this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2025
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@ubergeek@lemmy.today
They can't choose, and that's part of main issue as beings cursed by self-awareness: the impossibility to choose positively or negatively.
It's beyond any capability of will and it taints any other decisions that could be done (see the movie "The Artifice Girl", particularly the dialogue at the end when the robot is talking to her creator about how her primary directives made it impossible for her to really exert any fully free will).
The issue, here, emerges from the lack of choice alongside inevitable self-awareness, which takes us to:
They don't have this curse of "self-awareness". They do possess intelligence (especially crows and dolphins, not mentioned), but they don't end up cursed by knowing the pointlessness of their own existences through a broader, cosmic lens. We do.
Also, they don't restricted themselves into this Kafkaesque rearrangement we call as "human society", where we must "buy" food and "pay" to have a roof above our heads, as if it was some kind of optional luxury. They live from what Mother Nature gives. Bears can roam and do shelters for them wherever there aren't other bears (or other wildlife). Microbes' shelters are literally other lifeforms.
Humans, however, can't live from what Mother Nature gives, no no, this is too extraterrestrial for us to consider doing. I myself can't choose to live among the wildlife like any other primate because I'm prohibited to do so (and, also, because my entire human existence compelled me into artificialities that I'm unable to ditch, such as the myopia I ended up having due to artificial environmental factors (thanks "screens" and "enclosed spaces") leading to the need of using (and purchasing) prescription glasses).
Again, bears and microbes have no such artificial rearrangement.
But we do know it'll form, eventually. We do know the kid will become an adult and they'll be required to become a cog in this machine. Parents often see this as a matter of "proud" ("our offspring has a job"), ignoring how much suffering it accompanies the imposed serfdom (having to "seek" and "have" a "job", having to serve others).
If we were to talk about instincts, murdering to eat (hunting) is also pretty instinctive across species... Humans don't often "murder to eat" because they often delegate it for others to do it, but with enough desperation (e.g. lack of food) a human can even eat other humans (see Chichijima incident)...
It's also instinctive to live among the woods. Why don't we, though? Maybe because we're legally forbidden by other humans to move to a forest and live as our ancestors did, so we're required to live "among society", which in turn requires us to "pay" to "afford" food and shelter.
Are you sure about this? How can you possibly know? How about Octopi? They are, almost certainly, as intelligent as we are, and have 8 brains interworking with each other. You have zero possibility to even guess how they view the world.
Not sure your point? Tribes have always relied on varied tasks for members. Even higher primates do this.
No, it's not. Its instinctive to seek shelter, water, food, and to reproduce. Instinctually, we are also social animals, requiring our tribe to survive.
So, that's the root of the problem, and it's something we can change. See: Seneca Nation, or the people of Chiapas.
@ubergeek@lemmy.today
Science.
Spontaneous Metatool Use by New Caledonian Crows
Taylor, Alex H. et al.
Current Biology, Volume 17, Issue 17, 1504 - 1507
Structure of the cerebral cortex of the humpback whale, Megaptera novaeangliae (Cetacea, Mysticeti, Balaenopteridae)
Patrick R. Hof, Estel Van Der Gucht
Them, too. I forgot to mention them.
My point is how you tried to argue reproduction based on instincts, so I brought another instinct-based trait.
Urbanization and capitalism aren't part of Nature.
I doubt it can be changed, especially due to how things are pivoting to technofascism in the world. I doubt it can be changed, especially due to how we humans are constantly endangering other species for living as "modern humans".
The could be a change but it's beyond human agency: say, if Sun ejected a CME powerful enough, that could be a change of sorts, because it'd finally grind to a halt all the steel-made mosquitoes humans threw to orbit around this Pale Blue Dot, bringing humans back to a more natural means of existing.
However, we humans have been long detached from natural means of living so transition wouldn't be easy, we're sort of cursed to "modernity", so it's complicated.
Science has been able to get inside the heads and determine what animals are thinking? This is a breakthrough! We should now be able to communicate with these animals! Surely we can, right?
Ok, try not eating. Period. I bet instincts will kick in, and you'll eat, and not starve.
Nobody besides yourself even implied they are.
We've changed it myriad times. I provided two such examples.
Ah, so you think all humanity is illustrated only by western living, huh?