Interesting to think that all of culture is built from pretty much nothing interesting. Forests and sand and endless water. Thousands of years of culture from nothing. It gives me pause to consider just how arbitrary everything we value fundamentally is. And if we left the world as is and disappeared as a species, none of the things produced would ever have purpose or meaning.
10 months ago
That's the neat thing though. Us flesh bags of chemicals assign that value. Carbon itself doesn't do it, nor nitrogen, nor oxygen, but arrange enough of those together in just a particular way, poof, those things start valuing things over other things.
To me it's one of those things that tells me that it's important to preserve this at least as long as we can, because it's only us bags of chemicals that created it and that it can exist in.
It also begs the question, what other things do we not know that the universe has emerged like this? Not just out there, but even as close to home as here on Earth. Do ants "value"? · 10 months ago