Final-Fan said:
sapphi_snake said:
Final-Fan said:
Well the thing is, the metric is intelligence. We are on a whole other platform in comparison to any other animal. In fact Kasz is saying that the difference in intelligence between us and other animals is comparable to the difference in intelligence between other animals and plants. Now that is IMO a pretty arguable claim, but I agree with the general idea he is trying to get across.
If he said we are that special in eyesight compared to other animals, you would be right to object.
If you object to his judging the value of human life vs. that of animals or plants by intelligence rather than eyesight or whatever, that's a completely different debate and maybe an interesting one. But you should make it clear if that's what you're doing.
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Oh wait, in your last post that is exactly what you did. OK, well first of all you are wrong that there is anything out there which has a trait rarer than our intelligence that is completely unique to our species (on Earth, to a reasonable degree of certainty).
Next, I am interested in what you think would be more special than such intelligence. Natural radar? I guess that would be more remarkable because it is not just a "stepped-up" version of something other species have, no matter how dramatically stepped-up it is. But ultimately, why would that make it more special? Why would anything be more valuable or "special" than intelligence? I could talk about all the interesting things intelligent life could do, but you could say with some justification that a completely arbitrary standard might think it didn't matter as much as a being that could fart rainbows. But even by a totally uncaring viewpoint, human intelligence is the direct cause of spectacular biological changes. Aside from our own sudden spread and dominance and city-building, all the stuff we've done to biospheres across the planet is just amazing -- not necessarily good, but very, very special and (off the top of my head) simply unprecedented. The only things that even come close, I think, are oxygen-giving microbes, and maybe grass.
Anyway, to address your point comparing it to the console wars or cultures thinking they are far superior, both of those can be debunked by the fact that none of those consoles are on a completely different level from what they are claiming they are superior to. Unless the console war you refer to is the Atari 2600 vs. the PS3.
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It's hard not to take it with a grain of salt when someone says that they themselves (or the group they're part of) is better/more special/more valauble than other individuals (or groups).
Your comparison between animals and plants is quite ridiculous. Plants and animals are totally different lifeforms, and they evolved simoltaneously, animals did not evolve from plants. When you compare the two, you cannot judge plants based on the the criteria that would make an animal "superior". Why would plants even require "intelligence"? Plants and animals are on "completely different levels", however in their particular case you can't use a vertical hierarchy. Plants and animals are categories (in other words they're possitioned vertically next to eachother), each with it's own "hierarchies".
And why wouldn't natural radar be more "special"? The problem with this kinds of comparisons (as made evident in your plants vs. animals example), is that they're highly subjective, because the person making the comparison is itself subjected to it. And no one would ever admit to not being superior (and sometimes may not even be able to comprehend such a thing). Humans by default consider themselves to be special and superior, thus they consider their characteristics to be superior. They will thus use those characteristcs as criteria when judging whether something is or isn't "superior". Thus "human" becomes the standard to which everything is compared. Even aliens would have to mee this standard in order to be considered "superior" creatures (but even then humans would probably find some fault in them, because ultimately, they're not human which is the biggest "sin" a lifeform can commit in the face of a human). Just look sci fi movies. Aliens that are considered "superior" creatures are (almost) always humanoid. Same with fantasy movies. Humans cannot envision something "superior" that is not similar to themselves (and even if these creatures are presented as being more intelligent, humans are presented as being superior due to their "emotional intelligence", which end up being more important - see Star Trek).
Regarding what you said about cultures, are cultures really on similar levels? Every single culture that has ever exited has considered itself to be the most advanced culture that has ever been. Cultures thake their own characteristcs (which they deem to be the sings of a "superior" culture), and establish them as criteria for comparison. For example culture X can consider itself more advanced than culture than culture Y, because it performs a certain ritual which it labels as being something a "civilized" person would do, despite the fact that culture Y does not have such a standard (for example the differences in bathing rituals in the West vs. Japan). Now, there are spaces where cultures have interacted with eachother, borrowed from eachother (such as Europe or Asia), meaning that these cultures have similar standards. But what about isolated cultures? These cultures (that Europeans labeled as "primitive") were unique, they developed totally different ways to view the world. You cannot really compare such a culture with Western culture (for example), despite what many tend to do (Europeans would consider native African cultures to be "primitive" because they didn't wear clothes, or wore very little, but since when is wearing clothes an universal sign of being "civilized"?). This is the inability to imagone the "other".
Back to what Kasz said. What bothered me most wasn't the "special" part, but the "valuable" part (him giving being more "special" as a justification). Are humans really more "valauble" than other creatures? Obviously a human would say "yes", but that's just a subjective opinion (and an undertsandable one at that). Humans automatically consider themselves to be more "valauble" than other lifeforms, and "human" is the standard to determine the value of another living being (the closer a creature is to the "human" standard, the more valauble it is). Ultimately, the most objectively "valuable" living beings on Earth are plants, because without them there would be no life on Earth (us humans would disappear also). Humans are at the very top of the food chain, which objectively makes us the least valuable and most useless of Earth's inhabitants.
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Your objection to the comparison between plants and animals is quite ridiculous. Humans and dogs are totally different lifeforms, and they evolved simultaneously, humans did not evolve from dogs. When you compare the two, you cannot judge dogs based on the criteria that would make a human "superior".
I most certainly can use a single vertical hierarchy to describe the level of their intelligence. It's not their fault that they don't need intelligence and therefore never evolved much of it, but that doesn't change the fact that animals are much much smarter, to the point that they are on a whole other level of intelligence. I could understand if you wanted to put them on different graphs because of how much smarter animals are, but you could easily put them on the same graph if you wanted to.
Why wouldn't natural radar be more special? Well, a significant part of my post was devoted to trying to explain what made intelligence more remarkable than (for instance) natural radar, but apparently you just ignored it or something because you certainly didn't respond to it. And in point of fact the rest of your paragraph is completely off topic as far as I'm concerned.
Regarding different cultures, I assumed you meant cultures today, that have one way or another been evolving in a sense from earlier cultures. I would suppose that cultures today are much, much more developed than, say, cultures from 50kya, even the cultures that are still hunter-gatherer-type. I would argue that although individuals from different cultures will argue that their culture is better (and many people say better means more advanced) they will also agree that other cultures have things theirs does not. For instance many would agree that the culture of medieval Japan had very very advanced protocol in the ruling class, but I would argue that it was not a good thing, that it was stultifying -- but special.
He is judging our value (I believe) by how special we are, specifically our special intellience. And your argument that plants are more valuable is crap because you have no justification for talking about wiping out all humans vs. all plants, and if it was us vs. a single species of plant then you have no argument. Also WTF is this about the top of the food chain being the most disposable. Oh right your baseless combining of all the species in the bottom into one unit.
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