Why do people kill each other?

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h_k_s
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Re: Why do people kill each other?

Post by h_k_s »

Pages wrote: April 19th, 2019, 4:38 pm
h_k_s wrote: April 19th, 2019, 2:24 pm

This does not sound like a valid syllogism to me.
Why?
A is destroying B
A is C
Therefore, C is destroying B

The part is what makes up the whole. It doesn't make sense to say "the whole is greater than the part" like they are two separate objects. We are like atoms in a molecule-like universe or environment as the case may be. Without the parts, the whole wouldn't exist.

So, the environment is destroying itself and humans are just doing their bid, in a small significant scale.
Although continuous change has been observed by all great philosophers throughout all time, self destructiveness of the whole has never been acknowledged. You would have to somehow prove that not just posit it.
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Re: Why do people kill each other?

Post by Pages »

Prove what? That we are part of the environment or destroying ourselves?
The people who were trying to make this world worse are not taking the day off. Why should I?
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ash2016
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Re: Why do people kill each other?

Post by ash2016 »

I propose that perhaps it ultimately falls into the idea of nature. Humans are merely animals like any other, but we do have higher intelligence and reasoning skills than most animals. That being said, I think that it is the laws of nature that instill in individuals the will to kill. Most kill as a response to a stimulus (i.e. money, sex, revenge) but I think that true murder is nothing more than the will to power. All animals desire to become strong or to survive, and thus they kill in modern times for many reasons, but originally murder was something humans did to become stronger and to survive. Now, we still kill but it derives from our genetics and what was once natural for us.
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Sy Borg
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Re: Why do people kill each other?

Post by Sy Borg »

It's a dirty job but someone's got to do it!

Seriously, we are evolved predators. One thing predators do is suspend the empathy they usually have for their own group when they are hunting. A predator cannot afford a moment of hesitation. So this capacity to objectivise "the other" is innate. We all have this capacity within us to some extent as per the above post.

However, hominids cannot peacefully live together in endlessly large colonies. For instance, chimps can usually aggregate peacefully in groups up to about a hundred individuals. After that comes a dynamic we are all familiar with - that is, when a group gets too large then some members start treating certain other members as if they were outsiders. (Hello Divided States of America!).

The trouble is, giant groups of humans survive better than smaller ones. Smaller colonies (nations) tend to be disempowered and absorbed and controlled by larger ones. Thus, we humans ironically survive best in overcrowded and overheated environments - that bring us suffering.

Now the only jungle we are forced to survive is comprised of humans. The rest of nature is no longer a threat, but our own crowded societies are increasingly dangerous, complex and challenging "jungles", with their own versions of predators and parasites.

Humans' particular penchant for violence and cruelty probably stems to some extent from our role in nature. Humans are change agents on the Earth. That's what we're doing. The last organism to do this were the blue-green algae blooms that caused The Great Oxygenation event - a major extinction event that ultimately made complex life possible.

As with other species, humans are a functional part of the web of life. Our actions are reminiscent of the imaginal discs in metamorphosing insects. During pupation, a bug's imaginal discs start breaking down every single organ in its body. Effectively, the imaginal discs kill all extisting body systems. If you cut open a pupa too early you would not find a living being but goop - basically an organised group of microbial colonies. In time, each imaginal disc uses that goop to become a specific organ in the adult insect.

Humanity too is breaking down the life around it and turning that life into goop. That goop powers us as we create machines capable of sending the stuff of Earth to other worlds.

I see humanity as a phase of evolution, but a special one as change agents. We are both strongly destructive and constructive (unlike, say, a parasite or cancer). The business of being human is indeed dirty, being a ruthless change agent that wreaks havoc on our fellow denizens of Earth.

Yet, at the same time, we struggle towards some kind of grace, which is not easy in a world full of snobs and scoundrels, a terrible place where each of us can only survive by killing and/or maiming others.

Perhaps the intelligent machines that survive us after we're gone, lacking need to kill, will become genuine moral agents rather than indulging in the idealistic self-congratulatory hypocrisy humans so often mistake for morality.


tl:dr Humans are intrinsically not very nice.
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Re: Why do people kill each other?

Post by Pages »

Well said Greta,

It's very sad that freedom is an illusion and whatever we do is just part of a process.
Consequently, it means that it is nobody's fault that anything happens.
It could be argued that everybody is just doing their bit as part of the evolutionary process and whatever the law governing a group of people do as penalty is also not truly "right" but just effort to push their own selfish interest, also as part of the randomness in the universal circle.
Right and wrong could be meaningless. It's just my perception of life against yours.
Who's to say murderers aren't another nature's strategy to reduce population?

If may digress, why are people wasting their effort in trying to fight nature by protecting "endangered species?"

Anyways, I think nature is just a big box of mystery that we have very little time to figure out.
The people who were trying to make this world worse are not taking the day off. Why should I?
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Sculptor1
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Re: Why do people kill each other?

Post by Sculptor1 »

Pages wrote: March 19th, 2019, 2:56 pm This isn't about religion.
Tell that to John Calvin who lured Servetus into his home for a parley onto to have him killed.
Tell that to ISIS.
Tell that to the Crusaders.
Tell that to the Witch Finders.
Tell that the The Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad bin Abd Allah.
Tell that to just about every military commander, genocidal maniac and "god told me to do it" nutcases.
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Sy Borg
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Re: Why do people kill each other?

Post by Sy Borg »

Pages wrote: June 2nd, 2019, 4:30 pm Well said Greta,

It's very sad that freedom is an illusion and whatever we do is just part of a process.
Consequently, it means that it is nobody's fault that anything happens.
It could be argued that everybody is just doing their bit as part of the evolutionary process and whatever the law governing a group of people do as penalty is also not truly "right" but just effort to push their own selfish interest, also as part of the randomness in the universal circle.
Right and wrong could be meaningless. It's just my perception of life against yours.
Who's to say murderers aren't another nature's strategy to reduce population?

If may digress, why are people wasting their effort in trying to fight nature by protecting "endangered species?"

Anyways, I think nature is just a big box of mystery that we have very little time to figure out.
A brutal, but rational, summary of the situation.

I understand trying to save endangered species. The same reason we try to preserve art. Each destruction of a beautiful complex form makes the world a little poorer. We are caught between our love for the energetic past (especially the taste of it, poor buggers) and a compulsion towards an informational future.

So we mourn as we destroy. Before specialisation, those who killed also mourned the loss, eg. tribal hunter thanking his prey for its life. In today's Tayloresque societies we have specialist destroyers, who truly don't care a jot about that which they kill. We also have specialist mourners, whose killing has been outsourced. The practice of saying grace before meals was another version of this dynamic, where devout grace sayers would no longer thanked the individual victim animal but an abstract invention (God) instead that in hard reality represents the biosphere as a whole.

Still, I do hold some moral objectivism based on order and entropy. If we look at reality baldly, there is a clear and constant process - the conversion of moderately chaotic and entropic homogeneous fields/zones/entities into highly ordered concentrations of lower entropy (galaxies/stars/planets/atoms/cities/corporations) surrounded by relative space - a highly entropic and relatively bare environment.

Sorry, this is a bit garbled as I'm about to go out. If I remember, I'll edit and rewrite later.
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