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Comment by monktastic1 | Hacker News Reader

This apparently isn't a popular opinion, but: this world is precious. I would even go so far as to say miraculous. Until we wake up to this fact, we will continue to ennui ourselves and this world into oblivion. It's hard to prove (or even study), but I believe this is the root cause of all the other tragedies. It is not something we will merely engineer our way out of.

We don't like religion (or in many cases, even spirituality), and the modern scientific metaphysics has no space for "miracles," so we don't have a coherent framework in which to talk about or even remind ourselves of this profound truth. Each of us is left to cobble something together for ourselves (and for the few people around us that we trust not to think we're crazy).

I do think that psychedelics seem like one promising avenue. Perhaps they will help give us the inspiration to fill in this tragic blindspot.

Edit: If the votes are any indication, then I was too hasty in calling this opinion unpopular. Perhaps more of us suspect this than are willing to say it out loud.

Edit 2: On that note, I've been scared to share my own crazy take on this, but I'll just leave this here: https://www.lifeismiraculous.org

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>modern scientific metaphysics has no space for "miracles," so we don't have a coherent framework in which to talk about or even remind ourselves of this profound truth.

I'm not sure that this is true. As my understanding of the world has increased, my appreciation of it has also increased, as has my sense of wonder. The term 'miracle' implies some supernatural cause, but I don't need something supernatural to understand the preciousness of the world I find myself in. Nor do I struggle finding a way to talk about this.

My own hypothesis is that the world is simply too complicated for any one person to comprehend on large scales any more, and when it comes to environmental concerns, the problem of the commons completely kicks our ass.

It also helps you understand that no greater power is around to reset any damage or prevent total destruction of life on earth. There is no reason life needs to exist, it just does by an extreme amount of good luck and billions of years of evolution

I'm not sure I fully know your stances on all of this, but Religion is not really a prerequisite for fully appreciating how beautiful yet precarious our biosphere truly is.

Engineering solutions to combat or circumvent Climate Change is our ONLY way forward. But first we need to get a critical mass of our American citizenry to be convinced we have an actual problem. Especially, in fact, a large segment of the electorate that's VERY religious and continually refuses to accept the facts about AGW.

I say Americans here because a disproportionate percentage was/is being caused by us, and because we also play a unique place in world affairs.

> Engineering solutions to combat or circumvent Climate Change is our ONLY way forward.

I think that this perspective ignores the environmental problems inherent in a capitalist mode of production, and in fact plays into them.

I think that a political revolution could be imminent, and I would urge those concerned about the future of life on this planet to consider alternative modes of economics.

Capitalism is based on infinite growth (economists even laugh at people like Malthus who proposed otherwise) and on fungibility of values (money is green no matter where from). This basically leads to a necessity of destroying nature for the sake of realizing economic growth. We need at least start to take seriously the fact that, the way capitalist economy is conducted, there is no way forward to save the environment.

By that logic, capitalism leads to a necessity of murdering your business rivals for the sake of realizing growth.

Capitalism happens inside a framework of laws. There are strong laws against murdering your competitors, that's why this doesn't happen (nowadays). There is a whole set of unethical behaviors, however, that are commonly used for the goal of producing a profit.

The laws are not generally part of capitalism, but imposed upon it to prevent various harmful activities. Pollution is an example: capitalism itself (the private ownership of the means of production) has no mechanism that could deal with it.

It absolutely has a mechanism - property damage

the private ownership of the means of production

Is there any reason you're using marxist terminology?

Property damage is a consequence, not a method of prevention? The damage won't necessarily happen at the place of origination.

I'm not sure why you say it's Marxist terminology. It's more or less what Wikipedia uses. Is there another definition that you'd prefer?

Pollution is nothing more than a negative externality.

People have measurably shorter lifespans due to coal emissions. We aren’t doing anything about that, so why do you think property will be treated any differently?

What's your argument? You've so far told mecapitalism leads to terrible things happening in the name of growth unless there are laws against it, which there are, as 'capitalism exists inside a framework of laws'. Your own argument informs us that capitalism does not automatically mean environmental damage will occur.

What form of "Capitalism"? The unfettered type that sits all the way to the right of the spectrum (that does't exist, because it would only last a few hours), or the overly regulated one all the way on the left of the spectrum?

I disagree. One could change the capitalist model to account and be liable for all externalities and to tax/penalize those firms/countries who refuse to.

Right. Something along those lines is what we should be striving for.

I agree that religion (especially as it is conceived today) is not the answer.

I also agree that engineering will be required. When I said "merely engineer," I meant that engineering cannot be a replacement for our awakening to the "miracle," but must be used in service of it.

Carl Sagan wrote about the numinous, a feeling of awe from looking at the night sky. Can't remember if it was Cosmos, or Contact, or one of his other books.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numinous

The Sublime is a similar concept from the Romantic era.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublime_(philosophy)

Exactly this: we are divorced from nature.

I remember as a kid that going camping was considered an "escape from reality", which made no sense to me because of course Nature is reality and our cities are the artificial "escape".

Geoff Lawton has a quote, "You can solve all the world's problems in a garden."

It's pretty literal: food, recycling poop and pee, medicine, building materials, not to mention the peace and happiness you have caring for other living things and accepting gratefully their care of you.

It is fun and easy!

- - - -

For practical advice on what to do I recommend Toby Hemenway's videos in re: Permaculture

http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/

Especially "How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Planet – But Not Civilization" and the sequel "Redesigning Civilization with Permaculture".

Permaculture is a school of applied ecology (the word itself is a portmanteau of PERMAnent agriCULTURE) that has adherents and practitioners world-wide. It's not the only form of regenerative agriculture either.

See also https://www.greenwave.org/our-work Oceanic 3D farms! And now they are building reefs?

For this purpose, I think one doesn't need psychedelics, nor religion, nor to consider the situation slipping away from us a miracle.

You just need to go out to nature or a park, on a nice day, and realize you really want things like birds and (if you still have them) butterflies. And food, and air, and clean water, and not being underwater, and not having large swaths of continents be broiled to uninhabitable.

I really liked this essay:

http://paulkingsnorth.net/2013/01/17/dark-ecology/

And the author gets to a similar point:

” And so I come to this point, and I ask myself: what, at this moment in history, would not be a waste of my time? And I arrive at five tentative answers.

[...]

Four: Insisting that nature has a value beyond utility. And telling everyone. Remember that you are one lifeform among many and understand that everything has intrinsic value. If you want to call this ‘ecocentrism’ or ‘deep ecology’, do it. If you want to call it something else, do that. If you want to look to tribal societies for your inspiration, do it. If that seems too gooey, just look up into the sky. Sit on the grass, and touch a tree trunk, walk into the hills, dig the garden, look at what you find in the soil, marvel at what the hell this thing called life could possibly be. Value it for what it is, try to understand what it is, and have nothing but pity or contempt for people who tell you that its only value is in what they can extract from it.”

The solution to this is a culture that regularly participated in mushrooms or DMT.

I mean that seriously. It’s a profound awakening to love and beauty we are surrounded by.

Ayahuasca is almost an alien-like technology.

>psychedelics

Every "epiphany" that someone has told me they had while on psychedelics has been something that easily could have been come up with a bit of quite time and thought.

I have never heard a single story that blew me away or offered anything but mundane "insights" that easily could be gotten other ways.

Its time for the "psychedelics" people to come clean and just admit they are simply getting high.

They are profound to the experiencer precisely because they are experienced. They are seen and felt in an entirely absorbing manner.

That's a profoundly cynical view on experiencing, well, anything really. That's like saying couples in love should just wake up to the fact that an experience of love has zero nuance and can be summed up with a single word.

My point is no one is going to cure cancer or solve global issues because of psychedelics.

I have no issues with experiencing things. I just don't like that people try to sell it like it is anything more than that.

Have you had a psychedelic experience?

Have you seen any of the studies where psychedelics are able to resolve conditions like anxiety and depression that are resistant to other treatments? When a person goes through that kind of epiphany, it may sound insipid in words -- and thus not blow you away or sound like mundane "insights" -- but insights don't always have to be verbalizable. "Life is miraculous" sounds pretty obvious, but there are certainly times where it's more "in your face" than others.

I was talking about these "grand revelations" people claim to get. Medical use is an entirely different thing.

Your second half just reinforces my original point. Its an "experience" ie just getting high.

I agree with you that the world is precious. I also agree with someone else in this comments section that quotes someone saying the world and the life within is precious regardless of what we can extract from it.

However, this puzzles me:

> Psychedelics seem like one promising avenue. Perhaps they will help give us the inspiration to fill in this tragic blindspot.

Why? What do psychedelics have to do with anything? I'm not religious and I'm not about to try psychedelics either, and still I'm filled with awe at the world and want nature to continue existing. I find a lot of natural places breathtaking. I stare at a starry night's sky -- something increasingly difficult because of light pollution -- and I'm awed at the vastness and beauty of the cosmos. It's hard to describe the feeling, but anyone who's felt it knows what I'm talking about.

I still don't believe in any gods or need any kind of psychedelics.

> I'm not about to try psychedelics either, and still I'm filled with awe at the world

Wonderful! Psychedelics may not be relevant to your path.

For some, "magic" mushrooms (for example) a first glimpse, or a reminder, that this place is "magical" in a way that most of us curiously overlook constantly. That epiphany can have a lasting effect on a person.

Certain psychedelics can and do have a profoundly life-changing effect on people, which can be a positive, affirming experience in an appropriate/safe context. It is essentially impossible to describe their effects in any meaningful way, but the most succinct explanation might be something like "spiritual awakening", which is probably unfathomable. Many of the ancient world religions describe some sort of mysterious plant or concoction that is integral to ritual/rite/worship, but over time these religions or their practices have gone extinct, underground, or been co-opted or replaced. It is no longer a fringe opinion that many of our ancestors were engaged in some form of "mind expansion" based on entheogenic substances/mixtures discovered in nature; to this day there are shamans who practice millenia-old divination with the assistance of medicinal plants (they have a worldview too, which is probably quite different from yours). Terrence McKenna has hypothesized that the very emergence of language (as a precursor to civilization) was a result of novel neural stimulation exacted by these substances; it is, at least, without question that the class of drugs we call "psychedelics" make people think and feel in ways they've never before imagined. We have this notion of "bad drugs" vs. "good drugs". And we have a whole pharmacopeia of government-approved drugs to alter our emotional state (anti-depressant, anti-anxiety, anti-psychotic), so we've decided it's ok to administer drugs to alter emotions. We are now, finally, entering an era of renewed exploration in the previously-demonized "psychedelic drugs" in therapeutic contexts. Why? Because these substances can elicit profound changes in the mental state of their users. They are extremely powerful medicines that facilitate unique mental processes at low doses. Why do we find these substances throughout nature? By pure coincidence? Maybe. Or maybe our own evolution is somehow tied to them (all evolution is tied together, right?). At the very least, they are incredibly interesting from any perspective (scientific, spiritual, historical, social, legal). Psychedelics are perhaps the most interesting substances on the planet.

That is an excellent summary, and I _highly_ recommend everyone go read Michael Pollan's "How to Change Your Mind". I actually recommend the audiobook, as it is read by Pollan himself.

That's a central thesis of Dawkin's Unweaving the Rainbow. Understanding that a rainbow is caused by the prismatic effect of water droplets in the air makes it more miraculous, not less.

I think the modern, post-religious intellectual discourse has not even space for metaphysics. Anything in this direction is considered mumbo jumbo. :-) Materialism probably hasn't reached its peak yet.

The history of metaphysics is people denying that they're doing metaphysics. Materialism and scientific realism in science and various forms of Platonism and structuralism in mathematics are just too prevalent for people to even notice them at this point.

Can't agree strongly enough. Even with meditation, where the whole point is (in a sense) to wake up to one's entire field of experience, people are generally unwilling to dig under their own metaphysical layers. They write this off as "oh, I don't do metaphysics." Yes, you do; you're just unwilling to face it.

I updated my post above with a link to a first draft of a site where I go into a little more detail.

I'm not sure from what you wrote that we have the same definition of metaphysics. I'm referring to a specific branch of mainstream academic philosophy. [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics

I think we do. "Metaphysics" refers to both the branch of philosophy as well as any particular system of metaphysical beliefs. We all subconsciously (and sometimes consciously) carry around a metaphysics in the latter sense.

Precisely :)

I think there is actually a quite simple, coherent framework for such a thing: probability theory. You could say highly improbable is a more scientific synonym for miraculous.

I don't think the problem is that people are unaware per se of the miraculousness/improbability of life, but rather that said awareness is deeply frightening and most people would prefer to sublimate it. The fact that we've all already cheated the infinite oblivion of never existing is incredibly lucky (to non-pessimists), but deeply meditating on this fact is psychologically similar to having a near death experience. So we narrativize to reassure ourselves that our existence isn't just dumb luck, in any manner of ways, both mystical and pseudo scientific: our lives are preordained by God, or by a purely deterministic set of physical laws, or by the operators of our universal simulation, or by the anthropic principle.

All of these belief systems are roughly analogous to saying "Everything happens for a reason", which is something you hear even intelligent people parrot in times of distress. But as Quentin Meillassoux argues in "After Finitude", the only truly universal law of metaphysics is in fact the negation of that platitude: "Things could be as they are, or they could be otherwise."

There are some teachers who have actually figured out what needs to happen, but everyone's identity will backlash hard against it: https://www.youtube.com/user/ActualizedOrg/videos

What would our behavior look like if everyone realized that the point of their life was to work to improve the level and quality of their awareness and consciousness to the point that they also realize the point of their life is to become infinitely loving and utterly selfless? (The hard part is that everything you think you are has to die, you can see why dogmatic/skeptic will resist)

It's pretty, but your post in a nutshell: We are too full of ourselves to admit the transcendental beauty and value of our world soooo...drugs.

You should completely dissociate psychedelics from the concept you have of ”drugs”.

> Until we wake up to this fact

That is not really the case here. I woke up already long ago, but there is no way I can stop the idiots. Only governments can take action by law, not me.

France and Germany will not allow for Facebooks' Libra coin. It shows how fast they can act if their economy is at stake. But for decades already they allow pesticides for agriculture. They could and should know about allowing for mass extermination of entire insect species. So tell me what I can or should do if they let this sick economy prevail?

Germany managed to outlaw glyphosate. That's the government reacting to pressure from voters (especially the massive gains of the Green party).

That's an example of where democracy works because the voters are educated and care about important issues. In countries that are full of uneducated idiots, it doesn't work so well and glyphosphate isn't banned.

> this world is precious. I would even go so far as to say miraculous.

Here is an attempt at a framework to think about this: we have no proof that life exists anywhere else in the Universe. There is a possibility that life itself arose only once and that we are the only intelligent beings around. We have a sort of grand astronomical duty to not fuck it up and expand to the stars and keep the fire going.

That's what I'm saying man this behavior is just beyond selfish. And we are leaving nothing for the next generations to use in terms of raw materials in order to help us become a space-faring species. Society is perverted to the core.

There's a fun catch here though. Earth is going to face a natural destruction sooner or later. Be it by a gamma ray burst, a super-volcanic eruption, an asteroid impact, or any of other other practically infinite number of ways it can happen, has happened (multiple times), and will happen again soon or later. So we're all effectively living on borrowed time. You can't create a permanently sustainable Earth in a beautiful equilibrium because that's not how this universe works. It loves to throw a spanner in the works, over and over. And so the point of this is that it's only by racing against an unknown clock that one can hope to actually sustain humanity.

Consequently, our rapid development which is undoubtedly causing harm to Earth is likely also, equally without doubt, the very thing that may ultimately enable humanity to survive in the longrun. We already have all the resources we need to become a space faring civilization, except for one - public will. People of course want it, but also simultaneously think space is a fantasy, much like at one time crossing the ocean was seen as. And so it's put on the side burner while we focus on much more pressing matters, like what some politician or celebrity said on Twitter. If a tenth of the energy we spend on social media or trying to shove ads at each other was focused on space, we'd already have set foot on Mars.

That doesn't mean we aren't grossly misappropriating and wasting our resources and reducing our chances of achieving long-term civilization.

Cataclysmic events occur on geological timescales. Historically no species survives more than some thousands or perhaps millions of years, timescales short enough to fit between unavoidable extinction events.

Humanity is currently on a path to destroy the earth's capability to sustain us, on a timescale that is laughably small compared to geological timescales.

If we behaved better, humanity could conceivably exist for hundreds of thousands, or millions of years without being obliterated by an asteroid or colossal volcanic eruption(s).

At the rate we're going, we won't last another few hundred years before we create an environment so toxic and unlivable that we extinguish ourselves.

Luckily a few rich crap heads will get even richer before that happens, bless their cotton socks, so it will all have been worth it.

Even with today's technology there's no real path to making earth literally inhospitable within the foreseeable future, sans an intentional act like somebody exploding a salted nuke in the atmosphere. But we can, and probably will, certainly make it less hospitable. More importantly though technology will continue to improve and, for events that happen on a slow time scale, we have a good chance of helping to mitigate the most catastrophic of effects. Even in the worst case though where we somehow remain stuck with 2020 tech for centuries, there's no species ending level scenario on the books.

The problem, by contrast, with the natural disasters is not only their effect but how incredibly rapid it happens. For instance we nearly caused a very gradual catastrophe with CFCs by gradually depleting the ozone layer over many decades. Something similar has been suggested as the cause for the Ordovician extinction. Except there what caused the destruction of the atmospheric layer was a gamma ray burst, and it only would have taken a few seconds. This is even more apparent with things like asteroid impacts. We've had an increasingly large number (or probably more accurately we can now actually 'see' them a bit more accurately) whiz by us at a tiny fraction of the distance to the moon. If a single one of these made impact you're looking at the equivalent of millions of WW2 scale nuclear weapons going off, at once. And of course it's not just the immediate impact, but then the massive cooling and darkening of Earth that would follow. If this happened over decades to centuries we could probably survive through technological means, but we wouldn't have that luxury. It would happen over a matter of seconds, and then days as the fallout embraced the Earth with its tainted touch.

I agree with the sentiment. But I wouldn't use the term "miraculous" because that generally comes with the baggage of a creator.

I'd rather say that ~random variation plus selection is gobsmackingly impressive. But the results aren't as perfect as you might expect stuff that's designed and created to be. They're amazing, but not elegant.

> This apparently isn't a popular opinion, but: this world is precious. I would even go so far as to say miraculous. Until we wake up to this fact, we will continue to ennui ourselves and this world into oblivion.

I agree. I would argue the majority of people in developed countries share this view. However, it should be pointed out that it's also a luxury to have this view. If you're currently in, come from, or ever visited a developing country; you'd realize that for many other people a major primary concern is to get enough income for basic needs. They just don't have the bandwidth to fully appreciate the world as we do.

Of course it's miraculous. We're on this marble spinning around hosting life. There's nothing else like us that we know about. Nothing. For all intents and purposes, we're alone. Looking around the immediate universe (our galaxy), there may be life on other planets in the galaxy. But. If we keep going the course we're going, it is far more likely that we'll extinct ourselves before we develop the technology to find out if there is life out there and long before we'll find out how to reach a potential new home.

There was an entire aeon of life that produced so much waste that all of the organisms drowned in their own excrement, which happened to be oxygen. Fortunately for us now.

It might be that the purpose of humans, mammals, multicellular organisms, whatever.....in the holistic sense, is no greater than theirs.

I agree the world is precious, but the idea that you need to take psychedelics to realize this is completely absurd.

Religion certainly isn't going to help anyone appreciate nature. American Christians in particular think God gave the world to them to do whatever they want, even if that means driving around gas-guzzling SUVs and polluting as much as they want. Most other religions don't have a very good track record with environmentalism either.

Modern science, however, tells us exactly why we're having problems, and what things are likely to look like if they keep going this way. What more do you need for inspiration, other than "if you don't make some big changes, you're going to have massive flooding of port cities, and a lot more extreme weather, storms, desertification, etc., which will cause shortages of freshwater and food." If that isn't enough inspiration, I don't know what is. The problem is that too many people simply don't believe this, just like there's people who think vaccines cause autism.

Then again, since I'm a believer in science and I'm not religious, I can't speak for people who are, so maybe you're onto something with the psychedelics thing. Perhaps we should try a scientific study, giving religious anti-environment people psychedelics and seeing if it makes them appreciate nature more.

This study did not focus on religious people in particular, but there is at least some preliminary evidence (in addition to loads of anecdotal evidence) for psychedelics increasing appreciation for nature: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28631526

> we will continue to ennui ourselves...

I’m trying to recall which post from yesterday used this word which we probably both read.

But FYI I believe the word is merely a noun; one cannot ennui oneself.

Thanks. It turns out it can be used as a verb:

- (verb, transitive) To make bored or listless; to weary.

But it doesn't quite capture what I mean. It's not merely that we're boring ourselves by some particular activity, but by deciding that reality itself is boring.

I don't need psychedelics or religious fervor to realise and appreciate how extraordinary the likelyhood of our existence is though ^^.

In the modern world, the paramount desire of society is to grow the capitalist economy. For this purpose we are pressured to excel at things that will make this economy grow, and relegate everything else to a secondary status. That's why society views taking care of nature as non important. Many companies, such as oil and mining companies, are directly interested in destroying as much of earth as possible, just for the sake of making an extra buck. We need to create a new economy where these companies and others are directly controlled to produce only the minimum necessary in order to maintain what remains of this planet.

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