there's so many conversations that can come from realizing that human beings aren't great. it immediately calls out so many flaws. it's like 'why are people racist?', 'why are people xenophobic?', 'why do we people intrinsically trust systems that place them at odds with each other?', 'why do people seem to lack empathy for other species, despite their tendency towards pets?'
people even have the nature of thinking we are the last step in the evolutionary ladder. that' logic' simply wouldn't exist if it weren't for human beings.
if you accept this, then you must accept the ego is an invention of the human being. the idea or concept of a 'you' in itself is a fucking creation.
and so i come back to the point, if you have to subscribe to the point that human beings are 'the most amazing things in the universe' then i say fuck you. you as the 'individual' specifically.
We haven’t seen any other life get as far as we have, and the universe is on a clock.
If other life manages to do it better, great. I’m not gonna be a human supremacist. But so far, we seem like the best bet.
Maybe we’ll singularity something better into existence instead.
The question is how do you define better. Our evolution to this point was build on the paradigm of survival of the fittest. Maybe Neanderthals were way more empathetic than homo sapiens and that's why we erased them. However, I don't think human nature is bad per se. It's just that what was needed to come to this point is subjectivity dissapointing. It is, for example, biologically possible to feel like on heroin all the time. But if it were like that, our species might not have made it through colder periods, or whatnot. Or at least the ones that feel cold worse, would have mated with the partners of the ones that froze to death, because their serotonin was so high, they didn't feel that cold.
The question is, can there be a shift of the evolutionary paradigm. If, for example, we reach fully automated gay communism, maybe traits like compassion and empathy become the new paradigm and the next evolutionary stage would be a kind of super nice human (source: waking life).
As long as we have to concentrate on survival, our species in doomed to be an asshole.
i don't know about all that. i don't think the universe is necessarily on a clock, in that even if it stops there's nothing to say it doesn't start again like a new day. and i'm not sure what 'gaining mastery over itself' even means, but it sounds nice. i know that we don't treat our environment right, we don't treat other species right, and we don't even treat other members of our own species right.
Entropy’s a bitch. Everything trends towards heat death. Who knows, though? Maybe we’re a simulation and someone will hit the reset button.
As in, becomes able to use all of itself for any purpose.
You know how humans, in absence of any need for urgent survival, like to gain mastery over everything through sports, study, exercise, etc? Basically that, except on a universal scale. Mastery exercised for the sake of mastery. Full comprehension of all that was and all that will be. In other words pan-psychic godhood.