It's impossible to escape right now if I read/listen to news at all
The war between Israel and Hamas, or, the recent escalation of their decades-long conflict. Like the invasion of Ukraine by Russia last year, they hadn't actually been at peace the day before. It's more about how hot the fighting is at the moment. How many casualties per day.
Thinking about it. Today especially about how we give these abstractions like nations, ethnicities, religions, political parties, corporations, multinational organizations -- we give these abstractions a life of their own inside our heads. Hamas as a living thing, with a mind and motivations of its own, and not just any living thing, but a living thing that everybody treats like a human, like it thinks and acts and feels like a human.
Groups of humans are not themselves human. Groups have no thoughts, no motivations, no goals. But we pretend they do.
In much the way most humans have perceived gods -- if gods existed they obviously wouldn't be human, but all of our stories about gods treat them like humans, but humans with some superpowers. Gods seem to have human DNA.
Anthropomorphizing -- we evolved to be able to suss out what our neighbors were scheming, so we apply that model to everything, we think everything thinks like we do, we even think computers think like we do, so much that people fear AI is conscious or will become conscious and then start acting like powerful humans would.
AI will never be human, it's ridiculous, but this is our cognitive bias, we think of everything else as humans.
Except when we abruptly decide our enemies aren't human -- that helps us in killing them, if we think they aren't human. No, we also have the ability to turn off anthropomorphizing when it benefits us. Treat those cows as though they don't have relationships and emotional lives and pleasure/pain. They're just cows. But Hamas is a living thing.
Israel wants to "extinguish" Hamas.
You can't do that. Neither can you extinguish Israel. Both are simply ideas inside people's heads, and these ideas will jump from person to person faster than you can extinguish the people.
Like when the US declared war on "terror". Terror is an emotion. Everybody can feel terror. Terrorism? WTF even is that word? A belief in terror?
We're all just people. Who have a lot of fuckin' ideas about things.
Thinking about it. Today especially about how we give these abstractions like nations, ethnicities, religions, political parties, corporations, multinational organizations -- we give these abstractions a life of their own inside our heads. Hamas as a living thing, with a mind and motivations of its own, and not just any living thing, but a living thing that everybody treats like a human, like it thinks and acts and feels like a human.
Groups of humans are not themselves human. Groups have no thoughts, no motivations, no goals. But we pretend they do.
In much the way most humans have perceived gods -- if gods existed they obviously wouldn't be human, but all of our stories about gods treat them like humans, but humans with some superpowers. Gods seem to have human DNA.
Anthropomorphizing -- we evolved to be able to suss out what our neighbors were scheming, so we apply that model to everything, we think everything thinks like we do, we even think computers think like we do, so much that people fear AI is conscious or will become conscious and then start acting like powerful humans would.
AI will never be human, it's ridiculous, but this is our cognitive bias, we think of everything else as humans.
Except when we abruptly decide our enemies aren't human -- that helps us in killing them, if we think they aren't human. No, we also have the ability to turn off anthropomorphizing when it benefits us. Treat those cows as though they don't have relationships and emotional lives and pleasure/pain. They're just cows. But Hamas is a living thing.
Israel wants to "extinguish" Hamas.
You can't do that. Neither can you extinguish Israel. Both are simply ideas inside people's heads, and these ideas will jump from person to person faster than you can extinguish the people.
Like when the US declared war on "terror". Terror is an emotion. Everybody can feel terror. Terrorism? WTF even is that word? A belief in terror?
We're all just people. Who have a lot of fuckin' ideas about things.