I don't mean to dismiss the larger truth here about humanity's responsibility to exercise restraint in playing the impossibly strong 5-ace hand it was dealt by natural selection.
But the naturalistic fallacy has a knack for hiding its sharpest razors among the soft folds of words like "cooperative."
The universe appears, as far as we can tell, overwhelmingly hostile toward life with the sole observed exception of our precariously balanced biosphere.
And that biosphere is itself a circulatory system built on exploitation, consumption, and predation - host to endless torrent of unimaginable agonies which are both staggeringly abundant and structurally inalienable from the matrix of this 'cooperative' system.
It's hard, as another HN'er once succinctly put it, to be more cruel than Nature.
this is a dualistic belief that regards humans operating on human concepts as being somehow a qualitatively distinct phenomenon from the "system that systems" - a system in which they themselves increasingly constitute a locally (and potentially, a universally) significant energetic routing circuit.
No, it’s not dualistic at all. I have not and never do make the argument that humans are somehow “separate” from nature. I am making the argument that value judgments (like all concepts) occur in people’s heads and are not intrinsic characteristics of anything at all.
Sure, but in this context - in any reasonable context when one would make a value judgement on nature - a judgement is made relative to some human-specific or "unnatural" situation. When someone is making an appeal to nature, as in "nature is beautiful and good, and so the natural thing is better than our wicked ways", it's only right to point out that under this standard, nature is fucked up psychopatic hellscape, and the history of scientific and technological progress is one of escaping hell.
I think you might be unfamiliar with the term "dualism" since you don't appear to understand that your reasoning is synonymous with current spec, put briefly: "In general, [Dualism] the idea is that, for some particular domain, there are two fundamental kinds or categories of things or principles." [0]
To what domain, exactly, are you trying to relegate concepts with your vaguely dismissive take that they are "inside people's heads," as if this doesn't invalidate thought as an origin of material (that is, natural) change and thus pulls the rug out from under your statement itself - since, being just a concept inside your head, it should not have been capable of accumulating the physical mass and energy necessary to get out of your head, onto HN's server, and onto my screen - the letters of which are not randomly generated but an ordered echo of material pointing back to the source informing their order.
The relationship of concept to material is, especially in this kind of case, about as intrinsic as a relationship between entities can be.
When you look at, say, a pyramid in Egypt or Mexico etc, you are looking at the material shadow cast by nothing less than a concept that was at some point, only "inside someone's head" and which remains a fundamental and intrinsic characteristic of that structured mass of earth and stone.
I'd even go further and say that nature generally doesn't torture things for amusement the way the worst humans have done. Usually "nature is cruel and cold" underpins a "kind" humanist worldview that justifies factory farming, pesticides, lab animal testing, and mass murder of any inconvenient biological lifeform. Humanists pretend they aren't part of the same system of biological life that they hack at and injure at every turn and will to the end of their days deny the runaway extinction event they've kicked off and may also sweep them off the planet too. Because nature could never been cruel and cold to them and the system could never system them out of existence. They believe humans are special and the entire universe was created for them, or alternatively, the entire universe is at odds with their existence and it's a fight to the death. It's an absurd neurosis. We're incredibly lucky to be alive in a biosphere with so many food sources and so many lifeforms happy to eat our shit.
An superbly well-put rationalization for banal, business-as-usual cruelty. A desire to demonstrate that "I can go where others are too weak-minded/unwilling/inflexible to go" - to out-smug the smugness one sees wherever they find humanistic purpose, is to put an axe to the trunk of the tree on whose branches one smugly sits. Top kek, and all that.
But maybe you are not trolling. I'll assume rather that you're merely directing a blunt, honest cynicism toward what you see as the shallow, disingenuous cynicism of humanism (which I don't specifically subscribe but it's close enough for a throwaway internet argument). Someone who may or may not come from a place of disillusioned idealism, but in any case is not at all unhappy but rather perfectly content knowing we live in a morally neutral universe. Perhaps even a little pleased with yourself for having the tough-mindedness /so lacking in others/ that enables you to thrive in a hard objective vacuum intolerable to less robust spirits. Since there is essentially no point to anything, there will be no eschatological reckoning, and naturally no possible harm in optimizing for one's own material satisfaction for there is no such thing as harm at all.
Until we are confronted with conclusive evidence of intelligent life in the universe apart from what has developed in our own gravity well (setting aside the possibility of such entities existing outside a mutually impassible causality horizon); which is to say until we find evidence that the universe either has potential for a purposeful complex homeostasis other than the one we ourselves pursue, or else the apparent universal default fate of reduction to an undifferentiated energetic equilibrium, it is neither cold nor kind to act logically on the actual evidence at hand, which strongly suggests we are indeed the sole custodial inhabitants of this universe, conscious of our leverage over its fate, as we are of this planet (insofar as the notion of "custody" is presently confined to it until we learn otherwise - which, as an aside, would be fascinating even if it might trigger our destruction).
Consciousness (and the awareness, among other things, of suffering that it entails) will have to appear somewhere in the accessible universe first if it is to appear at all. So far, there's no basis for thinking that that somewhere isn't this biosphere right here, and consequently, for our purposeful (even if futile) opposition to the universal tendency toward self-consuming annihilation that would, unchecked, smother consciousness in its cradle.
I don't mean to dismiss the larger truth here about humanity's responsibility to exercise restraint in playing the impossibly strong 5-ace hand it was dealt by natural selection.
But the naturalistic fallacy has a knack for hiding its sharpest razors among the soft folds of words like "cooperative."
The universe appears, as far as we can tell, overwhelmingly hostile toward life with the sole observed exception of our precariously balanced biosphere.
And that biosphere is itself a circulatory system built on exploitation, consumption, and predation - host to endless torrent of unimaginable agonies which are both staggeringly abundant and structurally inalienable from the matrix of this 'cooperative' system.
It's hard, as another HN'er once succinctly put it, to be more cruel than Nature.