He said to Neo that humans are like a virus, breeding and infecting the world with our “stick” and general disgustingness.
I look around the world, at the state of society, the environment, international conflict and the enshitification of humanity - I’ve gone through my life blindly accepting that life for life’s sake is beautiful, and worth it.
But as I see the state of it all, our perpetual need to destroy each other over ideas and resources, I struggle to come to grips with it. Societies around the world are facing population shrinkage… Do they all know something I don’t?
Is human life beautiful, and objectively worth perpetuating? Or are we a blight? Why should we be?
Humans are animals, and are the only ones who’ve evolved to prioritize big, expensive brains over every other survival characteristic. It took us a long time to do that, and even then, we spent a massive amount of time - most of it, in fact, running around not creating anything more complex than baskets. There is a lot of evidence - 2 billion years worth - that there are a huge number of variables that have to work out just right to produce something like what a human is.
We didn’t prioritize big brains though. What we evolved to do lead us to big brains because we simply had great diets through cooking.
Other species can absolutely evolve cooking or at least a process of breaking down food to both be more calorically dense and easier to digest. After that it was what less than 1 million years to get here? Most of that happening in the last 100,000?
We’ve just not seen any species reach this point that doesn’t mean they can’t or won’t. Also a bigger question, why should they want to? What have we accomplished actually?
We’ve managed to understand how ecosystems work. Destroyed most of them.
We’ve discovered how to manipulate material to prolong our life span or ease our workload to what? Oppress our own species and others?
I just don’t see us being that great and also don’t see it being impossible for other species to surpass us in ways we don’t even consider because we are arrogant.
Many species on this planet are highly intelligent and arguably moreso than humans. If you judge a fish by it’s ability to climb a tree you’ll think it’s a moron. Dolphins, fungus, ants, moss, fuckin water bears. They’re all incredible creatures, why do we hold ourselves above them?