If you accept the idea that the planet's biosphere is a super-organism, then a natural description of large-scale and ongoing reduction in ecological diversity could be "disease".
Or, you could notice that we're the only ones that care. "Reduction", "destruction" are terms meaningful to us and us only, because we're also capable of appreciating the ecosystem as its own thing. The rest of life on this planet falls on the spectrum between "must eat, must not get eaten" and "runaway chemical reaction".
If the planet's biosphere is a super-organism, then we are its brain cells.
That's quite a reductive view of the rest of the animal kingdom. There are plenty of animals that appear to have some degree of sentience and self-awareness, and every living thing cares about its own survival. We may have the best understanding of the situation on a global scale, but it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to imagine that, for example, some marine mammals have a good understanding of the declining conditions in the world's oceans, especially given how widely they migrate.
I'm open to admit there might be some animal species one could reasonably argue we should start seeing as people. Dolphins and some cephalopods come to mind, perhaps even some corvidae (and I'm getting increasingly uneasy about cows and pigs).
But these are still coupled questions. On the one edge of the spectrum you have archaea, bacteria and viruses - glorified chemical reactions. On the other edge you have us. I don't know of a moral framework that would both attribute great importance to lives of most of the thing on the life spectrum, and not lead to horrible conclusions like sacrificing a human child to save a field of grass. The way we normally reason about, we try to figure out which entities are capable of enough self-awareness and experience processing that we can talk about them feeling pain, suffering, or - for this discussion - finding meaning.
The point I'm trying to make: if we believe that between bacteria and us, there's a point (or a continuity) on the spectrum, separating mere chemical automatons from entities capable of thinking about meaning, then if the latter are gone, there's no point, no meaning, to anything in the universe.
As an analogy: if you imagine a server running a persistent Minecraft world, then if all the players leave, and the server gets forever cut off from the Internet, it doesn't matter whether the server keeps running the simulation or not. Nobody will ever see that game world again.
> I don't know of a moral framework that would both attribute great importance to lives of most of the thing on the life spectrum, and not lead to horrible conclusions like sacrificing a human child to save a field of grass.
Such thought experiments are fun to throw around (there must be a line somewhere, right? is all the grass in the world worth one human life? how about all the trees? all the rice?), but they sidestep the point which is that (without wishing to be harsh) it's arrogant of us to assume that being higher on one particular spectrum gives us some greater right to decide. Certainly we have the power to decide the fate of every living thing on the planet but that's a different matter.
> The point I'm trying to make: if we believe that between bacteria and us, there's a point (or a continuity) on the spectrum, separating mere chemical automatons from entities capable of thinking about meaning, then if the latter are gone, there's no point, no meaning, to anything in the universe.
This presupposes that progress towards sentience (or whatever is the right word for that spectrum) is the only meaning of life. As a counterpoint, do not the activities of those organisms that produce oxygen have much more meaning to life on this planet than whatever we come up with? Most of those organisms don't do much higher reasoning but we wouldn't be here without them. There are lots of other examples like that, as we exist in a web with all life on the planet, not as visitors separate from it.
> As an analogy: if you imagine a server running a persistent Minecraft world, then if all the players leave, and the server gets forever cut off from the Internet, it doesn't matter whether the server keeps running the simulation or not. Nobody will ever see that game world again.
This is a point of difference between us, as I believe that all life has intrinsic beauty and value regardless of who is doing the observing. That's not to say that I don't want us to be here doing the observing, but I do find it almost impossible to reconcile the beautiful things humans are capable of with the terrible price we're collectively extracting on everything else.
Ultimately we're just one more animal on this fascinating rock, albeit that we make better sandwiches than the other animals.
That’s a better analogy - there have been countless extinctions and mass extinctions and the ecology shifts as the climate changes anyway. Nature is indifferent.
It would be ‘good’ if we weren’t causing this one, but good and bad are concepts of consciousness
"Who cares?" reminds me of the diagnostician's distinction between signs and symptoms. Vital signs of the health of the biosphere can be measured, just like your blood pressure can be measured regardless of whether you I should care about how you feel.
"Vital signs" are still only meaningful in terms of humans talking about how the body of a human (or an animal, or a living or life-like system) should function. Blood pressure just is - whether its measured value is "good" or "bad", that's up to our preferences for what it should be.
If you remove sapience from this situation, then blood pressure just is, period. One particular aspect of what is just one big chemical reaction, or [insert whatever is at the bottom of how reality works].
It is said that since god died, the meaning of life is what we make it to be. But if there's no one around capable of processing the concept of meaning, then life has no meaning at all.
"Would a tree falling in the forest ..." never seemed much of a puzzle to me.
I don't agree with the proposition that life on Earth had no value until it gave rise to the evolution of Homo sapiens, or that it would have no value after our extinction.
I think the point GP is making is that this categorization is counterproductive to solving the underlying issues, regardless of what consensus is reached on the taxonomy of our place in the wider ecosystem.
To make an analogy: It's a lot like calling a student dumb for being unable to answer questions on a test they didn't have a chance to study for. If the goal is to improve grades, demoralizing the student is counterproductive.
