Humans are extremely special! They have a unique trait no other extant and few antecedant species have/had…
replyNo other carbon terrestrial species can run for such long distances - a healthy young human can jog for 50 km or more on water and sugar: this is a (not too) breathtaking efficiency!
Can you imagine being a gazelle who has been sprinting away from a human for six hours but they just keep coming? Terrifying.
The ability to do so truly defines the species, to the extent they’re taxonomied as ‘homo marathoniensis‘ (fun fact: during the atomic age most human philosophers used ‘homo sapiens sapiens’ - more like ‘homo vanus vanus’ amirite).
And yet the cheapest car can easily outrun any human who ever lived. Everything is unique if you look into it closely enough. I would say that’s not the same as special, though I admit this is just semantics.
replyJust so. I don’t mean optimal locally or globally - the species is practically extinct! - only unique.
reply(A platypus is special too, while also rather the worst at everything it does.)
>Building something that supersedes us may have always been our purpose.
replyThis is just religion, but without even any serious philosophical/theological grounding.
You could say that about any religion given only a one sentence high level summary. “A guy in the sky made us in seven days.” has no serious, philosophical grounding.
replyYour comment's first half was a kind of freshman nihilism backed up by vague gesturing at science (despite the fact that science can't really answer normative claims or value judgements). You then follow it up with a totally unsupported teleological claim which completely contradicts the paragraph that came before.
replyIt was a Hacker News comment, not a doctoral thesis. People like you are why this site so desperately needs a block feature.
replyI just don't like this kind of poorly thought out misanthropy.
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