Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumEnvironmentalism without answers: A Search for the Meaning of Life
I grew up as a committed materialist and a logical positivist - a free-thinking man dedicated to a scientific understanding of the universe around me. Although I had strong values, for well over 50 years I felt that life had no particular meaning - it just was. Life was the product of blind, impersonal forces and I considered any sense of meaning or purpose to be reification at best, and at worst, self-delusion.
When I was in my early 50s I discovered the accelerating interlocking clusterfuck of modern industrial civilization - ecological problems, climate change, overpopulation, looming energy shortages (aka Peak Oil), increasing social injustice, global economic problems - in the words of Zorba the Greek, "The full catastrophe". The more I investigated it, the more I realized that we clever (but not so wise) humans had left ourselves no way out except for the collapse of the whole enterprise. That collapse seemed more inevitable with every stone I overturned. Our determination to destroy our planet seemed to hint that, to go back to the Greeks again, we were a tragically flawed species whose self-destruction was bred in the bone.
For quite a while I took enormous self-righteous pleasure in what I viewed as my own courage - my ability to look the untimely deaths of billions of people square in the face and say, "Well hey - that's just life, ya know. Deal with it!"
But of course, down that rabbit-hole lives nothing but despair. And the thing about despair is that it inevitably robs life of every last joy. Even momentary pleasures like reading a good book or sharing a meal with friends were obviously pointless and delusional. After all, if everything is about to come to an end in universal misery anyway, why bother with anything? And all those people around me who still found delight in their humdrum little, doomed little lives? Delusional, blinded, self-absorbed, pusillanamous idiots, the lot of them!
Eventually of course that much psychic pain becomes insupportable. There were only two ways out that I could see - either take myself out by my own hand or find some way to give my life meaning despite what I knew (and still know) to be the unfortunate facts of the situation. I decided to give myself one last chance. So I started looking.
As so often happens on this sort of quest, the moment I began to look for clues I began to find them. I recognized them in the ecological novels Ishmael and The Story of B by Daniel Quinn; in the book Blessed Unrest by the environmentalist Paul Hawken; and in the philosophy of Deep Ecology.
From Quinn I learned that our species is not broken, just mistaken - we have been telling ourselves a deeply damaging cultural narrative about domination and human exceptionalism. Hawken showed me the world-wide, ever-growing, grass-roots movement that is already changing that narrative, one person at a time. But it was in the third clue - Deep Ecology - that I found my doorway out of despair.
Deep Ecology is a radical, contemporary ecological movement based on the idea that all life - human and non-human alike - has intrinsic value, independent of its usefulness to human beings. A corollary of this idea is that human life is embedded within nature, a part of it rather than apart from it - just like every other form of life on the planet. This realization of interdependence drove home the idea that we exist only by virtue of our interconnections with other life and the planet itself. And that sense of being embedded in, dependent on and responsible to something much greater than myself was the opening I had been looking for.
In retrospect, my next step seems inevitable. The context I had discovered helped me to understand the word "sacred" for the first time in my life. I began to see Life itself as sacred. In fact, the whole of existence with its infinite interconnectedness was revealed as sacred. When I saw it in that light, I finally understood that the meaning of my life flowed from the simple fact of my own existence. At last I saw myself at home with everything else - the people, animals and plants, the rock we live on, the star we orbit and the universe of which we form such an infinitesimal part.
Once I had understood the word "sacred" in that sense, the next question I asked myself was why I saw things that way. What gave rise to the pain and the wonder, the searching and the answers? Asking that question dropped me instantly and squarely on the doorstep of consciousness itself. I have become convinced that there is something fundamentally sacred about the plain fact of consciousness, something so intrinsically important to the fabric of the universe that it must be honoured in every respect.
Nestled in that simple, profound, mundane yet transcendent quality lies the meaning of life, the universe and everything.
Note to hosts and juries: it's my own piece.
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napoleon_in_rags
(3,991 posts)Good line in a good piece.
I have this thought experiment, which asks, if your brain were instantaneously transported from your head and transplanted with a brain identical down to the molecular detail, would you be dead? If you answer yes, what if it was done piece by piece? Is there a certain part of your brain that makes consciousness? a single particle in there? (how does that particle interact with every part of the brain?) Or is spread out? If so, if HALF your brain were replaced by a copy perfect to the molecular detail, would you be half conscious of your experience, with another person (that has all your same memories) experiencing the other half?
Most people who think this thing through come to the conclusion that thoughts/consciousness, must be like software on a computer: They run on the hardware of the brain, but with indifference to the individual hardware. But if that's true, it means consciousness is information. The lens through which we see the material world isn't itself really material, and neither is our consciousness. That's a weird thought.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Is that they show how hard it is to come up with good analogies for consciousness.
To create useful analogies we have to start by truly understanding whatever we are analogizing. The uncomfortable truth is that we don't have a shred of a clue about consciousness - not about where it comes from, not what supports or directs it, and especially not what it is.
We know a fair bit about the brain that consciousness appears to play out "in" (or in association with). We know that if we mess with the brain we can alter consciousness, for instance, but that's like saying that we know which circuits to mess with in a television set (brain) to distort the program (consciousness) it happens to be playing. That analogy casts precious little light on the acting, lighting, script-writing and directing that created the program, nor about the transmission technology that caused the program to appear "in" the TV.
As far as I can tell, that's pretty much the state we're at with consciousness. We know that pushing this button turns the program off, and pushing that one makes it come back on (if we're a bit lucky). Beyond that, it's essentially a black hole. I agree that consciousness is probably "pure information" in some sense, but that doesn't really get us much closer to an answer, does it?
In Arthur C. Clarke's words, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." When it comes to understanding consciousness we're still shaking feathered rattles at the sky.
I love the fact that the universe has kept such a fundamental secret from us. Part of me hopes we never crack the mystery.
wtmusic
(39,166 posts)between accepting consciousness as a symbol of the value of life and Deep Ecology, which sees all life (even non-conscious forms) as sacred.
How do you reconcile that?
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)I don't think there is such a thing as "non-conscious life" - that idea is an anthropocentric mistake. From that point of view, consciousness is not simply a symbol of the value of life. Consciousness IS the value of life.
Odin2005
(53,521 posts)Nobody really understands what consciousness IS, and if they claim they do they are either lying or fooling themselves. Both the epiphenomenalists who try to dismiss it as irreverent and the dualists who insist that it is proof of an incorporeal soul are both arrogant and simply wrong.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)What has convinced you they're both "simply wrong", and what do you see as the right view?
Recently I've been exploring the truism that for any given mental construct, our level of certainty is composed of our level of direct knowledge plus our level of belief. For example if we wish to be (or are) 100% certain about something, but our direct knowledge is limited to 20%, then 80% of our certainty must come from our beliefs. If our direct knowledge makes us 80% certain about it, we need correspondingly less belief to become absolutely certain.
Beliefs come with no guarantee of truth, of course, so the only way to reduce the amount of unsupportable belief in our world-view is to either increase our level of direct knowledge or become satisfied with being less than certain about anything. Achieving that shift implies cultivating a great deal of agnosticism about the way things really are. I now enjoy the feeling of "not knowing", but it took work.
To bring this back to the board's mandate, this relates to how we think the whole eco/civ predicament we're in might play out in the future. There is no way to be certain, and the only way to approach certainty is to let a whole lot of belief creep in. It was shocking to me to realize how many of my previous rock-solid convictions were nothing but beliefs.
Nederland
(9,976 posts)Consciousness is merely a word, and like all words, it means whatever we define it to mean. Certainly different people might define the word differently, and that creates all sorts of problems when we talk, but that is simply a semantic problem. They way you describe it, you make it seems as though consciousness is some sort of Platonic form that we need to discover the true nature of. That idea seems a bit quaint, don't you think?
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)It's a mystery, for sure, but there are many ways of relating to mystery. Reducing a mystery to an absolute is just one of them. However, stripping away the possibility that a mystery might represent something absolute - especially at this late point in human intellectual development - might also close off avenues of exploration. Until we know a bit more about it, it might pay to keep all our options open, even if some of them make us uncomfortable.
I'm fairly sure that anesthesiologists (to pick one positivist example) wouldn't consider understanding the true nature of consciousness a "quaint" pursuit.
Shankapotomus
(4,840 posts)is the ability to react to external stimuli. And awareness itself is an evolved variant of physical reaction. It is also, obviously, intimately related to the sense of touch. A trees leaves can react to the sun's rays, albeit slowly, by bending in its direction. The vibration of our eardrum is a physical reaction to external stimuli. Visual stimuli is light physically entering our eye. (though one can argue nothing touches anything). How we go from physical reactions to purely psychic ones and then actual awareness I have no clue but I think they are related.
napoleon_in_rags
(3,991 posts)It makes sense having one system respond to another as if they are one, I mean you can have a machine do that. Also, I can imagine a "modelling" machine that tries to build a model of the world to predict what will happen when an action is taken. But is that machine conscious? Its a totally intangible phenomenon.
Shankapotomus
(4,840 posts)just reacting to everything and it only appears to us that we are conscious? Iow, awareness itself is a reaction to mental stimuli which is itself a reaction to physical stimuli. And the mental stimuli gives us the appearance of autonomous direction of focus and thought??? Ok my head is spinning and I'm not sure I'm even making sense.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Last edited Sat Feb 4, 2012, 09:21 PM - Edit history (1)
It seems to me that's the moment when consciousness enters the system. Complex stimulus/rersponse patterns can give the appearance of conscious behaviour to an outside observer (i.e. the system can pass the Turing test). But self-awareness can't be simulated.
patrice
(47,992 posts)Sat nam!
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)I've begun to wonder if the foundational "givens" for the existence of this multiverse just might be space, time, matter, energy and consciousness. There's no way to tell of course, but it's an interesting thought.
patrice
(47,992 posts)because that turns our attention to the physical mechanisms and processes, ALL of them, that result in awareness, which brings us to *B*E*I*N*G* aware that there are various kinds of awareness.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Awareness/consciousness is a very finely split semantic hair. My inability to split it is one reason I'm not a teacher.
patrice
(47,992 posts)not classify as "consciousness", so if there are events in the structures that produce consciousness, but those events aren't consciousness, how shall we refer to those events? There are many events/reactions "in" the organism, SOME of the products of which we refer to as "consciousness".
The relationships are not 1:1, reality in:consciousness out, there are structural traits like "cognitive consolidation", stimuli thresholds and things such as neural summation, especially in the class of outcomes that we refer to as perception, not to mention the fact that there are also variations in consciousness itself that we refer to as altered states of consciousness.
And all of that is just for starters . . .
XemaSab
(60,212 posts)and studying for a test so I can't give this full consideration this second.
I disagree with your singling out of consciousness.
What is consciousness but an emergent property from a long chemical reaction?
If butterflies and redwood trees don't have consciousness but one is able to complete a multigenerational migration that takes an individual animal back to the grove that its great-great grandparent left from, and if the other one is not only effectively immortal but weeps when its comrades are cut down, then are those not also special emergent properties from chemical reactions so very like our own?
i think defining consciousness as a special property that should take consideration above other properties smacks of anthropocentrism.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)The simple fact that I experience consciousness doesn't make it anthropocentric. I also experience feet, right?
I know that my dog is conscious, for example, so where does the scale stop sliding? I'm of the opinion that all life shares in consciousness. We are aware of it most strongly as a human trait simply because we can communicate about it symbolically. That doesn't mean we are its only repository.
The assumption that we are the only vessel for consciousness is the fundamental anthropocentric mistake, but I don't share that view. If pressed, I'll own up to some fairly esoteric speculations about the reason for the existence of consciousness in the first place, and the possibility that the entire universe - living or not - is permeated with the stuff.
OKIsItJustMe
(19,938 posts)Years ago, when seeking for a handle on intelligence, I decided that one of the hallmarks of intelligence was the ability of an individual to willfully control its own behaviors.
So, for example, twitching your leg when it is struck with a hammer is not intelligent/conscious behavior.
On the other hand, your Dog comforting you when you are in a funk is conscious behavior.
Following your sliding scale, greater consciousness implies greater “sacred worth.” While your dog is conscious, it is probably less conscious than you. Both of you have “sacred worth,” but your dog has less.
A sunflower, bending to follow the Sun is not exhibiting a conscious behavior. However, even though it may not be conscious, as a living thing, I believe it still has some “sacred worth.”
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)I think they are utterly distinct, but "consciousness" is one of those slippery words that's hard to pin a single definition onto.
Even if one were to assign the quality of consciousness only to complex animal life, the idea of a sliding scale of sacred value is difficult for me to accept. That would mean that a person who is less conscious than you has less worth than you. I can't go there.
I'm suppose I'm an absolutist when it comes to consciousness - I see it everywhere, and see it all as sacred. I don't see a sliding scale of consciousness per se, I see a sliding scale of its expression in forms that we can recognize as such. Yes, that's hair-splitting, but for me it simplifies the picture. Intelligence seems quite different - it's obviously variable, emergent from neural functioning (in the forms we've encountered so far), and more amenable to relativistic value rankings if one is inclined to do such things.
OKIsItJustMe
(19,938 posts)What do your instincts tell you? Is your dog of more sacred worth than a houseplant? Is your dog of more worth than a rock?
If you had the option of saving either your dog or a houseplant (but not both) from some calamity, which would you save?
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)They have the same intrinsic value, but attachment doesn't much care about that.
Take the same situation but substitute two of your children - one very smart but emotionally cold, the other less intelligent but more loving. Which one would you rescue? Notions of "sacred worth" aren't always helpful.
OKIsItJustMe
(19,938 posts)Let us say that you have a prized possession (a painting perhaps) given the choice of saving it, or saving your dog, which would you save?
This may not determine “sacred worth” but it certainly speaks to what you value.
Would you save an inanimate object from a fire instead of a conscious being which would suffer in the fire?
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Of course that assumes that Republicans might be conscious beings...
To be more serious for a moment,
The idea that things might have intrinsic "sacred worth" doesn't prevent us from giving them a value that springs from other roots. For me the idea that something has sacred worth serves as a reminder to be mindful in my relationship with it, whether "it" is a rock, a river, a plant, an animal or another human being. What I do with that mindful relationship then answers to other forces. All life needs to eat, for example.
OKIsItJustMe
(19,938 posts)GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)The first bolded phrase about the coexistence of everything with Buddha-nature is approximately what I mean when I say I see the entire universe as conscious. I only say "approximately" because I'm a little more radical than Chao-chou. I think the universe recognizes its own Buddha-nature because of the evidence I've seen for the "cosmic joke" - the universe laughing at itself.
When I inquire into my own process, I notice that my recognition of the coexistence of everything with Buddha-nature, and my awakening to my own Buddha-nature, were/are interdependent. The more I become aware of one, the more I become aware of the other. Because my discovery of Deep Ecology predated my own awakening I'm inclined to say it was a precipitating factor, but that's probably just another pesky temporal illusion.
Edited to add: By sheer coincidence (?) my dog's name is Buddha. There's that cosmic joke again.
Second addition: This has been a phenomenal thread. My deepest thanks to everyone who participated or lurked.
OKIsItJustMe
(19,938 posts)[font size=3][font size="1"]4[/font]There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, [font size="1"]5[/font]one Lord, one faith, one baptism, [font size="1"]6[/font]one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.[/font][/font]
Or… what Obi-wan Kenobi calls “The Force”
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076759/quotes?qt0440668
Or… what Oprah Winfrey allegedly calls “Duct Tape”
http://thinkexist.com/quotation/duct_tape_is_like_the_force-it_has_a_light_side-a/217542.html
patrice
(47,992 posts)e it, which are traits of the multi-verse itself.
bananas
(27,509 posts)
villager
(26,001 posts)...to quote the title of a Gary Snyder book.
Thanks for this, GG. I was a Deep Ecologist myself -- or rather, still am, in middle age, but seemed to be more of a practicing one, in my earlier years.
Now I'm divorced, living in a big city with a shitty transportation system and bad car-centric planning, which will make things... interesting, when the collapse comes (or comes more fully).
I'm still here because I'm raising two boys, in conjunction with their mother. A handful of years until the nest is empty...
I keep thinking I need to re-wild myself, however...
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)through less rational means. Welcome to consciousness. For each of us it is a little different.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)It sure feels like there are some big-ass clues rattling around in that sentence.
Have you noticed that as the clusterfuck gets uglier, more people seem to be waking up? Each in their own way.
OKIsItJustMe
(19,938 posts)I think that because of your recent personal revelation, you’ve simply become more aware of others.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)OKIsItJustMe
(19,938 posts)In High School, I found that repeatedly, in a crowd situation (like a party) I would single out, and have a “deep conversation” with someone, and their reaction was generally, “Wow! You are three-dimensional too!” (unlike the rest of “the crowd.”)
It wasn’t long before the coincidence started weighing on me. How was it that I kept encountering these special individuals? Were we drawn to each other by some sort of ESP? Were we driven together by our mutual repulsion from the crowd?
I eventually came to the conclusion that I simply had never invested the time it takes to get to know all of the individuals in “the crowd.”
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)There's a lot of room in this whole "waking up" business for misinterpretation, reification, teleology and ego. It can feel like trying to grab a fish in water a lot of the time.
txlibdem
(6,183 posts)Or is there a second path, one that comes from the frustration and despair that comes with knowing that we are indeed killing this planet, a realization that only by developing new technologies like solar and wind and energy storage and electric vehicles can we avoid the inevitable environmental collapse that we are seeing the very beginnings of (weather phenomena that none of us have seen in our lifetimes happening several times per year, etc).
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)"The system" is too big to survive long enough to permit a rational restructuring, no matter how good or conscious our intentions are.
The fact that we are now seeing the beginnings of system perturbations in multiple domains - climate, global economics and ocean health being good examples - means that it's already too late. The hysteresis of these systems is so large that the signals of disease take too long to work their way through the inertia. By the time we see them, it's game over.
It is game over for these systems in their current forms. The forms that they will take as they restructure themselves will be more or less beyond our control. We will adapt, but we cannot preserve.
I know that doesn't sit well with you, and I'm truly sorry. I wish I could believe it will be otherwise. The facts I've seen don't leave me any room for that kind of belief, though.
randr
(12,412 posts)The survival of our species is dependent on understanding the sacredness of the conscious mind.
Excellent post!
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)More and more concerned, compassionate thinkers are coming to exactly the same conclusion.
A lot of people are uncomfortable with their frank observations identifying consciousness, sacredness and the principle of Oneness as the most important tools with which to address collapse. It sounds a bit too ... um ... "woo" for most hard-nosed activists.
I've been convinced for the last 5 years that they are right, though.
Thanks.
hunter
(38,318 posts)It's broken. A very bad accident in the great white north american puritan eugenics lab.
I think the only reason I'm not dead is the Irish. At least a few times I had ancestors who followed their hearts and rejected the White Protestant Calvinist Fascist Mormon Nazi better-breed-of-human dog nonsense to run away to the wilderness and fuck 'cause it's fun and have lots of kids kind of Romanticism.
My baseline consciousness is run-down-the-street-half-naked-with-bleeding-feet-in-the-middle-of-the-night-homeless-crazy-person.
My baseline consciousness is the sort that gets kicked out of university twice and fights like hell to get readmitted simply so it can get back into the library and computer labs, even though it smells funny and always wears the same weird clothes.
And the night manager at Taco Bell, bless her heart, will give me the food they are supposed to throw away.
I've been riding the same bicycle for forty years, driving the same truck for twenty-five years. At home on the internet since 1979. I have no idea if these are good or bad.
My sense of "sacred of the earth" has to be entirely unconscious, like XemaSab's butterflies and trees, with a heavy dose of outside-of-self Catholic or Buddhist meditation. And that's the way it has to be. My consciousness can only fuck things up. It is not sacred. I'm at my best when I exclude consciousness -- when I can just be.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)But you don't sound very broken to me.
Somebody important once said something to the effect that being well adjusted to an insane system is not a sign of good mental health. And somebody else said that the only difference between an unenlightened man and an enlightened man is that the unenlightened man thinks there's a difference.
What would happen if you tried a different definition for the word "consciousness"?
hunter
(38,318 posts)
I enjoyed your OP.
When I go out of my head, leave my intellectual self, it's because I have to.
Otherwise I don't sleep at night.
patrice
(47,992 posts)acquires so much inertia that I have trouble stopping it.
Mantras help me greatly.
MindMover
(5,016 posts)as in quantum physics, this simplicity became more apparent when listening to others realities.....
being a clinical psychologist affords me that confidential time which further supports these quarkial interpretations .....
humanity tends to obfuscate for many reasons......and in this confusion lies many a wasted soul......
for me the personified brilliance of universal communication such as Holst's Planets becomes a key to universal understanding.....
hence my undying confidence in the human condition.....
no catastrophe.....
Just simply enormous potential and CHANGE........
Odin2005
(53,521 posts)I'm a Technogaian Transhumanist.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)That's not terribly surprising. With 7 billion people on the planet, each with a unique world-view, the amazing thing is that any of us agree on much of anything.
It's always interesting to find out how others arrive at different responses to similar situations. I've noticed that there are areas where you and I seem to agree, and others where we are almost diametrically opposed. There are always opportunities for personal growth in that situation.
ellisonz
(27,711 posts)"We need a little more compassion, and if we cannot have it then no politician or even a magician can save the planet." - The Dalai Lama
Response to GliderGuider (Original post)
Shankapotomus This message was self-deleted by its author.
fitzangus
(2 posts)John Von Neumann argued that the entire physical world is quantum mechanical, so the process that collapses the wave functions into actual facts cannot be a physical process; instead, the intervention of something from outside of physics is required. Something nonphysical, not subject to the laws of quantum mechanics, must account for the collapse of the wave function: Von Numann concluded that this outside entity had to be consciousness
In the Buddhist view, however, no such permanent, unchanging self can be found. Instead, our ever-changing mental and physical processes are likened to a stream that arises, flows, and passes away depending upon nothing but the various conditions that create and sustain it. The processes which constitute human existence are categorized into five groups, which the Buddha called the "aggregates of grasping" (upadana-khandha) since we tend to identify with and grasp onto them as our "self." These are the aggregates of form, feeling, apperception, karmic formations or volitions, and cognitive awareness or consciousness (rupa, vedana, sañña, sankhara, viññaa).
What is often referred to as the unconscious is the ground of what we call the conscious mind. In the Yogcara school of Buddhism sometimes called the mind only school there is a concept delineated as the Alaya Vignana, or storehouse consciousness. Material reality as we experience it is the processes of cognition and our physical brain transmitting and receiving consciousness. So the argument is that the brain for instance is not the producer of consciousness but a transmitter and limiter of mind in order that we can function as an individual.
However, our real reality is in fact the ocean not the waves. This all follows naturally that a Buddhist doctrine of interdependent origination.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)He's joined by a number of other luminaries from the world of physics who seem to think that consciousness has a fundamental role in the structure of observed reality, at least at the quantum level. Wolfgang Pauli, Eugene Wigner, Frijtof Capra, and David Bohm for example, all apparently stake out positions that QM is incomplete if we do not consider the role of consciousness (and of course any misinterpretation of their positions is entirely my own).
The problem I have with a strict Buddhist interpretation as you describe it is not that it may be wrong, but that in the absence of a fundamental understanding of consciousness, it is only one possible interpretation out of many. Of course, Buddhists have been explicitly studying the nature of consciousness longer than any other group on the planet, so I'm inclined to give their conclusions a fair bit of credence. However, to state that consciousness "is" this or that, and "is not" that or this - seems a little dogmatic.
Holding space for the mystery to resolve itself in its own time and according to its own nature, while playing enthusiastically with the possibilities in the meantime, is the most attractive approach to me.
Edited to add: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind%E2%80%93body_problem
txlibdem
(6,183 posts)One way we continue to treat the planet as a garbage receptacle and we will eventually die, all of us, humans, plants, animals, to be replaced by simpler species that can thrive in the hell that we have created on Earth with our chemicals polluting the air, lands and waters. The other way is to continue our scientific and technological development in a responsible way, free of the anchors of special interests, until we emerge as a species that does not rely on the destruction of our environment to maintain a safe and comfortable lifestyle, a lifestyle that frees us to seek the truths in the Universe that are still waiting to be discovered.
No person who grubs in the dirt for subsistence will be able to come up with E=MC2. Likewise, we cannot go back to a small number of humans and simpler lives that cause little disruption to the ecosystem. Every plant one eats, every varmint one skewers for tonight's meal, every fish taken from the water IS changing the environment in ways that we cannot foresee. There is no going backwards; only by going forward with technology and further understanding of the actual Universe (the 13 dimensional one) and how we can better use the laws of said Universe to our benefit will we be able to break the cycle of needing to dig into the ground to obtain the elements we need, to break free of the need to grow and consume plants for sustenance, to end the desire to kill animals to eat.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)We first have to agree that there is something here besides human life that's worth saving. That's a tough debate in this political/economic climate.
Once we come to an agreement on that we can go on to argue about the details of tech vs. rewilding, nukes vs. wind or any of the other minor debates we embroider our days with around here.
You and I may disagree on the value of technology, but when it comes to the need to preserve other life besides just our own I suspect we're on exactly the same page.
txlibdem
(6,183 posts)You are absolutely right. All life is important and should be protected. Without the wonders of nature we are lessened as a species. We may be able to live in dome cities and eat a genetically engineered algae paste that will keep us alive... but what's the point in living like that? We both seem to agree that our current ignorant use of technology has caused global problems and will continue to do so until we change our ways. I strongly believe that we are very close to having the technology to stop and reverse the damage, rewild the areas that need to be left wild, reforest the places that need to be forest. All we currently lack is the will (and control of our government) to do so.
