Consciousness?
Yes, but it’s only because you’re conscious that you can value self-consciousness, so that’s as as self-cancelling as all the other examples.
:rolleyes:
I mean, really, folks, some of you are doing everything but self-flagellating while crying “We are not worthy! We are not worthy!”
Having read that, I think maybe I should rephrase my earlier statement that anthropocentricism is a kind of collective ego. 
Maybe I should have said that anthropocentricism is a kind of collective narcissism and self-serving myopia that sees no value in any species that is not exactly like ourselves.
I view the OP’s question as essentially a moral and philosophical one, not a question of “competitive advantage” or of importance judged by who has the greater power to kill or destroy or just simply to control. In my view that kind of thinking leads to warped values in relation to the relative rights of both our fellow creatures and, by extension, of our fellow man. As an instructive exercise, for instance, for everywhere you have “human” up there, there are various things you can substitute to see how it sounds. You can try “white man”, wherein it sounds like something that might have been read to the Indians by the first settlers as they were getting off the boat. Or you can try “we, your new alien overlords”, thus putting yourself on the receiving end of it.
I think it may have been Gandhi who said that a society can be judged by how it treats its animals; the logical corollary to that is the directly related concept of how we treat our own poor and our sick and disadvantaged. And I’m reminded, too, of the observation of Clifford Geertz that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.” Those are all closely related concepts.
The facts I already mentioned are the evidence, albeit statistical. Given those facts there is no conceivable way to explain how life could have evolved on earth and yet nowhere else. That’s quite a bit stronger than “I don’t see why not” – it’s taking anthropocentrism and earth-centrism to a ridiculously implausible extreme, given that there are at least 10^24 other stars in the universe.
IMHO this assumes more than we know for sure about how and why life evolved on Earth and what conditions were necessary for it to do so. As far as I know (and I am willing to be corrected), there is not currently a consensus among scientists over the chances of life (or life of any complexity) existing elsewhere in the universe.
Importance is not a scientifically neutral expression. As far as I’m concerned humanity is the single most important thing in the University without which the rest is completely meaningless.
When it comes to throwing objects, humans are easily #1 among animal species. We’re great at it.
That’s the term, but it’s not necessarily a fallacy – it’s a point of view, or a tenet of a value system. Not objectively right or wrong, just a way of looking at things or assigning values.
Regarding astronomy, it can lead to errors in thinking, but I doubt Aristotle was guilty of anthropocentrism when he canonized the geocentric model. The model made sense at the time, given most of the evidence.
Bingo. “Dominance” is a term that is relative to some scale or context or means of measurement. Fred may be the dominant runner (wins all the races) but is henpecked by his domineering wife.
It doesn’t mean much to say “Homo sapiens is the dominant species on Earth.” It’s not even wrong.
However, we may wind up being the dominant species regarding impact on climate. We may be the dominant species impacting extinction of other species. We may be the most widespread species in terms of habitat (but then we’d share that honor with our gut bacteria).
So, dominant in what way? If we don’t say what way, we’re not having a debate.
True, we can do all those things, but not nearly as well as species that evolved to do them, and we need big, bulky, complex contraptions to enable us to do them at all.
(Dare I say it? Yeah, I do. I’m reckless, that way…)
Humans not biological in 500 years? CITE?
Bacteria may be intelligent. Perhaps not individually, but collectively. At least one highly educated person has so argued. Behold Amazon.com’s description of The Genius Within: Discovering the Intelligence of Every Living Thing by Frank Vertosick:
Noted ant scientist Edward O. Wilson has said that if all the earth’s biosphere were melted down into a chemical soup, the dominant chemical in that mix would be formic acid produced by ants.
Well, OK… Justify it. Present your argument, not the conclusion you assume.
Yeah, Whatever you say, Alice…
A survival trait cannot be a disorder. But I happen to be an admirer of the life-style of hunter-gatherers, whose cooperative society lacks any discriminations and who revere any life forms.
Gandhi, whom I’ve always respected, also says: “You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is like an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.”
On what basis can you possibly say that ancient hunter-gatherers “revered [all] life forms”? Seems to me that they were just doing what they needed to do to survive, and living in harmony with nature. Would that we could do the same. That doesn’t seem to be the kind of dominance to which you were referring, though perhaps I misunderstood you.
Some questions:
[ul]
[li]Is it OK to hunt a species to extinction because it’s profitable to do so?[/li]
[li]Is it OK to bulldoze an endangered species’ habitat, perhaps assuring its final extinction, because we would like to build condos or a new subdivision? [/li]
[li]Is it OK to massively disrupt an endangered species’ habitat just because we would like to drive gigantic wasteful vehicles that emit huge amounts of unnecessary pollution?[/li]
[li]Is it OK for congenital imbeciles like Sarah Palin to invite her friends to hunt wolves from helicopters because it’s so much fun? Does that in any way help demonstrate the transcendent nobility of the human race?[/li][/ul]
The hunter-gatherers didn’t do any of those things.
It works, if your definition of ‘revere’ is equal to ‘eat’.
I know that I revered the burrito I ate for lunch, today. And I will probably revere the sandwich I’ll eat, tomorrow.
Much of what we do now is non-biological. Our communications, our transportation, our labor is all mostly non-biological despite them originally being biological (phones and the internet are better than voice and hearing; machines and computers are better than hands; cars and planes are better than walking; etc). Since our machines are so much better than our biological bodies I don’t see why the trend would stop. People aren’t going to want to stick with sickly, fragile bodies and brains that are prone to mental illness and ennui once an alternative arises.
My cite is human history. Luddies are small communities and even they don’t follow their own rules. I’ve met Amish people, they take advantage of technology all the time.
If I’m wrong I will give you $20 in 2514.
Uh, no. That’s a discredited, and fairly racist, in a noble-savage kind of way, belief about hunter-gatherer societies. The truth is that the ones that have been studied tend toward extreme tribalism, disliking everyone outside of the tribe, to the extent that young men for shits and giggles will go on early morning murder-sprees against neighboring tribes. You need to stop reading new age tripe and read some serious works.
In other words, “It would be cool, so I assume it will be true”.
You got nothing except college dorm bullshit sessions to back it up. OK. :dubious:
(Oops. Almost missed this one.) By which time, the penny in my pocket, right now, will be worth more, if only as a collector’s item. Keep your $20. In fact, spend it now. It’ll be worthless in 500 years. Just like your prediction. But at least the twenty won’t be wrong.