Why we live

Right now, I'm thinking that there are two reasons why people go on living: hope, it might be uncomfortable to quit.

creatures, harm,

Whenever one creature harms another, this is less than ideal.

Two things that I can now think of as causes for harm between creatures: lack of understanding, and conflict of interest. These need consideration. I think them to not be sufficiently encompassing. What about intentional versus unintentional causation of harm?

Anyway, the definition of harm needs to be considered as well. Is to withhold vital information from someone who needs it to harm them? Perhaps. If you push them out of the way of oncoming traffic with such force that you injure them, is this harm. Perhaps not. So, how to define it?

ecosystem, purpose of reproduction

In a perfectly balanced ecosystem, does any organism die of old age?

existence, struggle, self

It seems to me that every living thing in this existence has a will to go on. That every living thing is struggling to survive in this existence. Does this need to be the case?

every individual should be recognized as valuable, though they may be unable to survive in their present environment

an idealization of the system is the idealization of its components

Conflicting interests and survival

I haven't taken the time to read about the best way to keep a persistent caterpillar thing from eating my rose bushes, so I've been policing them a couple of times a day and thumping the little guys to some other location. As I do this, I wonder, "am I effectively killing them by changing their environment?"

I have had this quandary with house flies as well. Because of our conflicting interests, our struggle ends with the death of an animated entity. What does this little body, processor, and perhaps other things have in common with me? What is consciousness and am I destroying one by killing the fly? If the fly doesn't have any consciousness, then do animals? How about Coco, the gorilla who can communicate to some degree with sign language? Does she have consciousness? How about a new-born human?

So, on abortion, my stance is simple, "yes, you're killing something. We're not really sure what, but there's definitely some kind of potential which is lost. Now, this may really be the best thing, all things considered". This seems, by my understanding, to be similar to some native American beliefs. We have to kill the animal and eat it to survive. While it would be nice to live without this bloodshed, it is simply a way of life. And there seems to be a mutual respect and peace between man and beast (if such a term may appropriately be applied to the latter).

So what about the fly - and the newborn infant? How about those is Sri Lanka who fled for their lives, only to return home to land which was now privatized? This would be an instance of displacement for personal interest and obvious conflict. And, it seems to me, that this situation is very similar to my removing the caterpillars who are eating my rose bushes: my interest is bringing about potentially negative consequences on other living entities (I know, "living" needs definition).

I saw a video on youTube which showed, I guess, millions of mice on these people's farm. I mean, they're all going to die, right? There's just not enough food to go around. So maybe some consciousnesses are just born/placed/something in the wrong spot for survival or eudemonia and toasting them is perfectly justifiable. Something about this rubs my ethic a little weird, but I don't yet have a concrete explanation for it.

Anyway, more later, I guess.

Reproduction, purpose, systems

Perhaps the constituents of nature do not reproduce in order to ensure the survival of their genes, but rather to feed those who are in a different place on the food chain with their offspring.

The tree will live, whether it produces fruit or not. However, the animals which depend on the tree's fruit (offspring) may not.

It is peculiar, however, that, having produced their offspring, animals vary in their protection of the offspring. Some animals eat their young, some give their lives to protect them.

Human connectedness, systems, coersion

As I think about solutions to global problems, the way people think continues to be at the forefront of my thinking. It seems to me that we don't need better systems to govern people, we need people to think better and govern themselves.

We have these systems in place which are supposed to protected the everyday common person with an objective means of coercing those who violate the agreed-upon rules. One of the problems with this approach is that, once a person has violated a rule, we don't know what to do with them. There are those in the mass who scream for punishment according to the crime, and this appeals to the vengeance in each of us, perhaps.

But when we "punish" them, what do we, as humanity, lose?

Samba, an linux tool to connect to windows file sharing clients is one I find invaluable. I was reminded of another tool which I find valuable which has been hurt by our societal law system. ReiserFS is a filesystem, that is, it is a specification and implementation of a set of rules for just how to write the bits of data to the hard drive. There are a bunch of different filesystem types, each using different pattern of writing data and logging where they put it, indexing it, etc - each for different purposes. So this guy Reiser (along with a team of folks, but the fs bears his name, so who knows) came up with such a filesystem which does some really neat things. He's (I guess) in jail now with a conviction of killing his wife in a (I think) first-degree manner.

Now, I'm not prepared to say whether he killed his wife or not, but I do believe that society suffers because he is now behind bars. Granted, if he could be expected to go on serially killing people, then it may be a different story, but perhaps (assuming he did kill her) it was a singular act of rage (or whatever), then there has to be some better way of dealing with the situation.

Long example of a point I find simple to say, hard to do: to realize a humanity that we all affect each other. I think, perhaps, that many stand behind the auspices that it is a system which was put into place which does good and bad things, so they're not responsible.

But it was people who put the system in place, and I will argue that they did this in order to not be personally responsible for their personnally-held beliefs.