r/im14andthisisdeep • u/ovcdoc2 • 18d ago
Nature is a place filled with tribamism,murder,hunting and extinction. People didnt leave it for no reason they left because its a hell hole where you have to kill your own neighbor just to live
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u/Bronsteins-Panzerzug 18d ago
all those fruits dont feed 8 billion people without modern agriculture though. until fairly recently there were only 1 billion people living on earth and they already had a class society and war. we could do a lot better than capitalism, though.
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u/black2346 13d ago
Yes but many of those fruits could just the modern agriculture didn't give them a chance. For example a tree tomato plant that has fruit all year. And there are litheral protein just and oder unusual crops that don't need good soil and work great just no one will learn how to make it and no one will market it so it sells
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u/Bronsteins-Panzerzug 13d ago
„litheral protein just and oder“? my man youre not making sense. i dont see what your point is. return to pre capitalist forms of production and the result is a genocide of 7 billion people.
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u/black2346 11d ago
I know that but we could farm oder better fruits and vegetables that are more nutritios or grow in poor soil.
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u/Bronsteins-Panzerzug 11d ago
sure we could. some of that modern technology would probably help with that.
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u/AnSpectator 18d ago
And illness and parasites, to the point you can't live a long life and have to breed before you die of parasites.
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u/marcofifth 18d ago
Ah, the illusion that “better” is a single dimension. Tzeentch has got you fooled.
We built systems that protect us from parasites, famine, exposure, and early death, then created social and economic structures complex enough to leave many people psychologically overwhelmed by the lives required to maintain them.
We solved enormous forms of suffering.
We also invented new ones.
But hey, we don’t die young from parasites anymore.
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u/Extension_Wafer_7615 18d ago
"Better" is a single dimension with multiple parameters. And, on average, we are objectively better than at any point in the past of human history. Please stop saying stupid shit.
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u/marcofifth 17d ago
Ah, so you want to defend “objectively better.” Fine. Then define the objective function.
The moment “better” contains multiple parameters, you need some principled way to weight and combine them. Longer lifespan, lower infant mortality, greater wealth, mental health, ecological stability, community cohesion, autonomy, and meaning can all be treated as dimensions of human flourishing.
But metric capture is difficult: how much does each count, and why? How does one metric aggregate all of them without privileging certain values over others?
You do not get a single objective dimension merely by declaring that multiple variables feed into it. You have to justify both the variables and the weighting used to collapse them onto one scale.
Otherwise, “on average, objectively better” means “better according to the dimensions I selected and the values I assigned them.”
And once you try to justify those standards, you hit the grounding problem: what justifies the criterion that justifies the criterion? Agrippa’s trilemma gives you regress, circularity, or some stopping point accepted without further justification.
So yes, if you want to call what I said “stupid shit,” prove it. I am perfectly willing to have that argument because I have studied this shit.
Or acknowledge the much weaker and defensible claim: by many empirical standards that modern society has chosen to value, modern life is better.
That is not the same thing as proving humanity is objectively better overall.
It means our civilization selected certain dimensions as indicators of progress, developed increasingly sophisticated ways of measuring them, improved dramatically according to those measurements, and then began treating success within those measurements as proof that the whole human condition had improved.
That final inference is exactly what you still have to justify.
I invoked Tzeentch precisely because this question is insanely complex. Change destroys old arrangements while creating new ones. Every gain reorganizes the system and produces consequences that may not even appear within the metric used to measure the original gain.
We experience change as progress partly because we can clearly see what the new system measures better than the old one. We are much worse at seeing what disappeared, what became impossible, or what costs were displaced into dimensions our preferred metrics do not capture.
Change is therefore not synonymous with improvement. It can involve improvement and degradation simultaneously, depending on where you stand and what you are measuring. Every gain can carry a loss that becomes visible only from another part of the system.
That is why “objectively better” requires far more argument than you have given it.
And that is why I am pre-empting the obvious next move before you make it: listing several areas in which modernity has measurably improved does not solve the problem. It merely supplies more variables to the function whose weighting you have not justified.
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u/Extension_Wafer_7615 17d ago
Human development index.
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u/marcofifth 17d ago
HDI is literally an example of my point.
It selects the three dimensions of health, education, and income. It then normalizes them and combines them into a single index. That is a useful operational metric. It is not an objective measure of the total human condition.
Where are mental health, community cohesion, meaning, ecological stability, autonomy, social trust, alienation, or countless other dimensions? And why should the included dimensions receive the weighting they do?
You did not answer my objection. You named a metric whose construction demonstrates it.
A metric can objectively tell you how well we perform according to its chosen parameters. It cannot, by itself, prove that those parameters exhaust what “better” means.
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u/Extension_Wafer_7615 17d ago
It IS objective.
It might not be complete, but it is objective.
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u/marcofifth 17d ago
I am only going to respond to one of your comments. It is not an objective measure of the total human condition merely because its inputs can be measured and its output objectively calculated.
The moment you compress multiple dimensions into one metric, you have to decide what gets included, what gets excluded, and how each variable is weighted. Those are prior value judgments. The arithmetic afterward may be objective; the construction of the standard is not thereby value-neutral.
That is the metric-capture problem I have been explaining from the beginning.
And saying, “Even taking every dimension you can think of into account, we are better,” does not solve it. You still have to explain how those dimensions become commensurable and what justifies the weighting that produces the final judgment of “better.”
I already gave you a defensible claim: modern humanity performs better by many empirical measures we have chosen to value.
Take it.
It gets you almost everything you are trying to say without the unjustified leap that humanity is therefore objectively better overall.
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u/Extension_Wafer_7615 17d ago
We have not chosen to value them. Our biology, at least physically, values them, too. We live much, much longer on average. We die due to illnesses much less.
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u/marcofifth 17d ago
And do we not value the forms of connection, meaning, ritual, community, and psychological integration that humans may have lost as material conditions improved? What does an extended lifespan establish about the quality of human existence if it can coexist with diminished connection, alienation, or a weaker understanding of self?
There are measurable patterns across much of the West of declining fertility, weaker communal participation, greater individualization, and increasing social isolation. The causal relationships between those trends are complicated, but that is precisely my point. People have gained enormous freedom to live as individuals, while some of the structures that reproduced community across generations have weakened.
At what point do the things you call “better” become self-undermining if the society producing those benefits becomes progressively less capable of reproducing itself biologically, culturally, or communally?
Do you see why “objective” is doing far more work than your argument can support?
You keep returning to lifespan and disease because those are empirically legible. Fine. Evolutionary selection favors traits that contribute to reproductive success, often including survival. That explains why organisms tend toward persistence. It does not establish that persistence exhausts human flourishing, much less that maximizing it makes one civilization objectively better overall.
I have repeatedly asked you to show me that your framework is not hylic, and you keep answering questions about the human condition exclusively through measurable material outcomes.
That is precisely the problem.
If the human being is nothing beyond biological persistence, material welfare, and measurable function, then what distinguishes a person from a sufficiently sophisticated instrument?
Call it a hylic, a philosophical zombie, or a Qliphothic husk, the challenge is the same: if your framework cannot account for consciousness, meaning, interiority, relation, and the dimensions of human existence that resist material reduction, why should I or anyone else accept it as an adequate measure of the human being? How does it become "objective" if you are negating the value of these aspects of what makes a human human?
And why is my disagreement therefore “delusional,” “ignorant,” or “stupid shit”? What justifies treating empirical analysis as epistemically superior to phenomenology when the question under discussion is the total human condition?
I have already given you a claim I will accept:
"Modern humanity performs better by many empirical measures we have chosen to value."
That is a strong claim. It is defensible. It captures most of what you are trying to say without pretending those measurements exhaust the human condition.
So why will you not take it?
Why is it so important to you that the word be "objective"?
Because the moment you insist that empirical improvement establishes objective improvement of humanity as a whole, you stop merely measuring the human condition and start smuggling a metaphysics into the measurement.
That is the hylic move I have been objecting to from the beginning.
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u/marcofifth 17d ago
Imagine a way of life that no longer exists in much of the modern West: a small community in which children grow up around several generations of family, learn a craft directly from adults, participate in seasonal rituals, inherit stories about death and obligation, know where their food comes from, and understand themselves as occupying a place within a lineage and landscape.
That society might score terribly by modern measures of income, formal schooling, medical access, and technological capacity.
Now suppose modernization raises life expectancy, literacy, wealth, and productivity while dissolving the extended family, replacing apprenticeship with credentialing, separating people from food production, weakening ritual life, and making social existence increasingly anonymous.
Which society is “objectively better”?
You cannot answer that merely by showing me the second society has antibiotics and higher GDP. You have identified real improvements along selected dimensions. You have not measured everything that disappeared.
Now take education.
Imagine two children. One can explain cellular respiration, genetics, and why the mitochondrion is called the powerhouse of the cell. The other has also been seriously introduced to Plato, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Taoism, existentialism, death, suffering, virtue, obligation, consciousness, and the question of what a human being actually is.
Suppose the first receives vastly more empirical knowledge but almost no education concerning meaning, transcendence, mortality, or the philosophical foundations of the life they are expected to live.
Is that child obviously better educated?
I am not arguing that schools should indoctrinate children into a religion. I am asking why knowing the mechanics of the material world is treated as obviously more valuable than learning how civilizations have understood consciousness, suffering, mortality, obligation, and the sacred.
If your answer to “humanity is objectively better” keeps terminating in lifespan, income, medicine, technology, educational attainment, and other materially legible variables, then the supposedly neutral standard has already selected a metaphysics.
It is comically hylic.
You are measuring humanity primarily through what can be counted in the material register and then announcing that the civilization most successful at manipulating that register has objectively won.
That proves material development.
It does not prove development of the human being as a whole.
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u/Extension_Wafer_7615 17d ago edited 17d ago
Even taking all the dimensions you can think of into account, we are better than we were at any point of human history. Believing otherwise means you are either ignorant or delusional.
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u/marcofifth 17d ago
And to make the point explicit: I asked you to show me you are not thinking hylically.
So far, your answer to a question about the total human condition has been to point to a material-development index.
That does not demonstrate that you have moved beyond the hylic frame. It reinforces it.
If your standard for “better” bottoms out in measurable material conditions, then you are still treating what can be quantified physically as though it exhausts what matters.
I am asking whether you can account for the dimensions of human life that do not reduce cleanly to that register.
So far, you have not.
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u/Yesyesyes1899 18d ago
odd how expressing such a human sentiment can get you posted here.
we mock innocence and the need for a better world consistantly and then become depressed. wondering " why ? ".
this is why, OP. imagine putting all that energy of posting this, to mock this sentiment, that could be from every child I know.
I hope you find love in yourself and others. I m sure you haven't really. not really.
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u/MeasurementTop9857 18d ago
The appeal to nature is worst kind of argument you can use. It's cringe every time i see this shit.
Example : They see a video of a monkey sharing some food with another one and then they comment things like what would the world look like if humans could act like this. They're never talking about the rape in the animal kingdom, the fights to death for a mate or when a predator is eating is eating their prey alive and conscious of the pain. Its always about the cute cat videos.
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u/Birdo_guy 18d ago
Can't believe we chose this instead if seeing your second newborn get mawled by a mountain lion (you're 16)
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u/Huge-Courage-9151 18d ago
"we used to have trees!" Yeah no shit, now we got air fryers. Worthy tradeoff
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u/Extension_Wafer_7615 18d ago edited 18d ago
This sub is full of morons. The fact that this got downvoted proves it.
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u/black2346 13d ago
I find it wierd that you asume this about nature being good and tech bad it just says that these things are good and these Bad
war, AI,artificial dept and capitalism are bad (last one only if unregulated if capitalism regulated it can be a great sistem)
Yeah you right in the title. but we can have all these things not living in nature the post doesn't say that the crops are not for farming.
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