Obvious psychological projection - projecting your fearfulness on to us. The negativity bias is a defensive mechanism that we evolved because negative stakes, ie. death, are higher than positive ones.Dalek Prime wrote:Everyone feel better, now, having slain the dragon of truth? You folks are like cave people huddled around a campfire of love to keep out the bugaboos of the unknown.
Crises aside, positivity is more rational than negativity. The problem of suffering is one of immaturity. Logically, if the universe has been developing for 13.8 billion years and its Stelliferous Era is anticipated to last about a trillion years, then the universe has lived about 1% of its productive life. That makes it a relative toddler with great potential to move beyond today's problems. This is why Lacewing was talking about being excited by the possibilities.
Do we judge toddlers for behaving badly or do we understand their limitations? We are all babies on the slow road towards learning how to cooperate to mutual benefit. Like babies, we are impatient and cannot accept that some things - like evolution and civilisation - take time to develop. So we complain loudly - like babies do - when we don't get our way.
Yes, everything is flawed. What did you expect? Is there another time in history aside from last century that you'd want to live in? Progress is not perfectly linear - sometimes there are backward steps, as is happening today. People assume that the temporary backward stage we are going through is reflective of the whole. Nope. You and yours might have no future, but humanity itself will most likely continue to thrive.
We aren't parasites, we are the biosphere reshaping itself. It is clearly undergoing undergoing metamorphosis. Just as tadpoles lose structures, whose material is used to make new ones, so does the biosphere. It's done it plenty of times before.Dubious wrote:To me the human race literally started off as a localized cancer that went into metastasis and infected the entire organism which hosts it. Cancer has always been preeminent in its power to overcome and even destroy the things that would cure it.
Again this is negativity bias blinding us to the obvious. A parasite reduces and kills off larger systems, reducing them to retrograde, simpler ones. Metamorphosis involves replacing simpler structures with more complex ones better adapted for the new life.
Just because we think that nature is beautiful doesn't mean that nature itself is enjoying the show - the suffering of wild animals is beyond belief. We might wax romantic about nature as a lion tears the guts out of antelope, but the whole affair obviously hurts like hell. So I figure that humanity is, no doubt amongst other things, an expression of the biosphere's mindless drive to survive and avoid suffering.
Humans inflict a lot of suffering on other species (and each other at times) but we are damn good at insulating ourselves from dangers and giving ourselves long stable and peaceful stretches of life. I think that the biosphere itself has this same mindless and reflexive survival/comfort drive, which has been passed to its inhabitants.