Often on Ayahuasca I feel extreme empathy for plants and feel like I communicate with them without spoken sounds. Sometimes I wish that it would work that way in real life, it is really wonderful and humbling feeling.
A biologist who believes that trees speak a language we can learn to listen to
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Re: A biologist who believes that trees speak a language we can learn to listen to
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
I too enjoy watching the perfect harmony of a lion eating a live impala
The huge difference is that lions dont put impalas into huge factories, where they feed them afwul food, rob them of any dignitiy, slaughter them by the masses, ship them across the globe in order to throw half of it away because it didnt hit the market’s taste of the month!
"Awful" food? "Dignity"? It doesn't make sense to judge the lives that these animals have chosen on human standards. Chicken is the most successful bird in the world, and cattle and sheep the most successful mammals. I'd say the symbiotic relationship with humans has worked out quite well in terms of reproductive success.
Re: A biologist who believes that trees speak a language we can learn to listen to
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Animals kill "for fun" too. Not just cats (example: https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2018-04-30/wolf-a... -- note: that was a single wolf, not a pack; and do you know what happens when a marten finds its way into the chicken coop? Chicken genocide).
Do other animals go to war, commit genocide, or in the context of our relationship with other animals, do anything similar to factory farming.
Yep, if they have sufficient intelligence and social organisation:
Re: A biologist who believes that trees speak a language we can learn to listen to
#74Often on Ayahuasca I feel extreme empathy for plants and feel like I communicate with them without spoken sounds. Sometimes I wish that it would work that way in real life, it is really wonderful and humbling feeling.
Paul Stamets would argue that IS real life, just with that channel amplified so you can finally hear it over the other channels jamming it.
Re: A biologist who believes that trees speak a language we can learn to listen to
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we are the only ones on the planet who can't live in harmony with other species. This "harmony" is really just interlocking loops of unconstrained growth, followed by running out of resources, and starvation while the food supply regenerates. It only looks pretty if you ain't looking very carefully. In fact, human beings seem to be the only ones observed with a capability for restraint . We're not very good at prac…
Your definition of restraint seems based on that one example. What about when my cat restrains from eating all of its treats at once? Or the restraint any animal takes through a farming process like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid#Ant_mutualism ?
Whoa, domesticated cats are exactly not an example of wind animals. They're more like part of human culture.
Re: A biologist who believes that trees speak a language we can learn to listen to
#76Thanks for the information
Re: A biologist who believes that trees speak a language we can learn to listen to
#77Language is found everywhere in nature. Personally, I'm looking forward to when google translate can do cat language
"My hovercraft is full of eels"
Re: A biologist who believes that trees speak a language we can learn to listen to
#78Humans can't perceive a lot of things, and on top of that, we have egos that makes us feel superior even though in reality, we are the only ones on the planet who can't live in harmony with other species. If you ever had a cat and really observed it and communicated with it, you know it has feelings and emotions. Birds have it also, so does pigs, horses... But we just ignore all that when it's convenient for us to ea…
I think you are misunderstanding the equilibrium of nature. There's no great and beautiful mutually orchestrated harmony. What happens invariably is a predator hunts a prey to the point of scarcity. At this point, assuming that prey was the predator's primary diet, the predators begin to literally starve to death which lowers their population. This, in turn, gives the prey a chance to increase their population with fewer predators. Over time this results in a dynamic equilibrium that gives the illusion of harmony - though it's really just controlled by starvation. At times, this equilibrium is never reached and one species or another ends up completely dying off (or getting killed off). And if that species that died off had not spread elsewhere, we get an extinction. Something that's been happening for millions and likely billions of years. Long before humanity entered onto the scene in any case.
I think humans today are, by far, the most harmonious creature on this planet. We have the ability to hunt absolutely anything to the point of extinction if we so desired. And while on occasion we do end up doing just that, for the most part we manage to create an artificial balance by restraining ourselves, diversifying our diet, and artificially multiplying the numbers of the species that we prefer to eat the most to ensure their sustainability.
And as another aside here, even in modern times with extinctions related to human activity you'll often find that while we did play a role, it's often also driven by other animals. For instance it's often said that the Dodo was hunted to extinction. That's entirely true, but it wasn't just by humans. The other animals introduced to the Mauritius also had a taste for the Dodo and its eggs in particular. A human might begin to take note of a population becoming more and more scarce. Another animal isn't going to think twice of it until they start starving for lack of their prey.
And also I do not think people just ignore the personalities of animals when choosing to eat them. If you've ever known anybody who's raised goats or even pigs. They're incredible critters that are friendly, cute, playful and in the case of pigs - even quite intelligent. Nobody, for the most part, enjoys slaughtering these guys, but meat is something our bodies have evolved to consume and is still the most straight forward means of living a healthy life. Hunting is a different story, but in many ways that's even more humane. An animal killed on a hunt undoubtedly lived a life magnitudes more free and pleasant than the conditions of many in the farms that produce the food you buy at the grocer or restaurant. In any case you'll find a strong overlap both in modern times, and premodern times, of hunters and animal conservationists. The circle of life is something those closest to it tend to understand all too well.
Re: A biologist who believes that trees speak a language we can learn to listen to
#79Humans can't perceive a lot of things, and on top of that, we have egos that makes us feel superior even though in reality, we are the only ones on the planet who can't live in harmony with other species. If you ever had a cat and really observed it and communicated with it, you know it has feelings and emotions. Birds have it also, so does pigs, horses... But we just ignore all that when it's convenient for us to ea…
I agree and emphathise with all your points.
I have an alternative perspective on the question of how harmonious we are with our surroundings. I'm not peddling a wordview here, but I think this is an interesting thought exercise. What if we are in harmony with nature? Yes, taking into account all our seemingly disharmonious traits, greed, self-obsesssion, social and environmental irresponsibility.
Conceptually, it's simpler (or more elegant?) to consider that we are in harmony with nature, like every other of its elements, but our definition of harmony, in other words it's our perception that is lacking.
If nature, as in life on earth, is a fractal of ecosystems, when we perceive that one fails, we change our focus by one level to the containing or a contained ecosystem and repeat the process of perceiving whether or not it is failing. The most basic example is a sickly animal that is then fed upon by predators, or medium-height plantlife withering due to expanding tree canopy. If it's failing, we again step to the next ecosystem; if we perceive that it's ok, then we consider the previous ecosystems to be ok too. As an extreme case, we could keep going this way, if we thought that everything on earth is failing, until we got to the "top-level" ecosystem of life on earth -- the earth itself. We could then just generalize the definition of nature to the cosmos as well, and the process would continue.
To come back to humans, while it's true that we are killing life on earth, we don't have to step far in terms of the cosmos to find harmony in it. In this view, the deeper point is that harmony is a property of perception, not the universe. Or in other words, the universe is universally harmonious.
Re: A biologist who believes that trees speak a language we can learn to listen to
#80Humans can't perceive a lot of things, and on top of that, we have egos that makes us feel superior even though in reality, we are the only ones on the planet who can't live in harmony with other species. If you ever had a cat and really observed it and communicated with it, you know it has feelings and emotions. Birds have it also, so does pigs, horses... But we just ignore all that when it's convenient for us to ea…
I assume you have - or have had - a cat? Which you watered and fed, provided with shelter and a modicum of social interaction?
...and then the cat goes out and catches a mouse. Not because it is hungry, only because it saw the mouse and just had to catch it. After discarding the mouse - it wasn't hungry, you see, just having stuffed itself with KittyPro (tm) (with Bull Elk, Nearly Extinct Herbivore and Baby Seal) - and goes on to catch a few birds which were happily hopping around, unaware of the presence of a killer in their midst.
Can you blame the cat? No, not really. Cats are hunters, being hunters they are playful - play being a way to keep their hunting skills sharpened - and they just have to strike when the opportunity arises.
Can you blame the human? No, not really. If the human would not water and feed the cat and provide it with a modicum of social interaction the cat would walk, simple as that.
Does this mean the cat 'lives in harmony with other species'? Of course is doesn't, that cat acts like a trophy hunter in a safari park.
Ever seen a chicken coop raided by a weasel? We lost 16 chickens in one night once, all of them killed by some nasty critter which had managed to wriggle its way into the chicken's safe space. All of them bitten in the neck and left to bleed out.
Can you blame the weasel who clearly killed far more than it could ever hope to eat, let alone the fact that it even could not get any of the chickens through the keyhole it used to enter the coop in the first place? Can you blame the human who thought to protect the chickens against just such mayhem but failed?
Does that mean the weasel 'lives in harmony with other species'? Of course is doesn't, that weasel acted like one of Stalin's henchmen, killing everything in sight.
Humans are intelligent primates and as such are capable of bigger feats. Bigger in both ways, from the human equivalent of what those cats and weasels are doing to, say, a group of humans cooperating to get a beached whale back into the sea.