Pythagorean said:
I also would be careful comparing human existence to a video game - video games are designed to be balanced (i.e., fair) and real life does not have a design or a scoring system or a "win" condition. We don't have cheat codes and we aren't dominant in every way. Bacteria don't care about growing cattle or building sports cars, but we struggle very hard to manage their presence in our home, our foods, and our own bodies. We can't even say we dominate the animal kingdom, given how difficult it is for us to tolerate an environment of water (which the majority of Earth's liveable volume is made of) and under what conditions would survive a large predator or venomous reptile/insect attack.
I disagree with some of this. I think it is entirely apt to say that we dominate the animal kingdom (and every other kingdom). We have, in the span of less than a century, wiped out more than one disease, have utterly dominated many others through antibiotics and other medications, driven multiple plant and animal species to extinction without even trying, and have established permanent or semi-permanent homes in nearly every single large-scale habitat known to exist on this planet (and even one
above it). We could extend ourselves even further if we wanted to.
We even have the capability, if we so choose, of wiping out nearly all life through the use of nuclear weapons, an act that in the past only astronomical bodies had (thankfully, they chose not to fully utilize this capability, otherwise we wouldn't be here now
).
As Dave said in post #14, we have to actively work to prevent extinction events from occurring at both the level of individual species and the level of large parts of the biosphere. I would say that no species in the history of the Earth has enacted such large-scale changes to Earth's surface and its biosphere in such a short span of time as the human species.
Pythagorean said:
There's also the question of suffering. Humans are practiced at causing it to themselves and others - i don't know how that compares to other animals, but it seems like it's a factor that should play a role in the assessing how a species is getting along.
That depends on what you mean by "suffering". Humans are far from the only species to engage in conflict. Conflict between different species and even between different groups of the same species happens in many places throughout the animal kingdom. So if conflict is a measure of suffering, then it is widespread. If, instead, suffering means something more along the lines of prolonged living in sub-optimal conditions or under some sort of subjugation, then we still aren't unique. Just ask those still-living spiders, paralyzed and with a wasp larva slowly devouring them alive. And if suffering means something closer to a state of mind or an emotion that only humans and higher-level animals can feel, then we've started to cut the rest of life out through the use of a narrow definition and the question begins to answer itself.
Pythagorean said:
Humans are certainly intelligent and colorful and have probably the most complex emergent social structures and unique environment adaptation (altering their environment through construction for their own survival and even their own pleasure - under the guidance of those previously mentioned social structures), but that doesn't make them particularly more efficient or dominant as a species. Just interesting, especially to themselves.
On the contrary, I think that's exactly what it means. But that's just me, some random guy on the internet.
