There are plenty of ‘childish’ exchanges. The ones that last for pages are the ones where the likes of me, you and others, unwilling to waste their time, step aside. It is then clear to see who the culprits are and they’ll eventually be ignored, smarten up, and/or weed out other such people so we can readily ignore them too.

It’s just a matter of keeping in faith in the sensible folk here and believing the power of one reasonably stable individual outweighs several other more dubious attitudes.

We’ve clashed and bickered a little if I recall? Even so, we manage to drop it and move on hoping to engage again in more amicable circumstances. We’re all susceptible to our egos every now and then, and some have a larger time of it from time to time.

Leave the door open a crack and maybe the most ridiculous character may actually rouse something interesting in you ... or maybe not. The internet is general a pit of filth and by most standards this place ain’t all that bad and it’s certainly preferable to banning too many people too quickly.

Assuming I understand what you mean by ‘civilization’ it would be sedentary living that instigated civilization - sedentary living would’ve also created more opportunity for specialisation alongside a need to ‘protect’ possessions within ‘owned’ territory. In hunter gatherer society warring undoubtedly took place too, but generally avoiding direct violent conflict would’ve be much easier as no serous time would’ve been invested in any particular ‘piece’ of land - little to no horticulture or construction of abodes in any permanent way.

Sedentary living is commonly viewed in anthropology as the beginning of ‘inequality’ due to ‘possession of land’. There is much more to consider of course so I guess you’re looking into alternative contributors to ‘civilization’ and ‘inequality’ by way of possessed ‘goods’/‘land’.

Here: https://libcom.org/files/Bertrand%20Russell%20-%20In%20Praise%20of%20Idleness.pdf

Never read it. Thanks for the ref., hope I can find a free pdf somewhere to skim through.

In simplistic terms it is kind of a counter position to stoicism. One says ‘take it on the chin’ and the other says ‘don’t even bother to fight, just have fun’.

I don’t see how any serious individual would claim to hold to either view without openly accepting that degrees if resistance are required. No matter what the ‘ethical’ premise is, there is always the embedded problem of how we act in ‘the now’ and what this does for us in ‘the long run’.

One thing I see in both stoicism and hedonism is a system of thought that pays more heed to the immediacy of emotional contents rather than the future repercussions - I’m not saying for an instant that they give ZERO regard to the future, just that they seem to lean more toward the immediate.

I think both are applicable in certain mental states. Sometimes a more ‘harsh’ outlook can rouse an individual to action and sometimes a more ‘rose-tinted’ view can rouse people to action. Adherence to either in a dogmatic sense is both dangerous and futile - for others if not for theirselves.

All perspectives have their own little seductions, so in this sense ‘doubt’ should be our home of contemplation where ‘lack of doubt’ is the path of exploration (full of woe, injury and the occasional reward if we’re astute enough to temper the seductions of ‘the new’ before they habituate us into stagnation).

It is true enough to say that motivation is based on possible positive and negative outcomes, in the immediate period or in future projections.

There are various neurotransmitters. When it comes to something like ‘motivation’ I’d say GABA is way more influential than anything else - inhibitory function. One thing we’ve become more and more aware of is that all neurotransmitters quite often have completely opposite effects in certain circumstances.

Something specific would be better. Any of us can easily find out about his general ideas so I don’t see exactly what purpose it would serve anyone to listen to repeats.

I’m not interested in stoicism so went for his views on the limitations of science and philosophy. I was expecting more depth than what I’ve heard in podcasts or youtube talks.

We have ours and our brother's and sister's loquaciousness whenever we like. Maybe better to be succinct, here, and give our guest the space? — tim wood

That’s probably a better option. Let him open with some ideas and then have us take a run at them rather than have him juggle with ideas that don’t really engage with his wants/needs. I think the stoicism side of things holds more sway here rather than discussing the problems of science and epistemic issues of communicating scientific concepts.

There is something to be said about Sellars and Husserl. I’ll have to look further into Sellars, but at a glance there is more in common between Sellars and Husserl than not. The problem is likely more about the breadth of terms like ‘natural’ and ‘empiricism’. I’ve haven’t found anything in Sellars’ yet that overrides what Husserl was about. As with Heidegger it looks like another case of taking one aspect of the phenomenological perspective and cutting it away as if it’s something different.

If you want to know about him there is plenty of content out there. I went for an approach that interested me and which I thought may open up some interesting responses.

Haha! Yeah, and then we’d have to introduce licenses flr having sex.

We cannot reverse this. It is already in motion (and would happen to a lesser degree without human contributions).

I can say many things that would help, but no one really listens - climate activists included. This century and the next will be tough unless leaps in scientific understanding allow us to discover a better energy source/storage.

Iron lungs, heart transplants and such demonstrate the case well enough for me.

I don’t confuse the two.

I don’t think there is a discussion to be had here so I’ll bow out unless the OP has something to say.

I’m not really interested in either much. I’m just open to seeing if some can ignite interest in me.

Stoicism only really seems to fit best for those at extreme ends. For the ‘average’ human I don’t think it’s of much use except from time to time. Like everything it’s a useful scheme in some circumstances and depending on individual characteristics.

Panpsychism is very much like a religious belief - ie. Not based on anything remotely substantial.

Cumulative ‘bits’ of ‘something’ making consciousness is an idea ... not much more. I’m sure there are plenty of nice avenues to explore, but to take it seriously as a means of explaining consciousness is a stretch.

Impractical and unrealistic. How do you begin to impose this mentality? By brute force? Where will you get the muscle for this?

There is no suggested solution from the OP just a hypothetical that has no practical consideration attached.

I feel it’s a problem of ‘Prometheus’. We have foresight and so we accumulate in order to stave off possible problems. We have foresight, yet we appear not to pay attention the ‘scope’ - meaning foresight is a great boon but we’ve not yet really figured out how to broaden our predictive capacities only extend them.

Saving for a ‘rainy day’ is obviously valuable and prevents starvation, war and poverty. The positives has outweighed the negatives. What appears to have happened is we’ve grown more and more accustomed to building ‘potential’ and then wasting it as we’ve become too habituated in society to place our potential ahead of ourselves so much that it is nearly always out of reach and rarely ‘cashed in’. For some the accumulation of ‘potential’ has become a religious exercise and a given a false sense of ‘worth’ in their lives.

I don’t honestly see a way to reverse the current attitudes held so I’m for pushing them to the point where they’ll have to alter - how or when I’ve no idea, but it would be ridiculous to assume the whole world is just going to move together in unison anytime soon.

Any suggestion of a possible solution then? I don’t see one here. I would imagine using ‘consumerism’ to solve the problem would make the most practical sense. It’s then just a question of untangling the mess and figuring out a way to redirect consumer trends towards better management of resources.

Like everything the answer is generally ‘It depends!’

Regarding the general ‘ethic’/‘moralistic’ stance mine is quite firm in terms of the OP. I’m willing to act as I see fit and suffer the consequences of being wrong - that said I’m likely too cowardly to actually act as I see fit, but I’m working on it like everyone else.

I certainly don’t buy into the whole ‘no making a choice’ as a ‘moral’ stance to emulate. That is cowardice in my mind and just because someone refuses to make choices I’m not going to look at them as a role model for life.

Imagine if the proposal was put to the vote and the majority voted for eugenics and then you had the choice to overturn the decision and suffer the consequences. Would you? A great number of people here may refuse much like they’d refuse to pull the lever in the Trolley Problem ... I call that cowardice, and understand that in such a situation I am most likely going to take the ‘coward’s’ choice.

For me when it comes to ‘better’ or ‘worse’ it is simply down to me acting as I speak as much as I can and constantly assessing how my choices pan out and why they pan out the way they do. I’m always at least partially in the dark, but I strive to be attentive rather than shirk any sense of responsibility and frame it as ‘moral’.

You can see strange attitudes in this thread. There is the ease of painting the situation black and white in order to shut down any reasonable discussion and frame such a line of attack as justified and progressive. I think it’s nonsense.

We may not know exactly what we mean by human ‘flourishing’ but we sure as hell understand what equal opportunity means even if it is a practical impossibility given we’re all different to some degree or another. I refuse to dismiss the concept of ‘betterment’ or ‘flourishing’ just because it is an inconvenient problem to face and we’re likely going to make hideous mistakes along the way and call them ‘better’. Remaining static is pointless.

When I say ‘flourishing’ and ‘betterment’ I don’t for a second consider this to be anything like an easy or painless journey. Frankly put, I don’t see a life absent of mistakes and suffering as a life I’d want to live - this is the immediate ‘good’ at the cost of future ‘good’. We have to be bold sometimes, take risks and ‘suffer’ the hands we’re dealt. Passivity is not something I see as beneficial to this end - but doing nothing can work as a considered choice rather than as a refusal to step up (maybe call it an ‘effort of passivity’ rather than blank refusal).

Show me a human whose brain has been removed that is conscious. I can refer to cases where humans are conscious whilst lacking numerous organs (except the brain). Evidence matters.

If you don’t find reality ‘reasonable’ ... well, so be it. Join the club. I imagine you’re quite capable of making choices based on what you deem ‘better’ or ‘worse’. If you deny this then you’ve got a lot of explaining to do because I don’t see how anyone can make choices without making judgements based on ‘better’ or ‘worse’ outcomes. We must necessarily balance out our predictions - shoddy as they may be. If you deem ‘hardship’ better then you deem hardship ‘better’. I’m not going to disagree with that completely.

I think there is a common misconception about the ‘extent’ of consciousness. Meaning, people have a tendency to think of consciousness neatly packaged away in some specific area of the brain - this is never the case for anything as there are ‘networks’ of items intertwined in many ways on many ‘layers’ (both literally and metaphorically).

The most useful person to turn to in this situation - as far as I’ve found - is Damasio. The whole body gives us consciousness even if we’re not attentive to it. In terms of behaviorism we ‘feel’ scared; meaning our conscious experience of an ‘emotion’ is ‘feeling’ (muscular tension, sweating, and increased heart rate). The interconnectedness of the brain organ (which is itself essentially a group of separated ‘areas’ we’ve partially created due to physical divisions and archaic maps that were based on a handful of research papers - hippocampus, Wernicke’s area, etc.,.) with various parts on the body and via numerous lines of communication (biochemical and/or via nerve cells) quickly makes the idea of nailing down a specific area of ‘consciousness’ as a little silly. If you think about having your arm chopped off you may still experience pain in the arm that isn’t there, butI can guarantee you won’t experience pain in the arm that isn’t growing out of your back because it never existed - then again ... I imagine some state of psychosis may induce such an experience, but you get the idea ;)

There is a very limited scope of terms in this area. Over the centuries we’ve used ‘spirit’, ‘self’, ‘ego’, ‘soul’, ‘mind’, ‘ken’, ‘consciousness’, ‘agent’, ‘memory’, ‘subject’, ‘monad’ and several dozen more in hundreds of languages. It’s a minefield for misconception, misunderstandings and misrepresentation.

Personally I just like to say I ‘experience’ and leave it at that. What is ‘experience’? Well, hopefully I don’t need to explain to you the gist of what ‘experience’ is as you’ll be ‘having it’ now. After that the only question I really have is why you’re asking anything more and to what end? Are you pushing a personal agenda or simply flying in the face of an existential type line of questioning?

The question behind the questioning is usually more telling. Questions without their dead parents are kind of in free fall more often than not - I’d say especially so in this case as the terms lack universal application in day-to-day speech. We can at least all agree, well enough, that ‘experience’ isn’t a term we’re going to deny where terms like ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’ create an instant shudder down many people’s spines.

Hope for everything and expect nothing :)

I’m hoping for a follow up, if not then I’ll just have to make do with the Stoicism stuff.

I’m told my writing style is often obscure/convoluted so if you’re short on time please just jump ahead to Second Half.

Science is limited just like any other human enterprise is limited. It's good for certain things, not so good for other things. The scientistic mistake consists in treating every problem as a nail to be handled with the only tool available: science's hammer. — MPigliucci

Agreed. Heuristics are heuristics. An artist views the world as ‘art’ and a psychologist as a world of ‘psyche’. Psychological fixedness is the tendency to use what works well in one application and it assume it can be applied elsewhere with equal success. A hammer is good for hitting nails and smashing skulls, it has extended applications beyond the intention of its maker when placed on a construction site or on a battlefield.

To run a little further with this - although, I am suspicious of analogies - such ‘tools’ are generally about increasing ‘efficiency’ and/or ‘accuracy’.

That is why the so-called social sciences are irreducible - in my opinion - to the natural sciences: they are a combination of natural science (insofar as one can carry out third-person research through experiments and observations) and humanities (insofar as one depends on individual, subjective testimony or input). Some scientists seem to have a problem with that, I don't, it's just the way it is.

What I find problematic, however, is some people in the humanities who claim that subjectivity is not just a limitation of science (it is), but also the way forward to some sort of alternative that goes "beyond" science. I think Husserlian phenomenology falls close to this position. The problem is that the whole approach seems to me to be predicated on not taking seriously one's own objections: if subjectivity and first-person experience cannot be treated by science then the answer isn't to create another "science" (or uber-science) that can handle it, but rather to accept that we as human beings are bounded to use a combination of third and first person approaches in order to arrive at understanding. — MPigliucci

As a counter, I could say that people once viewed Newton’s ability to accurately predict the trajectory of a ball as ‘magic’. To them, given their limited scope - mostly absent of scientific thought - was what he was doing was irreducible to their eyes. I would say it was. Multiple paradigm shifts in human thought throughout the ages have a tendency to make us think the ‘obvious’ as arrived at with ease. I guess this is more or less about where we decide to draw a line of ‘healthy skepticism’. And of course, my little example can be used against the same position by pointing out that Newtonian physics isn’t ‘wrong’ merely not as accurate as what was later discovered - it wasn’t supplanted.

From what I understand of Husserl he was concerned with exploring perspectives to reinforce the natural sciences, to bring psychology over to attend more readily to ‘subjectivity’ rather than have it taken over entirely by measurements and reductionism. His concern was ‘consciousness’ and we’ve seen that neuroscience has had many people claiming consciousness is merely a ‘material’ item. I actually stumbled across Husserl via Varela.

Second Half

Which brings me to what I think is the point of modern philosophy: here I agree with Wilfrid Sellars, who suggested that philosophy is the discipline that can make sense simultaneously of what he called the scientific and the manifest images of the world. The first is the "image" of how tings are that we get from science; the second the "image" we get from commonsense, personal experience, and so forth. The domain of science is confined to the first; the domain of much of the humanities to the second. Philosophy is uniquely positioned to straddle the two - which is necessary to arrive at as complete an understanding of the world as we can manage.

For instance: values and prescriptive judgments (you "ought" to do this) are nowhere to be found in the vocabulary of the natural sciences. They are not part of physics, chemistry, biology, and so forth. And yet they are necessary for human living. We won't "reduce" them to science by scanning people's brains and pointing to the neural correlates of value judgments, as interesting as such research actually is. We need, instead, what Sellars called a "stereoscopic" view of things: balancing scientific and manifest images, shifting from one to the other as needed, but never giving complete priority of one over the other. — MPigliucci

What come to the front of my mind a lot are the terms ‘dichotomy’ and ‘magnitude’. The two ‘images’ given above seem to be ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ - if not, no matter. This I have found to be one of the greatest misconceptions in colloquial speech. It’s a false dichotomy in the sense that people frame them in an absolute sense - like you said, we cannot hold to one without the other. The issue here, for scientific method, is the adherence to ‘objectivity’ - the illusion of absolute - in order to bring reductionism to the fore as the primary means of magnifying understanding about a particular item under rather specific, and ‘unnatural’, circumstances (this is not to deny the obvious uses gained by this methodology nor to say scientists are unaware of this). Really the ‘objective’ is the ‘intersubjective’ if we are to understand a world of different items about which we cross-reference and orientate ourself. In this same adherence to ‘subjectivity’ - another illusion of absolute - is necessarily the means of changes in efficiency brought about by ‘intersubjectivity’. Hopefully this isn’t anything extraordinary to your mind and you are generous with any possible misinterpretation.

So, in terms of philosophy and science what does ‘philosophy’ have to offer in terms of ‘personal experience’? It is clear enough that the cognitive neurosciences - reductionism being part and parcel of its tool kit - pays attention to this (although researchers like Koch certainly approach the issue more rigidly).

Marked in the quote above (italics), is the main point of my interest. How do we balance? I believe the two distinctions outlined are essentially incompatible in our current paradigm of thought because we’ve not developed the concepts that are universally communicable enough. In science/math/logic the rigidity of universal terms can be interchanged quite readily - the abstractions we make are not so easy though as we have refined these problem solving techniques from ‘physically’/‘socially’ grounded situations. Its common psychological knowledge that we’re just not very good in day to day life at making logical computations unless they’re presented in a meaningful narrative.

For anyone else reading, here is an explanation of what I’m talking about (Steven Pinker): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zJNeFtIDsE0

In science the ‘ought to’ is certainly part of any experiment. Scientists have expectations and set up their field of play to measure specific phenomenon. I’m not trying to be too pedantic here, only to guard against missing unseen areas. The experimental scientist operates in the sphere of applicable measurements. The philosopher, so it seems to me, operates more or less in the realms of what science cannot reach via accurate empirical measurement - be it through modeling based on current understanding or via applying pure mathematical discoveries to natural phenomenon with skeptical curiosity.

I think over the past several decades philosophy has shifted more and more towards reductionism in terms of human interactions almost as if to try and answer questions rather than analysis them or ask them. I mean this as I see philosophy today to be more about reductionism in terms of semiotics - which then necessarily get taken up by empirical data and modeling in terms of neurological research.

I was listening to a lecture by Robert Paul Wolf. He suggested that there are generally two ways of looking at what philosophy is for, the first being a way to communicate a complex idea simply, and the second being to communicate a simple idea in a complex way. I would learn more to the later as I’ve found oversimplification to be to shut off certain assumptions that often need greater attention. Of course I could present equally solid reasons for the opposite thought, and it is the ‘balance’ (I like to say ‘betweenness’ a lot) that remains the key, as far as I can reason, to shifting communication (through ‘language’ - in its broadest definition) so as to allow human thought the opportunity to create useful paradigm shifts.

Anyway, as an attempt to sum up for now, I would say ‘objectivity’ is a bigger problem for the ‘sciences’ as it doesn’t exist (it’s merely the ‘intersubjective’ framed in an ideality of ‘objective’) - a subtle difference of language that creates a certain personal regard for the world, and ‘on the hand’ (another dichotic idiom that probably does more to obscure investigation than supplement it) I would say ‘subjectivity’ is a bigger problem for the ‘humanities’ as it doesn’t exist either (again, its merely the ‘intersubjective’ directed toward experience framed as an ideality of ‘subjective’). None of this is to say that there is no use in framing perspectives as ‘pure subjectivity’ or as ‘pure objectivity’ it is more about recognising that they are ideations of cognition not opponents/opposites. So when I’ve talked at what I believe Husserl was looking at with his ‘science of consciousness’ or ‘pure subjectivity’ I don’t for a second see it as some ‘other’ uber-science, but as a pulling back from viewing the world as dichotomies and magnitudes, rather than as experience. The curious thing here is how the essential nature of intersubjectivity - of delineating ‘objects’/‘items’ of experience - is orientated among boundaries that automatically set up a world of dichotomies. Within language, as I hinted at in the first post, there can be quite different views on what antonyms are ‘gradable’, ‘complimentary’ or ‘relational’. Some seem to straddle more than one and the inclination is then to mostly dismiss such due to ‘context’. Which brings us full-circle back to the objective regard of science, having set contexts of application.

I’ll leave it there. I’m trying to dig out of you thoughts on language application, mental content and heuristics. Its a difficult subject matter to approach as ‘words’ are limited as much as any other ‘tool’.

Thanks if you got this far! Hope it wasn’t a complete waste of your time if you did :)

Look forward to hearing your thoughts about stoicism. It’s not a subject I’m massively interested in, but hope you open up my curiosity.

We generally have a reasonable idea of what ‘better’ means. Given that our conceptual landscape shifts what is ‘better’ is never known in any pure sense. It’s simply a matter of balancing the immediate benefits with future benefits ... given that we’re not able to know our future and that we’re burden with the emotional contents of the present, our estimates may be incomplete but we can usually make progressively ‘better’ choices as we fumble along.

What is ‘better’ is generally understood from a human perspective not from pure logic.

We have a pretty good idea about this already. In Kerala emphasis was put on educating young women. The effect was they didn’t marry so early, had less children and the area improved economically.

The situation is similar in Africa. Basically, if women have more control, education, then they make better choices concerning how they build a family - if they choose to; which most people do. If we just looking at individual countries the following comes into play ...

IQ is not a big deal really. Even if we were to consider IQ then the same follows as IQ, or rather ‘g’, is pretty concrete, yet in the early years it will drop of without stimulation. So, this beings us back to nurture in the early years of life. To put this into perspective wealthier families who have both parents contributing to interacting with their children as much as they can compared to parents who only have a few minutes a day to spare translates into classroom productivity - the former children end up coming arriving at school knowing how to count, read and write, whilst the later are at an incredible disadvantage having had no preschool teaching and a substantially limited lexicon.

Maybe we can discuss this if the OP cannot?

I think it is undeniable that there are benefits to this scheme on a facile level. The question is really do the positives outweigh the negatives? Can we put together a strong argument for such eugenics and then see how well it bears up to scrutiny?

Given bartricks silence to my questioning I can only assume he’s not given this as much thought as we have so we can do a better job I reckon - as I mentioned above I’ve been down this road before.

He’s dodged that question already and then called someone else a coward.

I can make an attempt though as the topic has been of interest to me before.

The criteria I imagine we’d be looking at would be to judge families based on monetary income/wealth. I think it would be a reasonable plan to set up ‘limits’ for licenses after maybe the first or second child - so family sizes would be dictated by circumstances. Of course this is a flawed plan as circumstances change and families may be making good money one year and then unemployed the next. This does at least seem to be a reasonable position to start from.

One thing we do have to consider is how socialised children are - how exposed they are to other people in their early year (ages 1-4) - as this has a huge effect on their lexicon. What is deadly important here is the time children spend with their parents during these early stages of development. This is a problem if we’re only regarding ‘income’ as a means of measurement, yet we can certainly understand that a family with more money generally has more freedom to interact with children where a single parent working three jobs would be able to.

I think from here we can begin to tackle the problem of providing a reasonable approach toward development in early years - the most important item when thinking about human potential.

Perhaps you think it won't prevent rights violations, but then argue that. Don't just label it 'eugenics' and think your job is done. — Bartricks

I don’t believe this is the case at all.

Answer the question. — Bartricks

Maybe you could answer ours before making demands?

Do you want to discuss this topic or simply pick a fight? You’ve tried to provoke me and now you’re doing your best to provoke another. We could have a civil discussion about this interesting topic.

To repeat, what exactly would be the criteria for ‘good parents’ and what are the positives and negatives that we can appreciate from a purely hypothetical position? I’m certainly not denying positives, and I have in fact asked almost an identical question in another forum so I understand knee-jerk reactions (the two people trying to engage in this discussion are not simply dismissing the topic).

Children are not held accountable. If under some policy an adult has a child in your scenario then they would be breaking the law - prison term or fine (I assume they’d likely be poor too).

Not to mention every parent screws up to some degree. We’re not robots.

Then there is the difference between children of young parents and older parents. Studies have found that younger parents tend to be less controlling and that their offspring tend to be more socially adaptable because of this whilst the children of older parents are more mollycoddled.

What exactly would be the measure for ‘good parents’?

Logic is limited. Different applications of logical method have different limits in terms of ‘truth’.

Such terms as ‘justified true belief’ is bound up in issues of semantics. A workable ‘gist’ is still workable, but it is necessarily limited. Applied to human life all abstractions are limited in scope and application. Reason/logic/philosophy/linguistics is about means and methods of delineating between every fluid human experiences.

The idea that children who are up for adoption have this right, but those who are not do not, is ludicrous. And thus, it is equally ludicrous that we licence the former but not hte latter. — Bartricks

This is quite ludicrous. My view we be the reverse approach though - that is to make it easier for people to adopt rather than to make it harder for people to have children.

I used to think it was bizarre that people could be banned from having pets yet could still have children. After more thought it is down to our regard for animals generally being quite different than for humans. Animals are always (throughout there lives) unable to do much to change their circumstances, and because of this are treated as ‘inferior’ as well as being mentally ‘inferior’ and reliant upon human care in a domestic environment. Human reliance on others decreases with maturity quite drastically.

We could propose possible ‘requirements’ for such licensing. It wouldn’t be long before we begin to open up a whole load of problems and unexpected problems merely in a theoretical realm. If put into action there would be unforeseen problems too.

Such blueprints for eugenics have been applied in the past. I believe poor, mostly ethnic minorities, were paid to become sterilized.

What possible requirements would need to be met, how would they be monitored, and what loopholes could be exploited that go against the basic idea of ‘betterment’ for all?

Also, why is this a concern? We know that less developed countries are have higher population rates to mitigate child mortality. As mortality rates in infants fall so do birth rates - all of this goes hand in hand with the lessening of inequality. It is sensible to guard against lessening ‘inequalities’ by inhibiting human choices (for ‘better’ or ‘worse’). There is certainly difficulty in finding a balance and often we fall into the stupidity of believing what works now works forever - balancing is a continuous act not something we can approach in a formulaic way and then leave unattended.

There is a serious issue regarding inequality due to the cost of education. Undoubtedly recent advances in our understanding of pedagogy has widened gaps in society regarding opportunity. This could have extremely bad results in the near future. Correcting/Giving better all round education is a far better way to tackle the gap as it is the route cause - selective breeding is merely a way of covering up the problem by removing some people’s rights (selective inequality based mainly on wealth/status).

I was merely painting the ‘IF’ picture. I am not attacking YOU.

I am in favour of preventing irresponsible breeding - that does not mean that I am in favour of killing those who have already been brought into existence. After all, in addition to having a right to a decent upbringing, kids also have a right not to be killed. — Bartricks

You are effectively dictating who has a right to exist.

Perhaps if you say how you’d go about ‘preventing irresponsible breeding’ I can point out clearly why it is wrong.

Attempts at goading me into anger won’t work either. If I say ‘facile’ it is because the term suits, and if i repeat it it is because I believe that you didn’t pay heed to it the first time around. If it upsets you I’m not particularly sorry because I’m not here to tread on egg shells and second guess every word I write as ‘possibly offensive’. The definition suits the situation perfectly from my perspective.

No. I stated clearly.

Eugenics is about selective breeding. I am against eugenics and for the protection of children born to psychopaths or other maladapted individuals - the best form of protection being to prevent them from having children (of course this is merely hypothetical because we’ve no way of knowing who is likely to become such a person - once known it would make sense that they are either locked up, made infertile, and/or have any offspring taken away from them.

This is already the case where adults with Down syndrome - depending on their mental faculties - are not allowed to raise infants just like children are not allowed to raise infants (unassisted).

It doesn’t matter how many times you try to snare me I haven’t said I am for eugenics. You can accept this or you can continue to bang your head against a wall. Which is it? Frankly I see it as a distraction from you having to defend the position you’ve set out - it’s wrong as far as I can tell so you’ll have to do more to convince me to shift.

Undoubtedly there will be a line where things are blurry, but that will be in extreme circumstances. Selective abortions is more or less where such items become socially relevant in today’s climate and what is likely to become an issue more and more this century.

Regarding items like stress, anxiety and IQ, there is something called the ‘grandmother’ effect. This means that if a woman is living in high-stress circumstances when pregnant then this effects the baby. Once that baby grows and has children (regardless of upbringing) there will still be a preset inclination toward stress for their children.

Think about this. Basically this shows genetic adaptation takes places over multiple generations so to suggest IQ is a given based on parents is utterly ridiculous as there is no evidence for this because both the prenatal environment and the postnatal environment are contingent to both that child AND their grandchildren to some degree. It’s very complex and we’ve barely scratched the surface of these mechanisms - ‘mapping the genome’ didn’t help anywhere near as much as people had anticipated.

Don’t get me wrong. I think the premise of ‘bettering’ the human race is a noble enough idea ... often the issue is simplified with extremely detrimental effects.

It is a topic that will no doubt become more and more apparent in political circles as the sciences advance our understanding. I’ve done a fair amount of research into this subject matter and the very idea of genetics determining human productivity is grossly overestimated. More support for poor families - such as governments paying parents to spend time with their children rather than punishing them financially and driving them away from infants - would be an extremely good idea. In terms of family planning that can be combated by educating young women in poorer nations.

When I said it would be better to make certain crazies in society ‘infertile’ I meant this for highly unstable individuals as they could effectively have children in secret and then lock them up. It wasn’t anything to do with some deluded idea that their children would grow up to be the same as them - there is no conclusive evidence to show this (in fact the opposite is generally more true when it comes to abuse).

No, but it would be hard to be a good parent if you're starving and have no resources, and those with IQs below a certain level are pretty much fated to a hard life of exploitation. A responsible prospective parent does not procreate if they know they're not in a financial position to be able to look after any offspring; and I think a couple who know that any child they have would have a very low IQ would also, if responsible, not procreate.

We may disagree about that, but in each case my defence of caring about those kinds of thing is fundamentally the same: protecting the welfare of others. — Bartricks

If your sole valuation of human life is based on IQ. Your facile reasoning is irresponsible so maybe you shouldn’t be allowed to have children? What do you say to that? Further still, given that you may already have children perhaps they should be ‘culled’?

Remind you of anything that happened last century?

I only suggested such action for complete psychopathic, vicious and/or murderous types. I am certainly not talking about selective breeding based on the whims of what I or anyone else considers a ‘genetic’ advantage.

If I child is abused I don’t think killing the child is an answer. If a family is poor I don’t think killing their children is the answer. If a family to raise a child then social services will come in and take the child away - protecting the life of the child is nothing like suggesting the child should never exist because they are from inferior genetic stock. There is a HUGE difference and what you’re saying appears to be purposefully clouding the lines between ‘eugenics’ and ‘protection’. True, you don’t need to protect children that don’t exist.

I can’t make head nor tail of this. If you cannot offer your own response, as example, to the ‘questions’ (whatever they are?) then I’ve nothing more to offer.

This is more about the proselytizers/indoctrinators out there. — jorndoe

Out there, not on this forum. No preaching allowed here. So this is kind of a one-sided argument and will remain so. I’d also say ‘Yahwah thumpers’ is a less than respectful manner to address anyone. There are levels of belief and many religious types don’t take a dogmatic approach - those that do take a dogmatic approach are usually beyond the limits of this forum and its rules of exchange.

I can only suggest you offer up your own view on this matter (the opening post) and then see if thre is anything to discuss. Otherwise I fear this will stop before it gets started.

To add, as I’m reading Marx, I imagine a great part of this thought is wholly absent of personal choice and tailoring goods to suit individual needs/wants/tastes. Can AI give us something we didn’t know we wanted? Can AI supplant human creativity? That would likely usher in the slow end of humanity, or our evolutionary progression where we’ll become entwined within AI.

Humanity with a necessary reason to strive would likely destroy in order to shake things up and stave of suicidal madness in what would be a ‘pointless’ existence. I guess we could end up revering AI as God and then find ourselves merely trying to ‘copy’ what AI can do ... it would be that complete rejection of AI.

We’re essentially imagining a scenario where humans would have no need to ‘labour’ away at all. We’d all be brought up with a silver spoon in our mouths. I’m not sure that would pan out very well at all.

As far as I’m concerned you may as well ask the same question about Winnie The Pooh. That is not to belittle the message only to make the content accessible rather than taken as a literal interpretation of some ‘other’ figure. Winnie The Pooh has a relevant message and The Bible contains many relevant messages.

Personally I find many arguments from atheists about literal interpretations to be just as ridiculous as believers who claim the existence of this undoubtedly abstract idea which is ‘felt’ in human existence to some degree or another.

Mythological stories are powerful because they rely on the listener for their interpretation. The art of interpretation is something people should attempt to hone when listening knowing they are prone to misrepresenting and misunderstanding in equal measure.