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If Man Has Acted as His Own Destroyer for Most of His History, Why Is He not Extinct?

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Dustin86

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Just now, Repairman said:

No, not at all. I am asserting that the act of applying reason to its best use, in coordination with man's physical ability allows him to achieve the wonders of the modern world, while mysticism was the dominant idea in man's earliest development. Man's nature is to consume other organisms; you are conflating this fact with parasitism: a contortion if ever I saw one.

Good luck trying to defend your line of "reasoning."

Are humans not organisms?

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25 minutes ago, SpookyKitty said:

Well since man's nature is to consume other organisms, and men are organisms. Man's nature is to consume other men. Maybe not always literally.

Wow, man. Yeah, we're all cannibals. Far out, dude! Are you literally high as a parasite right now?

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2 hours ago, SpookyKitty said:

No, as I said before, "paraiste" means any organism that takes what another organism has produced. This is not a synonym for "living being" because there are living beings that don't do this. For example, plants, autotrphic microorganisms, and bees, to name a few.

Ha, ha, bees! This is the funniest thread I've ever read. Please, don't ever stop drunk-posting! You're hilarious.

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2 hours ago, SpookyKitty said:

It is reason that tells man to kill his fellow for his stuff.

SpookyKitty, en passant, I was thinking today about whether reason alone can tell us what is morally good. If "it is reason that tells man to kill his fellow for his stuff", then clearly the answer is no. Reason is a tool, it may help people to achieve the morally good, but it cannot tell people what the morally good is.

Edited by Dustin86
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Just now, MisterSwig said:

Ha, ha, bees! This is the funniest thread I've ever read. Please, don't ever stop drunk-posting! You're hilarious.

Don't diss the bees. They're better Objectivists than you can ever hope to be.

EDIT: “I swear, BUZZ! by my life and my BUZZ! love of it, that I will never live for the BUZZ! sake of another creature, nor ask BUZZ! another creature to live for mine BUZZ!”

Edited by SpookyKitty
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The human has survived all this time because even though we have acted as our own destroyer, we have found a way to keep living. Take the bird's example, suppose that the bird is trying to break its legs and finally does it. Now, suppose the bird finds a way to keep moving without using its legs, yes birds can fly but they need their legs to land and hang on to everything. Not only that, but also they need their legs to catch their prey, so let's suppose that the birds find a way to not starve to death, to keep feeding its babies, to keep escaping from the predators. If they can do this breaking its legs does nothing because eventually they will recuperate. Same thing happens to us humans. Since ancient times there have been wars, epidemics, starvation and many other things that put humankind in danger yet we find a way to survive. In my opinion it's because us humans always find a way to strive and survive, after all we are the most intelligent species in the Earth. You ask yourself how are we still here, but the real question is when will we vanish from existence, if we even vanish. That's what we have to ask, we've gotten very far from where we started but we don't know how much more will we travel before hitting a barrier that can not be overcomed.  

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On 11/2/2016 at 0:34 AM, Dustin86 said:

SpookyKitty, en passant, I was thinking today about whether reason alone can tell us what is morally good. If "it is reason that tells man to kill his fellow for his stuff", then clearly the answer is no. Reason is a tool, it may help people to achieve the morally good, but it cannot tell people what the morally good is.

Quite the contrary, reason and reality are primary to defining the moral good. The notion that morality is subjective explains many historic tragedies. Rationalization is not to be confused with reason.  

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 10/31/2016 at 9:52 PM, SpookyKitty said:

The truth of the matter is that there or no people who are only producers or only parasites.

Statistically speaking, sure; most people who're alive today happen to live their lives somewhere in the middle. That's a fair description of the current state of the world.

 

On 10/31/2016 at 9:52 PM, SpookyKitty said:

Everyone, by painful necessity of the logic and reality of survival, needs to do both. Anyone who does just one or the other is pretty dumb (putting all your eggs in one basket and all that).

... Hold on.

 

Firstly, why the Hell can't anybody ever be consistently productive? The fact that most people aren't right now doesn't make it a physical impossibility. Since the unprecedented is not synonymous with the impossible - what in the Hell is going to prohibit anybody from earning whatever money they want to spend???

Secondly, it is not dumb to be consistently productive; that's actually the smartest strategy one could adopt. "Putting all your eggs in one basket" is a pretty good idea when the other basket is broken.

Thirdly, those assertions contradict each other. Either productivity is impossible to practice or those who practice it are just dumb; you cannot have it both ways.

 

thank_you_for_input_sherlock.gif

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On 11/1/2016 at 1:57 AM, SpookyKitty said:

The whole reason that [parasitism] is supposed to be bad is because it supposedly does not require the use of reason.

Nope. Parasitism requires a lesser degree of reason than production, but it still requires some amount of it. Otherwise vegetables (of either the cognitive or the culinary variety; take your pick) could do it, and that does seem to be physically impossible.

Think about it, though. If parasitism was evil for nothing more than the fact that it requires relatively little mental work then enjoying music or cinema would also be evil - and that would clearly be incompatible with Egoism. The evil of parasitism isn't because it's an easy way to get rich quick; it's evil because it doesn't work in the long run, and in the short run it screws up your insides.

 

On 11/1/2016 at 1:57 AM, SpookyKitty said:

But the concepts of parasitism and production are prior to any specific means of parasitism or production.

No, the concept of "production" is not prior to "manufacturing" or "baking" or "smelting" or "building"; it's closer to the other way around for both concepts.

 

On 11/1/2016 at 1:57 AM, SpookyKitty said:

But the concepts of parasitism and production are prior to any specific means of parasitism or production. Hence, there is a pre-moral (i.e. conceptually precedes rights and such) concept of parasitism.

That doesn't really follow, but OK.

 

On 11/1/2016 at 1:57 AM, SpookyKitty said:

A parasite, is simply any organism that survives by taking what other organisms have produced.

There's nothing wrong with redefining your terms or inventing new ones. This is Objectivism Online ... we do that. However, the entire purpose of conceptual innovation is to come up with better concepts to use; ones that are clearer, more precise and more expressive, and I don't see what benefit this new sense of "parasitism" provides.

If there is some benefit that I'm missing then I'd be happy to hear about it, but until then (as SoftwareNerd observed) it kind of sounds like you're just saying "organism" in some sort of secret code that you have to explain to everyone else in advance, rather than just saying "organism".

 

On 11/1/2016 at 1:57 AM, SpookyKitty said:

The necessary conditions for the survival of a human being are very minimal, requiring no more use of reason than that of a chimpanzee.

You think so?

 

Chimpanzees are much stronger than human beings. They have lower metabolic requirements, breed faster, have fangs and -most importantly- they're much better climbers than we are.

That's important because Chimpanzees live where the trees are. We don't. The evolution of the earliest hominids coincided with the formation of the Himalayan mountains, which prevented vast amounts of rainwater from falling in Africa and replaced the monolithic Rainforest there with Savannah's. The wide-open Savannah is a great place for lions, elephants and hyenas, but it's not so good for Chimpanzees.

 

I'm short on time so please forgive me; I'll have to cut to the chase. 

 

Without agriculture and modern medicine, the entire surface of the earth can support a few million of us. Without fire or spears, it couldn't support anyone. Without reason, we wouldn't even have fire or spears.

 

Reason actually is our means of survival.

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On 10/31/2016 at 10:38 PM, SpookyKitty said:

You had parents didn't you?

You're a parasite.

On 11/1/2016 at 9:36 PM, SpookyKitty said:

No, as I said before, "paraiste" means any organism that takes what another organism has produced. This is not a synonym for "living being" because there are living beings that don't do this. For example, plants, autotrphic microorganisms, and bees, to name a few.

Every living thing has parent(s).

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On 11/3/2016 at 9:10 AM, Luis Enrique Colón said:

The human has survived all this time because even though we have acted as our own destroyer, we have found a way to keep living.

...

That's what we have to ask, we've gotten very far from where we started but we don't know how much more will we travel before hitting a barrier that can not be overcomed.  

What makes you think that there is such a barrier?

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