domain:shapesinthefog.substack.com
HereAndGone
1d ago
But what if they all make up a group mind and so they have intelligence and sentience? You just don't know! What if yeast have souls? What if yeast are souls, the soul of Gaia? All the individual organisms on the Earth make up one giant mega-organism, just like all the different cells in our bodies make up one mega-organism that we call the self! And besides, humans aren't conscious either, there is no one single unitary "I" or "self". So it's all the same!
(No, I don't believe any of this, but if one gets into the weeds of philosophical explorations of what is life, what is consciousness, why do you think it's not okay to shove the fat man into the path of the trolley, etc., one can easily discard common sense by the way).
HereAndGone
1d ago
Obviously no, not unless it was two bees. Three? Absolute moral obligation or else you are a monster!
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
I hadn't thought about this theory, but it does explain why women with PR and related career backgrounds are over-represented among rich and powerful men's second wives, particularly relative to the actresses and models you might expect to see if it was about hotness and status. I had always assumed that it was because PR girls had the right mix of hotness, IQ high enough not to be dull but not high enough to be challenging, and elite socialisation.
Corvos
1d ago
I would be very surprised if Microsoft, a massive and bloated multinational corporation, switches to having one third of its programming done by AI in the near future. I don’t think it’s that nimble. I suspect the figure is a guesstimate to sound impressive and that the layoffs are Twitter-style bloat removal / offshoring.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
“The world” is shrieking about modest civilian casualties in Gaza’s dense urban landscape, if the gloves were off the Star of David could be flying off (the remains) of every building in Gaza in a month.
I do not think the IDF would expose its soldiers to nuclear fallout just to put flags up on ruined buildings. Just to be clear what "gloves off" means when the full panoply of modern weapons are available.
One of the things you need to know to understand the current Israel-Palestine conflict is that if Israel were as evil as Hamas, or Hamas as powerful as Israel, this would already have happened.
FeepingCreature
1d ago
I mean, if genes/IQ is real, it's probably small but compounding, a factor on a thousand stacked decisions, like a random walk biased upward or downward, second or even third order. In that case, most causes of bad things happening in their life would seem to be largely unrelated to IQ, since every step has a better causative explanation than IQ, but IQ would still be the determinant of where the chain ended up. (Admittedly, that's very hard to falsify.)
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
The Great Horseshit Crisis of 1894 is apparently an early example of fake news, but the price of horse manure in London dropped below zero at some point in the late 19th century, probably slightly after Carl Benz filed his first car patent in 1886.
Had people tried to run a city the size of 20th century London on 19th century transport technology, eventually there would have been a Great Horseshit Crisis. But we didn't and there wasn't. Van exhaust stinks, but per tonne-km (or ton-mile if you have to be perverse) of goods moved it stinks orders of magnitude less than horseshit. The Great Smog Crisis is real, but emissions control technology (and eventually the shift to EVs) is keeping pace with it in well-governed cities.
For a constant population and a roughly-constant material standard of living, high-tech urban societies are far more sustainable than traditional ones.
FtttG
1d ago
FtttG
1d ago
Never heard of it before, fair enough. To be pedantic, I'd rather "ostrotarian", as mussels and oysters seem unambiguously "meat" or "meat-like" in a way that honey, dairy or eggs obviously aren't.
A few years ago I coined the terms "trans-vegetarian" and "trans-vegan" for people who aren't vegetarian or vegan, but identify as such.
FeepingCreature
1d ago
I mean, I believe in moral intuition and I suspect in this case most people would have a strong moral impulse to do just this, even though they'd discard it as impractical. I think it's hard to retreat to moralistic intuition and five minutes later say "but this moral impulse you must squash."
Where it gets complicated for me is, do you have an obligation to save a bee that gets stuck in a spiderweb? There's no reason to assume the bee is more worthy of survival than the spider. But here my moral opinions strongly strike out in favor of "kill the spider, save the bee". But in that case I know that other people have the opposite response.
thejdizzler
1d ago
I don't eat diary or eggs though. Looks like there's a name for this. Ostrovegan?
HereAndGone
1d ago
It's the religious impulse turned in on itself. There are people who are naturally compassionate and charitable, and there are people who are naturally scrupulous and tormented by conscience, and there are people who like increasingly abstract thought experiments far divorced from any practical application.
And in the old days, their impulses would have led them to be like this man. There was an understood social framework around feeding the hungry, helping those in need, alms giving, and doing good works.
But that's gone by the wayside now, so what happens to those impulses that still persist but don't have the same socially cohesive and universal channels to divert them? If you get hung up on the likes of EA (sorry, EA, to always be kicking this philosophy but it does seem to get diverted very damn easily from 'cure the sick' to 'we must all network and get well-paying jobs so we can donate so that we can hold conferences about existential risk, sorry sick people but your present suffering is nothing compared to the potential suffering of potential future billions if we do the calculations right') and thus you need more extreme forms of do-gooding to satisfy your inflamed intellect. Ordinary "give to local church donations for the needy, help out in a soup kitchen", etc. actions are not good enough because any ignorant normie can do that, plus your philosophy has tidily proven that helping those you know near to you is racist and elitist and much less effective and efficient and not worth doing.
So you get hung up on shrimp and plants and 'suffering is bad' (which most people will agree on) 'hence we must wipe out all organic life, starting with every single wild animal, because their natural lives where we don't interfere with them are just horrible - nasty, brutish and short like the guy said' (which most people will think is freakin' extreme and slightly nuts).
Ah yes, the long rich democratic tradition of the 20 years between the World Wars, that were imposed by Woodrow Wilson's deranged fantasies, and managed to revert to authoritarianism even within that short timespan.
What is this meant to be a reference to please? Czechoslovakia? Because there was no reversion to authoritarianism in that case.
The attachment to democracy was so short that we were seriously debating if it's not better to take the Asian Tiger route, and only implement democracy after authoritarian reforms.
The Asian Tiger route was a strictly Southeast Asian (Confucian) phenomenon in the specific context of the Cold War and facilitated by generous and targeted American capital investment and the proto version of offshoring. None of that applied to Eastern Europe after 1989.
It can work if the stars align just right, but has the tendency of taking it's necessary conditions (like everybody having roughly the same values) for granted. The moment these conditions are not met the democracy enjoyers themselves will start begging for it's end, arresting opposition candidates, and seriously considering the banning of political parties, for the high crime of people voting the wrong way.
It was all a long-term consequence of German 'reunification' (the annexation of the former GDR into an unchanged federal state structure) being a complete shitshow which incidentally the Americans played no part in.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
Buddhist or Shinto or something - I don't know, and I assume the creators of the ad didn't know either
I would assume Jainism! They sweep the ground in front of themselves as they walk, and wear facemasks to avoid inhaling bugs. You beat me to it by about 15 minutes.
HereAndGone
1d ago
We will manage to rethink, remeasure, and find additional ways of suffering. People always have. Today, plants do not feel "pain", but tomorrow, pain may not a prerequisite for suffering.
I keep quoting this and Chesterton meant it as rollicking satire, but somebody is always trying to make it come true:
Then there was the opposite school. There was Mr. Edward Carpenter, who thought we should in a very short time return to Nature, and live simply and slowly as the animals do. And Edward Carpenter was followed by James Pickie, D.D. (of Pocohontas College), who said that men were immensely improved by grazing, or taking their food slowly and continuously, after the manner of cows. And he said that he had, with the most encouraging results, turned city men out on all fours in a field covered with veal cutlets. Then Tolstoy and the Humanitarians said that the world was growing more merciful, and therefore no one would ever desire to kill. And Mr. Mick not only became a vegetarian, but at length declared vegetarianism doomed ("shedding," as he called it finely, "the green blood of the silent animals"), and predicted that men in a better age would live on nothing but salt. And then came the pamphlet from Oregon (where the thing was tried), the pamphlet called "Why should Salt suffer?" and there was more trouble.
There is research about plant reactions to stimuli, but there's always that one person who can't resist taking it further
František Baluška is also very good at making inconceivable connections. Baluška, a plant cell biologist at University of Bonn, has for some time now been of the opinion that plants are intelligent—after all, they can process information and make decisions. But do plants have consciousness? That takes the discussion to a whole different level. If we could prove that plants have consciousness, we would have to radically change the way we interact with them, because we’d find ourselves facing the same kinds of issues that we face with factory farming in conventional agriculture.
Baluška, together with colleagues from around the world, including Stefano Mancuso from the University of Florence, has come a little closer to answering the question about plant consciousness. Baluška and his colleagues sedated plants that feature moving parts, such as Venus flytraps. These plants catch their prey in a trap that snaps shut as soon as insects touch trigger hairs on the inner side of their double-lobed leaves. The two sides of the leaf fold together in a flash, capturing the insect between them, and the plant then digests its prey. The anesthetics the scientists used, which included some that are used on people, deactivated electric activity in the plants so that the traps no longer reacted when they were touched. Sedated peas showed similar changes in behavior. Their tendrils, which usually move in all directions as they slowly feel their way through their surroundings to find supporting structures to grow on, stopped searching and started to spiral on the spot. After the plants broke the narcotics down, they resumed their normal behavior.
Some kind-hearted people have now got as far as worrying about bees, and shrimp. Bacteria will indeed be next. Then plants. How can we be so speciesist and arrogant about our artificial hierarchy imposed on the natural world? And of course there is chatter about "are machines sentient, is AI self-aware or could become self-aware?" so we're working our way slowly but steadily towards "do rocks think?"
Right now I can afford to laugh at researchers solemnly "sedating peas" and checking do their little tendrils twitch then writing up the results, but some day in the not-too-distant future, it may be no laughing matter. We may have to try can we live on salt (until the "thinking rocks" set argue about "why should Salt suffer?")
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
Adelstein ("Bentham's Bulldog") is a gifted philosophy grad student (I think--he was last year identified as a second year philosophy student in a well-regarded program). It's very impressive that he has multiple publications in top journals as a student. But his particular gift seems to be finding implausible positions and developing intuition pumps for them while neatly evading all the reasons why they are, even so, implausible. This is a good way to garner notoriety in the field. It is, not coincidentally, how Peter Singer really got famous. It is arguably why Jeremy Bentham is famous.
But I have to say that it is always disappointing to me when philosophers optimize for notoriety over the love of wisdom.
I think that all utilitarianism is mistaken, of course, because I am a contractualist who rejects aggregation. But Adelstein's take on veganism strikes me as aggressively, surely willfully obtuse--my priors are that it is more likely Adelstein is engaged in a kind of extended performance art, driven by the attention and notoriety he is accumulating, than that he is doing serious philosophy about the way the world really is. These are luxury beliefs par excellence--and maybe also anxieties of the sort that make people mentally ill. I guess I might be more willing to believe Adelstein was serious if I saw him walking around everywhere with a broom and facemask--and if he does, he's still wrong, but at least he's not performatively wrong.
BahRamYou
1d ago
I feel like people take the wrong impression from those stories of historical roads covered in dung. Back then, all humans were a lot closer to nature so they were less grossed out by it. That dung was a sign of wealth. Animals were one of the most expensive things humans could owb, especially horses. In most societies, owning a horse made you a weslthy man. The manure was carefully collected and used for crop fertilizer.
It would have been mind blowing for most historical societies to see a European city with so many horses they cant even pick up all the dung. It would be like living in an oil field.
FtttG
1d ago
although many vegans wouldn't consider me vegan because I eat oysters and honey
If you eat oysters, I don't even consider you vegetarian, never mind vegan. You're pescatarian, surely.
FtttG
1d ago
On this topic, I have an (admittedly pedantic) pet peeve. The pro-vegan, animal rights movement often use the phrase "cruelty-free", referring to cruelty-free diets, cruelty-free lifestyles, cruelty-freee products etc. The idea is that anyone who eats meat or uses cosmetic products which were tested on animals is therefore complicit in cruelty, unlike people who don't do these things.
I accept that people living plant-based diets are complicit in less cruelty than people who eat meat. But they are not living cruelty-free lives: the amount of cruelty in which they are complicit is far from zero. Agricultural farmers still have to clear land to grow crops, which means exterminating the vermin occupying said land. (Maybe I've just reinvented the "no ethical consumption under capitalism" meme.)
When I was a kid I saw this funny ad. It shows this monk with a shaved head and flowing red robes (Buddhist or Shinto or something - I don't know, and I assume the creators of the ad didn't know either), who's a friend to all living creatures. He's walking home when he spots a ladybird on the pavement that he almost steps on - so he leans over to delicately pick it up and places it gently on the grass next to the pavement. Then when he gets home he's sitting on the toilet, and while he's going about his business he picks up the bottle of bleach next to it and reads that it kills 99.9% of bacteria in his toilet. With mounting horror, he realises the genocide he's unwittingly caused every time he squirts bleach down his toilet.
Funny ad, clever concept. But it got me thinking - where do you draw the line in determining which animals' welfare to care about? Are bacteria animals? If we're meant to avoid eating honey because it causes bees to suffer more than they otherwise would have, why not bacteria? Are antibiotics genocide?
(Also I know this is mean, but ever since I found out Bentham's Bulldog looks like this I've been unconsciously discounting his opinions in my head slightly.)
jake
1d ago
and I think his claim to believe in God is one of those useful lies to the voter base rather than anything he sincerely believes in
By the way, and I should have said this back at Christmas, but alas. I'd say the probability of your assessment of Ramaswamy falsely professing belief is very high now. I won't go all the way, not because I mind admitting being wrong, you can treat this as my admission of being on the wrong side of assessing him, but because it's not my place to say on this whether someone believes what they say. "He's given adequate reason to doubt him," yes. I do think one of my arguments holds up, that a more competent actor would have found a way to say it without lying, because he dropped a few poorly chosen words on an issue and got himself banished to Ohio.
I'm not really that interested in buying anything. I suppose I'll need to get a helmet eventually, but outside of that this is more of a work with what I have situation.
Though I had an unrelated conversation with my sister recently about "boys" vs "girls" bikes, where I said I never saw the classic female bike design as peculiarly feminine, and outside of a bike that was pink or ribboned, I wouldn't really see a guy on a girls bike and think "fag."
If anything I could easily imagine one of those Traditional™️ masculinity™️ bloggers informing me that it was effeminate for a man to spread his legs to "mount" and "straddle" a men's bicycle.
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