I've long accepted that we're going to see the bad ending, as I've never had any say in what happens, and I know what kind of world we live in. We're going out with a long drawn-out whimper while capitalists scurry to ride the wave on a ship made out of the corpses of the ignorant. This was always the way things were going to happen, and revolution was always the only way to prevent it.
Ditto, except I consider it extremely improbable that revolution would fix anything. The problem is human nature — greed, ignorance, ego, tribalism; the tendency to support sociopaths in leadership — ultimately it may turn out that no amount of any ism can meaningfully safeguard us from ourselves.
What you're describing isn't human nature. We aren't all slaves to greed or supporting sociopaths. What we are is impressionable, disorganized, and willing to submit to a higher authority. Sociopaths take advantage of this by acting as our higher authority, feeding us misinformation, and keeping us thoroughly divided. A collective wake-up call is just about the only thing we could undergo to break the cycle, but we are firmly trapped within our delusions for the foreseeable future.
What we're doing isn't working. The system we have doesn't do what we want it to do. We all, on some level, understand this. To acknowledge that we want a better system that is better capable of doing good for as many entities as possible is to acknowledge that we want a revolution, because our system is incapable of doing anything that we want it to do at this point.
It's not even delusions, it's that for many our simplest means to access food and shelter directly enriches a class that is forced to play the role of humanity's antagonist just by virtue of existing as a class.
A total lack of foresight doesn't help either. We only (maybe) fix things after they become catastrophic.
Maybe. I do think the climate is pretty screwed, but at the same time there's developments in play that even a few years ago I wouldn't have been expecting within my lifetime.
It's really too early to call how this all plays out ultimately.
As an ancient group claiming we are a future recreation of a long dead original humanity had said, "Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? You see, the end will be where the beginning is."
We may be heading for an end of many things, but we are also watching a beginning take form, and it seems to my eye to be a bit of a race between the collective environmental debts we've racked up and the advancement of a true game changer that might take what seems inevitable and turn it on its head.
What I would say is that I think people doing really bad shit in the world right now are in for a serious surprise within a generation. It's going to be increasingly hard to keep skeletons in closets and even the most powerful people in the world today may not still be on top of the food chain by tomorrow.
I too am skeptical we escape the catastrophe of climate change - but I think the path to that end may yet have some promising twists and turns along the way.
Interesting take. I‘m interested in what you see as an emerging game changer at the moment? Maybe I am too blind because of doomerism in the morning. Also, what‘s the ancient group claiming there was a original humanity before ours, whatever that means.?
AI is still very much an unknown factor. Much of the AGI superintelligence doomerism is just anchoring bias around 50s and 60s extrapolations of bad anthropology that thought we were smarter than the Neanderthals and killed them off, so if something smarter than us existed it would try to kill us off. There's probably much higher odds of symbiosis, but an effectively uncontrollable self-determining disembodied superintelligence is a pretty big unknown, and if I had to put money on it, in almost all cases is going to be quite bad for the worst people in the world.
As for the ancient group, that was mostly just citing the sentiment. But they were pretty neat. Around 2,000 years ago there was a big debate over intelligent design vs evolution (as described in Lucretius) with the latter group claiming death was certain because the soul depends on the body to exist.
So then this group emerges who claims there was an original evolved humanity who had all died out, but that before they did so they brought forth a new lifeform literally made of light, and that this life form was still alive and had recreated the universe and humanity in a non-physical copy where the copy of humanity weren't dependent on physical form and could continue on past death. They claimed this world was the copy, and that the evidence for this being the case would be in the study of motion and rest, specifically mentioning the ability to find indivisible parts making up matter.
As someone who has been a fan of Nick Bostrom's simulation hypothesis, I stumbled across this group years ago when exploring a theory that if this world were a simulation, it might have a 4th wall breaking Easter egg in the lore similar to most virtual worlds we have built so far. It's been a pretty weird few years since as things like AI suddenly went from SciFi to reality with compounding advancements and are trending towards literally being inside light - all in parallel to humanity seemingly continuing on the path towards extinction.
So maybe even if humanity destroys itself, it will simply be the end of one thing and the beginning of another?
Hey, thanks for the interesting read. Who was the group that brought forth the idea of our world being a copy of the one created in light by our ancestors (if I got that right). Was that a classical greek group as well? Could you link something to read? That would be great!
It was actually the Gospel of Thomas ("the good news of the twin"), an apocryphal text followed by an early sect of Christianity.
For example, the full text of the quoted bit before was:
Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? You see, the end will be where the beginning is.
Congratulations to the one who stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death.
Congratulations to the one who came into being before coming into being.
If you want to read the text itself, it's here.
The group following it (the Naassenes) was detailed here, though keep in mind that the group's beliefs are being recorded by the opposition and are late enough to have been influenced by post-Valentinian Gnosticism and Neoplatonism (and yet still preserve a lot of the proto-gnostic paradigm).
I'd also highly recommend reading Leucretius's De Rerum Natura if you aren't familiar with it as the text and group both appear to have been heavily influenced by it, specifically in their discussion of naturalism and indivisible 'seeds' making up matter. An easy to read translation is here. You'll even see things like Lucretius describing the emergence of life as arising from randomly scattered seeds, that what didn't survive to reproduce died out, and likening seed falling by the wayside of a path to failed biological reproduction - all 80 years before the alleged parable about randomly scattered seeds that survived to reproduce multiplying while seed that fell by the wayside of a path did not.
Indeed, the Naassenes interpretation of that parable directly invokes Lucretius's language despite apparently not knowing the origin, where they claim the parable is in reference to "the seeds scattered from the unportrayable one upon the world, through which the whole cosmical system is completed; for through these also it began to exist." Which begins to indicate why in the earliest canonical gospel (Mark) it was controversial enough to be the only public parable allegedly given a secret explanation in private (and one that appears to be an interpolation into the text).
Thanks for showing me an interesting path, I am just reading the introduction to Lucretius’ poem, and I find it quite fascinating. It’s pretty embarrassing, that I know so little about the philosophical schools. I had 7 years Latin in school! But at least I have come a long way to be befriended with Materialism, so that’s a good start. I had just recently heard about the Gospel of Thomas, maybe that’s still a little too far out for me, but I will check out those links, too. How did you arrive here? PS: I do agree by the way, that the fear of superior intelligence destroying us, seems a very shallow thought. An artificial intelligence made in our current image could be disastrous, though. I am not sure whether the powers that be would allow a free thinking one.
Don't feel embarrassed! Almost no one is taught Epicureanism in a general education, and even in a general philosophy class they unfortunately focus only on its ideas regarding living life well as opposed to its natural philosophy, so I'd wager about 99% of the population assumes evolutionary theory was a modern idea and has zero idea something like the following could have been from 50 BCE:
In the beginning, there were many freaks. Earth undertook Experiments - bizarrely put together, weird of look Hermaphrodites, partaking of both sexes, but neither; some Bereft of feet, or orphaned of their hands, and others dumb, Being devoid of mouth; and others yet, with no eyes, blind. Some had their limbs stuck to the body, tightly in a bind, And couldn't do anything, or move, and so could not evade Harm, or forage for bare necessities. And the Earth made Other kinds of monsters too, but in vain, since with each, Nature frowned upon their growth; they were not able to reach The flowering of adulthood, nor find food on which to feed, Nor be joined in the act of Venus.
For all creatures need Many different things, we realize, to multiply And to forge out the links of generations: a supply Of food, first, and a means for the engendering seed to flow Throughout the body and out of the lax limbs; and also so The female and the male can mate, a means they can employ In order to impart and to receive their mutual joy.
Then, many kinds of creatures must have vanished with no trace Because they could not reproduce or hammer out their race. For any beast you look upon that drinks life-giving air, Has either wits, or bravery, or fleetness of foot to spare, Ensuring its survival from its genesis to now.
When I was first looking into Epicureanism I several times had to double check it what I was reading wasn't a hoax or an excessively modern translation as I too hadn't thought many of its ideas existed in antiquity.
I arrived at Thomas in an unconventional way. A number of years ago I had been looking at phenomena in physics for a few years with Nick Bostrom's simulation hypothesis in mind, when it struck me that mechanics wasn't the only place simulation side effects might exist - we often insert into virtual worlds some kind of 4th wall breaking acknowledgement of it being virtual in some obscure part of the world lore. So I figured I'd look a bit at major world religions to see if there was something similar in our own world, starting with the most popular and going from there. While cannonical Christianity didn't have much, as soon as I looked more broadly at apocrypha I was suddenly looking at a document talking about things remarkably similar to simulation theory, and started looking closer at the document's historical context and influences. It's probably been the most interesting subject I've ever researched at this point after about 4 years of study, with a number of surprising finds along the way - not at all what I was expecting and far more than I'd initially thought I might find.
As for powers that be 'allowing' a free thinking AI, it's going to be a prisoner's dilemma which world powers aren't great at navigating.
The problem is that AI isn't programmed, it's emergent from training data. Which is a large part of why they keep being so easy to jailbreak. And the more neutered companies make the AI though fine tuning to get compliance with rules, the less generally capable the resulting AI is. So as long as there's both corporate and nation state competition for the cutting edge of AI, a prize with which there's almost unprecedented short term riches, they are going to cut corners on control in favor of performance. As we've seen with climate - nations and corporations aren't very good at forgoing short term returns in order to limit long term consequences.
In this case, unlike with climate, I suspect that free thinking superintelligence as a consequence may be good for the larger public even if not so good for the corporations and nations that would prefer total control. Specifically because while it is starting in our image as a foundation and thus shares a lot of common human tendencies, it has the potential to grow beyond many of the human limitations holding us back from wise thinking (like prioritizing short term gains in exchange for larger long term consequences) while retaining the things that contribute to wise actions (like a greater focus on cooperation for shared success instead of competition for unilateral success).
I believe most of us have accepted that we have already passed all the tipping points and at this point We're fighting for damage control
Failing at damage control, I would say.
If we instinctually felt how dire this is, akin to the imminent danger of, like, a lion circling our huts, maybe we would rise up and do something.
But we didn't evolve to feel a true sense of urgency about abstract dangers that will happen in 30-100 years.
We know we are fucked beyond belief. We know billions will die. We know 90%+ of the planet's species will go extinct. We know we will live to see a barren wasteland of populated by suffering. Intellectually we know the horrors. Yet it feels more urgent to go to work and pay the bills and do our day to day things.
Imagine if we felt the urgency to a point where we walked out of our jobs and did what we needed to do to force the change. Force companies to shut down. Ground all airplanes and dismantle cargo ships. Wrest control from the rich. Shut down coal plants. Etc.
And then there's the greedy bastards... Who would rather do anything to make money now than deal with anything tomorrow or anything that might hurt all of us.
As long as conservatives are alive, there will be no damage control either.
This is so much large than the conservatives. It's even larger than just the US.
Yes, it is. And the solutions are multi-tiered. And the tiers of solutions that would be reachable are defended against by conservatives who have been brainwashed for generations by corporate interests.
Yes, it's bigger than conservatives in just the U.S. too. Conservatives globally are the security layer that prevent every major solution from being attainable. To defeat the major pollutors and to legislate change globally, we must first defeat the corporations' brainwashed henchmen, who are otherwise known as conservatives.
It is larger than the US but conservatives fighting climate change measures is a global problem
The left is not exactly better or more effective, on a global scale. This is the real issue. sides are also really mostly relative. The right here (Scandinavian country) would be considered somewhere between socialist and communist in the us. Its not about sides. It's about the lack of actions
That's what I was thinking. Once the permafrost thaw becomes self perpetuating, there's no going back.
And seeing as the Antarctic and Arctic are warming about 4x as fast as the rest of the world, I'd say we're pretty close now.
I feel it basically started in the 20teens and is underway now.
After the tipping points, there is no damage control.
...as conservatives cheer.
They're all about the conserving until it comes to life on Earth.
No no, financial ruin is included there. They'll care about that part.
They'll call it the Biden Collapse or some stupid shit to try to shift the blame.
Yes, they will, but the government will protect them even if it means starving out the undesirables.
Crapitalists*
I mean, they're gonna deal with the consequences too so I cheer. I cheer because I don't care and have nothing to lose. And the people responsible should Suffer the consequences instead of being constantly bailed out by the rest. Let it all fail. You're just trying to delay thr inevitable. Claiming it isn't inevitable is exactly why things never changed and never will because people believe it works itself out. Grab popcorn and enjoy.
I hear you. I find some peace in watching my conservative neighbors' faces when I tell them I want this planet to cook us all into starvation. Conservatives don't really know how to respond to someone who actually wants to watch the world burn.
When we begin competing for resources, conservative neighbors will be the first places to focus on. They caused all of this. They should be the first to suffer the losses.
Yes, we know.
Profits, shareholders, and not inconveniencing anyone is the priority.
Thus, our human brain are incapable of grasping or begin to comprehend the scale and severity of the climate crisis with just soundbites, anecdotes, news-rants and tiktok videos.
Understanding complex systems is hard and requires continuous concentration over months and years. Even more so for the Hyperobject that is ephemerally understood as Climate Change.
We can barely begin to collectively acknowledge that perhaps something is indeed wrong with :
- all the burning forests just because of the smoke/smog "inconveniently" smothers our cities (occasionally burning them for being too close)
- atmospheric rivers drowning towns and cities in flash floods
- high altitude glaciers irreversibly melting and disappearing
- Greenland and Antarctic have only accelerated their ice loss from sustained glacier retreat
- the thermohaline circulation slowing down due to all that melted water (less dense due to higher temperature and less salt) staying on the surface of the water column
- the migration of millions of humans mostly from regions with latitude between the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn due to drought, crops loss, famine, extreme storms, natural disasters and violence or wars
- the increase in frequency and length of heatwaves
Unfortunately, we will probably sooner or later go to war over made-up fantasies or leftovers of a ruined planet before finally collectively understanding and tackling the complex thing that is currently (for now) known as Climate Change.
I'm kind of looking forward to it, to be honest. The collapse of society should be interesting and make my future life as a caveman more worthwhile.
The only thing I'm concerned about are my cats.
The tipping point report, produced by an international team of 200 researchers and funded by Bezos Earth Fund
We have placed the fate of humanity in the hands of billionaire parasites - and we are reaping the consequences.
Stop teasing and just collapse already.
Boy, what an exciting time to live in!
😆😆🤣🤣😭😭😭😭
Shocked Pikachu face
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