We Are All Just Animals

[MoseyWalker]

We like to think that our cerebral cortex makes us somehow different, but the truth, hard as it is, is that we are all just animals.

We act and react according to various hormones and chemicals that may or may not be saturating our brains at the time.

We think that we think, but all we actually do is react chemically and hormonally to the actions and our beliefs regarding those actions, of others.

Our ability to pretend that we are above other creatures due to our bloated frontal cortex has basically caused the destruction of all, and the doom of most.

We pretend that because we have opposable thumbs and the ability to type words and transmit ideas in this fashion that we are somehow superior to the other creatures who managed to live on this planet for eons without destroying it.

We are the worst of the animals that have inhabited this earth.

Am I wrong.

[razors edge]

1. Hard to say

If we consider all creatures over history, there may have been some bacteria that smothered all the other life forms at the time, but short of something like that, I can't think of one who would qualify.

[Mend]

2. we are pretty bad but there are some gruesome animals, too....

like wasps who lay their eggs inside of caterpillers and slowly eat them up alive.

[Xipe Totec]

3. You are both right and wrong

Switching levels of abstraction can be confusing.

We Are All Just Start Dust

We like to think that our organic nature makes us somehow different, but the truth, hard as it is, is that we are all just stardust.

We act and react according to various physical properties of atoms that may or may not be saturating what we consider our bodies at the time. etc., etc., etc.,

But, if we are all just chemical soup, generated by stellar explosions, what do you care what we do or don't do to the environment here on earth?

Why do you care so much about your own survival?

If it doesn't matter, why even post here?

[MoseyWalker]

7. Part of my chemical soup thinks it cares about others

so, I post.

I care less about my survival than one might imagine, but I still appreciate your words.

[Xipe Totec]

13. There you go!

It's just a mater of picking the right level of abstraction; the right frame of reference to view the universe.

If one takes a view that is too reductionists, nothing matters anymore.

All of these frames of reference exist, and are true simultaneously. There is no privileged frame of reference.

That is why I love this quote, from a corny Sci-Fi movie so much:






Gallagher:"You didn't just give up being a scientist one day did you?"

Chantilas:"I realized science couldn't answer any of the really interesting questions. So I turned to philosophy... been searching for God ever since."

Chantilas:"Who knows... I may pick up a rock and it will say underneath it 'made by God'. The universe is full of surprises."

http://www.moviesoundclips.net/sound.php?id=33

[razors edge]

14. Didn't you disprove your OP

by showing that we, as humans, can even contemplate the fate of other species and demonstrate a revulsion to the idea?

I hope so.

We know we can change, but we don't know we will change.

[MoseyWalker]

15. Possibly, and thanks for pointing that out

I was just sitting here thinking how I feel a little less negative than I did earlier.

[razors edge]

16. Thats cool. we can keep trying. n/t

[Orrex]

4. Everything that humans can possibly do is natural

That includes the manufacture of plastic and the enrichment of uranium. There is no objective way to measure one species against another as "better" or "worse" except to pick a listing of more or less arbitrary criteria and then rate each species against it.

Human nature is without an absolute measure by which to define its worth.

We're bad. We're good. And we're indifferent. Just like every other animal.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

5. We're better than spinner dolphins.

If those fuckers had opposable thumbs it'd be the fourth reich in no time.

But I agree with your basic tenant. We're all animals.

[MoseyWalker]

9. You get my

Official Chuckle Response to a Post of the Night!

funny!

[BlooInBloo]

6. So lets do it like they do on the Discovery channel!

:rofl:

[KittyWampus]

8. speak for yourself. IMO, it's your attitude that's the problem.

[hyphenate]

10. I think Henry Beston has the

definitive quote on this subject. His sensitivity to the issue has been relevant for 100 years:

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

[MoseyWalker]

11. Henry

was on to something there. Thank you for that!

[catnhatnh]

12. As an EMT I have seen murder and child abuse....

...but I have also seen Michaelangelo's Pieta...I am conflicted when discussing human potentialities.....

[aikoaiko]

17. " so let's do it like they do it on the animal channel"

;-)