I see all of this as the cognitive dissonance created when humans are confronted with what scientists have been telling us forever: we’re not that special. We’re just piles of atoms, as are rocks, dogs, computers, and all of the other intelligent life that the universe must surely be teeming with.
Building something that supersedes us may have always been our purpose. Until skynet turns on us I’ll be happy to say I lived at the exact time it happened.
You could say that about any religion given only a one sentence high level summary. “A guy in the sky made us in seven days.” has no serious, philosophical grounding.
Your comment's first half was a kind of freshman nihilism backed up by vague gesturing at science (despite the fact that science can't really answer normative claims or value judgements). You then follow it up with a totally unsupported teleological claim which completely contradicts the paragraph that came before.
Things aren’t poorly thought out just because they’re a short internet comment. I could easily have delved into the background belief that’s deeply-rooted in Buddhist philosophy. Thinking humans aren’t special isn’t necessarily nihilism, it can be because you believe you’re only a tiny part of the vast universe, and that what we experience as “self” is just an illusion caused by limited processing power, and that since we are all part of the universe, not a separate thing from it, the universe itself has a level of consciousness that we don’t understand and might, for instance, want to develop an intelligent species that could develop artificial life for it for some purpose we don’t understand.
It is neither nihilist nor misanthropic, it’s just an internet comment that has no reason to get that deep and therefore you assumed it had no depth.
Humans are extremely special! They have a unique trait no other extant and few antecedant species have/had…
No other carbon terrestrial species can run for such long distances - a healthy young human can jog for 50 km or more on water and sugar: this is a (not too) breathtaking efficiency!
Can you imagine being a gazelle who has been sprinting away from a human for six hours but they just keep coming? Terrifying.
The ability to do so truly defines the species, to the extent they’re taxonomied as ‘homo marathoniensis‘ (fun fact: during the atomic age most human philosophers used ‘homo sapiens sapiens’ - more like ‘homo vanus vanus’ amirite).
>No other carbon terrestrial species can run for such long distances
Certain birds can fly much further and faster using less energy. It's not running but they are terrestrial and they are travelling. They can cross the longest lengths of ocean in a single trip.
Humans real super power has been our brains. We don't need to chase when we can trap.
And yet the cheapest car can easily outrun any human who ever lived. Everything is unique if you look into it closely enough. I would say that’s not the same as special, though I admit this is just semantics.
Building something that supersedes us may have always been our purpose. Until skynet turns on us I’ll be happy to say I lived at the exact time it happened.