Important Philosophical Questions + POLLS

Another, perhaps more fundamental, problem: can every idea be expressed in terms?

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The number of words needed to express an idea depends on your cultural references. For instance if two persons from the same family say that an action was “immoral”, they will understand each other immediately. But in a discussion between two persons from different countries, one of them may need to spend time explaining to the other that their notion of morality is different.

Also, an idea may be explained roughly in a few terms, but a more detailed explanation may require a whole book and/or may require study and practice to understand the meaning of the sentences. Think of “strength” or “influence” in go for instance.

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Maybe not?

The Japanese have a number of words that are often mistranslated into English, such as Ikigai. In the translation, an abstract idea is shoehorned into defined terms. While doing so, the idea becomes misconstructed.

You also see this in Go, where discussions arise about what Aji means exactly. And then there’s the Dutch Gezellig, the Finnish Sisu, etc.

So if some ideas are barely definable in one language, it seems fair to assume that there are ideas that no language is capable of describing.

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Its possible to independently reinvent an idea from zero yourself.
Words from other people is a tool to make process of reinventing an idea faster and easier than if you do it independently.

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Words never give enough information. We understand anything because we try to invent missed details.

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One thing I wonder every time I go to the zoo and read the description of some predator:

Why does everything the animals do maintain balance in the ecosystem while everything the humans do destroys it?

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It’s not the case that everything animals do maintains balance. Species go extinct all the time, and with any species, those other species depending on them will go extinct soon after.

Humans are good at adapting, thus also good at destroying a lot more without feeling the consequences (immediately), but once we’ve destroyed enough of the ecosystem that we cannot sustain our population, then humans will start dying out as well. Until few enough humans are there so that the ecosystem can recover.

If it can recover, that is. If it cannot, humans will just go extinct, like so many other species.


As an example from nature of a species that ‘causes’ its own extinction: some pathogens (bacteria, virusses) are so good at killing their host, that they cannot spread quickly enough to survive as a species. Such strands can just go extinct.

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Sure, not everything. But it’s intriguing to know that some maintain the intricate balance. I’m sure the animals are not thinking about the balance in the ecosystem at all when they are trying to hunt their lunch.

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I believe the balance happens because all the imbalanced ecosystems are transient. It’s a bit like asking “how did the planetsso many asteroids find the perfect orbit around the sun?” (The answer being that most planets asteroids either pass the sun or get sucked into it)

Edit: misunderstanding about planet formation. Does the analogy work for asteroids?

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Indeed, this is what I mean: not everything animals do maintains balance, but those cases that don’t won’t survive long.

It’s not just humans either, for instance many birds in New Zealand became extinct after mammals were (inadvertently or not) introduced by humans. Those mammals and birds certainly did not maintain balance.

It’s the same for many exotic species introduced in new environments: if they manage to survive at all, they usually end up usurping the niche of some native species that then goes extinct.

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Not entirely, though. Planets didn’t “happen” to fly around and land in exactly the right spot, but rather dust happened to do that, and gravitational pull of enough dust is what resulted in planets. Although a planet could form from dust that does not orbit a star, it’s highly unlikely that a planet orbiting a star is formed in that way. Since the orbiting planets are kind of an average of orbiting dust, the only way an orbital planet could lose orbit, is if it gets knocked or pulled out of it by something of similar or larger mass.

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Right, the Rare Earth Hypothesis and the Survivorship Bias.

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A slightly different question that natural selection doesn’t really fully cover, could be this:

“Why do all the animals seem to have a particular skillset and purpose and humans do not?”
or, to be more exact:
“All animals seem to have a particular skillset and purpose, but humans do not. What was our original skillset and position within the ecosystem?”

For example, you will never see a seagul that cannot fly, a hawk that cannot hunt or a cat that cannot prowl or jump (or a cat that got obese and couldn’t jump - that happens only to domesticated animals), yes, exactly because those that cannot will die, therefore those are the basic skillsets of those particular animals.
However humans, by creating societies, diversified the ways someone can survive within it (e.g. it can be argued that the vast majority of people living in the cities have never produced any sort of food in their lives, yet quite a few of them are obese. A preposterous condition in nature) actually lost whatever unique skillset they might have had as a species.

Even in other social creatures that form intricate populations and habitations (mostly insects and some birds, if I am not mistaken), the units of that society retain the basic skillset of their species or their purprose (e.g. every parrot living in a coloy can fly and forage or every soldier ant can soldier, every worker ant can work etc ) and just add a layer of cooperation over it.

In our case, things got so complicated we seem to have overwritten our natural skillset with an artificial one. So, what was the original? :thinking:

Humans use tools. That skill is enough to survive in any environment.

Have you never heard of invasive species and plagues? Those can severely disrupt ecosystems, because it takes time for ecosystems to adjust and they might collapse before that happens.

In a way humanity is like an invasive species or plague in many ecosystems.

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I thought it was a product of evolution rather than a skillset that they had from the start? Just like how humans started with the homo specifies which survived quite well

In another way, we are also part of the ecosystem :sweat_smile:

I don’t see animals having a purpose, so I don’t understand that part of the question, but humans have particular skillsets as well. We have very good eyesight in daylight (more clarity than most other animals, and we can see colours in three dimensions) and stamina (a fit human can outrun a horse for example, not in sprint, but in marathon), we are pretty great climbers, and of course quite intelligent, and have perhaps the most complex social structure in the animal kingdom.

Early species of humans, from before tool use allowed humans to dominate their entire surroundings, seem to have been excelently adopted for hunting and foraging. The lack of speed or muscle is offset by stamina and team work.

If you go back far enough, our original skillset and position would have been similar to that of other great apes, like chimps, bonobos, gorillas, urang-utans, who are also excelent foragers, and in case of chimps and bonobos, hunters as well.


Many ants never produce any food of their own. Male lions generally don’t have to hunt for themselves, as the females usually do the hunting.

Nope, it’s not preposterous. Staying in fit condition as a species costs a lot of energy, and if there is little pressure, then “fitness” of a species does not necessarily have to be associated with physical fitness.

Animals that live in caves evolve to turn blind, because eyes cost energy better spend on other things. Being blind would be a major handicap outside of caves. Animals on remote islands without predators lose their abilities that would allow them to survive predators, such as quick reflexes, flight (think about the dodo or the kiwi) and tend to shrink in size, because again, energy spent on nothing.

Once you remove the pressure, animals are no different than humans, as any obese lazy domesticated animal shows you.

Humans just happened to have removed almost all environmental pressure for themselves. We don’t have to fear predators, many humans don’t have to fear shortage of food, we barely have to fear illness. Given enough time, evolutionary fitness will not be the same as in caveman times, but rather more important is your ability to socially fit into society.

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Interesting how I just bumped into this video about a certain animal’s behavior

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DHGcxRhMmUe/?igsh=MTVlaXYyNjU2ejZ1eQ==

I do not mean that all those animals didn’t evolve from something else or that they always had those skills, but I was talking about the skills they currently have evolved to possess at this moment.

Maybe “purpose” is not exactly the correct word, so maybe an example might describe it better.

What is the “purpose” of a migratory stork? In order to survive it needs to be able to fly across great distances and fly to forage, to locate a good habitat and have the ability to build a nest and tend to their chicks. And in order to achieve those goals, they have evolved to have particular skills and traits.

So, yes, maybe not “purpose”, but “function”?
I am not sure which the correct word is. Sorry about that.

That seems like a good answer :slight_smile:
It also seems that we have deviated quite far from most of those skills.

There seems to be a slight misunderstanding here, I did not mean that it is preposterous to evolve to be like that through the passage of time, but it is preposterous to be so deviant within the current skillset of your species.

E.g. There is no way that a totally obese cat could exist outside in nature, exactly because there is still “environmental pressure” outside, for cats. If such pressure was gone, sure all cats could evolve to look and move like small hippos and grazing grass, but at this moment, an obese cat that cannot move fast or jump, cannot survive in nature, therefore it cannot be found/created in nature at this moment.

True. By the way, I find that quite perilous, but that is a different kind of issue/question.

It could be argued that this is already the case, at least in western societies.
The average “charismatic individual” (politicians, famous people, artists, influencers and so forth) is far more valued and has much more easier survival (a.k.a. “more money”) than the average productive member of our society.

This is already being reflected in surveys like this:

Incidentally that swift in “what society rewards” was exactly the premise of idiocracy. :sweat_smile:

I quote:

As the twenty-first century began, human evolution was at a turning point. Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits.
Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent. But, as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. A dumbing down. How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.

Which is eerily similar to what you described.
Let’s call it an ideological convergent evolution ahahah

I’ve heard of other cases as well, when they will toss their offspring as bait, to the predators (thus fulfilling the “joke” that “you do not have to be able to outrun a bear, but just be able to outrun the person next to you”), but I cannot remember which animals do that.

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