Are humans as a species slowly going insane and heading for collapse?

Wow! This is a great thread! (how did I miss this one until now????)

Excellent OP, and so many great contributions!

I definitely see some parallels from the experiments posted by the OP and modern society today.

a reply to: BomSquad

those experiments are nice and all but the reality of human population centers is vastly in opposition to the results they showed in said experiments. humans are nothing like mice and have a totally different social structure that relies on obeying the strong for survival of the "pack" if you will. in fact humans actually behave better the more populated things become, humans thrive when there's more of us because the pack generally conforms to whatever the powerful say or do.

the modern strong is the police, politicians, stars, judges and the news media or anyone with influence of some kind, in the end humans fall in line no matter what.

humans behave more like ants than mice, where while it might look chaotic on the surface there's an underlying order and structure that keeps everything running smoothly, especially in situations where survival is a priority for everyone.

like during that multiple day power outage in new york and surrounding states in 2003, people didn't go crazy and act like savages, things were pretty normal for the most part.

en.wikipedia.org...

mice aren't humans, they can't think and reason like humans can and that alone changes our behavior in ways such experiments can't show.

originally posted by: namehere
a reply to: BomSquad

those experiments are nice and all but the reality of human population centers is vastly in opposition to the results they showed in said experiments. humans are nothing like mice and have a totally different social structure that relies on obeying the strong for survival of the "pack" if you will. in fact humans actually behave better the more populated things become, humans thrive when there's more of us because the pack generally conforms to whatever the powerful say or do.

We're both mammals. There's no reason why our evolved instincts should vary too much from each other. It's possible that mice don't form into packs..... but it seems like they must sometimes. Surely rats do.

Human instinct to "work together for the common good" bears a lot of resemblance to the way wolves do it. Someone steps up and becomes alpha. Then the others follow. However, if they can get away with it and still retain their place in the pack, betas will totally defy the alpha's rules. (How else are they going to mate with the females in the pack, who the alpha probably claims to himself?)

Adding all this extra structure, of police and stuff, doesn't really change it. Just makes it a larger scale.

The only real difference I can see is that humans are able to ignore instinct and turn to logic and reason instead.

Mice only have the one option.


So are our instincts leading us to an apocalypse or other disaster? Probably.

Will we follow them? That is up to us.

We are self destructive by nature. I agree we will never accept a utopia. Hell just look at the world and all the diversity in beliefs. There are places on the planet where people eat other people. That is insanity to a civilized person, but not necessarily to those that are canibals. I think what we are seeing is a result of technology melding with our lives. Yet I stopped worrying about all that. I believe we will end up back where we started eventually a nuclear war will occur, eventually we will become self destructive once again, history proves this. A mistake will be made some belief in technology will give someone enough confidence to launch a nuclear strike, so yes eventually it will be technology’s fault we self destruct so perhaps indeed technology will indeed make us crazy enough to kill ourselves on a biblical proportion..

🤷‍♂️

I stopped worrying about it years ago..

The people who think their genes aren't the ones that will be selected for by the status quo, those are the ones most likely to desire a biblical apocalypse.

Even if you know you will personally get to live a comfortable life in this situation, but expect your descendants will gradually get genetically absorbed by failing to find mates, your programmed instinctive/genetic response is going to be to blow it all to kingdom come.


And, of course, the people having the most babies these days are exactly that group. The undereducated, and quite frequently less capable of getting educated (regardless of money). The ones who know they won't be able to contributed to the corporate machine.

It's a "scattershot" approach. Just throw out as many descendants as possible, and hope by sheer number of possibilities, a few will get through the selection process. (Easier still if a apocalyptic event, that doesn't have any directed selection, goes through and randomly decimates the population.)

It's sometimes hard to tell the difference between the decisions the human mind makes (at a more or less unconscious level), and the decisions a computer AI would make if it were given the same directives.

ooops, flag like failed due to sign in woes.

freestone

Guests used to be polite and get offered a drink.

Nowadays they haven't even sat down yet but already need ur wifi password pronto.