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Comment by dogma1138 | Hacker News Reader

Because otherwise everything up to this point would've been pointless do we really need an article explaining why the survival of our species is important?

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There is still the real possibility that life is actually pointless. And there is no real justification why humans should rule this instead of any other species. Except made up ones, of course.

There is a scientific theory out that has yet to be proven, but addresses the actual purpose of life. https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o... TL;DR (with my philosophical interpretations included) - his claim is that life occurs as a natural process to help dissipate concentrations of energy. This occurs because the universe is on a never-ending march toward higher entropy and life is a tool to help it achieve that goal - the goal being maximum entropy and the effective end of the universe as we know it, a situation where all matter is in its most stable state and no energy can be obtained from anything anymore. So we are here to help the universe and all life die.

life cannot exist without (outside / away from) energy gradients. is the purpose of life to speed up destruction of its environment? even if the answer is yes which i disagree with, it's only an approximative answer: it's immediately followed by "ok but why is it so?"

imo, life has as much purpose as stars have: none. it's the wrong question to ask. life is simply there, just like stars are there. it "materializes" when-and-where there are the right conditions (a narrow spectrum of energy gradients), just like stars do (the spectra are extremely far apart, of course).

To be clear, all of the teleological claims here are your own philosophical interpretations; they do not appear to be in the paper discussed in the link you have given.

If we accept your interpretation, then I think we must conclude that the purpose of life is to hasten its own extinction, by accelerating dissipative processes.

What would differentiate a real justification from a "made up one"? Point, purpose, justification, etc. are by definition human concepts; without humans, things just are.

With evidence we can refute made up justifications. If we want to. Not all do. In fact, the huge majority prefers made up reasons.

If we humans perish, our knowledge could survive us. What we have found out about how nature works transcends our species. That is not a good justification why life exists, but at least this reason is not limited to humans, like all other ones.

And if there is no one else that can use our knowledge, and no one comes after us, life was pointless all along.

You might feel that life is pointless, but you don't speak for everyone.

You have already admitted that individuals may enjoy life and find much meaning, so it seems only honest to append a very large qualifier to your "life is pointless" belief.

> There is still the real possibility that life is actually pointless.

No there isn't, for a simple reason: I enjoy life, many others do, and those who don't generally want to enjoy it. The point is what we want. Not some external criterion we have yet to discover. (Some Christian fundamentalists make a similar mistake, believing there would be no morals without God —as if we haven't eaten the damn fruit already.)

Now there's this tiny little problem about resolving conflicts: we have yet to extrapolate a collective will from lots of individual wills in a way we'd all agree is "fair" —I believe we have demonstrated the absence of a general solution. The overlap however is quite comprehensive, so I have hope.

Of course, we individuals can find meaning and purpose in our life. Through family, creativity, social bonds, etc. But I am thinking about life as the whole humanity, the whole nature. I do not think individual purpose answers the questions why life or humans should exist.

> I do not think individual purpose answers the questions why life or humans should exist.

What we should do is defined by what we want. Most of us want life and humans to continue to exist. Therefore they should. It's that simple.

Once you are dead you won't enjoy it and you won't care, so there is no reason to prefer life to death by that criterion.

Life might be nothing more than the most efficient way to hydrate carbon (entropy ftw).

Intelligent life is so far subjectively the most amazing thing that has happened in this universe.

We are the only intelligent species on our planet, our planet is the only place where we know for sure life exists in our solar system.

Based on our limited observations we are also the only intelligent beings in our galaxy at least at this time period.

While intelligent life may have no interensic meaning we have the capacity to give our life and the life of future generations meaning, this trait is quite likely the result of natural selection.

We study history, cherish our past, honor our heroes and plan for a better future and this is a universal trait that we as a species share.

Saying that life has no meaning is a pointless argument there is nothing to benefit from making this assumption, in fact you lose everything.

I meet people who disagree with this all the time. And clearly even if we think it, as a species we aren't acting on it.

The survival of our species is irrelevant on the large scale. It is only important to us - the members of the species. Let's he honest, the world as a whole needs nothing from us. In fact, it was arguably better off before us and therefore would benefit without us around.

And it's not true that everything up to now would be pointless. Advancements in technology, science, knowledge, etc. have all been enjoyed by those who are living and have previously lived. Any lack of future humans doesn't mean the benefits of those efforts were not realized or consumed.

We're the only things around with the capacity to care about the future of the planet. "Better off before us" is context-dependent: the concept of "better" is meaningless without knowing who is doing the judging. Since you are doing the judging, it seems a bit disingenuous to say that the world is arguably better off without you.

If elephants or tigers or really most mammals but us, are doing the judging, they would agree we are the cause of all of their suffering.

Them being incapable of judgment renders that point somewhat moot.

How do you know? Don't you think they suffer and weep when they see their siblings being killed? Don't you think they're capable of happiness?

I don't think the rest of the planet would need to worry much about the future of the planet (not that they do anyway) if it wasn't for humanity.

Arguably humans make life on earth worse for most other types of life we are in contact with

the world as a whole needs nothing from us

Well, not exactly. Life on Earth's only hope of surviving beyond the decline of Sol currently hinges on some intelligent species developing space travel. They say, "life finds a way"- maybe we are life's way of getting all her species off this planet before it is engulfed by the sun.

Life's purpose is to self-replicate.

If we get off our planet we will ensure the long-term self-replication. Without us it wouldn't happen and all life on Earth would sooner or later vanish.

Judging by our current political priorities - yes, we do.

There exists a theory that says all the suffering that has been experienced up to this point would have been avoided if our species hadn't survived, and that the scale of human-inflicted horror and injustice, which we are doomed to continue repeating forever, far outweighs the relatively small and inconsequential improvements that humans have contributed to nature.

Doesn't natural suffering of creatures far outweigh anything humans experience or inflict? Plus, we've made life better for countless animals through domestication.

If you're going to play the weighing game of pleasure versus suffering of domesticated animals, I would bet that factory farming far outweighs pets/animal helpers/more humane farms. The numbers are pretty incredible.

Factory farming is a blip on evolutionary timescales.

That's the Sunk Cost Fallacy. As a rationalist who seeks to maximize my utility, why should I care about future generations?

Because you likely weight the survival of similar genes highly, being decendant from genes that did

I'm not sure why I would do that, although there are instincts which rely on that (e.g. sex). My immediate concerns are of my somatic existence rather than my genes. If my personal survival depended on the survival of the species (as an example: cryogenics), that would certainly be a factor.

Because if your genes didn't historically result in an organism with a drive to propagate itself, your genes would have a significantly higher likelihood of dying out in an ancestor generation.

If you do not have that drive, then it is natural to cull yourself.

you shouldn't, it's not healthy. you'll contribute more to future generations if you're happy, and individuals who are concerned about whole generations tend to despair. despair leads to loss of sexual appetite, which leads to selection against said trait. ;)

you don't need to care about future generations in general, but you probably deeply care about the future of your children. if you do not have any (yet): i'd said similar things before i became a father. since i've had kids... my urge to preserve the well-being of my children specifically is absolutely visceral, and i can only assume (it does seem so) that other parents feel similarly. no parent needs to care about their children's whole generation, the urge to care is decentralized and spread over the whole generation of parents.

the next question might be: why would you care about your offspring? because parental care is a trait that helps carry the DNA which encodes it farther than DNA without this trait will get (all other things equal). in general, we care about (a few particular members of) future generations (our offspring) because people who didn't give a fuck about their own children died out.

This reasoning ignores the tragedy of the commons: Earth is finite, so exponential growth cannot be sustained indefinitely. Even if we go into space, at best we can expand at O(n^2). So the urge to preserve your children has to be tempered by the self-discipline not to have more than two per couple (on average). And that has to somehow be extended to everyone, because even a single breeding pair whose genes allow them to ignore this fundamental fact puts us back on the path to eventual calamity. Sooner or later exponential growth must stop. If we don't do it ourselves, the laws of physics will do it for us.

The population is predicted to max out at 10-11 billion people this century, as birth rates lower when countries become more developed. These are demographic trends that have been unfolding for many decades now, as I recall.

Yes, let's hope those predictions play out. But there's another problem: for several hundred years our economic institutions have been structured on the assumption of exponential economic growth. That has been fueled by both population growth and innovation, but that can't go on forever either. It's an open question whether we'll be able to restructure society to adjust.

I was really surprised by this, too. It seems like the majority of people don't care for the fate of humanity. Of the people I've asked in the past, they either don't care because they'll be long dead by then, or they believe that we shouldn't change the course of nature.

Not everyone agrees that we need our species to survive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Mov...

Note: nothing in this comment should be taken as an endorsement of that. I'm just offering it as an example of people who are making an argument that we should not try to survive as a species.

It was a clickbait headline -- note that it has been revised.

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