That's not proof of a supreme being though. That's proof of evolution and survival of the fittest. The fungi Ophiocordyceps has the ability to infest an ant's body and completely control it's host to the point that it can kill other ants and wipe out a whole colony....and then take over more ant bodies and move on and do the same to another colony. Total invasion of the body snatcher style. Is that proof of a supreme fungi being?
Conscience is a cognitive process....it's not something you're given or you obtain. And your conscience feelings are relative to where, when, and how you're raised in this world. If you had lived in the south as a white man a few hundred years ago owning a slave might not have bothered you at all....but today you might feel bad about it. Your conscience is shaped by your environment.
Could be evolution - where the need to assist the tribe and where everyone had a role - was paramount to the group’s survival. Doesn’t mean a higher being planted it in me as part of a memory chip or behavioral program.
Although there are similarities in arguments, completely reprogramming and taming would be two different things. And the only reason I point that out is that off the top of my head, I can't think of any other species that tames another in order to personally benefit in a manner that is not exclusively mutual. I'm not looking at it from a religious point of view but a simple evolutionary one that might be worth looking at later in the discussion (when it circles back to where we were previously). Is there an example of that anywhere?
Totally different things. My only point being that having the ability to dominate another species, through chemical, physical, psychological means or otherwise....isn't proof of a supreme being. It's proof of evolution. Tames or domesticates? No. Off the the top of my head there isn't. There are, however, a lot of examples of one species using another for some sort of benefit. Some apes in captivity have been known to keep pets like cats or rabbits and show affection for them. But having the actual ability to tame them is different. Important to note this is not an ability humans have always had. Animal husbandry is something we evolved to learn.
Mutual benefit is something that is all over the animal kingdom. Sharks are at the top of the food chain, yet they let their teeth be cleaned by smaller fish. A meal for one and a needed aid for another. The main difference would be the correlation between sentience and the ability to tame species for the sole benefit of one. Having the ability and learning how to use it (the 'when') are two separate discussions, but were we capable of doing so from the moment we would have been considered sentient? That would be another discussion all on its own. It all comes back to the idea of being self aware and how that plays against our own understanding of where we are in the universe and what role we are destined, or randomly selected, to play.
Mutual benefit and our own evolution is what led to us domesticating and taming animals though. Early man learning to co-exist with wolves sped up our own evolution. It began as a mutual benefit....wolves were good at finding food and man could provide them protection from other prey. That relationship evolved wolves into dogs and taught man how to domesticate an animal. There isn't a huge difference in why animals use each other in nature and how we've learned to tame and use animals....we are simply the most evolved. Animal husbandry is the result of using a mutual benefit. I would say no. But it's based on when you consider us having become sentient. Are you only willing to consider modern homo sapiens when you say we or do you include our ancestors? Neanderthal's were self aware as was homo erectus. But we didn't begin to domesticate animals until long after they were gone.
The biggest argument against us being selected to be who and what we are today is the fact that we haven't always been who and what we are. Did a creator create us and also create evolution? If so.....that creator was leaving some of our development to chance and therefore couldn't have possibly known the end result.
Yet we are the only species on the planet that has tamed other species with the benefit being exclusively ours. IMO, that is a very significant difference. Why we have reached this point compared to our earlier workings with animals relates to this next portion - This would still have the question of whether we possessed the ability to from the moment we made the leap to being self aware. You can relate it to any learned human quality or skill. We possessed the mental capacity to do far greater things at earlier times but there was a lack of understanding the basic principles of how our universe operates. That's the part of the discussion that ties back into our earlier conversation regarding the multiverse and simulation theories. What we are beginning to understand now about the possibilities of our known universe will exponentially dwarf anything we knew a generation ago. So, even though we are advancing at an astronomical rate, there is still the question of when the human mind was able to coalesce expanded thought and how that relates to both shared space with other species and understanding our place in the world, including whether or not there is purpose in life.
I'm more inclined to believe this is all happening by random chance. In terms of humans evolving to what most consider a superior being over animals I also call bs. Has anyone considered that our so-called superiority which has caused the death of millions and put the earth into a state of unforgivable deterioration could be, in fact, attributed to a very inferior being instead? Look at how intelligent porpoises are. The Orca whale for instance. Maybe these creatures are a whole lot more intelligent as a species than humans are. They don't go around wrecking shit and mass murdering other species just because: money, politics, greed.
We are, coincidentally, the most highly evolved species. Evolved to a point that we have halted the evolution of many other species. I don't think our early ancestors...say neanderthals....possessed all the same abilities we do. At least not cognitive abilities. They had brains similar in size but structured differently with a larger portion of the brain dedicated to sight. They thought less, reacted to stimuli more. Our brains have changed over time. Neural plasticity giving us the ability literally train our brains and unlock new functions. The part of your statement that I'm really fascinated with is....what abilities do we currently have that we don't know about?
There are a lot of intelligent creatures. But despite all of our flaws we are at the top of the evolutionary chart and the food chain. And we aren't the only species on the planet that can wreck an ecosystem. We just happen to be the largest and can deal the most damage planet wide. Our evolution has actually slowed down or completely halted the evolution of other animals.
I don't disagree with this. In fact...I think if you were to hit a reset button and do it all over again you might have a completely different result.
I think it becomes a question of when we decided as a species that animals were to be thought of as items to be owned, labored and consumed. At that point we were no longer in a shared relationship, with the main focus on ownership. Hunting to eat is different than forced evolution of a species to own it. There are countless animals that have been re-engineered to better suit our own needs, with their original 'programming' no longer a factor in their or our lives. This would expand the question to include - At what level of self awareness do we consider ourselves connected to our predecessors? We know that we evolved from a lower hominid, but at what point do we know for sure that we possessed the same capacity to reason as our originators and how does that correlate to when we began to advance in animal husbandry as well as cultivating? We know that there was a time in which both Neanderthals and what is considered to be modern humans coexisted, with the former being eradicated by changing landscape and the inability to retain their own domain, so when did the switch flip for the change between the two? Within 1,000 years of Gobleki Tepe there are signs of animals being farmed, so when exactly did we begin to tame them for the purpose of ownership? Considering Neanderthals were present at the time of the building of Tepe, it would seem that we were looking to procure both land and animals for the purposes of domestication and agriculture at relatively the same time we made the leap past the Neanderthals. I'm not saying that is a definitive answer, but it does point to the idea of different levels of understanding our environment and how to manipulate it at different levels of self awareness.
Sorry, a little off topic reply here but this comment jolted a memory back out of the cobwebs. Used to play SimLife for weeks on end on the PC back in the 90's, where you could just mess with everything to create life and a sustainable ecosystem. And if things didn't work......hit the reset button. I think you can download it free off the web if anyone is interested.
@babyfan Thanks for the post a couple pages back with the Buddhist precepts, etc. Always a little curious and too lazy to go find out a little bit about that. I learned a little something from it
