this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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I find it fascinating how we're so willing to ascribe thoughts, feelings, and motivations to inanimate objects or forces of nature and on the other hand we're so quick to remove all of those attributes from other groups of humans to justify horrible acts done to them.
We're hella cute. But pareidolia is seriously gonna be the end of us when the AI takes over ๐
It's already responsible for religion and all the nonsense it's spawned.
Even ascribing consciousness into others or ourselves is actually pretty stupid if you think about it.
Stemming from religion there's this idea that human "souls" are somehow special and exist on a plane outside reality. But that's not the case.
We are just semi-rigid blobs of mostly water that grew into weird shapes.
Woah woah there, who you calling a weird shape?
Because our collective we is composed of many different people. You have brilliant scientific minds and genius artistic people and everyone in between. At the same time you have very empathetic people and others who would not hesitate to hurt someone for their gain.
Diversity is both a blessing and a curse.
That is true, but people are capable of holding both views at the same time. Soldiers on the battlefield go out and do horrific things to enemy soldiers and civilians, and come home and are loving fathers and husbands who wouldn't hurt anyone. Or how many times have people been caught for horrible crimes and all their friends and neighbours say it isn't possible because they're the kindest and most helpful people they know.
This isn't a matter of "some people are capable and some are not". It's a case of "most people seem to be able to set aside someone else's humanity to do horrible things"
Or that everyone everywhere pictures a little robot the size of like Wall-e, when curiosity is really 10 feet long, 7 feet high, and 2,000 pounds.
That's exactly what @[email protected] was talking about. They cut off the feet of like 5 humans, just to measure the size of a damn robot.
Oh come on, humans aren't that unnecessarily cruel! We just cut the feet off several thousand peasants back in the day to determine the average length of human feet and then made a bunch of sticks that length so we don't have to be so cruel each time we wanted to measure something. We just had to do it that one time.
"Why cut their feet off instead of just measuring them?"
It was necessary for scientific rigor, so that others could go back and verify the final result. It's very important to be accurate using a measurement that is completely relatable to the average human. Funny enough, we later realized that about 300 randomly selected feet would generally get within 5% of the true average, so that makes it even better that we did do that because how else would we have discovered something like that?
"Wouldn't that just give an average for peasant feet in that region? For average human foot size, wouldn't you need to take feet from people who aren't peasants, like nobles, clergy, and scientists?"
Well, you see... Hmm. I guess to be completely accurate... That does sound right. Hmm.
You know, I've been hearing great things about the metric system! I mean, who really thinks in terms of how big their feet are anyways?
Probably the biggest and most important question in the world.
I dropped my phone the other day and started apologising to it for dropping it again.
Beautifully (tragically?) put. Well done. It's worth pondering...
I think maybe it's because when something lacks human qualities, we're more able to project our wishes onto it, whether that's its "personality" or "story" or "feelings", whatever. Maybe in a way it makes it feel predictable and "safer", like we know it somehow. It will behave the way it behaves regardless of the little projections we put on it that can sometimes be a remnant of our own egos.
...People, on the other hand, are much less predictable, and tend to highly dislike being projected upon. Maybe removing relatable qualities and generalizing groups of them is a selfish way of turning them into an "object" that "feels more predictable" and the one projecting feels like it satisfies their need for control, even though it dehumanizes others who are, in actuality, just like themselves.
I feel like it's a maladaptive way to simplify the complicated. The brain loves to simplify.
Empathy tends to be such a prevention AND a cure...