I'm starting to lose faith in mankind at an alarming rate

Isis · 2011-04-24T22:57:44+00:00

I just got sent a link of a video involving pretty shocking footage of a pig farm in the US. I'm Afrikaans and I love my meat as much as the next guy, but I'm not sure whether or not I'll be able to carry on like this. I've always felt like I was supporting crap such as this by buying factory farmed meat. I've never seriously considered going vegan though. On the one hand I'm aware of the fact that one consumer is not going to change the world, and whether I continue to eat meat or not is irrelevant. On the other hand I cannot help but feel that I'm the sort of person that stands up for what he believes in, even if I'm standing alone. I don't want to be the type of person that compromises his values because "everyone is doing it". Or it's "normal", we need protein.....bla bla bla. We pride ourselves on the fact that we are sentient beings that can put ourselves in another shoes. Why the hell do we insist on torturing animals for the sake of stuffing ourselves full of food that go way beyond our dietary requirements? I'm so furious I could kill these assholes with my bare hands, but I'm afraid they're just the product of our wondrous and progressive society. I'm beginning to think that consumerism is not that great after all. I'm so ashamed of being human right now it's not even funny ☹ I'm sorry for posting this on the forum but I feel like I need to share this with someone.

Wizard

X-rated Bob wrote
Hammeron wrote It seems to me that if you step back and look at our planet as Mankinds only home, that Mankind as an organism is treating it more like a host, and thus appears more like a virus than a mammal.
ALL life consumes something. There is no alternative. Life has nearly come to an end on this planet at least twice - and long before mankind appeared (and at least once before there were any mammals).

I think Hammeron was saying that man's consumption is destroying the very thing that is providing for him; in contrast to living in harmony with nature in a sustainable way.
I think man is the only lifeform that destroys its own environment.
(like using up all the Madagascan Rosewood)

vic

Isis wrote The development of science is an interesting topic, albeit a complicated one. I'm going to try and compound what usually takes me about 5-6 lectures to teach into a single post here, so bear with me...........

If we make a statement "If you throw stuff in the air, it will come down" we assume that this is a universal law. That will, roughly speaking, be our hypothesis. If we want to see whether or not this is actually true, we'd have to test it. So we proceed by throwing a bunch of stuff in the air and they all come back down. Now we'd be tempted to conclude that this is a universal law we have just discovered. The problem of induction pokes a stick in our spokes though. What guarantee do we have that the next thing we throw in the air will indeed come down? There is no logically coherent argument that we can make to formulate a universally applicable law based upon a limited number of experiences.

Isis then I need to "teach" you something here in one paragraph.... ? Anything you throw up in the air (here on earth) with an upward speed of less than 11 km/second WILL come down again and anything equaling that or faster, WILL go into orbit. Period. It's called the escape velocity which you may well know. But there are different escape velocities for each and every heavenly body. If you're on the moon or on Mars, it will be less, and on Jupiter it will be a lot more. There's no debate necessary about it. It's a law that holds for all systems in the Universe....even for black holes. Here, anything would have to travel at speeds exceeding 300,000 km/sec (c) to escape from it......and as you know, nothing can go faster than c (except inflation of space itself.... ? )

So Isis, physics has answers for most things philosophers grapple with in classrooms...even with the subject of reality ?

Isis

PeteM wrote This discussion reminds me of a time when I was producing a programme for a lighting company and I was looking for a deep philosophical statement on what 'light' is. After mounds and mounds of research the most enlightening (pardon the pun) statement I found was that 'LIGHT IS NOT DARK'. Very profound indeed.

Through this exercise, and as a simple member of the human race, my observation about philosophy is that it takes an awful lot of time, energy and waffle to arrive at no conclusion. It also reminded me that we know nothing.

?

Obviously I'm going to disagree with this statement. ?

Philosophy is questioning what we take for granted. I'm afraid you guys might have a misconception about what philosophy is if you believe it's a waste of time and involves waffling.

The underlying logic that makes scientific discourse possible is due to philosophical waffling. Much of what we have come to know about the world and ourselves can be, either directly or indirectly, attributed to philosophical waffling.

Viccy, you actually made the exact same point I wish to make. I think we differ on one point though. In my opinion science is not a question generator. Science is not very good at giving us new descriptions of how we should life.

The very same ethical problems that plagued the ancients are still with us today, despite our immense scientific progress. There is no such thing as a scientific approach towards ethics. The people that very often generate new and interesting descriptions are poets and novelists, not scientists. Rorty even refers to these creative people that give us new and interesting ways to look at things as strong-poets. The examples he uses include Nietzsche, Einstein, Orwell, Nabokov, Yates and my personal favorite, Milan Kundera. This is a very difficult idea to get ones head around, but moral progress is not a linear process and fuzzy philosophical concepts are very often at the heart of this process.

Hammeron

X-rated Bob wrote
Hammeron wrote It seems to me that if you step back and look at our planet as Mankinds only home, that Mankind as an organism is treating it more like a host, and thus appears more like a virus than a mammal. After all, viruses seem bent on host destruction, while the only mammal that seems bent on doing this is Mankind.
Well you can let a bunch of goats loose in your garden, but I'm telling you here and now that nothing constructive is going to come of it.

ALL life consumes something. There is no alternative. Life has nearly come to an end on this planet at least twice - and long before mankind appeared (and at least once before there were any mammals).

Humans are the one form of life who have the capacity to step back and say "wait! We're sawing at the branch we're sitting on." Give us (and yourself) at least that much credit.

Oh yes, there are many humans out there that are absolutely brilliant and certainly would never come close to even cosidering sawing off the branch on which they were sitting, but for every one of them there are many that are sawing that branch as we speak.........

Isis

vic wrote
Isis wrote The development of science is an interesting topic, albeit a complicated one. I'm going to try and compound what usually takes me about 5-6 lectures to teach into a single post here, so bear with me...........

If we make a statement "If you throw stuff in the air, it will come down" we assume that this is a universal law. That will, roughly speaking, be our hypothesis. If we want to see whether or not this is actually true, we'd have to test it. So we proceed by throwing a bunch of stuff in the air and they all come back down. Now we'd be tempted to conclude that this is a universal law we have just discovered. The problem of induction pokes a stick in our spokes though. What guarantee do we have that the next thing we throw in the air will indeed come down? There is no logically coherent argument that we can make to formulate a universally applicable law based upon a limited number of experiences.
Isis then I need to "teach" you something here in one paragraph.... ? Anything you throw up in the air (here on earth) with an upward speed of less than 11 km/second WILL come down again and anything equaling that or faster, WILL go into orbit. Period. It's called the escape velocity which you may well know. But there are different escape velocities for each and every heavenly body. If you're on the moon or on Mars, it will be less, and on Jupiter it will be a lot more. There's no debate necessary about it. It's a law that holds for all systems in the Universe....even for black holes. Here, anything would have to travel at speeds exceeding 300,000 km/sec (c) to escape from it......and as you know, nothing can go faster than c (except inflation of space itself.... ? )

So Isis, physics has answers for most things philosophers grapple with in classrooms...even with the subject of reality ?

Vic, we can, logically speaking, never conclude that this will be the case. How do we know that the law of gravity is indeed a universal law? It's like concluding that all cows are brown, because I've never encountered a white cow before. Maybe I just live in an area where there are no white cows. Just because every single instance we observe seems to suggest something, it does not imply that this is universally the case. Newton's original formulation of gravity is worlds removed from musings about gravitons and branes as we find in string theory for instance. Newton had no clue what gravity was, although he did mathematically map its effects accurately. How do we know that our scientific theories are not the same? Maybe we can predict what is happening, but how can we say for certain what the cogs look like that are producing those effects?

At best we can say we find it practically useful to think of things in terms of gravity and causality etc.

PeteM

Isis wrote This is a very difficult idea to get ones head around, but moral progress is not a linear process and fuzzy philosophical concepts are very often at the heart of this process.

I don't think it's difficult to to get ones head around it.... you either get it or you don't.

Sean

Isis wrote ...This is a very difficult idea to get ones head around...

Goodness, there is an understatement ? Although I've been following this thread ( as well as looking at the links that Singe posted ) the only conclusion that I've arrived at is that I'm not all that bright :-[

Isis

Sean wrote
Isis wrote ...This is a very difficult idea to get ones head around...
Goodness, there is an understatement ? Although I've been following this thread ( as well as looking at the links that Singe posted ) the only conclusion that I've arrived at is that I'm not all that bright :-[

Sean it has nothing to do with being bright. I've been studying philosophy for about 8 years now, so I've done loads of reading and picked up a bunch of technical arguments along the way. Some of them took me a few years to properly appreciate because they fly in the face of everything I thought I knew. I'm also convinced that you know more than you do, though you may lack the words to properly express them.

Ask me about something about chemistry or law and I'll be as useful as a piece of rosewood.

vic

Isis wrote
PeteM wrote This discussion reminds me of a time when I was producing a programme for a lighting company and I was looking for a deep philosophical statement on what 'light' is. After mounds and mounds of research the most enlightening (pardon the pun) statement I found was that 'LIGHT IS NOT DARK'. Very profound indeed.

Through this exercise, and as a simple member of the human race, my observation about philosophy is that it takes an awful lot of time, energy and waffle to arrive at no conclusion. It also reminded me that we know nothing.

?

In my opinion science is not a question generator. Science is not very good at giving us new descriptions of how we should life.The very same ethical problems that plagued the ancients are still with us today, despite our immense scientific progress. There is no such thing as a scientific approach towards ethics. The people that very often generate new and interesting descriptions are poets and novelists, not scientists. Rorty even refers to these creative people that give us new and interesting ways to look at things as strong-poets. The examples he uses include Nietzsche, Einstein, Orwell, Nabokov, Yates and my personal favorite, Milan Kundera. This is a very difficult idea to get ones head around, but moral progress is not a linear process and fuzzy philosophical concepts are very often at the heart of this process.

It's simply not true Isis ? Scientists have been warning about the challenges we grapple with at this moment for decades...things like pollution, global warming,over-population,extinction of species,etc. Statisticians have predicted the current recession 5 years ago...all of these were based on accurate mathematical calculations and extrapolations. It's the philosophers who spent years debating ethics while sea levels are rising.... ?

Isis

Lmao

Damn philosophers wasting time and money on nonsense ? Oh wait....science cannot tell us WHY this is something worth avoiding ??? Meh, I'm confused.

Yeah sure, people will die, but who cares. We'll all be cruising around on bitchin' boats.

[deleted]

Science is not very good at giving us new descriptions of how we should life.

I believe that science is more capable of facilitating life in accordance with our ethics than philosophy is. And you haven't explained why you believe ethics are so important after you went to such great lengths to explain why it's futile to try and understand anything. Do you think an explanation is necessary, or is it too large a concept to get one's head around?

There is no such thing as a scientific approach towards ethics.

Once again I believe the mere act of science is an embodiment of ethics. To be faithful, diligent, to persevere, to observe without prejudice, to understand the nature of the elements that we live with and that we are indeed made of, to seek ways to improve life for mankind and better understand how absolutely amazing it is to be alive. It is a beautiful art, and one that I think is not recognised enough.

vic

Isis wrote Lmao

Damn philosophers wasting time and money on nonsense ? Oh wait....science cannot tell us WHY this is something worth avoiding ??? Meh, I'm confused.

Yeah sure, people will die, but who cares. We'll all be cruising around on bitchin' boats.

? What is it that you want to avoid ? I'm also confused now :-\

BTW, we also have an ethics committee in the Physical and Natural sciences who needs to OK all research proposals before post grad students can proceed...it's a never-ending battle getting them to get their heads around issues which need to be expedited ?

On light bulbs....."The existence of the light bulb cannot be proven, and therefore it does not need to be changed." :?

PeteM

vic wrote On light bulbs....."The existence of the light bulb cannot be proven, and therefore it does not need to be changed."

Was that the light I was seeking... or am I still in the dark? Now that's the philosophical question.

Isis

Viccy, I never said we cannot prove anything and thus we should all be a bunch of nihilists. What I tried to convey is that there are various unseen narratives or linguistic paradigms that influence how we see the world. If we don't attempt to uncover how these narratives influence how we think, then we'll be significantly poorer for it. Science is not the tool for this job though. Poetry and art is probably a better option. Contrary to what you might think, I'm not some anti-science crusader.

I'm afraid ethics committees have lost the plot a bit. They made me jump through hoops to prove that my "research" wouldn't contain elements of racism, because I mentioned race in my research proposal. Talk about a waste of time....

Bob-Dubery

Wizard wrote
X-rated Bob wrote
Hammeron wrote It seems to me that if you step back and look at our planet as Mankinds only home, that Mankind as an organism is treating it more like a host, and thus appears more like a virus than a mammal.
ALL life consumes something. There is no alternative. Life has nearly come to an end on this planet at least twice - and long before mankind appeared (and at least once before there were any mammals).
I think Hammeron was saying that man's consumption is destroying the very thing that is providing for him; in contrast to living in harmony with nature in a sustainable way.
I think man is the only lifeform that destroys its own environment.

Not at all. That's why I mentioned goats. No wild animal thinks about conservation or husbandry. The bad thing (arguably) about man is that we don't (arguably) conserve enough. The good thing is that we actually can conserve - no other living thing on this planet has that capacity.

We make a mistake when we think that nature is harmonious and beautiful and in balance. It isn't. It's harsh and chaotic and competitive and except for mankind there is no forward planning. Wildlife populations rise and fall all the time. Too many cows and the pasture doesn't last and so the cow population diminishes. Until the pasture recovers and then populations go up again.

I refer you to Warren's earlier post - mankind and technology achieve a lot of good things too. We should give ourselves some credit sometimes.

Sean

X-rated Bob wrote We make a mistake when we think that nature is harmonious and beautiful and in balance. It isn't. It's harsh and chaotic and competitive and except for mankind there is no forward planning. Wildlife populations rise and fall all the time. Too many cows and the pasture doesn't last and so the cow population diminishes. Until the pasture recovers and then populations go up again

But is that not balance? Has mankind not introduced an element of imbalance through our massive consumption of...well, just about everything?

vic

X-rated Bob wrote
Wizard wrote
X-rated Bob wrote
Hammeron wrote It seems to me that if you step back and look at our planet as Mankinds only home, that Mankind as an organism is treating it more like a host, and thus appears more like a virus than a mammal.
ALL life consumes something. There is no alternative. Life has nearly come to an end on this planet at least twice - and long before mankind appeared (and at least once before there were any mammals).
I think Hammeron was saying that man's consumption is destroying the very thing that is providing for him; in contrast to living in harmony with nature in a sustainable way.
I think man is the only lifeform that destroys its own environment.
Not at all. That's why I mentioned goats. No wild animal thinks about conservation or husbandry. The bad thing (arguably) about man is that we don't (arguably) conserve enough. The good thing is that we actually can conserve - no other living thing on this planet has that capacity.
We make a mistake when we think that nature is harmonious and beautiful and in balance. It isn't. It's harsh and chaotic and competitive and except for mankind there is no forward planning. Wildlife populations rise and fall all the time. Too many cows and the pasture doesn't last and so the cow population diminishes. Until the pasture recovers and then populations go up again.
I refer you to Warren's earlier post - mankind and technology achieve a lot of good things too. We should give ourselves some credit sometimes.

Of course we must....it's the decission makers, those who put 20 cows on the pasture when it's only fit for 10, who must get the stick.

Bob-Dubery

Sean wrote
X-rated Bob wrote We make a mistake when we think that nature is harmonious and beautiful and in balance. It isn't. It's harsh and chaotic and competitive and except for mankind there is no forward planning. Wildlife populations rise and fall all the time. Too many cows and the pasture doesn't last and so the cow population diminishes. Until the pasture recovers and then populations go up again
But is that not balance? Has mankind not introduced an element of imbalance through our massive consumption of...well, just about everything?

Well a scientist might argue that the world is always in balance - or tending towards a state of balance. I don't want to use words like "trying" because these are just physical systems that we're talking about, not a concious being.

So I think we're asking the wrong question. What we should be trying to figure out - but I don't think it's easy - is how to maximise our species' chances of survival. Again we're the one species with a chance of extrapolating and planning.

Time scales are not constant either. Arguably (and I think probably) we have not yet depleted the resources we rely on. When we do then, like cows in a grazed out pasture, we have a problem.

I think we also need to understand that the earth and all it's systems are not in a settled, constant state that man is busy messing with lately. There have been ice ages in history and global warming. Sea levels have risen and dropped. One reminder of an earlier rise in sea levels is the Norfolk Broads.

There was the "Medieval Warm Period" from about mid 10th to mid 13th century. Unlikely to have been anything to do with CO2 emissions.

I think most people know about Krakatoa. Not so long before Krakatoa an in the same part of the world, Mount Tambora erupted in spectacular fashion in 1815. It ejected so much debris into the atmosphere that 1816 was known as "the year without a summer". Temperatures dropped, crops failed.

I'm not saying we shouldn't be concerned about conservation and pollution (y'all separate and recycle right?), but to get a handle on such matters I think we need to understand that earth/nature whatever you want to call it (any suggestions Don?) is a dynamic system or a set of dynamic systems.

DonovanB

If this thread is what philosophy touches on I'd rather work at MacDonalds.

I reckon there are much better ways to spend time. Ray! Let's hit the pub amigo.

vic

Donovan Banks wrote
If this thread is what philosophy touches on I'd rather work at MacDonalds.

I reckon there are much better ways to spend time. Ray! Let's hit the pub amigo.

LOL...what about all them chicks....fortunately it's not that serious ?

Where, when and what time :goodtimes:

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