In biblical terms this doesn't make sense to me because before they left the paradise Adam and Eve already had the task to step down to the animals and name them (step down as in: take care of them).
What separates us, in biblical terms, is that humans were made after the image of God.
If becomming conscious is what separates us, how do we know other creatures are unconscious?
I feel like the main difference is that we shape the world around us to a degree far greater than any other being, to the point where it affected our evolution tens, hundreds of thousands of years ago. I mean yeah, some animals use tools like sticks or rocks to get food, or build rudimentary shelters like nests, or even plant or store food for next year, but they don't build fires and cook their food, they don't produce more than they need for themselves and their immediate families, etc.
I mean you see a lot of human / societal traits in a lot of animals, but humans have perfected it to an extreme degree. "Top of the foodchain" is another one; sure, in a barehanded 1v1 we probably won't make it out of a bear fight, but as a group we can decimate all other creatures + each other + the whole world.
They can’t communicate with humans, and their thought patterns are likely very different to ours. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they are just as complex. Whales and dolphins especially.
How complex are a humans thoughts if not raised by other humans? How much of complex thought is transferred generationally through example and language. An octopus biology may be capable of extremely complex thought, but as a species they are limited by their inability to document and propagate information in written form, unless they have some kind of telekinesis and can beam and download memories from each other.
I'm not a big believer of thought complex thought patterns that fail to manifest in any meaningful way. If they are as sentient, they should have to make a difference.
The same attitude was shown by humans towards other humans a thousand years ago. If they couldn't understand the language of another tribe, they considered that tribe inferior and called them names signifying that.
The ancient Greeks called non-Greek-speaking peoples "barbarians", suggesting they are uncivilised, primitive. To this day, the name of Germany in Polish means "those-who-cannot-speak".
One of our major advantages against other animals are versatile hands with opposable thumbs.
I wonder what corvids could do if they had hands and not just beaks. They are fairly smart, I would expect them at least to build some more complex structures. Which would trigger a self-reinforcing cycle between improving tools and improving brains.
Now it dawns on me that it might be possible in the future to give them the necessary genes to grow hands ... wild.
To you. If someone doesn't speak to you and doesn't respond "meaningfully" to your input, does that mean they do not have complex thought patterns? With that philosophy, it's probably for the best that you don't take care of sick people :)
And we keep having original sins. The original sin of America is slavery. The original sin of the Internet is advertising. We ain't ever getting back in.
By some interpretations, sentience is the original sin (or at least the consequence of it.) Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge, after all, and if you take the serpent at its word, the knowledge was to "be like God, knowing both good and evil."
Then again, the original sin is more likely to be disobeying God to begin with. Although that leads to a chicken and egg question of how it was possible for Adam and Eve to be talked into disobeying God to begin with if humans didn't have the capacity to sin at the time.
Yep, the two are intertwined. This is actually some deep philosophy related to the determinism/free will debate and how it relates to morality, embedded in religious scripture.
Author here, thanks for those tough nuts :) I am working on a successor of this POC called rich-rss [0], which contains a full rewrite of rss-proxy in a strongly typed language.
This legal agreement idea does not work at all. In most cases this agreement would have an expiration, only include specific actions and most likely could be withdrawn unilateral at any time. This makes an agreement basically worthless. The fact that people bring up technological solutions for social problems shows their inability to understand the messiness of social constructs.
IMO nuclear power won't help us in the climate crisis. The inertia to change our technologies, behaviour... is already extremely large, with nuclear energy (which is very limited) there will be less incentive to change anything at all. Hence, we will just prolong the party and not make use of this tiny thread of hope.
This feeds into my dystopian believes. I a couple of years those drones will be affordable to every individual. This individual will then savely engage in a drone strike against other individuals. Hence I predict an end of the celebrity cult :)
You know, I'm honestly amazed we haven't seen any serious terror attacks use drones yet. I guess there is still a bit of a barrier in terms of cost and technical know-how for your average mass-murderer, but there are already drones which could do a huge amount of damage in an open space if equipped with the right weaponry.
There are people [0] who claim that air traffic will be the first target of this development. It is very fragile, has a huge attack surface and efficient counter strategies are non existent. I am really amazed why "nothing" we know of has happened yet.
I disagree. I find the it wasteful, that every source will implement their way of rendering data. If we ignore the ad-problem for a moment, I would love if RSS would be the output of every website and the client then renders HTML to achieve the best UX possible. No broken layouts, no distractions, no dark pattern, just content.
Boredom is a totally underestimated and undervalued mental state these days. IMO it's quite difficult to become bored these days with all the distractions of the Internet. Many great thinkers went to rural "boredom resorts" to let their ideas thrive after they got stimuli from crowded cities.
I hate it when my precious limited boredom gets intruded on by nagging feelings that I need to learn or achieve something to avoid falling behind. I seldom have the energy/willpower to learn or achieve well anyway, and end up wishing I had enjoyed my boredom instead.
https://api.feedless.org/f/c5f5ae53-16f1-4f67-b45f-1c3e8a92d...