I wonder what kind of cats rich people tend to go for. Like, say, it’s some kind of black long haired green eyed mini cat. It’ll receive better healthcare than most humans on earth.
How to tell someone is reading Sapiens.
Still, insane that “science/technology improvements” did not improve happienes at all. Just shifted the standards.
While I wouldn’t say that’s right, I also wouldn’t come right out and call it wrong either. This very much engages with the “Selfish Gene”, an heuristic model of thinking about evolution from the perspective of the gene itself instead of populations.
As an added amusement, the book “The Selfish Gene” came out in 1976, and is the source of the word “meme,” used somewhat differently than it is now, naturally.
This idea comes from “sapiens a brief history of humankind”. It’s a play on semantics because domestication (domo=house) basically means put in house and the evolution of wheat to be more fit to human consumption in a way pushed us towards agriculture and houses.
The selfish gene ironically proves that gods exist. https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/the-memetic-proof-for-the-existence-of-gods-e5d103234fc7
Oh it’s like touhou, I get it now.
Utter nonsense. Your argument is that because you can imagine a god and spread the idea they are real. The logical conclusion there is that anything you can imagine is equally real. Bigfoot really is wandering around a forest, spaghetti absolutely does grow in trees, and the moon landing was definitely on a sound stage (but they also really landed on the moon because I can picture that too).
Bigfoot doesn’t live in the woods. He lives in people’s heads. That’s where all memes, including the gods, live. In people’s heads.
So then what’s the difference between “the gods” and something purely fictional, in your view? Because if there is none than this whole thing seems like just an exercise in surface-level semantics.
The gods are mythical, whereas Frodo Baggins is fictional. People believe in myths. Though of course it’s a fuzzy boundary. You can arrange various characters on a spectrum from myth to fiction. For example, Zeus is pure myth, Lucifer is an originally fictional character that has almost entirely become mythical, Achilles is sort of directly in the middle, Sherlock Holmes is a highly mythologised fictional character, Gandalf is a fictionalised adaptation of a myth, and Jake Sully is pure fiction because nobody gives a shit about him.
Also *You
Ah, so the difference is the weight that people assign the idea.
Do the gods exist for an atheist who contends that all of the things you called “mythical” are in fact purely “fictional”? Or does a lack of belief among some individuals not matter because the gods are a social construct?
Your argument is that because you can imagine a god and spread the idea they are real.
You could say the same of Mickey Mouse or the Philly Fanatic. Which is, in fairness, where this is ultimately going.
A god as a timeless enlightened super-being might not be real. But a god as an ideological mascot or cultural touchstone is.
At best it proves the concept of gods exists and I doubt anyone disagrees with that, you can’t really argue that a thought can’t exist. What it doesn’t prove is that God exists as some material or immaterial entity and that’s what atheists claim, that there is no existence of any entity that could be considered a god.
Why it doesn’t prove the existence of gods is simple. If the proof is that it exists because we thought it then dragons exist, faeries exist, even flat earth exists because there are people who think it exists. I don’t think I need to bring more examples to show how ridiculous the premise is. Just because we can think of a thing doesn’t mean that thing now exists.
Dragons certainly exist. They live in books and reproduce when someone reads a book about dragons and is inspired by it. Over time evolutionary pressures have caused the more successful of the younger dragons to become cuter and more friendly, and the most successful dragons even made the leap to film. That’s how Toothless from How To Train Your Dragon came to be. He is the result of a long process of evolution of dragons. You can trace his lineage from the Beowulf dragon, to Tolkein’s Smaug, through Eragon’s Saphira, to the Toothless of the HTTYD books, and finally to Dreamworks’ movie version. Each generation trying out new evolutionary adaptations that changed their fitness to survive and reproduce, and the niche they occupy within the ecosystem that is human thought. Toothless is the culmination of those thousands of years of evolution, purpose built to fill children’s heads up with wonderful dreams.
I don’t know if you have a wife but I’m now going to imagine you have a wife. You’re now married. Now I’m going to imagine having consensual sex with your new wife. Now I’m imagining you’re killing your wife because she cheated on you. I guess you’re a murderer now, it’s true because I thought of it. Actually I thought about a lot of way worse things about you but I’m not going to go into detail about all the vile shit you’ve done, I’ll just sum it up as you being the worst human being who has ever lived. Since that’s what I thought it must be true, right?
*You. I use capitalised pronouns. And My ex-wife uses it/its.
I couldn’t care less.
If you don’t care, then surely you don’t mind editing your comment to use My preferred pronouns, seeing as you have no preference and I do.
Mate, it’s just a link to My blog, no need to take it any more seriously than you would Me.
Yes, and as per the blog the other user linked people have a habit of posting Medium links under the guise of providing supporting information. Given you made a claim “x proves y” you and other people who post Medium links like this probably know “but here’s a link to my blog that is also just my opinion” probably doesn’t hit the same.
*You. I use capitalised pronouns.
Given your reasoning for doing so has been rebuked by members of the lgbt+ community, I’ll have to decline that correction unfortunately.
I feel the need to remind you that many members of the LGBT+ community have rebuked all preferred pronouns. Take for example Lily Cade and the other lesbians in the BBC’s infamous article, “We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women”. Lily Cade in fact called for the lynching of trans women.
The queer community is no monolith. There are transphobes within the community who refuse to be associated with trans people like Me, and want us pushed out of the movement, denied healthcare, driven to suicide, or indeed even lynched. I do not think you should be basing your opinions of trans people on what these bigots say.
I have reported your comment for deliberate misgendering, and I am asking you once again to edit your comment to use a trans person’s preferred pronouns. This is so that you have every opportunity to do the decent thing, and so that if you do not want to act decently, your intent in this abuse is clearly demonstrated.
pregnantgoku
Oh you wrote this. Do you think it proves the existence of God by itself or is it another way people who already believe in God point to it?
I would prefer if you didn’t use “god” as a proper noun. The practice was invented by monotheists and is usually used to exclude other gods. It’s very rude towards other gods like Loki, Kukulkan, and Myself. None of us go around pretending we’re the only god.
Take your meds
it’s called “co-evolution”
Reminds me of The Botany of Desire
Humans are an unfortunate by-product of the fungus’ colonisation of the planet. As soon as they’ve tricked us into heating the planet enough to melt the poles, their conquest will be complete.
This makes me think of Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael… is there a community for that?
Haha. I’m reading Sapiens right now, too
I’ve never actually read any Harari books for some reason. Is his stuff generally “reliable”?
I think he’s a historian by trade, so no
His first book (Sapiens) does a great job of showing how frail is modern civilization, though. Its foundation is, like religion, only beliefs.
It’s a superb book - I was being mischievous.
He’s into meditation is a big way, as was I when I read it, although I have since lapsed.
The advantage I think this gave me at the time, was to deeply connect with his writing perspective - ie not human-centric.
Buddhism cautions against human exceptionalism in various ways and invites anyone to discover this through meditation.
The quote about wheat profoundly expresses this, with great concision.
My quip was about historians being vulnerable to artistic license to tell a story !
We don’t trust historians?!
Only entomologists are known for lying
I’m only half serious :)
They are Wonderful storytellers !
My personal difficulty is the grey areas between inference and speculation.
Ie “this is the area where they made a fire” vs “they would have discussed village politics while roasting meat here”
r/askhistorians on reddit always rails about it being, paraphrasing: too cut and dry for such complicated topics. I’ve the first half of the first one, and I don’t disagree, but I’m not a historian. Reductionism is definitely in play, and there’s certainly a narrative bias in there for entertainment.
It seems about as reliable as Isaac Asimov’s essays (as published in The Road to Infinity, or similar).
Thanks. So, interesting and generally reliable, but claims should be treated with caution?
His former supervisor disowned him. He’s not known for good science. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/the-dangerous-populist-science-of-yuval-noah-harari As someone with a strong anthropology background, I’d urge you to take it with a lot of salt. Perhaps pickle it. He does not have the background for this work.
Yep.
When a historian complains that something is reductionist, I usually ask them “what is the temperature of the air in the room right now.” I don’t mind reductionism, particularly when ingesting materials from outside my field of expertise – because I don’t have time to become an expert in every field :)
I usually ask them “what is the temperature of the air in the room right now.”
What mean? I can’t brain good today
They’ll probably answer something like: around 20 deg/around 70 deg/room temperature/warm/etc
All of which are reductive, and the only non reductive answer would begin with our understanding of the concept of heat
I assume that if they answer with a simple number you can point out they are being reductionist too, because the temperature differs measurably between the floor and ceiling, and that’s not even accounting for any air currents. Most of the time it is reasonable to reduce that down to a single temperature.
Okay, so, temperature is a statistical measure of the kinetic energy of the atoms in a material. It’s useful, so we use it. But, I’ll try to handwave a lecture from Thermodynamics 300 – the actual lecture requires quantum mechanics, partial differential equations, and a dude named Maxwell.
So imagine you put at molecule of an inert gas (helium or similar) into a perfectly insulated box, and that box (aside from the single molecule of helium) is a perfect vacuum. Now, what temperature is that molecule of helium? The question is somewhat meaningless. What we can do instead is ask, what is its position, and its velocity/momentum. For an object as large as helium, you don’t really have to deal with the uncertainty principle, and can largely just treat it as a billiard ball bouncing around in there, boing boing boing.
But if you add a second helium, now you have interactions. They can both have a position and momentum, but occasionally they will bump into each other, and depending on the angles and velocity and such, they can transfer momentum into one another. Still a billiard ball scenario, and relatively easy to visualize.
As you start adding more balls though, tracking the position and momentum of each one starts to become crazy. You stop being concerned about the positions of the billiard balls, but start doing statistics – you sample a few of them, and get some new estimates: average distance between balls at any given time, average momentum of the balls at any given time. What we’re doing is moving from treating the atoms as discrete elements into treating it as a gas. For helium, it’s actually quite reasonable to work the math out from first principles because it behaves so ideally. But you end up deriving a quantity known as “pressure” – which reflects the average distance between the balls, and “temperature” which is effectively the average momentum of the balls.
But here’s the thing – just because we have an average, doesn’t mean it’s evenly distributed. In a real gas, there are big and small molecules all jostling about, and some are moving faster and some are moving slower. But statistically, we can treat it as a nearly uniform material because there are a lot of them.
We’ve reduced an incredibly complex thing to a single number or two.
Tangent: we lose some of our atmosphere to space every year, and this process is partially why. Some of molecules jostling about at the top of the atmosphere where the distance between them is quite large can sometimes bounce into one another in accidentally perfect ways such that single atoms or molecules can get to great velocities. If these exceed escape velocity, they will never return to earth. But it’s more likely that these collisions eject smaller molecules, like hydrogen and helium, than larger molecules, like oxygen or nitrogen. So we lose the light stuff preferentially. Imagine the box with billiard balls bounding around it it, but some ping pong balls are there too and they can get launched! See Jeans Escape for more details if you want a rabbit hole.
Ah, thank you for the detailed explanation on the mechanics. In hindsight it’s obvious what you meant, but like I said I’m cognitively deficient today 😅
No idea, tbh. I’m nearly half way through it and I’ve yet to hear anything controversial other than religion is basically made up, but I already thought so. It’s really just super thought-provoking stuff.
If I were to describe it, I’d say it’s moreso an incredibly well thought-out narrative on the story of the human species and where we fit in time and space.
For example, the part this meme is from blew my mind. It’s a couple paragraphs and gets set up with the backdrop/context of the agricultural evolution and kind of comes out of nowhere.
Lastly, one interesting thought I had while reading it is how evolution doesn’t really “care” if we’re depressed, as long as we’re still reproducing the cycle continues (this was moreso a thought I had while reading the book than something explicitly said, I think)
Omni-Man’s red eyes make him look blazed, which fits what he’s saying pretty well. “Dad, what the hell are you talking about?”
We have been played for absolute fools
Humans dont invent anything, they discover it.
Once you put enough things together so the parts do other things, I think it’s reasonable to call it inventing.
It really is a symbiotic relationship we’ve developed with the things we’ve domesticated (or that domesticated us)
Especially animals reserved for working instead of eating, because in those situations oftentimes the food being made with the work is shared between the symbiotes.
Yeah, influence is rarely a one way street and things like agriculture or animal husbandry have definitely changed us as well
I would say it’s symbiotic to the continued survival and propegation of their genes, but not to their well-being as individuals.
Depends on the situation, factory farming definitely, but for most natural raised situations I’d argue the animal’s well being is like 99% of the work being done.
It’s also a double-edged sword. The moment a domesticated species isn’t useful enough for us, its numbers (and therefore genes) will decrease dramatically. Plenty of livestock populations may be reduced to a tiny size if artificial meat production becomes cheap enough, or if it’s decided to be a necessity to fight climate change.
Just like cats right?
Just like cats.
Wouldn’t the cats have also been demesticated by the wheat? Since the wheat domesticated humans, stored the wheat berries in silos which attracted mice and is the whole reason cats were like… “I live here now.”
Aha, so it was all a plan by the feline overlords to assume direct control of both wheat and humans in a single swoop.
Well, who’s living in the house? Certainly not the wheat.
You, a farmer, living in a thatched roof mud hut just alongside the field and spending 90% of your day - sun up to sun down - digging irrigation ditches, spreading fertilizer, and hauling around buckets of seed.
Me, a wheat grass, cozily settled into freshly irrigated mud, reaching towards the sun with my long fronds, spreading my seed between all my neighbors, and never having to worry about competitors because this dipshit ape-thing weeds the area for me every day in hopes of one day gargling my fermented plant-jizz until he blacks out.
The jays and crows around my house have domesticated us too
I so want to befriend my local crows, been meaning to buy some seeds for bribing them
They like unsalted peanuts
Just definitely make sure they’re unsalted. You can even get unsalted boiled peanuts, which they adore.
And grapes
They fucking love meatballs, the scavenger birds that they are.
I have the local crows as my friends. Just shared a pastry with them while coming home. They often fly besides me when I’m coming from the store to see whether I have anything for them.
Puck up the cheapest 40lb bag of dogfood you can find they’ll love it and its got the nutrients they need!
Huh I would never have thought to get dog food for them. I’ve done zero “research” though, just figured that unsalted seeds, nuts etc at least won’t kill them 😅
There’s some magpies near me, but I don’t have a predictable enough routine to befriend them. I had some crow friends once and they would knock on my window when I was late coming out to them.