Comment on Capitalism is an unrealistic death cult.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 6 days agothe great filter
The problem with “Great Filter” Theory is that we have yet to identify even non-intelligent life outside of Earth.
It’s one thing to say intelligence is self-terminating. Or, at least, incapable of sustained extra-terrestrial expansion. It’s quite another to say every other observable planet in the galaxy must have already experienced intelligent life and wiped itself out before we started looking.
Far more likely that we’re in a Dark Forest than a Great Filter. Or, at a minimum, that we are unable to identify extraterrestrial life because we haven’t figured out how to spot it at such a large distance.
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
I don’t think there’s a conclusion that’s “far more likely” than other; multiple explanations explain the data equally well.
My preference for the great filter is just based on my pessimism on how not only power works, but how the human mind works. Since life is everywhere and always competitive, short-term survival is what life will always be programmed for; and beyond biology, we have systems. Greedy systems–systems that seek power at the expense of everything else–will be advantaged over systems that seek equilibrium.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Humans, in small enough numbers (ie, Dunbar’s Number), play reasonably well together for extended periods of time. Environmental limitations and other social resource limits can cause conflicts. But humans have presented a fairly advanced skillset for mitigating violence between larger communities, equitably sharing resources across areas as large as continents, and both budgeting limited resources over time as well as expanding the accessible volume with advances in technology.
The human mind takes a lot of undeserved shit. But I’m in a room with dozens of other people right now. None of them are trying to crack my head open with a rock and feast on the delicious goo inside.
I don’t know how you look at a modern day metropolis and see a system that has failed to achieve some high level of equilibrium.
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
I didn’t get into my problems with the way the mind works, but the root of it is the mind prefers comfort to truth. That’s how we get the just world fallacy. And you’ll also see how people oppressed by systems are often the ones who defend it the most fiercely.
I do like cities, and they are, on the whole, remarkably stable. I will consider this.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Everything has its limits, and you need to burn a lot of calories to hunt for Big-T Truths. So people spend some of their time in introspection, but they don’t explore forever. Eventually, they want to exploit their understanding to some benefit.
This is an experiment that’s played out iteratively across billions of people and thousands of generations. Minds aren’t static or perfectly elastic, they do amazing work over a 20-40 year period, and then they fall into a more stable pattern of survival and preservation.
Individuals don’t all value abstract notions of justices equally highly. And systems of oppression tend to be layered. Also, the same guy who vocally defends the System of Oppression when he’s getting the Good News on TV will decide actually, he hates oppression, and wants it overthrown when the TV (or his boss or his credit card company) tells him the Bad News instead.
But, even more broadly, when you go looking for the Big Truths, sometimes you don’t find Liberal Progressive Egalitarianism. Sometimes you find an enduring history of bigotry and a real material advantage to exploitation and a certain cosmic understanding of your own insignificance that washes away personal guilt for global phenomena.
Sometimes you need to be a bit naive, delusional, and straight up stupid to do the Right Thing or to blaze a trail into the wilderness or to go down a rabbit hole of scientific inquiry that - 9 times out of 10 - wastes a career when it terminates at a dead end.
Sometimes you’re playing a very strategic game of chess on a board that stretches to infinity. And other times, you’re just one of the rungs on a Plinko board that other people are bouncing off of. And that’s not a consequence of the human mind or the nature of evolution or reality, beyond the simple fact that we’re not Gods. We have a certain limited scope of action and opportunity, a certain limited amount of information to act on, and thousands - perhaps millions or billions - of years to experiment iteratively through the generations.