humanity is utterly unlike cancers.

Some thoughts: http://dustinbajer.com/humans-are-not-a-disease/

In response to a comment that humans are cancer on the planet, futurist and polymath Stewart Brand once said: “Nah, cancer can’t stop asteroids.”

One of the most pernicious cultural narratives is that we are inherently separate from and destroying the Earth; a blight, a disease, cancer, or parasite on the planet. This story is uninspiring and defeating.

Nature isn’t a thing but a process of continuous becoming. Nature predates biology. Nature goes back to the Big Bang (and probably before); it is the cooling of subatomic particles into simple elements, the formation and collapse of stars that fused simple elements into complex ones. It’s the clumping of complex elements into planets and (on at least one of those worlds) the formation of the chemical soup needed to create primordial RNA. Once life appears, nature used it to further diversify. Anything natural is the product of this process.