[SI_Rob]

> in a vast, global cooperative

I don't mean to dismiss the larger truth here about humanity's responsibility to exercise restraint in playing the impossibly strong 5-ace hand it was dealt by natural selection.

But the naturalistic fallacy has a knack for hiding its sharpest razors among the soft folds of words like "cooperative."

The universe appears, as far as we can tell, overwhelmingly hostile toward life with the sole observed exception of our precariously balanced biosphere.

And that biosphere is itself a circulatory system built on exploitation, consumption, and predation - host to endless torrent of unimaginable agonies which are both staggeringly abundant and structurally inalienable from the matrix of this 'cooperative' system.

It's hard, as another HN'er once succinctly put it, to be more cruel than Nature.

[llamaimperative]

Nature is neither cruel nor kind. Those are human concepts applied to a system that just systems.

[SI_Rob]

this is a dualistic belief that regards humans operating on human concepts as being somehow a qualitatively distinct phenomenon from the "system that systems" - a system in which they themselves increasingly constitute a locally (and potentially, a universally) significant energetic routing circuit.

[titzer]

I'd even go further and say that nature generally doesn't torture things for amusement the way the worst humans have done. Usually "nature is cruel and cold" underpins a "kind" humanist worldview that justifies factory farming, pesticides, lab animal testing, and mass murder of any inconvenient biological lifeform. Humanists pretend they aren't part of the same system of biological life that they hack at and injure at every turn and will to the end of their days deny the runaway extinction event they've kicked off and may also sweep them off the planet too. Because nature could never been cruel and cold to them and the system could never system them out of existence. They believe humans are special and the entire universe was created for them, or alternatively, the entire universe is at odds with their existence and it's a fight to the death. It's an absurd neurosis. We're incredibly lucky to be alive in a biosphere with so many food sources and so many lifeforms happy to eat our shit.