• Apathy Tree
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    9 months ago

    What’s crazy to me (I didn’t watch your thing, I’m sorry; maybe they discuss it maybe they don’t) is that when you provide the basic needs of many species, they are also able to move into cooperative social structures. Even when we can’t understand how that would evolve for them.

    Think about all the videos we’ve seen where an animal takes on care of another species’ young. Or forms a friendship bond that transcends predator/prey relationships. That really shouldn’t happen in the wild, and it probably doesn’t, but the artificial post-scarcity but non-enriching environment we give them makes it possible.

    Turns out those basic needs are really vital, but once met, open a lots of species up to communalism and cooperation.

    • @[email protected]
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      29 months ago

      i maintain that cooperation is just objectively the best strategy on large scales, to the point that life on earth is fundamentally cooperative.

      Like, imagine if species couldn’t eat each other, if mushrooms didn’t exist to break things down into digestible nutrients, we would have a fraction of the biomass and diversity we do now and life would be extremely vulnerable.

      Cooperation inherently leads to more efficient resource utilization as species can specialize and resources are continuously recycled.