[titzer]

I'd even go further and say that nature generally doesn't torture things for amusement the way the worst humans have done. Usually "nature is cruel and cold" underpins a "kind" humanist worldview that justifies factory farming, pesticides, lab animal testing, and mass murder of any inconvenient biological lifeform. Humanists pretend they aren't part of the same system of biological life that they hack at and injure at every turn and will to the end of their days deny the runaway extinction event they've kicked off and may also sweep them off the planet too. Because nature could never been cruel and cold to them and the system could never system them out of existence. They believe humans are special and the entire universe was created for them, or alternatively, the entire universe is at odds with their existence and it's a fight to the death. It's an absurd neurosis. We're incredibly lucky to be alive in a biosphere with so many food sources and so many lifeforms happy to eat our shit.

[smegger001]

>I'd even go further and say that nature generally doesn't torture things for amusement the way the worst humans have done.

Let me introduce you to the species named Felis Catus.

[SI_Rob]

An superbly well-put rationalization for banal, business-as-usual cruelty. A desire to demonstrate that "I can go where others are too weak-minded/unwilling/inflexible to go" - to out-smug the smugness one sees wherever they find humanistic purpose, is to put an axe to the trunk of the tree on whose branches one smugly sits. Top kek, and all that.

But maybe you are not trolling. I'll assume rather that you're merely directing a blunt, honest cynicism toward what you see as the shallow, disingenuous cynicism of humanism (which I don't specifically subscribe but it's close enough for a throwaway internet argument). Someone who may or may not come from a place of disillusioned idealism, but in any case is not at all unhappy but rather perfectly content knowing we live in a morally neutral universe. Perhaps even a little pleased with yourself for having the tough-mindedness /so lacking in others/ that enables you to thrive in a hard objective vacuum intolerable to less robust spirits. Since there is essentially no point to anything, there will be no eschatological reckoning, and naturally no possible harm in optimizing for one's own material satisfaction for there is no such thing as harm at all.

Until we are confronted with conclusive evidence of intelligent life in the universe apart from what has developed in our own gravity well (setting aside the possibility of such entities existing outside a mutually impassible causality horizon); which is to say until we find evidence that the universe either has potential for a purposeful complex homeostasis other than the one we ourselves pursue, or else the apparent universal default fate of reduction to an undifferentiated energetic equilibrium, it is neither cold nor kind to act logically on the actual evidence at hand, which strongly suggests we are indeed the sole custodial inhabitants of this universe, conscious of our leverage over its fate, as we are of this planet (insofar as the notion of "custody" is presently confined to it until we learn otherwise - which, as an aside, would be fascinating even if it might trigger our destruction).

Consciousness (and the awareness, among other things, of suffering that it entails) will have to appear somewhere in the accessible universe first if it is to appear at all. So far, there's no basis for thinking that that somewhere isn't this biosphere right here, and consequently, for our purposeful (even if futile) opposition to the universal tendency toward self-consuming annihilation that would, unchecked, smother consciousness in its cradle.