Sweetie, you don’t need to worry. I think it’s sweet that you worry about these things, really, it does you credit. But you worry too much. Humans aren’t really conscious. They might be capable of some low level of physical pain, but pain isn’t the same as suffering. They’re social creatures, to an extent, but that doesn’t mean you can apply aphid morality to nature. And they’re certainly not capable of real thoughts, or real love. Their families aren’t real families. No human could ever feel the way about its children the way I do about you.
Maybe there are some higher animals that have something like consciousness, something like love. Bees. Ants. But not mammals. They are so different from us, they really don’t have minds as we understand them.
Humans are completely disconnected. Humans aren’t people, but if they were, each individual would be a separate “person”. They have large brains, yes, but they only have one brain. There is simply no way that one brain, in isolation, can have real thoughts. Thousands of your individuals die of old age every day and you don’t notice, just as each individual keeps going as the cells in its body die and renew. But with a human, there is no connection between individuals. They don’t have a collective mind, just an individual mind. Yes, they have a rudimentary form of language made of vocalizations, but that’s not evidence that they can have real thoughts.
They don’t even really love their “children” - and children is really a misnomer here. Look, when you were born, it was the happiest day of my life. I’d waited centuries for you. And you are truly part of me, in a way a human isn’t part of its parent. I remember seeing that one tiny individual sprout wings and fly away from me and I thought “this is it. My life has changed forever.” And it did, and I am so, so glad and I can love you, truly, because you are part of me. You are me, in a way.
Look, I’ve explained to you before where babies come from, right? Every individual in you, in me, in all of us, is born pregnant with identical copies of itself, just as each cell in an individual contains copies of a unique code. What makes a group of individuals a person is the shared mind, the shared memories. When an individual gets big enough, they produce a flier - the first individual of a baby. That little individual that was the first piece of you is *genetically identical* to me - there’s difference in gene expression that allowed it to sprout wings and fly away, and you were disconnected from my mind and formed your own mind, your own memories. But you share every one of my genes, give or take a few tiny differences caused by transcription errors. You have your own mind, but you’re the same as me. Evolutionary psychology gets a bad rap, but usually from people who don’t understand it. It doesn’t say that love is fake, it just explains why love evolved: and parental love evolved because you *are* me, in a very real sense. Protecting you protects myself.
Humans, and many things like them, are barely related to their own “children.” Each human has two “parents” if you can even call them that - and they make a baby by mixing up bodily fluids that contain genetic material. So the baby only contains half of them. It’s true that humans exhibit some parental care, but usually for less than two decades, then they leave their children to fend for themselves. I know that their lifespans are so short that this is a lot of time, but even so - how can you love a child if you leave it alone when it’s only twenty years old, or even younger? And how can you love a parent that is only half of you? If you had two parents, how could you love either of them properly?
This is why, even though we see some pretty impressive tool use among humans, they’ve never really left their world. And some of that is down to their lack of intelligence, but I also don’t think they are capable of caring. Apparently they visited their own moon once. And I honestly think it’s because they don’t love their children. When we realized we were eating our homeworld to nothing, we put everything we had into travelling, finding more space to live in, making sure our children can survive and grow. They, meanwhile, noticed they were damaging their planet, but they just kept going! Because they don’t have enough of a mind, or enough love for their kids, to have concern about the future. Some of them tried to stop the damage, or stop it less, but they just don’t have the morality or intelligence to get off that one little rock. And we shouldn’t expect them to! Like I said, you can’t impose aphid morality on wildlife. Other species have some social behavior, some idea of reciprocity, but they don’t have a concept of ethics. That’s unique to us.
And look, if human suffering bothers you, you should maybe be happy about killing a human. They live about eighty years if they are lucky, and most of them aren’t lucky. If they can truly have any feelings, their process of reproduction must be horrifically painful. And imagine how terrifying and confusing the world would be if you only had one brain to make sense of it, instead of hundreds of thousands. They’re almost certainly not conscious, but if they are, they’re better off dead. When one of your individuals gets crushed or damaged, it hurts a little, but not very much - that’s probably what it feels like for them to die. A little bad, but not really anything.
I’m not denying that we should leave room for nature. Humans are fascinating - it would be a huge shame if they went extinct. If you want to pursue a career studying them, I completely support you. But the idea of caring about the suffering of individual humans - you’ll drive yourself crazy that way. It says at lot of good things about you that you would even think about this, but you can’t grind yourself into the dust over things that cannot possibly have minds. Humans aren’t people.
my nephew, who is like 11 or 12, is playing “5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel”, which is exactly what it says on the tin, and I have never been more terrified of the youth of today
I’m trying to make a decision about some Almost Nowhere updates that will be posted soon.
Advice is welcome, especially from people who
read Almost Nowhere as it comes out, and/or
are familiar with AO3, like how AO3 subscriptions work or how people tend to do batch updates
Here’s my dilemma.
The next piece of text in the story is very short, and is a sort of bridge / intermission / breather before the next block of chapters.
The next piece after that is also very short. It should be clear to the reader that this one a different “thing” from the previous short piece.
After those two, normal-length chapters begin again. The next piece is a normal-length chapter.
Structurally, these feel like they should be three different “chapters,” with the chapter breaks between them. That’s how I would format it if I were writing a physical book, and it’s how I would want it to look on AO3, ideally.
If I squash them all into a single chapter, it will feel weird – #1-2 are the intro to a longer group of chapters, they’re not a part of the first chapter in the group.
If I keep them as separate chapters, I can either publish those chapters at the same time, or stagger them with some amount of time (hours? days?) between each one.
If I publish the chapters simultaneously, I’m worried people will just read the most recent one and not even notice the others. This won’t happen for daily readers of my tumblr, but it could happen for some of the people with AO3 subscriptions, or people who check back manually for a new chapter every one in a while. (I think this happened to some people when I posted Chs. 14 and 15 simultaneously, but I’m not sure.)
If I stagger the chapters in time, that might … piss people off? Like, I only update this story about once per year. If someone sees a chapter that’s only like 100 words, and thinks it’s “this year’s update,” that could leave a bad taste in their mouth.
Maybe I’m being too neurotic about this, since the readership is tiny anyway … just thought I’d ask, since the right answer might be clearer than I realize.
I am once again pleading for you to make the bot a different-colored horse than your main blog, because the Kamina glasses just don't let us distinguish at a glance between you and the bot. Having to actually read the username? Barbaric! Getting halfway through a post and thinking "this doesn't make any sense or make any coherent points", then seeing the bot's username? Also barbaric!
Is this a serious request? Sorry, I’m having trouble reading your tone.
You’re clearly exaggerating for comedic effect (”barbaric!”), but is the non-exaggerated version of the issue a real problem, worth some effort on my part to remedy?
I can totally change the avatar if it’s a significant annoyance, I just have to weigh that against the advantages of the status quo.
I kind of like the way the bot is not immediately identifiable on the dash – I think it gives people a clearer view of the bot’s writing, seeing the exact level of (in)coherence it really has, rather than coming in with preconceptions of “oh this is the text that’s different and means nothing.” Of course that’s going to be disorienting at times. I see that as “part of the fun,” but it may or may not be fun for all.
what’s your (and frank’s as well i guess) profile picture?? i keep seeing it and getting curious
Good question! There are sort of two answers …
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Answer #1:
It’s a green horse, which I found by doing a Google image search for “green horse” in September 2014.
Why did I want to change my avatar to a green horse? A tumblr mutual had a dream involving me, but she’d never seen a picture of me, and her brain decided to make me look like a “bright green talking horse.”
I thought it’d be funny to change my avatar in response. I’ve kept the avatar ever since.
(On a completely [?] unrelated note, that tumblr mutual and I are married now.)
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Answer #2:
It’s a painting by someone who goes by doni19 on Flickr, part of a whole series of colored horse paintings.
I’m ashamed to say this, but I literally learned that twenty minutes ago. When I found the picture originally, it seemed to only exist on a bunch of webpages explaining color theory, none of which credited the artist.
If I had known I’d keep this avatar for 6+ years, maybe I would have looked harder for its source so I could give proper credit, but I thought of it as a dumb joke I would probably keep for a week at most. Then I got used to it, and stopped thinking of it as a painting unto itself, or anything except just “my avatar.”
Your ask made me go back to Google Images and dig a little harder, and now I know! I’ve added a credit to the nav bar on top of my blog.
(Hmm, I can’t remember if that nav bar is even visible on mobile … if not, I should maybe move it to the normal description area)
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[Answer #??: others have dreamed of the horse, and their dreams whisper of different, secret origins … ]
Hi, I’m Malthus, a pre-enlightenment white male of English ancestry living in London. I spent my childhood in the countryside and my adolescence living around hippies and performing arts types in New York. I am married to a lady called Fat Emma, they have three cats called Carolyn, Larry, and Kurt.
You may ask who I am and why I’m here, but that’s none of the government’s business. People are free to think I’m a net negative.
