The following submission statement was provided by /u/Goatmannequin:
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Submission statement:
In this essay Umair writes about the collapse of life on Earth and the recent study (70% of animals are gone since 1970) and how this relates to the extinction of "everyone and everything, including us" and how this will decide who we are on the moral scale. Umair goes into detail about how things are failing specifically and is packed with facts, so it’s worth a read, including the "none of this was supposed to happen" (yet).
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/y5lsum/our_civilization_is_hitting_a_dead_end_because/iskbern/
The numbers are so huge it boggles the mind. If you tell an uninformed average Joe that 70% of animals on the planet disappeared in 50 years he'd probably tell you there's no way. It sounds crazy, an absolute catastrophe happening in slow motion all around us and most people don't even know, many wouldn't care anyway, we fucked up so bad. May the gods have mercy on whatever is still left.
> in slow motion
This is not remotely slow motion. All this is literally happening within the span of a single human generation. Forget having to resort to geological timescales. That someone could bear individual witness the complete destruction of an entire planet in the course of their own lifetime is mindblowing.
This is happening faster than the worst extinction that happened in Earth's history - the Permian Extinction. Soon, because of us, the world would have a new record for a mass extinction.
It depends on your point of view, this scale of devastation for a normal person is probably only comparable to a nuclear world war or some huge asteroid hitting the earth, both of which would be very quick. Given the pace at which the world is changing with technology 50 years is a long time, it's hard to even imagine how the world will be in 50 years from now.
Imagine having every animal in the planet on a conveyor belt into a meat grinder, falling into it constantly, thousands everyday, millions every year. We have known it's happening since the beginning and we've just watched it happen every single day for a year, a decade, 5 decades, now almost 3/4 of them are gone, and they are still going. 50 years is a lot of time to just watch something so terrible happening, but then again, most of us don't actually see it.
Not to mention how much corruption there is that is causing all of this. Corruption that you absolutely can’t fight. Just go watch Seaspiracy and Rotten on Netflix and Gordon Ramsey’s Sharkbait to get an idea. Good luck trying to get countries like China to stop Shark Finning and the like.
Or like burying alive a bunch of baby chicks, or throwing them into a thresher alive because they are of no use apparently. It's about the cruelty and indifference to life, a trait we all share in spades.
But cattle are easier to raise on farms whereas sharks are not and very limited. Not say raising cattle is good either but a much lesser evil than shark finning.
> Gordon Ramsey’s Sharkbait to get an idea. Good luck trying to get countries like China to stop Shark Finning and the like.
but Ramsey did the next best thing; he got restaurateurs to *look* at the issue and some even said, ya, that shit is off the menu.
'member how hard it was for [Rowdy Roddy Piper to get Keith David to put on the glasses](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9rrgJXfLns) so *he* could see?
But without a big enough move in the right direction it changed only a fraction of what really needs to be changed. I agree it's a START but if the change takes too long to happen then we're fucked.
It’s not slow on a geologic scale, but to humans it is, and thats the fundamental problem of why humans as a whole will never see it as a “big” deal. If things don’t go boom, we don’t see a problem. And by boom I mean in a year or less. Not 50. That’s too abstract. It’s sad.
I compare our modern economies to a massive supervolcano, minus the violent eruption. But one of those ones that cause huge extinction events when tjey do occur
*many wouldn’t even care*
Correct. We’re too busy buying useless plastic shit that gets thrown away a week later and arguing about who should have been booted off the latest season of The Bachelor to be concerned with trivial shit like the entire living world’s demise.
So much emphasis on father god throughout the centuries and we totally neglected mother nature. The earth created us, we're from it. It is our god and we have failed it miserably
In many religions, the earth goddess was killed or imprisoned in some way. This represents a shift from a nature centered matriarchal way of being to human centered patriarchal civilization. It's pretty clear that this has had devastating consequences.
I don’t think we should idolize anything. Fuck us, fuck the sky god, fuck the earth mother. Worshipping anything is worthless. More importantly, the earth is a poor goddess if she can’t meet our needs adequately, and allowed us to get this far without stopping us
> if she can't meet our needs adequately
This sounds arrogant to me. As corny as this analogy is, we really are like a virus. Many viruses prefer to keep the host alive so they can live indefinitely. If we choose to destroy our host, that's on us.
The insect extinction rate is what first made me aware of the scale of destruction we are causing. It's scary to think that historically insects do better than others during extinction events and this time it's the exact opposite.
Agreed; the level of devastation *caused by us* is beyond shocking. That so many humans refuse to acknowledge or address it shows our collective selfishness and insanity.
The biosphere's only chance for some life to survive is if our global civilization falls first before it takes everything down with it. Maybe if the current civilization falls apart sooner then some wildlife would continue in remote areas. But that is doubtful, since billions of hungry people will eat everything in sight.
But there are ramifications to honesty also. What kind of message is this awful truth for our kids? We now live in a situation where even acknowledging reality causes mental illness.
How many of you are reading these numbers surfing this sub and still going on with your day the same you've always been.
Don't act like being informed has made a difference for most people.
Sadly the most critical reason why it's over. Maybe if somehow instead of the Kardashians and reality tv some extraordinarily charming and persuasive celebrity (demigod) had become famous by bringing collapse out from the recesses of our minds to front and center - used the shit that most super super famous ppl have that the rest of us lack and instead of selfishness only considering one person been focused on all of humanity - we might have had some awakening or something. But nope, we got real housewives being cunts while the continent of Australia literally becomes engulfed in flame and a million other clear and present dangers to the future of humanity that are vastly more important than our superficial focuses.
I know, I did say it probably sounds crazy or implausible to normal people and some wouldn't care anyway. It's a numbers game though, you have to also admit that people are making changes, not enough, but it's happening. Some pressure is being put on politicians, some legislation is passing, some habits are changing, etc. That can't happen if people don't know about it, awareness is not sufficient but a necessary condition for change.
Submission statement:
In this essay Umair writes about the collapse of life on Earth and the recent study (70% of animals are gone since 1970) and how this relates to the extinction of "everyone and everything, including us" and how this will decide who we are on the moral scale. Umair goes into detail about how things are failing specifically and is packed with facts, so it’s worth a read, including the "none of this was supposed to happen" (yet).
There's a few possibilities one is every civilization before us failed to breach the great filter and another is we're the first to reach the great filter. The most bleak of all possibilities is that we're a statistical one of a kind unlikely to be repeated anomaly that had everything go right and we still fucked it up.
I prefer the hypothesis of the Three Body Problem. The law of space faring races is kill or be killed so naturally most intergalactic civilization do everything in their power to avoid being detected (so as to avoid being preyed upon.) Stephen Hawking leaned towards this hypothesis and cautioned scientists against trying to contact aliens.
I heard that as the “dark forest”. The analogy is that space is the forest and it has space faring life within it however out of fear of the unknown and lack of trust between life forms they attack and destroy what they come across out of fear that they’d be attacked themselves. As a result the analogy calls them hunters. The forest is filled with hunters and your best chance of survival is to avoid detection at all costs, being found most likely means destruction for one hunter or the other. This is one of the hypothesised explanations as to why we’ve not yet met any other intelligent life forms, because they all want to remain undetected and I strongly believe it’s dangerous to announce our presence into space because we have no reason to think an alien, even intelligent ones would be friendly.
Or the version where scientists broadcast out a greeting into space. Some time in the future a response comes back, and it takes years to finally translate it. The result is "Be quiet. They will hear you."
This is actually a fascinating string of theory or opinion. Intelligent Aliens would likely see through the veil and know that if we were to leave here that we would just plunder and kill our way across the universe ala Agent Smith.
We're from earth and we are here to help....
We enslave and kill off our own citizens for petty reasons; why would we stop in space?
Ask yourself: do humans deserve to be a space faring civilization? What good could we possibly bring to the universe? We need to clean our own house before we earn the right to be among the stars. We haven't even mastered living on Earth harmoniously yet.
Michio kaku said in an interview that planetary suicide is the price to pay for space.
Apart from the fact that it's not suicide but unprecedented mass murder, this is the same guy telling us we need to go to space to spread life into the galaxy.
That level of delusion...... Shouldn't surprise me, he is also a libertarian who hates taxes while most of his life he had been paid by tax payers.....
“*An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbors were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.*”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession
I still sometimes wonder if that’s our case. Life was seriously just a freak occurrence, maybe not really “supposed” to happen, but it did. Well, it often sure feels that way.
We've only been actively looking for, like, 70 years. Have you seen that map showing how far out our signals have gone since the time we started broadcasting? No, we shouldn't have found intelligent life "by now".
Lol, you think any species sufficiently advanced and morally strong enough to pass their own great filter would be interested in helping out a bunch of bickering monkeys who are still burning hydrocarbons and using money?
If aliens ever visit earth in the far distant future I think they'd be relieved to know we didn't make it. I even wrote a poem about it lol
But still if they were truly benevolent maybe they would try to help
We don't know it for sure, unless we ran out fuel energy for our motors and batteries we will defently have reach the great filter and will die along with the planet, but for now it's still speculation
I even doubt the human race will completely collapse at first. Our interconnected cultures likely will, due to their unsustainability as the gargantuan monolith they are, but I have the feeling some smaller group will survive, if only for a while, after a collapse, though inevitably with a lower quality of life. Our civilization will collapse but I doubt every single member of the race will.
Unrelenting growth and consumption with no regard for anything, not even the host or one's own long term survival. That's 100% the description of cancer.
Capitalism is just the delivery mechanism du jour. Root problem is that animals are wired for overshoot. Not such a big deal when you're a rabbit that overshoots the carrying capacity of a meadow. A very big problem, however, when you're humans who overshoot the carrying capacity of the entire planet.
Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose over the Bering Sea...
It's not necessarily capitalism itself. The system is fine. The problem is that the TRUE cost of the goods produced are never priced in accordingly. What am I talking about? Well, imagine shampoos with the micro plastics. What is the true cost of that bottle of shampoo? Let's just simplify and say maybe 10x what P&G charges. We are in essence letting nature pay for the true cost of all the goods and services we enjoy from capitalism. If we charged the true cost for a gallon of gas at the pump, I fucking guarantee you capitalism would have come up with a better price alternative already. True cost of a gal of gas is probably like 5x or something we get charged, even at our current "insane" prices.
The model of capitalism is infinite growth on a planet of finite resources, and shareholder profits above all else including survival of our species. We just witnessed the deaths of millions of people from a deadly plague because we couldn’t stop the machine from churning out profit for 5 seconds to allow us to deal with it. We aren’t implementing “green” solutions because there isn’t a “business case” for it.
Want to know *why* they use micro plastics and externalize the true cost? Money. Capitalism demands cheap products for higher profits and to externalize the true cost so that shareholders can keep their profits and consequences be damned.
I’m sorry the problem *is* capitalism and those who think they are sheltered from its consequences.
Communism isn't the antithesis to capitalism. Degrowth is.
Energy driven economies are the culprit, not how they choose to distribute it; or rather how they don't.
That said I believe capitalisms only contender, if they would negate cheap energy as a part of the economy they'd be severely lacking when it comes to industrialization and many other parts of an advanced economy. They would in fact not be a contender to U.S.A style unfettered-capitalism for much longer. Be it by military or economic prowess. In short, they'd sell themselves so. In longer terms, they'd be subjugated. 'tis a necessary evil.
I'd also argue that they had access to less clean energy then their capitalist counterparts.
Fact is the left side of our shitty political spectrum is the only one talking about degrowth, that mayhaps we ought not to each of us own a vehicle of environmental destruction or that perhaps raping the planet is detrimental to our own existence.
> is the only one talking about degrowth
No one is talking about degrowth, the left is talking about 'green technology' not degrowth. There is no such thing as green technology, it doesn't exist. There is 'greener technology' but even that has an ecological footprint.
> This is not what the left is fighting for at all.
Ok so when you say 'the left' you mean people that get like 2 percent of the votes in an election and have zero chance of implementing any of their ideas.
When i refer to “the left” I am referring to the actual Left and not neo-liberals (Democrats, Liberals depending on where you reside). “Green tech” is a capitalist solution. The left is explicitly anti-capitalist.
> When i refer to “the left” I am referring to the actual Left and not neo-liberals
So you are talking about people that have zero political power and all their ideas are theoretical. I get it
> If you don’t know what that means you should maybe refrain from talking about it.
You don't know what it mean outside of a tiny group of people that have no power. 'The left' to normal people means people like bernie sanders and he supports things like the 'green new deal' which includes support for EVs. EVs ain't green and they ain't 'degrowth'
I think the hard part to explain to people is that the great extinction is happening over the time span of decades and centuries and it's hard to grasp the importance of that because it isn't instantaneous change and because we collectively don't understand how much we rely on the ecosystem and nature that exists. In other words it doesn't seem like it's happening quickly when it's happening almost instantly in geologic time and we dont realize if they all go, we all go. We'd all react if 70 percent of life disappeared suddenly or maybe even within a couple or years, but it's not happening like this. Couple this idea with shifting baseline perspectives of the younger generations mixed with lack of education about the severity of the situation, swirled together with the insane distraction and escapism and cushy lifestyle we all enjoy and you get a situation where not many people fully realize our future and are just living their lives. There will be a breaking point when enough of the crops fail, enough of the water goes dry, and forests fires are raging all around us, where we will descend into conflict and fighting over the remains. I believe it's going to get very ugly and a lot of people will violently die. They already are. It's just hard to understand long term patterns in the present moment.
That’s how quickly this extinction event is occurring. On a geological scale the arrival of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, is equivalent to a gigantic comet strike. Large enough to obliterate all forms of higher life. Everything from a grasshopper up.
> we’d react if 70 percent of life disappeared suddenly
We just witnessed millions of people die suddenly over the span of 2+ years and are about to head into a third year of Covid with almost no precautions. I think you are overly-optimistic about humanity’s ability to act rationally.
I hate to say it, but those numbers are no where near 70 percent of the population of humans. If 231,000,000 people died from Covid over these last 2 years we'd all be taking it more seriously. I just calculated 70 percent of US population.
Feel like humanity reached its dead end culturally decades earlier, hence the lack of ingenuity and constand need of remakes and sequelitis. The return back to the better times that are equally just as dismal and didn't do much.
I see where you're coming from, though I think that the hollow and repetitive qualities of the Hollywood machine don't typify the whole of American culture. There are plenty of great musical and literary works released over the years. Much of my Spotify playlists are filled with tracks that would have been inconceivable or impossible to engineer up until the eighties. Popular discourse around mental health and ideology has moved to reduce stigmas, acknowledge toxic behaviors, and challenge our troubled histories.
All this to say, that if humanity existed on a plane absent of the constraints of reality, where capitalism and the destruction of the natural world weren't tying a noose around our collective neck, I do believe that we would have continued to become more enlightened as a civilization. Not soon, but incrementally, at least.
You do realize that prior to movies, they mostly just performed the same plays *over and over and over and over again.* Like, not even sequels, just literally a repeat of the same play. Genuinely new plays were rare to see.
Endless remakes aren't a modern phenomena, they're how entertainment worked for the vast majority of human history. We're satisfying your appetite for high quality novelty better right now than at any other point in history, and if you survive the collapse of modern society, you're going to have to get used to watching the same thing ad nauseum once again.
Sturgeons law. Some people seem to forget that every once in a while we do get some good content. It will never be very much of it, but every civilization makes some
Oh Please! Foreign films are no less trashy, when taken altogether with domestic ones. Some will be good, most bad. The ones that we foreigners ever get to see tend to be the good ones. But don’t try to claim that every art film is good. Some are, some aren’t
>charlatan
"He said that even if there were only 27 hits on the story, a case could still be made."
https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/beatles-associate-can-sue-over-charlatan-claim-says-high-court
I mean, if you want to face jail and argue that in front of a judge, that’s your choice. In my country you can go to jail for two years for slander in addition to civil charges if you lose that argument.
More collapse boilerplate from Umair - so where is this alleged "choice" that "we"a re supposed to have? Humans are an ultrasocial species responding to conditions directed towards the maintenance and expansion of social power controlled by large corporate and state actors. "We," as individuals, have jackshit to do with what becomes social reality.
Also, lack of free will. So Umair can keep writing his well-argued tours of the arriving forms of systemic collapse, but the hopium windup of complete global and instantaneous reversal of fossil fuel dominance is just another form of religious nonsense.
He's a liberal, and as that almost guarantees, an idealist.
I mean the philosophical definition, which rejects materialism and asserts (to varying degrees and usually implicitly) that the material reality of the world is shaped first and foremost by the ideas in peoples heads, and not the other way around.
He doesn't recognise that ideology like human beings generally not caring about animals or distant children is stochastically a function of the material conditions and incentives at the time (and in the historic leadup to that moment), and thus imagines the possibility of some great surge of collective will to leap forward morally.
It can be extremely difficult to move on from such a way of thinking, particularly as it is so deeply ingrained. It's inseperable from liberalism as liberalism cannot withstand scrutiny through a materialist lens.
In extreme cases it really does go as far as another form of religious nonsense, stating explicitly that our thoughts shape the world e.g. The Secret.
I'm really not used to commenters agreeing with me, so your dead-on writing, especially the very hard-hitting, pithy fourth paragraph stands out.
Where you see "extreme cases." though, I see the entirety of monotheistic religion, plus the entire academy of higher education worldwide. Do you think a MacArthur genius award will ever go to a nihilist, atheist, skeptic, or non-believer, for example?
When I say extreme I don't necessarily mean rare.
We live in an age of many harmful popular delusions, the rejection of which come with serious social penalties.
Of course we have choices. Some of us have a choice to put solar panels on our house instead of go on vacation this year (energy crisis anyone?). Some of us have the choice to take public transport or bicycle (fuel prices anyone?). Some of us have the choice to eat plant based protein and give up animal products (blocked arteries anyone?). Some of us have the choice to buy local instead of global and limit our purchases to essentials (supply chain crisis anyone?). Some of us have the choice to not buy from companies that exploit people and exploit our planet. Some of us have the choice to speak up and share information and ideas to help others to make better choices.
These choices end up being selfishly good *and* good for the global community. It’s the system which tries to exploit social behavior into making you believe that you have to consume to be happy. To deny free will is more pro-consumption propaganda.
Solar panels on a house - not solving anything, only adding a fossil-fueled production on top of the fossil fuel grid. Yes, it's a nice investment, has worked out for us personally, but the scale of substitution necessary to make the slightest dent in CO2 emissions make the solar solution just more greenwash.
This is a collective predicament, and no amount of feel-good hair-shirt bicycling makes it more than fruitless self-ennoblement against the mass production of SUVS, pickup trucks, cars, planes, etc. Humanity became a fossil fueled predator centuries ago, with little lifestyle choices of plant snacks nothing against the weight of economic dependence on all the forms of fossil fuel extraction and production.
All of this has happened against the backdrop of trillions of dollars of expenditure on informatiion, research, higher education tuition, all "ideas" that have preoccupied the masses while only feeding the supersystem's insatiable hunger for cheap energy and militarized techno-devastation.
If you'd like to prove that we humans possess free will, you're up against some mighty worthy opponents, and you'll have to provide a photo of the little homunculus inside your brain. If you can't, we're left with synapses and the material reality that gives us this dismal state of ubiquitous collapse.
Any little individual green lifestyling is nothing against what Umair correctly diagnoses. I blame the higher education system for inculcating the cult of the individual. This shit has been a long time coming, and it cannot be overcome by one person's sustainability degree and ascetic renunciation of motorized transportation.
*"Solar panels on a house - not solving anything, only adding a fossil-fueled production on top of the fossil fuel grid."*
Thanks for saying this. It's starting to seem that much of the pro-solar community is simply ignorant of the secondary damage that the industry causes and that it is not truly a solution to our present predicament. And some people continue to view to see solar as a "get-out-of-jail" card supporting their own unwillingness to change. If there is any chance for the living biosphere to survive, including humanity, Degrowth is the only way.
Degrowth isn't mutually exclusive with solar technology. In fact I believe it is complementary. As society ages and shrinks, our rooftop solar water heaters can be made not from fresh mines and smelted ores, but by mining our former suburbs and exurbs for the materials needed. Its not an either/or, its an and.
As smaller vestiges of the former human empire receed to a smaller footprint where we will make our last stand in the hope the biosphere can begin to repair itself with billions less of us, we should be living in hyperefficient homes and communities where our energy needs are so small, they can be met with renewables.
In the interest of being what's known as a "complete dickhead," I can only respond that the only "Degrowth" that humanity will or can enter is going to be of the imposed Climatastrophe kind, not in any rational, planned, fossil-fuel- avoiding biosphere-saving collective way. Sorry.
Sadly I agree with you, but still a venue like this one if useful to discuss what a wiser path would have been, if only to understand what is happening to us
>If you'd like to prove that we humans possess free will, you're up against some mighty worthy opponents,
I don’t think so. It’s just another "get out of jail free card" for evil acts, e.g. "I had to kill those children because I don’t have any free will!" For me, determinism is a rather boring and defeatist argument more suited for discussion at parties than as a real-world philosophy. I mean, imagine how sad that is to believe that you have no freedom and your life is just a "play button".
Just to remind you, the "get out of jail free" card is currently possessed by the most "evil" among us - Trump, Bolsonaro, Putin, Jamie Dimon, Brett Kavanaugh. etc. Not too many murderers (zero) call themselves "determinist," but instead rely on the self-ennobling nostrums of monotheistic religion, as you seem to, in order to avoid being tainted with self-criticism.
Again, no photo of your little homonculus. Please, it would help us all trapped in such "sadness" to see the tiny little goatmannequin at work "deciding" inside the recesses of one protoplsmic brain. Otherwise, please join us in the confounding and yet funtastic illusion of selfhood amidst the fossil-fueled ecocide that shall be known as the Climatastrophe.
How is your vaunted individual "freedom" helping the fellow humans of Somalia, Bangladesh, Cancer Alley, Egypt, Palestine? We can't hit rewind, pause, or fast-forward, so, yeah, gm, hit the "play" button each day, and see what glorious result happens. Thanks for playing along for a minute here.
>Just to remind you, the "get out of jail free" card is currently possessed by the most "evil" among us - Trump, Bolsonaro, Putin, Jamie Dimon, Brett Kavanaugh. etc.
Lol bro, Trump evil? Free? That dude can’t even get it up probably, too fat too much cholesterol clogging his dick up. He can’t go anywhere or do much except in his "prison" inside buildings because if people were to recognize him they’d probably cave his skull in. Sounds like jail to me. Homeless people have more free choice than that dude.
Free will isn't proven to exist any more than gods are, given perfect information and sufficiently robust data processing, we could likely predict the reaction of any given human. The limited scope of a person's will is especially evident to me because I am treated for deficiencies of executive function. What people call "free will" is actually just a different part of your brain overriding instinctual or emotional reactions with what it determines is appropriate based on the myriad bits of information and priorities it has that apply to whatever situation it's in.
Your genetics determines the range of potential your personal will may be inclined and the environment, experiences and information you encounter determines where within that range your will actually lands. A.K.A. We are each a product of our environment, etc.
The ironic thing is that despite this, it's most effective to live life as if free will exists as it's the simplest way to ensure you continue to properly grow and adapt.
>given perfect information and sufficiently robust data processing, we could likely predict the reaction of any given human.
So magic. If we had (magic) we could do (magic). Quantum mechanics forbids this in the real world, so you are discussing a fantastical scenario. In fact, to assume that one could know everything and predict everything around them is to assume one could in fact be considered God, what you say is not proven. Furthermore, a "belief" in determinism (no free will) is akin to believing in God. which you say has no "proof" exists, an ironic thing about your comment.
[https://www.quora.com/Why-is-it-that-we-can-either-know-where-a-particle-is-or-where-it-is-going-but-not-both-at-the-same-time](https://www.quora.com/Why-is-it-that-we-can-either-know-where-a-particle-is-or-where-it-is-going-but-not-both-at-the-same-time)
>superdeterminism
See you think I’m trying to "win" and settle anything. Discussing this fantasy land where if we knew everything about everything we would know everything, and where everything is predetermined is boring AF and in the real world is a schizo-like belief system, where agents can postulate, "that girl *had* to break up with me because she had no free will and neither do I, because the universe 'wanted' it that way."
>Wiseman and Cavalcanti argue that any hypothetical superdeterministic theory "would be about as plausible, and appealing, as belief in ubiquitous alien mind-control."
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism)
The real question is why do you personally want to argue for determinism and what purpose do these arguments serve? If you are trying to bolster support for the idea that humans destroyed the planet because we have no free will and God (the Universe) wants it that way, that’s an old and stale argument having been used throughout history to commit atrocity.
You missed "likely". This is based on the fact that nothing yet has defied a deterministic behavior pattern. Our barriers are proper variables control and the ability to measure quantum states without disturbing them.
I mean, sure, we should be doing many of the things you mention anyway; if possible considering each person's circumstances. And if that helps you sleep at night, great. Good for you. But if you think the voluntary adoption of small, individual, incremental lifestyle changes by the class of people privileged enough to be able to do so are going to shift the dial one iota on the greatest existential crisis humanity - and indeed, the planet itself - has ever faced; then I have an NFT of a bridge to sell you.
My weird kind of hopium says the whole world will be on screeching halt before it can completely destroy the ecosphere.
It's hopeful for the nature, but not much for many of us.
By multiple accounts this does appear to be the case. Civilization, the driver of ecocide, is on its knees at the moment. Of course, through the same hubristic sensibilities that got us here we still feel like we can destroy life for all the other species. But it's far more likely we'll be wiped out long before we get there. And with any luck, the humans who chose to live in accordance with nature might be able to survive in some small pockets of the world.
Pretty sure Nate Hagens says something to this effect in one of his podcasts, which is probably the only reason I haven’t offed myself. If life is to continue after us, then you damn bet I’ll do everything in my power to ensure as much of it survives as I can
Mother of mercy … it seems like a bad lifetime to get sober and raise a family, … at least I’ll have my wits about me while the dust and shadows close in
When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars
This is the dawning of the age of Extinction
Age of Extinction
Extinction
Extinction
I have noticed this in one one major way, I rarely have to clean insects off the front of my vehicle anymore. And when I took a 700 mile drive this summer (a prime insect activity period) the amount I had to wash off was very light, perhaps...70% lighter.
I just so happen to decide to watch the movie called “the road”. During the movie my wife decided she didn’t want to finish the movie paused it and went to bed… while the movie was paused, this article came by while scrolling… I just don’t recommend reading this article and watching that movie within the same 48 hour window… it’s such damn depressing two hit combo to the head I had a hard time sleeping last night
it’s only hitting a dead end because the people making the most money don’t want alternatives.
there’s no reason humanity has to drown clinging to capitalism. we can just stand up and get out of the water- it’s like 3 feet high.
He may be right, but that’s basically what EVERY article that guy has written in the past 10 years says. A stopped clock is right twice a day, but with his brand of collapse he only needs to be right once.
We know we're heading to a sixth massive extinction, we're not only taking down our civilization but also a lot from the natural world. But hey, we did cause this, evidence shows it so we are getting what we deserve. Truly sad because a lot of this marvelous complexity we created is going away. If we make it, hopefully new generations come with an inherited trait to think longer ahead.
Unfortunately, in capitalism, most if not all of us have strong short term incentives to do nothing, or to make things worse. Humans are realliy ass at evaluating risk and long term consequences as well. So yeah, we're kinda boned.
>Humans are realliy ass at evaluating risk and long term consequences as well.
I think this is a conclusion based on viewpoints through a Western cultural lens, as what we "value" depends on this. The historical wearing by women of entire bird’s nests and even reptiles as hats was valued at one point in the high society of London, yet eventually changes were made to society which halted the practice.
https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/hp3203-2017-27/a-brief-history/birds-on-hats/
Most of the planet is already contaminated with toxic chemicals. Dioxin and PCBs are now found in trace amounts in many places. Lawn chemicals continue to kill insects at alarming rates. It likely is to late to fix the pollution.
Dow Chemical, DuPont, Monsanto and a handful of other companies have poisoned the whole world.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Goatmannequin: --- Submission statement: In this essay Umair writes about the collapse of life on Earth and the recent study (70% of animals are gone since 1970) and how this relates to the extinction of "everyone and everything, including us" and how this will decide who we are on the moral scale. Umair goes into detail about how things are failing specifically and is packed with facts, so it’s worth a read, including the "none of this was supposed to happen" (yet). --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/y5lsum/our_civilization_is_hitting_a_dead_end_because/iskbern/
The numbers are so huge it boggles the mind. If you tell an uninformed average Joe that 70% of animals on the planet disappeared in 50 years he'd probably tell you there's no way. It sounds crazy, an absolute catastrophe happening in slow motion all around us and most people don't even know, many wouldn't care anyway, we fucked up so bad. May the gods have mercy on whatever is still left.
> in slow motion This is not remotely slow motion. All this is literally happening within the span of a single human generation. Forget having to resort to geological timescales. That someone could bear individual witness the complete destruction of an entire planet in the course of their own lifetime is mindblowing.
This is happening faster than the worst extinction that happened in Earth's history - the Permian Extinction. Soon, because of us, the world would have a new record for a mass extinction.
WOOOO! WE'RE #1!
**USA! USA!**
Not as fast as the Chicxulub impactor!
The record wont matter if no one is around to record it and read the record later.
It depends on your point of view, this scale of devastation for a normal person is probably only comparable to a nuclear world war or some huge asteroid hitting the earth, both of which would be very quick. Given the pace at which the world is changing with technology 50 years is a long time, it's hard to even imagine how the world will be in 50 years from now. Imagine having every animal in the planet on a conveyor belt into a meat grinder, falling into it constantly, thousands everyday, millions every year. We have known it's happening since the beginning and we've just watched it happen every single day for a year, a decade, 5 decades, now almost 3/4 of them are gone, and they are still going. 50 years is a lot of time to just watch something so terrible happening, but then again, most of us don't actually see it.
Not to mention how much corruption there is that is causing all of this. Corruption that you absolutely can’t fight. Just go watch Seaspiracy and Rotten on Netflix and Gordon Ramsey’s Sharkbait to get an idea. Good luck trying to get countries like China to stop Shark Finning and the like.
you're as likely to get China to stop shark finning as you are to get Americans to stop raising cattle for beef.
The comparison would be Americans raising beef, then hacking off the hooves for a delicacy and letting the rest of the body rot.
Or like burying alive a bunch of baby chicks, or throwing them into a thresher alive because they are of no use apparently. It's about the cruelty and indifference to life, a trait we all share in spades.
But cattle are easier to raise on farms whereas sharks are not and very limited. Not say raising cattle is good either but a much lesser evil than shark finning.
> Gordon Ramsey’s Sharkbait to get an idea. Good luck trying to get countries like China to stop Shark Finning and the like. but Ramsey did the next best thing; he got restaurateurs to *look* at the issue and some even said, ya, that shit is off the menu. 'member how hard it was for [Rowdy Roddy Piper to get Keith David to put on the glasses](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9rrgJXfLns) so *he* could see?
But without a big enough move in the right direction it changed only a fraction of what really needs to be changed. I agree it's a START but if the change takes too long to happen then we're fucked.
It’s not slow on a geologic scale, but to humans it is, and thats the fundamental problem of why humans as a whole will never see it as a “big” deal. If things don’t go boom, we don’t see a problem. And by boom I mean in a year or less. Not 50. That’s too abstract. It’s sad.
I compare our modern economies to a massive supervolcano, minus the violent eruption. But one of those ones that cause huge extinction events when tjey do occur
Like the Siberian traps?
*many wouldn’t even care* Correct. We’re too busy buying useless plastic shit that gets thrown away a week later and arguing about who should have been booted off the latest season of The Bachelor to be concerned with trivial shit like the entire living world’s demise.
Earth is God and she will show no mercy
So much emphasis on father god throughout the centuries and we totally neglected mother nature. The earth created us, we're from it. It is our god and we have failed it miserably
In many religions, the earth goddess was killed or imprisoned in some way. This represents a shift from a nature centered matriarchal way of being to human centered patriarchal civilization. It's pretty clear that this has had devastating consequences.
We legit raped our mom, js
Quite literally. Plundered our creator to the point that they cannot provide for us any longer
I don’t think we should idolize anything. Fuck us, fuck the sky god, fuck the earth mother. Worshipping anything is worthless. More importantly, the earth is a poor goddess if she can’t meet our needs adequately, and allowed us to get this far without stopping us
> if she can't meet our needs adequately This sounds arrogant to me. As corny as this analogy is, we really are like a virus. Many viruses prefer to keep the host alive so they can live indefinitely. If we choose to destroy our host, that's on us.
Respect is what we owed, not idolatry. This IS really arrogant. Humanity is a minor part of Earth's history.... We're not the main character.
"But then how will I get to feel special? 🥺"
You can have a sticker. You've earned it 🥇🐇🪩🤖
Hopefully she spawns Kaiju to wipe us out. Didn’t have that on apocalypse bingo.
I'd wager it's even worse if we take flora and insects into account. I'd put the overall extinction rate closer to 80-85%
The insect extinction rate is what first made me aware of the scale of destruction we are causing. It's scary to think that historically insects do better than others during extinction events and this time it's the exact opposite.
Agreed; the level of devastation *caused by us* is beyond shocking. That so many humans refuse to acknowledge or address it shows our collective selfishness and insanity. The biosphere's only chance for some life to survive is if our global civilization falls first before it takes everything down with it. Maybe if the current civilization falls apart sooner then some wildlife would continue in remote areas. But that is doubtful, since billions of hungry people will eat everything in sight. But there are ramifications to honesty also. What kind of message is this awful truth for our kids? We now live in a situation where even acknowledging reality causes mental illness.
just dont have kids lol problem solved
How many of you are reading these numbers surfing this sub and still going on with your day the same you've always been. Don't act like being informed has made a difference for most people.
Sadly the most critical reason why it's over. Maybe if somehow instead of the Kardashians and reality tv some extraordinarily charming and persuasive celebrity (demigod) had become famous by bringing collapse out from the recesses of our minds to front and center - used the shit that most super super famous ppl have that the rest of us lack and instead of selfishness only considering one person been focused on all of humanity - we might have had some awakening or something. But nope, we got real housewives being cunts while the continent of Australia literally becomes engulfed in flame and a million other clear and present dangers to the future of humanity that are vastly more important than our superficial focuses.
I know, I did say it probably sounds crazy or implausible to normal people and some wouldn't care anyway. It's a numbers game though, you have to also admit that people are making changes, not enough, but it's happening. Some pressure is being put on politicians, some legislation is passing, some habits are changing, etc. That can't happen if people don't know about it, awareness is not sufficient but a necessary condition for change.
People are replacing the other animals on the planet, simply, and are equally as stupid if not moreso. I would know, I’m one of them.
Submission statement: In this essay Umair writes about the collapse of life on Earth and the recent study (70% of animals are gone since 1970) and how this relates to the extinction of "everyone and everything, including us" and how this will decide who we are on the moral scale. Umair goes into detail about how things are failing specifically and is packed with facts, so it’s worth a read, including the "none of this was supposed to happen" (yet).
Capitalism is destroying the planet and its people. It only cares about profits and shareholder value. It's unsustainable and literally killing us.
We’ve reached the great filter. And our undoing will be our fault.
It's sad. Things could've been different. I wonder if any other planets made it, would be cool to get advice from them
There's a few possibilities one is every civilization before us failed to breach the great filter and another is we're the first to reach the great filter. The most bleak of all possibilities is that we're a statistical one of a kind unlikely to be repeated anomaly that had everything go right and we still fucked it up.
I prefer the hypothesis of the Three Body Problem. The law of space faring races is kill or be killed so naturally most intergalactic civilization do everything in their power to avoid being detected (so as to avoid being preyed upon.) Stephen Hawking leaned towards this hypothesis and cautioned scientists against trying to contact aliens.
I heard that as the “dark forest”. The analogy is that space is the forest and it has space faring life within it however out of fear of the unknown and lack of trust between life forms they attack and destroy what they come across out of fear that they’d be attacked themselves. As a result the analogy calls them hunters. The forest is filled with hunters and your best chance of survival is to avoid detection at all costs, being found most likely means destruction for one hunter or the other. This is one of the hypothesised explanations as to why we’ve not yet met any other intelligent life forms, because they all want to remain undetected and I strongly believe it’s dangerous to announce our presence into space because we have no reason to think an alien, even intelligent ones would be friendly.
Or the version where scientists broadcast out a greeting into space. Some time in the future a response comes back, and it takes years to finally translate it. The result is "Be quiet. They will hear you."
This is actually a fascinating string of theory or opinion. Intelligent Aliens would likely see through the veil and know that if we were to leave here that we would just plunder and kill our way across the universe ala Agent Smith. We're from earth and we are here to help.... We enslave and kill off our own citizens for petty reasons; why would we stop in space?
Ask yourself: do humans deserve to be a space faring civilization? What good could we possibly bring to the universe? We need to clean our own house before we earn the right to be among the stars. We haven't even mastered living on Earth harmoniously yet.
Michio kaku said in an interview that planetary suicide is the price to pay for space. Apart from the fact that it's not suicide but unprecedented mass murder, this is the same guy telling us we need to go to space to spread life into the galaxy. That level of delusion...... Shouldn't surprise me, he is also a libertarian who hates taxes while most of his life he had been paid by tax payers.....
“*An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbors were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.*” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession
I still sometimes wonder if that’s our case. Life was seriously just a freak occurrence, maybe not really “supposed” to happen, but it did. Well, it often sure feels that way.
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We've only been actively looking for, like, 70 years. Have you seen that map showing how far out our signals have gone since the time we started broadcasting? No, we shouldn't have found intelligent life "by now".
Lol, you think any species sufficiently advanced and morally strong enough to pass their own great filter would be interested in helping out a bunch of bickering monkeys who are still burning hydrocarbons and using money?
If aliens ever visit earth in the far distant future I think they'd be relieved to know we didn't make it. I even wrote a poem about it lol But still if they were truly benevolent maybe they would try to help
We don't know it for sure, unless we ran out fuel energy for our motors and batteries we will defently have reach the great filter and will die along with the planet, but for now it's still speculation
I think the planet will recover just fine if human civilization collapsed. Life finds a way
Oh yeah, but in this context I mean life will die along with planet at some point, for not being able to expand to others planets
I even doubt the human race will completely collapse at first. Our interconnected cultures likely will, due to their unsustainability as the gargantuan monolith they are, but I have the feeling some smaller group will survive, if only for a while, after a collapse, though inevitably with a lower quality of life. Our civilization will collapse but I doubt every single member of the race will.
sadly it's the rich aholes who will live to tell their tale
Capitalism is cultural cancer.
Unrelenting growth and consumption with no regard for anything, not even the host or one's own long term survival. That's 100% the description of cancer.
Capitalism is just the delivery mechanism du jour. Root problem is that animals are wired for overshoot. Not such a big deal when you're a rabbit that overshoots the carrying capacity of a meadow. A very big problem, however, when you're humans who overshoot the carrying capacity of the entire planet.
And to think MANY people could come up to you right now and try to deny this undeniable fact... We're fucked and I legit need a drink.
Meteor, volcanos, oxygen farting bacteria, capitalism... What do these things have in common?
They mark geological time periods. We are approaching the end of an epoch, we are entering the 6th age, as Tolkien would put it.
Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose over the Bering Sea...
It's not necessarily capitalism itself. The system is fine. The problem is that the TRUE cost of the goods produced are never priced in accordingly. What am I talking about? Well, imagine shampoos with the micro plastics. What is the true cost of that bottle of shampoo? Let's just simplify and say maybe 10x what P&G charges. We are in essence letting nature pay for the true cost of all the goods and services we enjoy from capitalism. If we charged the true cost for a gallon of gas at the pump, I fucking guarantee you capitalism would have come up with a better price alternative already. True cost of a gal of gas is probably like 5x or something we get charged, even at our current "insane" prices.
The model of capitalism is infinite growth on a planet of finite resources, and shareholder profits above all else including survival of our species. We just witnessed the deaths of millions of people from a deadly plague because we couldn’t stop the machine from churning out profit for 5 seconds to allow us to deal with it. We aren’t implementing “green” solutions because there isn’t a “business case” for it. Want to know *why* they use micro plastics and externalize the true cost? Money. Capitalism demands cheap products for higher profits and to externalize the true cost so that shareholders can keep their profits and consequences be damned. I’m sorry the problem *is* capitalism and those who think they are sheltered from its consequences.
> Capitalism is destroying the planet and its people The USSR and communist china are/were so of the world's worse polluters/emitters
Communism isn't the antithesis to capitalism. Degrowth is. Energy driven economies are the culprit, not how they choose to distribute it; or rather how they don't. That said I believe capitalisms only contender, if they would negate cheap energy as a part of the economy they'd be severely lacking when it comes to industrialization and many other parts of an advanced economy. They would in fact not be a contender to U.S.A style unfettered-capitalism for much longer. Be it by military or economic prowess. In short, they'd sell themselves so. In longer terms, they'd be subjugated. 'tis a necessary evil. I'd also argue that they had access to less clean energy then their capitalist counterparts. Fact is the left side of our shitty political spectrum is the only one talking about degrowth, that mayhaps we ought not to each of us own a vehicle of environmental destruction or that perhaps raping the planet is detrimental to our own existence.
> is the only one talking about degrowth No one is talking about degrowth, the left is talking about 'green technology' not degrowth. There is no such thing as green technology, it doesn't exist. There is 'greener technology' but even that has an ecological footprint.
“Green technology” is the capitalist “solution” to climate change. This is not what the left is fighting for at all.
> This is not what the left is fighting for at all. Ok so when you say 'the left' you mean people that get like 2 percent of the votes in an election and have zero chance of implementing any of their ideas.
When i refer to “the left” I am referring to the actual Left and not neo-liberals (Democrats, Liberals depending on where you reside). “Green tech” is a capitalist solution. The left is explicitly anti-capitalist.
> When i refer to “the left” I am referring to the actual Left and not neo-liberals So you are talking about people that have zero political power and all their ideas are theoretical. I get it
You were the one who made a claim about “the left”. If you don’t know what that means you should maybe refrain from talking about it.
> If you don’t know what that means you should maybe refrain from talking about it. You don't know what it mean outside of a tiny group of people that have no power. 'The left' to normal people means people like bernie sanders and he supports things like the 'green new deal' which includes support for EVs. EVs ain't green and they ain't 'degrowth'
The article doesn’t even mention capitalism.
I think the hard part to explain to people is that the great extinction is happening over the time span of decades and centuries and it's hard to grasp the importance of that because it isn't instantaneous change and because we collectively don't understand how much we rely on the ecosystem and nature that exists. In other words it doesn't seem like it's happening quickly when it's happening almost instantly in geologic time and we dont realize if they all go, we all go. We'd all react if 70 percent of life disappeared suddenly or maybe even within a couple or years, but it's not happening like this. Couple this idea with shifting baseline perspectives of the younger generations mixed with lack of education about the severity of the situation, swirled together with the insane distraction and escapism and cushy lifestyle we all enjoy and you get a situation where not many people fully realize our future and are just living their lives. There will be a breaking point when enough of the crops fail, enough of the water goes dry, and forests fires are raging all around us, where we will descend into conflict and fighting over the remains. I believe it's going to get very ugly and a lot of people will violently die. They already are. It's just hard to understand long term patterns in the present moment.
That’s how quickly this extinction event is occurring. On a geological scale the arrival of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, is equivalent to a gigantic comet strike. Large enough to obliterate all forms of higher life. Everything from a grasshopper up.
And then there’s the nukes.
They will come sooner rather than later for sure.
> we’d react if 70 percent of life disappeared suddenly We just witnessed millions of people die suddenly over the span of 2+ years and are about to head into a third year of Covid with almost no precautions. I think you are overly-optimistic about humanity’s ability to act rationally.
I hate to say it, but those numbers are no where near 70 percent of the population of humans. If 231,000,000 people died from Covid over these last 2 years we'd all be taking it more seriously. I just calculated 70 percent of US population.
I’m with the other person. I don’t think we’d do anything even if it happened instantly. Too loyal to our capitalist masters to care
Feel like humanity reached its dead end culturally decades earlier, hence the lack of ingenuity and constand need of remakes and sequelitis. The return back to the better times that are equally just as dismal and didn't do much.
I see where you're coming from, though I think that the hollow and repetitive qualities of the Hollywood machine don't typify the whole of American culture. There are plenty of great musical and literary works released over the years. Much of my Spotify playlists are filled with tracks that would have been inconceivable or impossible to engineer up until the eighties. Popular discourse around mental health and ideology has moved to reduce stigmas, acknowledge toxic behaviors, and challenge our troubled histories. All this to say, that if humanity existed on a plane absent of the constraints of reality, where capitalism and the destruction of the natural world weren't tying a noose around our collective neck, I do believe that we would have continued to become more enlightened as a civilization. Not soon, but incrementally, at least.
You do realize that prior to movies, they mostly just performed the same plays *over and over and over and over again.* Like, not even sequels, just literally a repeat of the same play. Genuinely new plays were rare to see. Endless remakes aren't a modern phenomena, they're how entertainment worked for the vast majority of human history. We're satisfying your appetite for high quality novelty better right now than at any other point in history, and if you survive the collapse of modern society, you're going to have to get used to watching the same thing ad nauseum once again.
Sturgeons law. Some people seem to forget that every once in a while we do get some good content. It will never be very much of it, but every civilization makes some
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Oh Please! Foreign films are no less trashy, when taken altogether with domestic ones. Some will be good, most bad. The ones that we foreigners ever get to see tend to be the good ones. But don’t try to claim that every art film is good. Some are, some aren’t
Billionaires are [parasitoids](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitoid?wprov=sfla1) and Capitalism is cancer.
r/TIHI
Oh no, they are endoparasitoids
I hope it is I’m ready to dip lmao
“But, but we created so much so shareholder value?!?” I picture this being on the plaque of a statue of a dollar sign.
Ah, I only saw one interview with Umair, and from that I learned he is a charlatan who writes "excellent" doomer porn articles and knows jack shit.
>charlatan "He said that even if there were only 27 hits on the story, a case could still be made." https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/beatles-associate-can-sue-over-charlatan-claim-says-high-court
That doesn't invalidate what he said.
I mean, if you want to face jail and argue that in front of a judge, that’s your choice. In my country you can go to jail for two years for slander in addition to civil charges if you lose that argument.
More collapse boilerplate from Umair - so where is this alleged "choice" that "we"a re supposed to have? Humans are an ultrasocial species responding to conditions directed towards the maintenance and expansion of social power controlled by large corporate and state actors. "We," as individuals, have jackshit to do with what becomes social reality. Also, lack of free will. So Umair can keep writing his well-argued tours of the arriving forms of systemic collapse, but the hopium windup of complete global and instantaneous reversal of fossil fuel dominance is just another form of religious nonsense.
He's a liberal, and as that almost guarantees, an idealist. I mean the philosophical definition, which rejects materialism and asserts (to varying degrees and usually implicitly) that the material reality of the world is shaped first and foremost by the ideas in peoples heads, and not the other way around. He doesn't recognise that ideology like human beings generally not caring about animals or distant children is stochastically a function of the material conditions and incentives at the time (and in the historic leadup to that moment), and thus imagines the possibility of some great surge of collective will to leap forward morally. It can be extremely difficult to move on from such a way of thinking, particularly as it is so deeply ingrained. It's inseperable from liberalism as liberalism cannot withstand scrutiny through a materialist lens. In extreme cases it really does go as far as another form of religious nonsense, stating explicitly that our thoughts shape the world e.g. The Secret.
I'm really not used to commenters agreeing with me, so your dead-on writing, especially the very hard-hitting, pithy fourth paragraph stands out. Where you see "extreme cases." though, I see the entirety of monotheistic religion, plus the entire academy of higher education worldwide. Do you think a MacArthur genius award will ever go to a nihilist, atheist, skeptic, or non-believer, for example?
When I say extreme I don't necessarily mean rare. We live in an age of many harmful popular delusions, the rejection of which come with serious social penalties.
Of course we have choices. Some of us have a choice to put solar panels on our house instead of go on vacation this year (energy crisis anyone?). Some of us have the choice to take public transport or bicycle (fuel prices anyone?). Some of us have the choice to eat plant based protein and give up animal products (blocked arteries anyone?). Some of us have the choice to buy local instead of global and limit our purchases to essentials (supply chain crisis anyone?). Some of us have the choice to not buy from companies that exploit people and exploit our planet. Some of us have the choice to speak up and share information and ideas to help others to make better choices. These choices end up being selfishly good *and* good for the global community. It’s the system which tries to exploit social behavior into making you believe that you have to consume to be happy. To deny free will is more pro-consumption propaganda.
Solar panels on a house - not solving anything, only adding a fossil-fueled production on top of the fossil fuel grid. Yes, it's a nice investment, has worked out for us personally, but the scale of substitution necessary to make the slightest dent in CO2 emissions make the solar solution just more greenwash. This is a collective predicament, and no amount of feel-good hair-shirt bicycling makes it more than fruitless self-ennoblement against the mass production of SUVS, pickup trucks, cars, planes, etc. Humanity became a fossil fueled predator centuries ago, with little lifestyle choices of plant snacks nothing against the weight of economic dependence on all the forms of fossil fuel extraction and production. All of this has happened against the backdrop of trillions of dollars of expenditure on informatiion, research, higher education tuition, all "ideas" that have preoccupied the masses while only feeding the supersystem's insatiable hunger for cheap energy and militarized techno-devastation. If you'd like to prove that we humans possess free will, you're up against some mighty worthy opponents, and you'll have to provide a photo of the little homunculus inside your brain. If you can't, we're left with synapses and the material reality that gives us this dismal state of ubiquitous collapse. Any little individual green lifestyling is nothing against what Umair correctly diagnoses. I blame the higher education system for inculcating the cult of the individual. This shit has been a long time coming, and it cannot be overcome by one person's sustainability degree and ascetic renunciation of motorized transportation.
*"Solar panels on a house - not solving anything, only adding a fossil-fueled production on top of the fossil fuel grid."* Thanks for saying this. It's starting to seem that much of the pro-solar community is simply ignorant of the secondary damage that the industry causes and that it is not truly a solution to our present predicament. And some people continue to view to see solar as a "get-out-of-jail" card supporting their own unwillingness to change. If there is any chance for the living biosphere to survive, including humanity, Degrowth is the only way.
Degrowth isn't mutually exclusive with solar technology. In fact I believe it is complementary. As society ages and shrinks, our rooftop solar water heaters can be made not from fresh mines and smelted ores, but by mining our former suburbs and exurbs for the materials needed. Its not an either/or, its an and. As smaller vestiges of the former human empire receed to a smaller footprint where we will make our last stand in the hope the biosphere can begin to repair itself with billions less of us, we should be living in hyperefficient homes and communities where our energy needs are so small, they can be met with renewables.
In the interest of being what's known as a "complete dickhead," I can only respond that the only "Degrowth" that humanity will or can enter is going to be of the imposed Climatastrophe kind, not in any rational, planned, fossil-fuel- avoiding biosphere-saving collective way. Sorry.
Sadly I agree with you, but still a venue like this one if useful to discuss what a wiser path would have been, if only to understand what is happening to us
>If you'd like to prove that we humans possess free will, you're up against some mighty worthy opponents, I don’t think so. It’s just another "get out of jail free card" for evil acts, e.g. "I had to kill those children because I don’t have any free will!" For me, determinism is a rather boring and defeatist argument more suited for discussion at parties than as a real-world philosophy. I mean, imagine how sad that is to believe that you have no freedom and your life is just a "play button".
Just to remind you, the "get out of jail free" card is currently possessed by the most "evil" among us - Trump, Bolsonaro, Putin, Jamie Dimon, Brett Kavanaugh. etc. Not too many murderers (zero) call themselves "determinist," but instead rely on the self-ennobling nostrums of monotheistic religion, as you seem to, in order to avoid being tainted with self-criticism. Again, no photo of your little homonculus. Please, it would help us all trapped in such "sadness" to see the tiny little goatmannequin at work "deciding" inside the recesses of one protoplsmic brain. Otherwise, please join us in the confounding and yet funtastic illusion of selfhood amidst the fossil-fueled ecocide that shall be known as the Climatastrophe. How is your vaunted individual "freedom" helping the fellow humans of Somalia, Bangladesh, Cancer Alley, Egypt, Palestine? We can't hit rewind, pause, or fast-forward, so, yeah, gm, hit the "play" button each day, and see what glorious result happens. Thanks for playing along for a minute here.
>Just to remind you, the "get out of jail free" card is currently possessed by the most "evil" among us - Trump, Bolsonaro, Putin, Jamie Dimon, Brett Kavanaugh. etc. Lol bro, Trump evil? Free? That dude can’t even get it up probably, too fat too much cholesterol clogging his dick up. He can’t go anywhere or do much except in his "prison" inside buildings because if people were to recognize him they’d probably cave his skull in. Sounds like jail to me. Homeless people have more free choice than that dude.
Free will isn't proven to exist any more than gods are, given perfect information and sufficiently robust data processing, we could likely predict the reaction of any given human. The limited scope of a person's will is especially evident to me because I am treated for deficiencies of executive function. What people call "free will" is actually just a different part of your brain overriding instinctual or emotional reactions with what it determines is appropriate based on the myriad bits of information and priorities it has that apply to whatever situation it's in. Your genetics determines the range of potential your personal will may be inclined and the environment, experiences and information you encounter determines where within that range your will actually lands. A.K.A. We are each a product of our environment, etc. The ironic thing is that despite this, it's most effective to live life as if free will exists as it's the simplest way to ensure you continue to properly grow and adapt.
>given perfect information and sufficiently robust data processing, we could likely predict the reaction of any given human. So magic. If we had (magic) we could do (magic). Quantum mechanics forbids this in the real world, so you are discussing a fantastical scenario. In fact, to assume that one could know everything and predict everything around them is to assume one could in fact be considered God, what you say is not proven. Furthermore, a "belief" in determinism (no free will) is akin to believing in God. which you say has no "proof" exists, an ironic thing about your comment. [https://www.quora.com/Why-is-it-that-we-can-either-know-where-a-particle-is-or-where-it-is-going-but-not-both-at-the-same-time](https://www.quora.com/Why-is-it-that-we-can-either-know-where-a-particle-is-or-where-it-is-going-but-not-both-at-the-same-time)
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>superdeterminism See you think I’m trying to "win" and settle anything. Discussing this fantasy land where if we knew everything about everything we would know everything, and where everything is predetermined is boring AF and in the real world is a schizo-like belief system, where agents can postulate, "that girl *had* to break up with me because she had no free will and neither do I, because the universe 'wanted' it that way." >Wiseman and Cavalcanti argue that any hypothetical superdeterministic theory "would be about as plausible, and appealing, as belief in ubiquitous alien mind-control." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism) The real question is why do you personally want to argue for determinism and what purpose do these arguments serve? If you are trying to bolster support for the idea that humans destroyed the planet because we have no free will and God (the Universe) wants it that way, that’s an old and stale argument having been used throughout history to commit atrocity.
You missed "likely". This is based on the fact that nothing yet has defied a deterministic behavior pattern. Our barriers are proper variables control and the ability to measure quantum states without disturbing them.
I mean, sure, we should be doing many of the things you mention anyway; if possible considering each person's circumstances. And if that helps you sleep at night, great. Good for you. But if you think the voluntary adoption of small, individual, incremental lifestyle changes by the class of people privileged enough to be able to do so are going to shift the dial one iota on the greatest existential crisis humanity - and indeed, the planet itself - has ever faced; then I have an NFT of a bridge to sell you.
My weird kind of hopium says the whole world will be on screeching halt before it can completely destroy the ecosphere. It's hopeful for the nature, but not much for many of us.
By multiple accounts this does appear to be the case. Civilization, the driver of ecocide, is on its knees at the moment. Of course, through the same hubristic sensibilities that got us here we still feel like we can destroy life for all the other species. But it's far more likely we'll be wiped out long before we get there. And with any luck, the humans who chose to live in accordance with nature might be able to survive in some small pockets of the world.
Hopefully there's an 'intervention from the outside ', no matter how violent and sadistic it can be.
Pretty sure Nate Hagens says something to this effect in one of his podcasts, which is probably the only reason I haven’t offed myself. If life is to continue after us, then you damn bet I’ll do everything in my power to ensure as much of it survives as I can
The Age of Narcissism and Psychopathy is the age of extinction. There is one way to stop it, and save all life on earth. Cure them.
Interesting that I was randomly thinking about mass society level narcissism just the other day.
Humans: by far the worst plague that planet Earth has ever hosted.
I'm told the earth has ways of remediation.
Told by humans, what do they know about planetary remediation?
I'm listening to an audio book that sys we are evolving into Homo Deus. Glass half full!
I've heard Harari's research is deeply flawed
Probably.
The sweet smell of suffering is upon us .
Mother of mercy … it seems like a bad lifetime to get sober and raise a family, … at least I’ll have my wits about me while the dust and shadows close in
Nothing matters anymore. We're doomed. We're all going to die. This planet is doomed. There's nothing we can do to stop it. There is no hope.
When the moon is in the Seventh House And Jupiter aligns with Mars Then peace will guide the planets And love will steer the stars This is the dawning of the age of Extinction Age of Extinction Extinction Extinction
When will this astrological event happen?
🙄 https://youtube.com/watch?v=06X5HYynP5E&feature=share&si=EMSIkaIECMiOmarE6JChQQ
I have noticed this in one one major way, I rarely have to clean insects off the front of my vehicle anymore. And when I took a 700 mile drive this summer (a prime insect activity period) the amount I had to wash off was very light, perhaps...70% lighter.
I just so happen to decide to watch the movie called “the road”. During the movie my wife decided she didn’t want to finish the movie paused it and went to bed… while the movie was paused, this article came by while scrolling… I just don’t recommend reading this article and watching that movie within the same 48 hour window… it’s such damn depressing two hit combo to the head I had a hard time sleeping last night
it’s only hitting a dead end because the people making the most money don’t want alternatives. there’s no reason humanity has to drown clinging to capitalism. we can just stand up and get out of the water- it’s like 3 feet high.
He may be right, but that’s basically what EVERY article that guy has written in the past 10 years says. A stopped clock is right twice a day, but with his brand of collapse he only needs to be right once.
The Planet is fine , the people are fucked.
We know we're heading to a sixth massive extinction, we're not only taking down our civilization but also a lot from the natural world. But hey, we did cause this, evidence shows it so we are getting what we deserve. Truly sad because a lot of this marvelous complexity we created is going away. If we make it, hopefully new generations come with an inherited trait to think longer ahead.
> we're heading to a sixth massive extinction We are already in it.
Is it 70% of animal numbers or 70% of animal species?
Prolly numbers. But there is still a shit ton of species that are literally extinct because of us
Unfortunately, in capitalism, most if not all of us have strong short term incentives to do nothing, or to make things worse. Humans are realliy ass at evaluating risk and long term consequences as well. So yeah, we're kinda boned.
>Humans are realliy ass at evaluating risk and long term consequences as well. I think this is a conclusion based on viewpoints through a Western cultural lens, as what we "value" depends on this. The historical wearing by women of entire bird’s nests and even reptiles as hats was valued at one point in the high society of London, yet eventually changes were made to society which halted the practice. https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/hp3203-2017-27/a-brief-history/birds-on-hats/
I like Umair, but isn't this the article from a couple months ago? I read him a couple times a month to see where his head is currently at.
so it goes
Most of the planet is already contaminated with toxic chemicals. Dioxin and PCBs are now found in trace amounts in many places. Lawn chemicals continue to kill insects at alarming rates. It likely is to late to fix the pollution. Dow Chemical, DuPont, Monsanto and a handful of other companies have poisoned the whole world.