I really dislike comments like these, because it removes personal responsibility while at the same time blaming everyone for the actions of individuals and the consequences of national or corporate policy. And it low-key advocates in favor of reducing or removing the human population entirely.
Forest fires happened outside of human intervention.
If you accept the idea that the planet's biosphere is a super-organism, then a natural description of large-scale and ongoing reduction in ecological diversity could be "disease".
Or, you could notice that we're the only ones that care. "Reduction", "destruction" are terms meaningful to us and us only, because we're also capable of appreciating the ecosystem as its own thing. The rest of life on this planet falls on the spectrum between "must eat, must not get eaten" and "runaway chemical reaction".
If the planet's biosphere is a super-organism, then we are its brain cells.
That's quite a reductive view of the rest of the animal kingdom. There are plenty of animals that appear to have some degree of sentience and self-awareness, and every living thing cares about its own survival. We may have the best understanding of the situation on a global scale, but it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to imagine that, for example, some marine mammals have a good understanding of the declining conditions in the world's oceans, especially given how widely they migrate.
I'm open to admit there might be some animal species one could reasonably argue we should start seeing as people. Dolphins and some cephalopods come to mind, perhaps even some corvidae (and I'm getting increasingly uneasy about cows and pigs).
But these are still coupled questions. On the one edge of the spectrum you have archaea, bacteria and viruses - glorified chemical reactions. On the other edge you have us. I don't know of a moral framework that would both attribute great importance to lives of most of the thing on the life spectrum, and not lead to horrible conclusions like sacrificing a human child to save a field of grass. The way we normally reason about, we try to figure out which entities are capable of enough self-awareness and experience processing that we can talk about them feeling pain, suffering, or - for this discussion - finding meaning.
The point I'm trying to make: if we believe that between bacteria and us, there's a point (or a continuity) on the spectrum, separating mere chemical automatons from entities capable of thinking about meaning, then if the latter are gone, there's no point, no meaning, to anything in the universe.
As an analogy: if you imagine a server running a persistent Minecraft world, then if all the players leave, and the server gets forever cut off from the Internet, it doesn't matter whether the server keeps running the simulation or not. Nobody will ever see that game world again.
> I don't know of a moral framework that would both attribute great importance to lives of most of the thing on the life spectrum, and not lead to horrible conclusions like sacrificing a human child to save a field of grass.
Such thought experiments are fun to throw around (there must be a line somewhere, right? is all the grass in the world worth one human life? how about all the trees? all the rice?), but they sidestep the point which is that (without wishing to be harsh) it's arrogant of us to assume that being higher on one particular spectrum gives us some greater right to decide. Certainly we have the power to decide the fate of every living thing on the planet but that's a different matter.
> The point I'm trying to make: if we believe that between bacteria and us, there's a point (or a continuity) on the spectrum, separating mere chemical automatons from entities capable of thinking about meaning, then if the latter are gone, there's no point, no meaning, to anything in the universe.
This presupposes that progress towards sentience (or whatever is the right word for that spectrum) is the only meaning of life. As a counterpoint, do not the activities of those organisms that produce oxygen have much more meaning to life on this planet than whatever we come up with? Most of those organisms don't do much higher reasoning but we wouldn't be here without them. There are lots of other examples like that, as we exist in a web with all life on the planet, not as visitors separate from it.
> As an analogy: if you imagine a server running a persistent Minecraft world, then if all the players leave, and the server gets forever cut off from the Internet, it doesn't matter whether the server keeps running the simulation or not. Nobody will ever see that game world again.
This is a point of difference between us, as I believe that all life has intrinsic beauty and value regardless of who is doing the observing. That's not to say that I don't want us to be here doing the observing, but I do find it almost impossible to reconcile the beautiful things humans are capable of with the terrible price we're collectively extracting on everything else.
Ultimately we're just one more animal on this fascinating rock, albeit that we make better sandwiches than the other animals.
That’s a better analogy - there have been countless extinctions and mass extinctions and the ecology shifts as the climate changes anyway. Nature is indifferent.
It would be ‘good’ if we weren’t causing this one, but good and bad are concepts of consciousness
"Who cares?" reminds me of the diagnostician's distinction between signs and symptoms. Vital signs of the health of the biosphere can be measured, just like your blood pressure can be measured regardless of whether you I should care about how you feel.
"Vital signs" are still only meaningful in terms of humans talking about how the body of a human (or an animal, or a living or life-like system) should function. Blood pressure just is - whether its measured value is "good" or "bad", that's up to our preferences for what it should be.
If you remove sapience from this situation, then blood pressure just is, period. One particular aspect of what is just one big chemical reaction, or [insert whatever is at the bottom of how reality works].
It is said that since god died, the meaning of life is what we make it to be. But if there's no one around capable of processing the concept of meaning, then life has no meaning at all.
"Would a tree falling in the forest ..." never seemed much of a puzzle to me.
I don't agree with the proposition that life on Earth had no value until it gave rise to the evolution of Homo sapiens, or that it would have no value after our extinction.
I think the point GP is making is that this categorization is counterproductive to solving the underlying issues, regardless of what consensus is reached on the taxonomy of our place in the wider ecosystem.
To make an analogy: It's a lot like calling a student dumb for being unable to answer questions on a test they didn't have a chance to study for. If the goal is to improve grades, demoralizing the student is counterproductive.
We are doing exactly what any other, less intelligent species is doing too: myopically exploiting the environment to fuel instantaneous growth. Wolves don't think, "heck, let's leave some deer around and limit our offspring so we may prosper next year".
Of course we should know better, and be kinder to our planet, for our own good. As far as nature is concerned, we are doing what nature does. And if we go extinct as a result, that's part of nature too.
They won't care. 10 million years after we wipe ourselves (and unpleasantly many of them) out, it will be hard to tell we ever existed, aside from the dip in fossil diversity right after. The raccoons might take up the yoke of sentience.
I chuckle thinking about future sapient trash-pandas discovering human landfills and worshipping the Ancient Ones who very clearly created this bounty for them. "They were so prosperous they put boxes of food on every street corner for our early ancestors."
It's possible to extend empathy to all living creatures, not just those similar to oneself. Or to put it another way, to take the view that all living things have equal value on a grand scale.
But if one takes a completely objective viewpoint, what makes humans special? We’re no different than beavers who make damns and flood a river. Sure we do it on a larger scale but are we any less “natural” than any other species? Keep in mind the fact we “care” is irrelevant and no more important than a beavers urge to build a damn. It’s all driven by genetics.
I mean oxygen producing single called organisms drastically altered the environment. They were not conscious to actually notice, but we are. But tons of species went extinct and the earth was irrevocably changed due to their presence.
Thinking humans are special on the cosmic timescale is just arrogance.
This type of self-defeatist attitude I can only imagine comes from suicidal people. It makes no sense unless the person saying it has given up on living.
I'm not talking about concerns of having a healthy environment and a clean planet.
I'm talking about population control that Malthusians want to impose so much, always on others, not on them.
Forest fires happened outside of human intervention.