In that case they should stick to their knitting and not write books which end up in the Religion section of the bookstore. — Wayfarer

Not in my bookstore.

Be that as it may, why should he?

What is Richard Dawkins allowed to write about?

What sorts of things is he allowed to write about what he is allowed to write about?

I assume you're not especially threatened by his participation in the great discussion of religion or spirituality; you disagree and you may even think he argues, so to speak, in bad faith.

But none of this is a threat to your views, so why do you care what he says?

Two tribesmen from Papua New Guinea head off on an expedition in the heart of a strange and entirely new kind of civilization: they want to explore everything, taste everything, and try everything - an absurd and wonderful marathon to discover France. — Olivier5

Lovely.

I'm going to start a thread in the Lounge for documentary recommendations, starting with this one.

Sounds cool and I will watch -- does the filmmaker explain in the film how he came to be doing this? If so, I'll see it, but if not I'd be curious.

Will watch.

Ever see The Gods Must Be Crazy?

I see an object emitting a wavelength of 640nm, and say "I see a red object". I see an object emitting a wavelength of 680nm, and say "I see a red object". Whether "I" have free will or not, my statement "I see a red object" is necessarily semantically indeterminate, in that I could be referring to any wavelength between 640 and 680nm. I could invent 40 new words to describe each wavelength in changes of 1nm wavelength, such as red650 meaning red of a wavelength of 650 nm. But I would still have the problem of describing each wavelength in changes of 0.1nm.
IE, the word "red" is inherently semantically indeterminate — RussellA

You do not have trouble describing a wavelength of, say, 650.1 nm -- look, I just did it too. You just don't have a non-numerical word for that and only that.

You can have words that you are certain do apply to that, easily, by defining "red650" to be objects emitting wavelengths >= 650 and < 660, and you can do that in any chosen increment, for any granularity of measurement.

Do we need a vocabulary that can keep up even if we change the granularity of measurement, or that would be equally useful for any conceivable granularity? On the one hand, we already have that because we can resort to numbers when need be, and on the other, this is obviously an absurd requirement. But some of this is down to the word "need" up there.

Let's say, broadly speaking, that the use of a vocabulary will be to distinguish one thing from another, either for purposes of description or of reference by description. Words come in usable groups. If we define "red" as "emitting at 650nm" then everything "not red" is emitting at any frequency unequal to 650 that's not necessarily useless if 650nm is of particular importance to us in what we're doing, important enough to be given a name and treated as the designated value, but it's not very widely usable.

Instead we will tend deliberately to have words that are helpful for a range of cases, say 640nm to 680nm. If that means this word doesn't help you distinguish objects of 640nm from 670nm, that's hardly a complaint, as it wasn't designed to capture that distinction and it doesn't leave us helpless. If I have three screwdrivers, one blue-handled and two that have handles of different shades of red, you can perfectly well pick out the blue one by using the word "blue" but of course you can't get away with something like "the red one" or with no other explanation "give me the red one, not the red one". But there is no problem here: either you say from the start "the dark red one" or something, or you correct, "sorry, I meant the other red one".

But what I really want to say is that you seem to think that for our words to be determinate they have to match the degree to which reality is determinate -- even though that degree is perhaps undefined, or dependent on our choice of measurement granularity -- when this is obviously not so. There is what is distinguished within the system of our vocabulary, and there is what is distinguished in reality -- assuming that means anything, doesn't matter. The degree to which a word needs to be determinate depends not on how determinate things in the world are, but in the role it plays in a system of linguistic distinctions. "Red" and "blue" work perfectly well in being distinct from each other, even if in the real world it turns out there are things purple or purplish, where we begin to feel either both words or neither apply. That doesn't make "red" and "blue" any less distinct; it just means there are cases where their distinctiveness doesn't quite match our needs for this particular case. Describing an urn of red and blue marbles, the "purple issue" won't arise at all. (When it did, I used the words "purple" and "purplish" just now.)

And again, when standard color words are quite enough, we have a lot of special-purpose options, and we invent these over and over again -- pantone, the old X11 color names, and of course numbers.

So it does come down to our needs and words can be perfectly determinate for one need and not good enough for another. And we can often be uncertain whether a given vocabulary is determinate enough for a given purpose and investigate and take steps. We can always manage somehow to be exactly as determinate as we need to.

This notion of information as something that preexists its own expression in the cell, and that is not affected by the developmental matrix of the organism and environment, is a reification that has no explanatory value. It is informational idolatry and superstition, not science
-- Evan Thompson — StreetlightX

Isn't this just the central dogma? Just because we call it a "dogma" doesn't mean there's any idolatry or superstition here.



Here's something that if I were educated I would have already known:

Comparison with the Weismann barrier

The Weismann barrier, proposed by August Weismann in 1892, distinguishes between the "immortal" germ cell lineages (the germ plasm) which produce gametes and the "disposable" somatic cells. Hereditary information moves only from germline cells to somatic cells (that is, somatic mutations are not inherited). This, before the discovery of the role or structure of DNA, does not predict the central dogma, but does anticipate its gene-centric view of life, albeit in non-molecular terms. — Wikipedia

Dawkins has said he should really have called it "The Immortal Gene". Just a tiny bit more evidence that while Dawkins may be narrow-minded about biology, he was trying to represent what seemed to him forty years ago to be quite mainstream views distilled in memorable and understandable form.

I think if you asked the CEO of almost any firm, gun to their head, whether more data leads to better decisions, they would say no. They'd probably offer to tell you their personal horror story of learning this.

Obviously, for any decision, there's a data threshold below which you shouldn't even be making a decision. But above that, you have to simultaneously solve the problem of knowing whether you have enough data to make an acceptable decision (not optimal but satisficing), which in turn will depend on the understanding of the situation that you can get from the data you already have.

I guess if there's a general pattern, you'd hope that a kind of equilibrium could be reached quickly where you've gathered enough data to be confident you don't need more data. And sometimes you'll be wrong about that.

I don’t know why I keep commenting on these threads — khaled

I never have before, and I really appreciate your effort.

It's a very odd thing all around. It walks and talks like a logical paradox to me, so that triggers particular instincts, but the strangeness of it seems to come from somewhere else.

But seriously, I can absolutely imagine an encyclopedia entry in a generation or two that calls this argument "The Anti-Natalism Paradox".

Thanks again for the arguments.

I hope this conversation keeps going — Albero

Not me. It's been exhausting and I'm ready to let it settle for a while. I'm not sure my reactions are worth much because I haven't read the literature.

Is it moral for someone for a couple that finds out that they both have hidden genes that will result in their child having a severe mental/genetic illness to have children? — khaled

I like this argument. I think if it were me I would choose not to, but I cannot muster a definite approval or disapproval for someone else. Is that odd? If they asked my advice, I don't know what I'd say.

Maybe it's just that I'm not used to thinking of reproduction as a moral question at all, so I'm simply lacking intuition here.

Make the affliction only probable and I'll be completely at sea.

Why or Why not or Is there an arbitrary point at which you would consider that illness "bad enough" for them having children to be wrong? — khaled

And I just don't get here. I've got nothing.

On the other hand, ask me how I feel about bad parenting; I have a truckload of moral intuitions about that.

I do have one final thought I'd like to hear your thoughts on.

The asymmetry of effects (conditions of possible harm to person if born, no one to be harmed if not) is the real fulcrum of the argument; I see this as paradoxical but you don't. (I'm also not granting this.)

There is a mirror asymmetry, that no one benefits from anti-natalism. A person who is not born can no more benefit than they can be harmed. If no one is ever born again, eventually there is no one to benefit from your ethics.

An ethical proposal that by design benefits no one strikes me as paradoxical.

Do I need to know about Quine? — flaco

I was going to say this is wildly off-topic, but in a way it's not because Quine was a major force for naturalism in analytic philosophy and he pretty explicitly thought of philosophy as a kind of helper discipline for real sciences.

I'd always recommend the essays in Ontological Relativity and From a Logical Point of View as the place to start. He writes well, and he was probably the most influential American philosopher throughout the mid-century explosion of science and academic philosophy (coinciding with the spectacular growth of the American research university).

This kind of argument only make sense if we are talking about possibilities that affect no one. You can't equate this with something like "The pink unicorns should be prevented from existing because they might kill the green leprechauns".. Yeah since none of those things actually exist or ever will.. then that is indeed nonsensical to talk about as if it is real.. But an act that WILL create an ACTUAL person if it is followed, DOES have considerations for a future being, so your rebuttal is null. — schopenhauer1

But this is exactly my problem. An actual person could have any sort of life, but for your argument you need to talk about it this way:

This is equivalent to saying that you know someone who will encounter immediate torture upon birth shouldn't be considered, because they are not born yet.. No, in this view, you'd wait for the person to be tortured for you to say, "NOW, we can consider that person". Doesn't make sense. — schopenhauer1

Is "immediate torture upon birth" one of the marbles in the jar you imagine me drawing from? You're not talking about an actual person, but about a very definite though hypothetical person.

This continual flipping between empirical claims about human life and bizarre thought experiments leaves me wondering if you might have an airtight argument that happens not to apply to real life, like one of those old models in economics with perfect competition and utility-maximizing agents who have perfect knowledge, etc. etc.

I think there is a real argument to be made about the sort of suffering humans actually endure. I'm not sure how to respond to it, but in part that's because I can't quite see how to construct the inference from an understanding of what real people go through to anti-natalism without taking liberties that puzzle me. If one of you ever manages to make just that argument, then we'll see. I would make it myself for you, but I'm not sure how.

Maybe we should just leave it there. The formalism of the argument, which is crucial, just doesn't resonate with me, but you've given me some things to think about.

And I don't think the comparison to Quine is fair. — StreetlightX

You're probably right, but I suppose I'm imagining the beginning of a research program, or the realization that a new theoretical framework is needed. The old framework should be determinate enough that it either won't accommodate new research or it is really obvious how uncomfortably they fit together. I suppose I'm kind of thinking of apo's vague and crisp thing, and crisp can help you advance by failing in a way that's easy to see and persuasive.

Of course, once you switch horses, the old horse is only worth thinking about for historical reasons or if the new horse runs into trouble that would make you wonder if the old horse had something to it that you should have brought along and that you can use in the new model, horse number three.

This means that the unsung heroes of science are all of those guys who sacrificed their careers and reputations by supporting the wrong positions. No Nobels for those guys. But no science without them. — flaco

This.

Don't know about your cat, but I heard somewhere a bit of the story of dogs that I found fascinating. It's a very old relationship. The theory was that wolves would naturally scavenge a bit around the settlements of early humans. Animals have a characteristic ethologists call "flight distance", how close you allow a possible threat to come before bolting. The idea is that wolves with a shorter flight distance would be the beginnings of domestication: humans come out to chase wolves away from the garbage dump, and one doesn't run off immediately but stays and gets a closer look, eventually leading to interaction, maybe deliberate feeding of that wolf by a human. To me, the idea of some random variation laying the groundwork for small changes in behavior that enable big changes in behavior and then genome (since we soon get artificial selection), that's all pretty cool.

In any case the question of 'metaphor' is a sideshow. Dawkins uses it as snakeoil to slide in and out of when and as he needs; the question is if the underlying notion which it is used to communicate - the gene as the sole unit of natural selection - is valid or not. It isn't, and the book is a waste of the trees that were destroyed in its printing for it. — StreetlightX

You've read a lot more of this stuff than I have, so I'd be curious what your view of the landscape is. Is something selected by natural selection? If so, what? Do you have a sense of the current consensus on this, or what the leading competing views are now? Obviously forty years ago whether group selection was likely or even possible was still a very active question.

While I'm interested in your views, I really don't understand the animus you display here. If Dawkins was wrong about genes, he was wrong. It happens. The course of science is meandering. I'm in no position to judge whether he's right, but I like that he makes as clear a case as he can for his view of the unit of selection. As I said, I thought of him as advancing the debate. If his view is wrong then he has done everyone a service by making the best case for the wrong view that he can, so that its shortcomings can be clearly shown. In that tweet that @Saphsin shared, Pigliucci says there are solid biological criticisms of Dawkins's view, but that Midgley was indeed attacking a straw man. Here's a recent snippet summary of Pigliucci's criticism:

In a nutshell, TSG presents an exceedingly reductionist view of biology that is simply incapable, in my mind, of taking in the bewildering variety of biological phenomena that we have documented ever since Darwin. Dawkins’ focus on the gene level and only the gene level, his refusal to take seriously the idea of multi-level selection, his (later) casual dismissal of epigenetics, his ridicule of advances coming out of paleontology, his utter ignorance (judging from the fact that he hardly wrote about it at all) of important concepts like phenotypic plasticity, phenotypic accommodation, niche selection, robustness, and evolvability — to mention but a few — meant to me that his view of biology was hopelessly limited. — Pigliucci

Okay, cool. TSG is forty years old, and even at that time one-sided and misses some important stuff. Sounds good. It's not my field but I could imagine this is all true. And if Pigliucci is right to characterize Dawkins as dug-in and dismissive of alternative views then that's interesting, but it's mainly consumers of popular science books who would need to be wary, as working scientists aren't taking their cues from such stuff anyway.

I still can't help but feel there is a value to the community in a certain sort of narrow-mindedness. You can look at the position of Quine in American philosophy: his preferences and commitments are always as clear and consistent as he can manage, and that made his objections (I'm thinking of the development of modal logics in the mid-century, for instance) valuable as a rock to hurl yourself against.

For all I know, the gene-centric view will win out in another forty years and the current almost universal embrace among philosophers of possible-world semantics will be all but forgotten. We can all just keep doing our work rather than handicapping some supposed horse race of ideas.

Or they commit suicide, in whichcase the answer to the question is a very clear "no" — khaled

I'm sorry, what?

There are the end-of-life decisions of the terminally ill, which is a sound-mind answer of "no" to the question, "Do you want to continue living this way?" not to any other question like, "Do you wish you had never been born?" or "Was life worth it?"

There may indeed be cases of sound-mind decisions to take your life that should count as answers to questions like that, but I don't happen to be familiar with an example.

In the overwhelming majority of cases, suicide is not so much something a person does as something that happens to them, because of mental illness or extreme mental duress, something they cannot stop themselves from doing and no one else does either. This is not a sound-mind judgment of anything, not an answer to any question, and it's callous to treat it as such.

From your side, the existence of conditions in which people take their own lives is unjustifiable, so it still counts.

But this is really strange, because it's as if you are substituting the ideation of major depression for the thing itself, or the desperate thought for the conditions that gave rise to it. Major depression is a disease to be treated and managed; the stresses of life are something people need help to cope with. The fact that there is propositional content associated with these conditions is not a moral fact to be taken into account; it's a side-effect.

Is this just a thought experiment or are you talking about something real like major depression?
— Srap Tasmaner

Can be seen as either. — khaled

That doesn't strike me as much of a position, but then the whole argument has a sort of fluidity to it, may or may not be based on actual facts, as if it makes no difference. Are we talking about suffering? Or about the idea of suffering? Or about what we think about suffering? Makes no difference.

And so it goes with the hypothetical person at the center of it all. We wouldn't presume to say of anyone living that they shouldn't be, that their life is not worth living; we would respect their view on the matter. We wouldn't presume to decide on behalf of someone suffering that they should die; we respect their decision. Then what are we to say about the hypothetical person? We can't respect their views and their decisions, for they have none.

So we go around that and make it an epistemic problem for us. I can't know whether my hypothetical child wants to become real, whatever that could mean. I can't know whether, once living, they will always want to go on living. I can't know whether they will at some point wish they had never been born. And then we switch it all around and construct a duty out of things that I cannot know not because they are private but because they are not facts at all.

But then those non-facts are treated as somehow determinate, as if having a child is drawing a world-line from the proverbial urn of marbles. My child's life will be a red or a blue, it's just a matter of probability, and we can confidently assign probabilities to the different results, probabilities of a very vague sort like "> 0". What justification is ever offered for this absurd formalization?

The "result" is whether or not your children would rather have not been born. — khaled

What does that even mean though? Are we asking them at the end, "So, what'd you think? Worth it?" Should we survey them weekly? I don't think any of them have ever thought this, but it could be, there have been some rough times. Is the question, did you ever, over the course of your life, wish that you hadn't been born? What would having had that thought prove?

There is a non zero chance they would have still hated every minute of their lives despite your best effort be it due to genetic/mental illness or some accident, etc, etc. — khaled

You guys always throw around this "hating every minute of their life" thing. Is this just a thought experiment or are you talking about something real like major depression?

Is this the actual substantial argument for anti-natalism? That there is a non-zero chance your child will experience major depression therefore no one should ever have children?

How would YOU go about deciding in all these situations actually? Ignore everything I have argued, how many variables would YOU try to process? — khaled

My cockamamie ideas are not under discussion here.

If they weren't happy with the deal whose fault is it? And should we pretend that this risk is non existent or that it is not worth considering?
(( ... ))
What do you do if your kids hate their existence? — khaled

I think my oldest son almost hated his existence for a little while in the Spring. He's a musician and had begun thinking that live music might never be a thing again. Pretty depressing stuff for a young man to deal with. He's in fine form these days.

Generally speaking, I don't know. One or two of the kids tend a little toward melancholia, but it's just personality not pathology. So far as I can tell, there's neither mental illness nor despair among my children, though the ones that are old enough have had their moments. Mostly they are wild, creative, gutsy, fascinating little and not so little people.

Having children is of course a roll of the genetic dice, but parenting is not. The way you talk about the risk involved is just meaningless to me. Having and then raising children is not spinning a roulette wheel or something, just one action and then you get the result: loves life, hates life, mostly hates life, mostly neutral, ... Like it's on a scale from 1 to 7. That's not my experience of life or of raising children, or the experience of anyone I know. There is no result, so no risk of the result being one thing or another. We're just alive.

What gives you the right to take that risk in the first place? To say "I'll take a risk at harming others because it'll probably turn out okay" is not enough of a justifaction for me. — khaled

Parents don't just guess how things will turn out, they work at it, they take responsibility. Obviously can't speak for all parents -- most people only know what their parents were like and what they see on TV. If you are a parent, you know a couple more examples, and you tend to know other people with kids and know at least a little about what they're doing.

If you told my kids that I harmed them by bringing them into the world without their consent, I'm gonna guess they would love that. There would be a fair amount of "Yeah Dad, what about that? You violated my rights. You owe me." But once you were gone they would probably all blurt out that that was an amazingly stupid idea.

I've read through Dawkins' response to Midgley (here). — Olivier5

Thanks for looking this up and providing a link. It was excellent!

How can I possibly know, especially if he's just been in a car crash, whether he will consider the rest of his life good or bad?
— Srap Tasmaner

You can't. But you know statistically that the majority of people are not pianists. And you know statistically that most people with disabiliites learn to live with them in a couple of months or years. So you can surmise that it is more likely that this person would want to be saved. — khaled

What are you even arguing?

Are you seriously attributing to me, standing at the site of a car crash, the ability to correctly calculate the conditional probability of a crash victim's future happiness drawing on my knowledge of established base rates of happiness among people with traumatic injuries that resulted in disability? And this is what I do to overcome the requirement that I seek his consent before saving his life?

If he's conscious but bleeding out, do I still ask for his consent to save him, or do the calculations anyway? Should I discount because he's likely in shock and just apply pressure to his open wound, even if tells me to let him die? No, wait, I need to calculate the conditional probability that he would later endorse his own withholding of consent while in shock, again considering my knowledge of the base rate of changes of heart among people who were saved having asked not to be.

Gotta say, it's starting to look I'd best just stay out of it.

On the other hand, this little exercise makes anti-natalism much more appealing. I mean, if figuring out what the right thing to do requires so much work -- and my god, what about the chance of a mistake in my calculations! -- then the simplicity of there being nothing to think about if your kids never exist is really appealing. I totally get it.

The thing is, I have kids, and I can tell you for a fact that the world is a better place for having them in it.

But I did violate their rights back when they didn't exist yet, so shame on me. Oh and their mom, she did too. We'll apologize, but I'm pretty sure they're cool with it.

Of course, as soon as they were born I took all the rest of their autonomy away. Their mom too, we both did. And we still haven't given all of it back. Thing is though, the kids did get parents in exchange, and I think they're mostly happy with the deal.

Do you think this might be a pretty common situation? You know, I violate a non-existent person's rights by bringing them into the world, and I continue to violate their rights for years, but in return I accept considerable responsibility for their well-being, at least up until the point where they're ready and willing to take if not all then most of that responsibility themselves?

That could be a reasonable set-up couldn't it? Just as an alternative to anti-natalism, which is still an awesome choice and a lot simpler.

No, it sounds okay, but where are the conditional probabilities? I can't even tell you the base rates of offspring happiness! Clearly, this approach is far too slipshod, and we should stick with anti-natalism. At least I know how to calculate 0. And while the world would be less good, less exciting, less interesting, less beautiful without my kids in it, none of us would know what we were missing, so who cares, amirite?

Not in this case. And not in most cases. This is what I'm saying. Doing nothing to the guy in the car crash scene will result in his death. Passivity has consequences. — khaled

Suppose I keep him alive until paramedics arrive and they revive him, he looks at his crushed hands and says, "Oh God! Why didn't you just let me die!" because he's a pianist and the rest of his life will be miserable. How can I possibly know, especially if he's just been in a car crash, whether he will consider the rest of his life good or bad?

Or suppose he's evil, and by saving him, I allow him to do appalling amounts of harm to others. How can I possibly know whether others will suffer because he lives?

Or, perhaps, I should not guess at the sum worth of lives I know nothing about, and the effect those lives have on other lives.

I can also deny, no matter your arguments, that my not acting must be counted as an action. I can deny responsibility for his death all I like. I did not act; if I did not act, I caused nothing to happen.

Or I could agree and say the only way to be sure I am not, no matter my intent, causing more suffering in the world, is to have no dealings with other people at all -- so I should never have been there to face the choice of saving the man or not.

But I may still have a negative effect on others, however indirectly, just by living, and the only way to be sure I'm not doing harm, no matter my intent, is to make sure that I do not exist.

Or, perhaps, I should not guess at the sum worth of my life, and the effect my life has on the lives of others.

But relative to other actions it is possible. For example if you have to kill one innocent person vs kill 5 innocent people you can't sit there and say "Gee, I can't tell which is better because this is impossible to calculate" — khaled

But are you saying I must only make these obvious short term calculations? That I have no business wondering about what those involved think of their lives? Or guessing what might be awaiting them around the corner? Or speculating about the effect they have on others? What if I choose to kill the one, but he was happy and made many others happy, while the five I save are miserable and make others miserable? Are you saying I shouldn't speculate about such things when I make moral decisions?

For taking any action at all of any kind that may ever effect anyone else in any way:
1. Do something: some chance of good effect (impossible to calculate); some chance of negative effect (impossible to calculate).
2. Do nothing: no effect.

If you take any action, you incur a risk that you may produce a negative effect, because of your uncertainty, therefore it is better never to take any action at all of any kind that may ever effect anyone else in any way.

Okay, let's look at the argument you've presented, leaving aside exegetical questions about Hume.

1. You don't get knowledge of the empirical unobserved by reason or by observation. For example, I cannot tell that the sun will rise tomorrow by thinking about it, and by looking at it. — Humelover

First premise. Is it true that you cannot tell by looking at the sun rising right now or by reasoning about it rising right now that it will rise tomorrow?

What does the question mean? Do we mean looking at it and knowing nothing about it? Just gazing as a newborn might or a visitor from another dimension unfamiliar with our universe and how it works? What are we allowed to assume and not assume?

It's hard to say. At the very least we want to rule out any of the sorts of knowledge that are at issue in the rest of the argument, and we haven't looked at that yet. We'll err on the side of caution and not rely on anything else until we know it's okay.

Bringing no previous knowledge with us, can we tell what will happen tomorrow? No, not just by looking and not by thinking about what we're seeing. That seems obvious.

2. Causal inference will be the only way which will give you this knowledge. — Humelover

Maybe. What else could there be? We could just hypothesize that there is a regularity, a predictability to what happens without thinking of one event causing another. The sun just does this everyday, full stop.

3. To gain knowledge with the use of causal inference, we have to know causal relations. — Humelover

Causal thinking is convenient though, so we'll go with it. Then presumably what we want to predict future events is knowledge of lawlike relations: whenever A happens, B happens. Then we could use that knowledge, together with the knowledge that A has happened to predict that B will happen. We might even claim that we know that B will happen.

4. Causal relations could not be known by observation and reason. — Humelover

Now we're back to something like the first premise. How can we come to learn a lawlike fact of the sort "B happens whenever A happens"? By looking at things? Seems unlikely. By thinking about them, reasoning about them? That's more promising, if you collect in your memory all the instances of A happening and check to see if B followed. But what does that really tell you? Only that the instances you know of fit the pattern. For all you know, the very next time you're aware of A happening, it won't be followed by B. This looks like a dead end, so far as knowledge goes.

5. You can't get knowledge of things that are empirical unobserved — Humelover

What would we do to gain knowledge that the sun will rise tomorrow? We would want to know a law something like "Everyday the sun rises" and then when tomorrow comes around we could say, "Here's another day, I know the sun is going to rise". But how can we come to know this law? By watching the sun rise right now? No. By thinking about it rising now? No. By recalling that it has risen everyday up to today? No. By thinking about that? No. There's nothing left. We can't come to know such a law, so we have no rule that will allow us to infer that when tomorrow comes around the sun will rise. We can predict that, assign it a probability, but we have no justification for claiming to know it.

Does the argument make sense now? Does it seem to you both valid and sound?

I think it's okay. We've picked out the importance of lawlike statements, their use in inference, and nodded at their potential justification via induction. It's not bad.

If you were to argue against the argument you presented, what would you say? Do you disagree with a premise? An inference?

That touches on another problem with Midgley, which is that she dismisses the genetic theory of evolution on the basis that genes aren't propagated, only their likenesses. But, persuant to your question, a gene is identified as the type within a population, not the token within the individual. — Kenosha Kid

Right. That business about physical particles, wow. It takes effort to talk genetics without the word "information" once coming into your mind.



I started watching the Aeon video and I like her resistance to a simplistic model of beastly instincts and civilizing reason keeping them under control, and her suggestion that we actually listen to what ethologists say about animal behavior in all its complexity, including social complexity. I think there's lots of rethinking to be done there and she's picked a great starting point. I'm enjoying the discussion of individualism, but she just seems absurdly wrong to drag Dawkins into it.

Still excited about other aspects of her work.

This sort of thing is amusing:

He draws all his material from 'sociobiological' evolutionists such as W. D. Hamilton, Edward O. Wilson, and John Maynard Smith — p. 444

Yeah, that's a list (and throw in Robert Trivers too) of names nearly forgotten these forty years later, names disgraced and buried in a dusty corner of the annals of biology, practically heaped in ignominy.

Yes, a mutation is beneficial only if it benefits the entire organism, which in turn benefits it's entire genome. Like a group that benefits from a particularly good hunter. But there still had to be a benefit due to that mutation. — Kenosha Kid

I wonder if a shortcoming of the organism-centered view is that evolution might only happen to be non-Lamarckian. If evolution is about changes from one generation to the next in a gene pool, rather than changes in a population of organisms, then evolution is necessarily non-Lamarckian.

And something tells me biological evolution must be necessarily non-Lamarckian. Might be the difference between replication and imitation. Might be the reality of species. I'm honestly not sure, and I'm out of my depth.

Oh well. I've finished the paper now and it's shockingly bad. I'm disappointed.

pp. 451 - 454 at least graze the issue of the unit of selection, but mainly to entertain group selection and mainly reject it and then quote Gould.

There are two excellent issues here that she could have spent the entire paper on:

• the issue in the Gould quote, that environmentally driven selection has to take or leave whole individuals and cannot reach down to the genetic level;
• the issue of the gene's integrity, its reality as a unit that can be inherited.

All the rest of the paper was junk and her treatment of these issues was insubstantial.

Since you don't seem to find anything logically suspect in non-existent entities, let's look at a related case.

You arrive on the scene of a car wreck. There is before you on the ground a young man whose heart has stopped. As he is unconscious, he cannot give consent for you to perform CPR.

Your position suggests that there is no issue here at all, that it is absolutely immoral to perform CPR.

The title of the book is The Selfish Gene, not The Selfishness Gene; if you take the former to mean the latter, that's on you.

Your logic like others, goes something like this "Even if I was to know a being would be born into certain torture, I would not consider this future event because that being doesn't actually exist yet, so how can I consider a future being or event if they don't exist yet!" — schopenhauer1

But you've changed your argument. Where is consent?

We start with the intuition that I have a moral duty to respect the autonomy of others and take actions that affect them only if I have their consent.

We then infer that if I do not have the consent of an entity, I must do nothing to them.

If an entity cannot give consent? Children and animals for instance? We make special rules. Rocks and trees? We make different special rules.

Beings that don't exist? No rule needed, since I can't do anything to them.

But, you argue, I could cause the non-existent entity to exist; the entity I cause to exist could not possibly give consent, because at the time I cause them to exist, they don't exist.

To you that might look like an absolute moral truth but to most people, I submit, this will look like a bit of sophistry, or dorm-room philosophy, or stoner profundity, or, in the best case, a paradox. However it's taken, it doesn't look like the foundation for an ethical position, nothing on the order of respecting the autonomy of others.

My point was that the way you're relying on consent in this argument may be logically defensible (or may not -- there are logical challenges I'm not bothering to mount) but it is not persuasive.

If you want to abandon the reliance on consent and just ask me if it's moral to bring a being into the world knowing with certainty they will be tortured continuously, that's a different question.

I think it might be reasonable to interpose something like a model and treat data only as state, something like that. Then you can imagine having incomplete or untrustworthy knowledge of the current state of a system, but you could also have an erroneous model of how the system behaves, and those are quite different, which will become clear when you intervene.

I'm thinking as I write of the HBO series Chernobyl, where you can see almost every sort of problem: we only partially know what happened and what seems to have happened doesn't make sense according to our model of the system; we only partially know the current state of the system and gathering more information is extraordinarily difficult; we do not know what will happen next or what we can do about it. To reach even a tolerable resolution, they had to overcome several different types of problems, and some of those were not with data but with their model for the behavior of the system.

I'm not checking, but I think of there being two different arguments: one is about whether we can genuinely infer causation by induction from (so far) constant conjunction; the other is about the status of induction itself. I think Hume ends up giving more or less the same answer to both. I'm not sure what to think about causation, but I always found the argument that induction cannot be rationally grounded persuasive.

Yes, I think both the sceptical argument and his sceptical solution are both valid and sound. In fact, I think this is one of only a handful of knockdown arguments you will find in the history of philosophy.

Not your best argument. — Banno

it fitted the tone of the times, along with Milton Friedman and all that garbage about self interest. — Banno

Or yours.

But I will grant you -- if only to make @unenlightened's ears bleed -- that there was at the time a convergence of economics and evolutionary theory to the extent that they both relied more and more on game theory. In both cases, this is largely a retooling of existing theory, as I understand it. But there is a difference: the economic theory being retooled was not empirical at all. We're in a somewhat different position with evolutionary biology because we know empirically how inheritance works and we know empirically that the distribution of alleles in a population can change over time; evolutionary game theory just provides a framework for known, rather than, as in economics, postulated effects.

Which is not to say there's any reason to think Dawkins thought of evolutionary biology as an application of laissez faire economics.

From a Darwinian standpoint rape advantages the rapist — Olivier5

Not shown.

it fitted the tone of the times, along with Milton Friedman and all that garbage about self interest. — Banno

Horseshit.

Did we need Dawkins to tell us that human nature includes it's fair share of selfishness, greed, egocentrism, and narcissism? — Olivier5

I don't think that's why he wrote any of those books.

You could, you know, look at Dawkins in exactly the opposite way: the machinery that underpins life is in itself relatively simple and serves only to replicate certain molecules for no particular reason; but the mathematics of differential reproduction leads to the extraordinary variety of form and behavior we observe. You insist on the narrowness and simplicity of inheritance to reveal just how powerful evolution by natural selection is, that it can make all this out of almost nothing.

It would take a lot to convince me there's a "rape gene". I'm not sure that even makes sense.

Because they don't exist YET, doesn't negate this principle — schopenhauer1

I get how the logic works: you are only entitled to do something to someone with their consent; therefore not existing is functionally equivalent to withholding consent. But it's still a little odd: my moral duty is constituted by the claim others have on me to respect their autonomy; but then somehow I end up having a moral duty to people who don't exist.

The inference only holds because one or more of the premises fail, so it's vacuously true, which doesn't seem like much of a foundation for an ethical position.

If that's really it, then no wonder no one ever persuades you (your position is logically defensible) and you never persuade anyone else (the key inference is only vacuously valid, but not sound).

Respecting "what could be"? But that's not an individual, and they have no consent to give or withhold.

At any rate, it turns out you don't need a extra principle to block mass mercy killing, because you start from respect for the individual life, and believe anti-natalism can be derived from that. Yes?