More radical by todays standards maybe, but not in an absolute sense I don't think, they used to form roving warbands, were recruited in the army, or started insurrections... now they are merely a nuisance like an internet-troll is considered annoying. Their frustrated energy is re-directed mostly into verbal aggression, instead of physical aggression, which is probably a win for society... unless it has some yet unknown toxic effects downstream.

I'm not sure what to do about it, other than generally providing for more community-alternatives that can provide support and maybe some meaning. These seem to have eroded for everybody, not only incels, and leaves a lot of people that get sidetracked without any direction or guidance.

Incels always have been a problem historically, because a lot of testosterone without a reason (aka a women and a family) that can channel it into a social constructive force is a recipe for and source of societal unrest.

What changed is societal evolutions making being incel even more undesirable (MeToo, male-centered values devaluated etc etc), and technology like social media making it easier to organize around whatever.

It's not overlooked, it's taboo to talk about it.
— ChatteringMonkey

Yes, which is unfathomable to me. Whatever the contributing factors to ecological damage are, they are magnified by the size of the population. If we can't at some point rise to the level of rational dialogue, I don't suppose we are as a species worthy of survival anyway. — Pantagruel

It's a thorny issue in more than one way, but a large part of the problem is that acknowledging all the different aspects of the issue, poses fundamental problems to all current dominant political ideologies... They don't seem to be able to incorporate what would be needed into their ideology without becoming something else.

We all were using a lot less energy in 1890,
— BC

I don't think the rate of emission matters much. Produce the emission size from the 1890s over a period of 500 years and you've got a climate crisis. — frank

I does matter some, there are carbons sinks that have more time to draw carbon out of the atmosphere, and slower emissions do mean slower temperature change, which give us and eco-systems more time to adapt.

Beware of pointing to population as a contributing factor in this eco-crisis, you will get accused of being a Malthusian. It's not overlooked, it's taboo to talk about it.

Social laws are not causal, and future human and social consequences are not necessitated by the past. At the extreme, humans can choose to act in opposition to such predictions. It is logically impossible to know what someone will do in the future, since even given that they know, it remains that they might do otherwise. I can predict that you stop reading this post here, but it remains that you may choose to read on — Banno

I didn't really address this particular point I feel.

The problem I have with this idea (that it is logically impossible to predict what humans will do because if they know it, they can always choose otherwise) is that these predictions don't necessarily concern individuals, but groups of people or the outcome of a lot of people interacting with eachother. Maybe individuals have some amount of agency, although I would probably argue about the extend of it, but groups of people don't necessarily have. Social outcomes are almost never the result of a single self-aware person make a decision, the impact of individuals is usually rather limited, and so I don't think it would be logically impossible to make predictions about the future of societies.

I'm gathering that there are more points people pick up than this from Michel :D -- yes?

I agree that there's no static system or utopia, and that social lives are in perpetual motion. That's not the point I saw in Michel, but hey, we agree there.

*That is, the guy who, in writing, wrote about how slavery is good. That guy. Slaves? OK. Oligarchy? Fuck that shit. That guy. — Moliere

Yes, it is what I take away from it I guess.

Michels wasn't a static entity either ;-), he started out a socialist and when he wrote about the Iron law of of oligarchy he apparently was some kind of syndicalist revolutionary. He was not that extreme yet when he wrote that book. But yeah I do get your point, there's a lot not to like about the guy for sure.

The interesting thing to me is that he did come out of socialist milieus and the unions, people who are supposedly aware of and actively fighting against oligarchies, and yet turned oligarchy themselves. That is where he got the experiences that influenced his ideas about oligarchy.

(1) In the Politics even Aristotle* makes a distinction between Oligarchy and Aristocracy -- and he happens to like Aristocracy over Oligarchy. Naturalized politics is kind of his whole thing and gets along with the idea that we can falsify such stuff, I think.

1: Given that we're looking at all societies due to the law-formluation, I'd take Aristotle's Politics as evidence that many constitutions exist, and someone smart back then knew about these tendencies but didn't generalize oligarchy to all organizations. If we're looking for textual counter-examples then he counts. — Moliere

I'm not all that familiar with Aristotle... but even though he was in many ways more empirically minded, he was still a student of Plato and his academia. Isn't aristocracy akin to the Ideal form, how it is ideally conceived and intended originally, and oligarchy how it eventually ends up after special interests corrupt it over time. If that is the case, then this wouldn't exactly be a counterexample to the iron law, but rather a more general and broader theory about the eventual corruption of political organisations.

(2) The second formulation of the CI pretty explicitly points out how one would organize with someone: by treating them as not merely a means, but as an end unto themselves.

2: This points to how we can collectively organize on ethical grounds even from a libertarian individualist stance. It's not inevitable, from that perspective, because we all make choices based upon some commitment, and here is a commitment which harmonizes collective action rather than pits all individuals against one another. Even on rational grounds. — Moliere

I'm not sure how to address this because I don't think the CI works in practice. I don't mean this in a base or mean spirited way, but we do sometimes use people as a means, out of practical and psychological necessity... I would be hard if not impossible to live in total accordance with the CI.

I think I do agree that collective organisation around values is where it is at, I'm just not sure how we can do it in practice while at the same time avoiding all the known pitfalls. What you describe for instance functionally looks a lot like how religions or myths would organize communities around shared value systems, but then a lot can and historically has gone wrong with that.

Thank you for your response. I think I disagree with the general picture you paint though. A lot of historians do indeed view human history and future as fundamentally unpredictable. There are others though who do think there are patterns we can discern and use to make predictions about the direction of human societies, like say Peter Turcin. Turcin started as a biologist predicting behaviours of groups of other animal species, with some success, and he saw no reason why this couldn't be tried with "human populations" as he became a historian.

One reason I think there is much resistance to this idea, we'd like to think we have a lot agency in determining the direction of our societies, it's a problem for our treasured notion of free will if we don't.

So putting it simply, even if we accept that there is a trend in democratic institutions towards centralisation of power, humans can choose to work against that trend. — Banno

Yes human can (and will) work against it, that's not the point I don't think, the point is that humans on aggregate won't keep working against it hard enough over time. It's more like say the second law of thermodynamics in that way... even tough locally entropy can decrease, on aggregate the total entropy of the system will always increase over time. Roll enough dice and you will tend to the mean.

The supposition that democratic institutions will become oligarchies gives no time frame. Suppose a given institution remains democratic after a year, is that a falsification of the "Law"? Perhaps we shoudl wait ten years? If an institution remains democratic after a hundred years, do we consider the law falsified? Any institution that remains democratic is not a falsification, since it can be claimed that it still will become an oligarchy. Hence the supposed law is inherently unfalsifiable.

While studies of the history of such institutions might reveal a trend, there is no reason to suppose that such trends are inevitable. Trends can only tell us what happened in the past, not what will happen in the future. This is a result of the problem of induction, addressed by Popper in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and resolved by fablsificationism. Inductions of the form that are used to justify the supposed "iron law" are logical invalid. Even in physical sciences, the statements sometimes called "Laws" are for fablsificationism only as-yet unfalsified generalisations, to be further tested. Historicism will oft mistake such a trend for a supposed universal law.

Social laws are not causal, and future human and social consequences are not necessitated by the past. At the extreme, humans can choose to act in opposition to such predictions. It is logically impossible to know what someone will do in the future, since even given that they know, it remains that they might do otherwise. I can predict that you stop reading this post here, but it remains that you may choose to read on. — Banno

It's hard to argue this point because this seems like a variation of Hume's problem of induction, and I think ultimately Hume was right, there is no reason to believe the future will resemble the past. But you can use that objection against science as a whole, and all we are left with is some form of absolute scepticism. Scientist haven't cared all to much about this lack of epistemological foundation and just went with what seemed to work.

Specifically about the social sciences, as you are probably well aware, there has been a replication crisis , starting a good decade or so ago... and I would argue they haven't really recovered since. Either results of research cannot be replicated or the research is so trivial truism to be of little use... I think there are issues with trying to use the same methodology as the exact science in the social sciences. It's just a lot harder to isolate phenomena and have all other variables remain the same so empirical test can be run that can be compared with eachother.

So, again, where does that leave us?

We can just throw our hands up into the air, and give up on the endeavour altogether. I would be fine with that, I wouldn't say Michels theory is a scientific theory, but I still do think there is something there, even if not scientifically proven. We believe a lot of things that strictly can't be proven.

Or we can try to devise better methodologies that do try and address these concern, like Peter Turcin. Maybe that will be successful, maybe not, we will have to see.

What constitutes an oligarchy is left ambiguous by the Law. As a result the supposed trend towards oligarchy is left to interpretation, so any mooted historian may find or falsify the trend as they see fit - based on their ideology, as it where. Ideology is written into the very structure of the "Law". Hence it is disingenuous to insist that responses avoid ideology. A better response would be to openly admit the ideologic base of both the supposed "Law" and the responses. — Banno

What I object to is the all to common dismissal out of hand, because it doesn't fit our ideology. You were the first one in this thread to post something that actually dealt with the substance. I would like to think that the purpose of a philosophy board is to question our beliefs rather than to have them confirmed and echoed all the time.

Oligarchies fail eventually, even Michels himself says as much, because oligarchs tend to always push inequalities to far, and so it breeds discontent, and eventually revolutions... at which point you get new organisation and things can start again.

The point is not that oligarchy is a good system, or even that one shouldn't even try to do something about it, tensions and struggle against oligarchy is just as inevitable... the point, I think, is rather that we never arrive at some perfect static system, at some utopia, but that these things are in perpetual motion.

Yes yes, it always comes down to this, we don't like the consequence of an idea, so it can't be true... as if the consequences of an idea have anything to do with it's veracity.

I wanna say maybe Poppers critique is itself ideological, as a progressive you would want the future to be unconstrained from the past, so it can be whatever we want it to be.

It seems to me that Poppers critique in the poverty of historicism would apply more to something like dialectical materialism and Marxism, than Michels thesis about how organisations tend to oligarchy... because Marxism is much more a prediction of where the totality of society goes.

Maybe more importantly, I wonder where that leaves us? If we want to demand the same methodological standards like in the exact sciences, it seems to me very little can be said that would stand that test, and so we are just left with competing ideologies without any real justification in past events? That doesn't seem right to me, the world does seem to put constraints on what is possible.

I think, if we are willing to be somewhat charitable, and not dismiss his thesis out of hand because it doesn't fit our ideology, there's something there.

I've said this before in another thread, it doesn't need to be a law, and strictly inevitable, to be something we should probably take into account if we want to have a political philosophy that is effective.

His point is precisely that specialisation and leadership tend to oligarchy over time because of very common human tendencies to want to maintain power, seek and conspire with likeminded people, bend and corrupt the rules because they are in a position to do so etc etc... Demanding this very precise definition of oligarchy so we can go measure it in the world is kind of weak argument it seems to me... if we see this process happening all the time. This is not the kind of thing we can test and verify with perfect accuracy like say a law in physics anyway.

And one doesn't need to subscribe to conservatism, fascism or any far right ideology like that because of this insight, but we probably should take seriously the notion that organisation and hierarchy are in some way tied to each other, and that we therefor should probably take that into account to determine the kind of equality we want to aim for (if we want organisation at all). But you know, this is a non-starter for a lot of lefties.

There are operating communes all over the world; all different, mostly functional. So, of course it's feasible. In fact, it's the most reasonable and efficient form of human organization. Unfortunately, it only works on a small scale. And since these communities are surrounded by oceans of dysfunctional monetary society, they have a high rate of death by drowning. — Vera Mont

It will be relevant again. See my first post on this topic. I always differentiated between ideology "ism" and a communal system of organization. — Vera Mont

Are you suggesting a whole lot of people will die? Or at least our dysfunctional global monetary system will die, which probably also implies a lot of people dying.

Because that's the only way i see it really becoming relevant again. Global geo-politics won't go away on its own otherwise, and so communal systems of organization will continue to be drowned out.

You realize literally every person, intelligent and not, said this exact thing, in personal sincerity and absolute truth, since the beginning of language. Correct? — Outlander

Maybe they said that, but they were wrong :-).

I have actual reasons that are more that just "I feel special". I could elaborate, but this isn't really the thread for it I think.

EDIT:

Man discovers fire. Same thing. Man discovers cooking. Same thing. Man discovers ChatGPT. Same thing.. there truly is nothing new under the sun. — Outlander

For much of history progress was very slow, and general energy consumption and economic growth modest. Since the industrial revolution, and exploitation of fossil fuels, this has accelerated exponentially. Now we are nearing the end of that exponential growth, with climate change fundamentally altering the climate we developed our civilizations in, fossil fuels that need to be phased out and populations stagnating. That, combined with unprecedented scientific knowledge and technology makes for I would say unprecedented times.

The key word there is "history". We may need to look farther back for sustainable systems of human organization. And even when we've found a model that could work for us, we'd still have to find its vulnerabilities and insure against the identifiable threats. And, having done all that, prepare to change whatever needs changing in response to new developments and circumstances. — Vera Mont

The farther back one goes, the less relevant human organisations become for present times it seems to me... There were a lot less people and a lot more space and resources to go around. There's also the practical problem that we can't really know what came before written history.

What I would agree to is that we are heading for truly unprecedented times in a lot of aspects... so maybe none of history will remain all that relevant shortly.

I voted no, because I believe we do have certain tendencies that tend to certain outcomes.These are not necessarily hard limits to how we can organize, but rather practical concerns that steer organisations over time in certain directions (Oligarchy). The problem isn't necessarily that you can never overcome those tendencies some of the time, but that you can't overcome them sustainably.

In the Iron law of oligarchy, Michels for instance describes step by step how the unions he was part of gradually became stratified and hierarchical over time, because of the simple reason that at some point you need specialists, because everybody doing every job all the time just doesn't make much practical sense (people can't be bothered basically).

Because of specialization you inevitably get differentiation in power (some become representatives, or leaders eventually, for instance), and then those specialists tend to group up with like-minded people, to eventually consolidate their power-advantage over the rest (because they have better access to decision-making processes, and therefor can make rules that benefit them more, get more money, resources and power etc etc...).

Ultimately these oligarchs do seem to always take it to far however, at which point you get revolutions because of to much inequality... and all of it can start over again basically.

All of this seems pretty human, and actually seems to describe a process that we have seen over and over again in history. I think good political philosophy should start from description.

My point here is not the Protestant professor's take on Nietzsche, but the way he seems to be positioning his interpretation around an appreciation of aesthetic grounds. — Tom Storm

Ironically Nietzsche rejected Christianity and God precisely on aesthetic grounds. And he thought most philosophy through the ages essentially boiled down to a rationalisation for morality, aesthetics :

"It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of — namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown."

Aesthetics, morality, beliefs... all of them are in some way personally embodied and intertwined with what motivates someone as a living human being. Truth is not something we arrive at after some un-motivated dialectical process. Reason usually only comes in after the fact.

Can those immersed in the philosophical tradition tell me if aesthetic reasoning is used to justify positions on morality and meaning? — Tom Storm

It is, unconsciously... but usually no philosopher will admit as much consciously, that is the philosophers conceit, their pride in their reason getting in the way.

I am not disagreeing with the low(er) entropy part. The space that is currently occupied by the observable universe was at a much lower entropy 14 billion years ago (it had better be!) Was it at a maximum entropy? That's a trick question. I would say that, in a limited sense, it was. — SophistiCat

The space or the matter in that space is at lower entropy? That is what is confusing to me. How can space itself be measured entropically. Isn't that just the condition that sets the degrees of freedom for matter in that space to be in, determining the range of entropy? Maybe I'm missing something fundamentally here, which very well could be.

Ah, see, I actually don't agree that "low entropy is unlikely by definition." That is true of closed systems that have been evolving for some time. As per the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, the entropy of such systems should be increasing over time. But we are talking about the initial state, which does not have a history. — SophistiCat

Yes unlikely by definition maybe isn't true for initial conditions, I can see the reasoning there. It still is an observation (and a condition for our universe to like it is) that the universe was in a low entropic state, it could have been otherwise I suppose... Not that that is saying much. We just don't know anything beyond it, and so it is what it is then, is the best we can do?

In response to this Count Timothy von Icarus invoked the principle of indifference. I object that we cannot get a free lunch from the principle of indifference: it cannot teach us anything about the physical world. And conclude that statements about how probable/special/surprising the early universe was are not meaningful absent a theory of the universe's origin that would inform our expectations. — SophistiCat

Yes I definitely agree with that. Anything like the principle of indifference, or anthropic principles, or things along these lines, is making assumptions we have no right to make. And without these kind of assumptions, we don't have enough information to sensibly talk about probabilities.

I'll have to return to this thread for a more detailed response later, but the early universe has this very confusing property of being in thermodynamic and chemical equilibrium but nonetheless being "low entropy." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes this I don't understand then I suppose, because isn't equilibrium necessarily maximum entropy... If entropy always increases, it can only be in equilibrium if max entropy has been reached no?

EDIT: Unless max entropy and low entropy are somehow considered the same in this particular instance, i.e. it is still considered low eventhough it is maximum entropy (for instance because compared to entropy in the rest of the history of the universe it is low). But that just sounds like confusing use of terminology to me.

This is confusing since most textbooks and classes will lead you to associate equilibrium with high entropy. The simplest explanation, which leaves out a lot of nuance, is that there is also gravitational entropy to be considered, and this being low initially offsets the apparent equilibrium seen in the cosmic microwave background.

But there is a lot more going on. Particles are changing identities incredibly frequently at these energies, the fundemental forces aren't acting like they do normally, the density of particles are changing as the universe expands and temperature shifts. It's a very dynamic model. To make things more confusing, there are arguments that the laws of physics aren't eternal and unchanging, but actually behaved differently in this era. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This sounds like it could be an answer to my question, but I don't know enough about this to judge it to be honest.

There is no limit to thr energy we can harness as long as that energy harnessing isn't directly dangerous to our existence (the air we breath, the water we drink m, the food we eat etc). — Benj96

There are limits though, even only theoretically speaking... never mind practically.

Is the level of organisation required to produce life the antithesis of entropy? Who knows. — Benj96

No, life is perfectly compatible with the second law of thermodynamics, no antithesis or counterforce is needed. In fact life depends on the universe "flowing" from a low entropy state to a higher entropy state, if the universe were static at either end no life would be possible.

Life itself is a process by which entropy is increased. We take in low entropy free energy and produce higher entropy waste, sustaining our biological form along the way for a while. A pre-condition for this is that you have a source of low entropy energy, like the sun. This makes local decreases in entropy possible (i.e. biological life-forms on earth), but the total entropy of our solar system always increases.

As the sun eventually runs out tending towards maximum entropy.... no life will be possible. That's why I said "ultimately" in quotes, it will take a while... and shouldn't necessarily concern us all that much. We live on a different time-scale as humans.

I would still critique the idea of continual progress, but from a slightly different perspective, still related to energy and entropy. The total amount of energy we receive from the sun is limited, as are natural resources on earth. That puts physical hard limits on how much we can progress, limits we possibly already passed in some ways.

To maintain complex societies we need a lot of energy continuously, the more complex the more energy.... Currently we are getting surplus energy from fossil fuels that took millennia to generate (from that fixed amount of energy from the sun), but those will run out eventually. Maybe we could replace those with other sources of energy, but at this point it's entirely unclear if we can do that without the kick-start from fossil fuels. Maybe we can manage to some extend, but certainly not indefinitely... and as you said there are always trade-offs.

Maybe more fundamentally, there are also other biological and psychological reasons why continuous progress may actually not be what we want. To "grow" as persons, and societies too, we want and need some challenges to be able to grow. As things get progressively more safe, easier and more conformable, we may also lose something vital... so you know, the question then becomes is that kind of progress really progress?

So, was the (relatively) low-entropy state of the early universe very special and unlikely (whatever that might mean)? Frankly, I don't see how. — SophistiCat

Likely or unlikely, it was in a particular state, which we have no explanation for.

In cosmology, the past hypothesis is a fundamental law of physics that postulates that the universe started in a low-entropy state,[1] in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics. — Past hypothesis - Wikipedia

It wasn't at equilibrium, because it was quickly expanding, but if, counterfactually, there was no expansion, then the universe would have already been at its maximum entropy (and on very short time scales, during which expansion could be neglected, it was). — SophistiCat

You seem to be disagreeing with the past hypothesis, in that it wasn't low entropy, but maximum entropy?

Anyhow i'm not sure what the question is relating to this topic, I couldn't figure it from what was quoted, maybe I should read the other topic.

EDIT: I guess the question is not whether it was likely or not, but whether it was low entropy or not (low entropy is unlikely by definition), and that would in turn depend on whether space/the universe itself was expanding (progressively giving more degrees of freedom for matter to be in), or whether it was a low entropy configuration of matter expanding into an already existing larger universe/space. This is probably very basic stuff, but i'm no physicist so excuse my ignorance.

EDIT2: And if it was the first case (the universe itself explanding) than the past hypothesis isn't "matter was in a low entropy configuration", but "the universe was small". Is a small universe likely or unlikely, without another frame of reference, who knows... so I guess I would agree with you. Probabilities only make sense if you have relevant information. And since we don't, it doesn't. What is the likelihood of drawing the ace of spades out of an undefined amount of cards and with undefined types of cards in the deck?

For some the prospect that everything may being fundamentally pointless (that progress in the end is futile) is a source of great sadness/depression. — Benj96

Everything is 'ultimately' pointless since entropy is a fundamental law of the universe.

Maybe it is a source of sadness/depression for them because they have been falsely let to believe that that is and should be the goal. Most earlier philosophers actually disagree with this, it's only in the past centuries that this idea has become commonplace.

Base and noble in Nietzsche's conception, and in that of old (Greek) religions (where he got the idea), correspond roughly to ruled randomly by animal instinct vs someone who has overcome that "basic" animal nature and managed to order those instincts into some more.

So why would workers find it more difficult to submit to captains of industry? Because they don't see a real difference in them, they are just as base as the workers and so there is no perceived natural difference in rank between them that maybe could justify their "rule".

Maybe you could say some of the current ideas are substitutes for the religions of old in that they employ some of the same methods. In Nietzsche conception though the problem is rather with the valuations they promote, not necessarily with the method. Capitalism seeks to merely fulfill desires in the most efficient manner, it strives for contentment, happiness for the largest number. Mere utility therefor is its main value. Religions of old, and Nietzsche, saw those as something to be overcome... the aim should be over-man.

I'm a bit of an energy-determinist, which is maybe just another word for taking the laws of physics seriously...

It's my contention that most of what people call scientific, technological and moral progress largely follows from the fact that we progressively use a lot more energy (since the industrial revolution), which is the real driver behind all of this.

None of the technological advances of the past centuries could've taken off if we didn't have increasingly larges amounts of energy to power them... and to keep powering them. It's calculated that in western societies we use per capita the energy-equivalent of more than 100 human slaves working 24/7 (energy-slaves).

Because of that we can live like kings of old in material terms. Because of that utopian ideals like liberalism, socialism and communism, or moral progress in terms of equality, non-discrimination became possible in principle. Because of that we could afford larger parts of society to devote their time on things like science. People regularly get the causality backwards on these things.

In the idea of progress ala Pinker is assumed that this will last at least a while, that these advances are somewhat permanent and can be build on going forward. If it would end tomorrow, or some day in the near future, all of this would sound rather hollow.

Now of course the elephant in this particular room is that most of the energy we use, are fossil fuels which are being used up at a rate that is much faster than they regenerate. Futhermore we are destroying important parts of the ecosystems we depend upon in doing so. None of this seems sustainable, which just means - in plainer terms - that it will end sooner rather than later.

The belief that progress will keep on going the way it has gone the past centuries, could be nothing more than the epistemological shortsightedness of humans having lived their entirely life on the sharp end of the hockey-stick of progress.

Human nature is both egalitarian and stratifying, i.e. we do have tendencies tor greed, social status seeking etc etc... but at the same time we also have a moral impulse that wants to tear down those who seek to elevate themselves above others at the cost of the group.

Egalitarian projects fail, because of scale and specialisation that becomes needed in larger groups. The moral impulse, social control, works better in smaller groups where nobody is inherently all that much elevated above others. But when you get larger groups, more specialisation and more power concentrated in certain required roles, it's harder for these moral impulses to keep those that seek elevation down.

Scale is the issue, not human nature (or at least not directly).

In principle, it may not be. In results, it certainly is. Nature selects for what is most likely to survive and thrive. Man selects with quite different motivations, and I find some of them suspect. It's okay to select out hemophilia - though nature would have done that faster, left alone - but I doubt it's a good idea to select out heavy melanin pigmentation, in a warming world. — Vera Mont

I don't think we can know the results for certain. I also don't know if nature selecting is something we should necessarily aim for.... at this point we are a large part of nature anyway.

I don't see how that's going to get any worse through medicine than it's already getting through politics and economics. — Vera Mont

Don't you see how inequality might get amplified by virtue of some people having access to it and others not?

That's it, the big question. What if it gets away from us? What if it's suborned by the evilest entities among us? Or the least socially responsible? What kind of monsters will be created? For what purposes? — Vera Mont

Yes agreed, what are the risks and can we deal with them is the question.

We have to use imagination. There are plenty of departure-points. What do people who resort to artificial insemination ask for? What do Couples hiring a surrogate mother demand? What were the bad old eugenics programs aimed at? The most nearly perfect, healthy, clever, beautiful, talented, potentially successful baby they can possibly get. Superman and Uberwench. Will that generation of perfect children also be bred/spliced for empathy, fairness, humility, affection, generosity, aesthetic sensibility? — Vera Mont

I can see the relatively small changes like removing diseases, or giving someone more of a desirable trait... but even there, there would already be a lot of disagreement in what is actually desirable. Where it becomes really difficult is when to decide what to do when and if we get beyond human. Sure we can imagine a variety of things, but how do we decide and maybe more importantly who decides?

I think it's fine.

If ethical restrictions should be placed on it, it should be because of negative consequences we want to avoid. Calculating consequences is notoriously difficult though, so probably because of that reason alone, we should exercise some restraint.

But in essence tinkering with genes is not that different from the selective breeding we have been doing for millennia. We have been selecting plants, animals and even human partners in a quest to produce some kind of result in the offspring. The only difference is that we could presumably do it with a lot more precision now and actually have some notion of what we are doing.

So you know, the question is why would unknowingly fumbling around with selection be better than more conscious and precise selection? In principle it isn't, would be my answer.

The reason to exercise restraint anyway, is more of a general objection to any potent technology.... because it implies a lot of power, and so it creates bigger rifts between haves and have nots. That is a problem, not necessarily because of the nature of said technology, but more because of the nature of our societal organisations which seem to tend to inequality and all the problems that come with that.

Another more general objection would be that we are simply not mature/smart/wise enough as societies to deal with technologies that are this powerful. These technologies, may have some advantages, but they also multiply risks. If we don't have sufficient organisation to deal with those, it would seem a bad idea to mess with them.

As for your last question, that is a very interesting one, but also exceedingly difficult, and I see no good way to sensibly think about it. In part we are a product of evolution and the way we think about things, what we value is informed by what kind of biology evolution happened to give us. We are viewing things from within evolution, and cannot do otherwise really... but to answer that question sensibly it would seem we need a perspective from outside? It's like trying to measure something without a fixed measuring-standard.

Along those lines, I wonder, is there a common root for all such endeavors? Did philosophy begin somewhere? If so, where and how and when and why and who and what? — Bret Bernhoft

Though some aspects of what we could consider philosophical thinking where probably always already present and fused into the mythological and the religious, I would say a common root (not necessarily the only one) probably was writing, or at least the more widespread use and cultural integration of writing. There language becomes something that is more fixed, and can more easily be reflected on.
With words surviving past the authors utterances and the concrete situations he made those in, you get more of a need for interpretation (what does such and such really mean?) and a need for fixing meaning over different contexts and precise definitions etc... you get more abstraction, which is what is needed for philosophy.

In short it co-evolved with, or was a by-product of, new technological evolutions in language-use.... as we started using language in other ways, we also evolved other ways of thinking to fit those.

I don't think so, I think Nietzsche was right in that he was tired of life and killed himself by trolling Athenian elites. Sort of like when forum members can't get themselves to leave the forum, and go out in a frenzy of insults and behaviors that are in obvious breach of forum rules... a suicide by Mod type of thing.

(3) Who decides (1) and (2)? — Mikie

Those that have the power to do so.

Bit of a flippant answer maybe, but probably one of the more honest ones.

In the world we live in it you never get to escape some already existing power relations. That is the situation you start from and then maybe you organise to negotiate a bigger share or change the rules... that is you take it by getting more power. And there it probably helps if you can appeal to some moral sentiments, yes.

But ultimately there is no non-arbitrary answer to these kinds of questions in the abstract. If you say everybody should get a share equal to his input, then you are presupposing some kind of meritocratic principle. Why, who knows? You could just as well decide to allocate shares according to needs, or maybe you just give everybody an equal share for practical reasons etc etc... Every answer presupposes some value or principle that can't be wholly justified.

Can someone please enlighten me? — believenothing

Yes I can enlighten you, you seem to be under the assumption that something is only meaningful if it persists indefinitely or something is only meaningful relative to some ultimate goal or consequence. In that case nothing is meaningful because of the ultimate heat dead of the universe, but more importantly the choice of ultimate consequences or goals as the only thing that is relevant is arbitrary, and need not be the only way we look at meaning.

The wording was a bit of a play on your wording... what I meant is that the social aspect of how we learn was missing in your story. Trail and error on its own would be very difficult if you don't start from a lot of build up knowledge through the generations. Put another way, I don't disagree with what you said, I just thought it could use this addition.

I don't think what I'm saying is that outlandish, but you know, I'm not a professional so I very well could be somewhat off the mark.
— ChatteringMonkey

I don't think it's outlandish, but I provided specific sources for my opinions. The extent to which human behavior is innate has been argued on the forum before. There is scientific evidence on both sides. No one argues that cultural influences don't have a big role to play. If your positions weren't expressed so definitively I wouldn't might not have responded so vehemently. — T Clark

Ok fair enough.

The force of my expression was probably more a reaction to current ideologies like liberal individualism completely missing the mark in my opinion, than anything you said in particular.

Though I do still disagree about Homo Sapiens being just another animal. I would agree we're not special because of reason/consciousness, as was the general idea in the West in philosophy and Christianity... And yes, we do have instincts like other animals, but on top of that we also have cultural evolution, which can I think be considered a real phase shift in evolution on earth... and which does make us qualitatively different.

Do you have a source for your understanding? — T Clark

Not a single source, I've read a bunch of stuff about evolution over the years.

There was one guy in particular who gave me the idea of genetic evolution having 'offloaded' a bunch of it's "work" to cultural evolution (culture is more flexible and therefor adaptive than genes), but I don't remember his name at this moment.

The idea that organisms lose traits that become obsolete is rather commonplace and well established I think (like snakes having had feet at one time).

And then there's a lot of research on our sociality being one of our most important traits for our success.

https://www.amazon.nl/Secret-Our-Success-Evolution-Domesticating/dp/0691166854

https://darwinianbusiness.com/2016/02/29/cumulative-cultural-evolution-an-overview-of-joseph-henrichs-the-secret-of-our-success/

I don't think what I'm saying is that outlandish, but you know, I'm not a professional so I very well could be somewhat off the mark.

It would make sense, given what we know I think... but sure, hard to tell if it is true with any certainty.

EDIT: To be clear I don't want to imply that we lost "all" of those traits (as that was in the part you quoted), but that we lost at least some so that we are not 'complete' without the cultural part. Clearly we do have some instincts too.

Trial and error is induction basically, or maybe abduction more precisely.... we form theories about what we experience, and then refine them with new experiences as we go.

This process relies in part on our ability for pattern recognition, which is probably not that unlike how self-learning AI learn via neural networks. Those have existed for a long time, from the seventies or sixties, but only recently they became something that was useful, because only recently we could feed them big data gathered via the world wide web. Without big data they wouldn't get all that far in training their neural networks.

As an individual one can only experience that much in a given lifetime.... culture is our proxy for big data.

Trial and error is how we learn, yes, but not necessarily as individuals, that is to convoluted. We get most passed on by our parents, society at large, by tradition.... and then we can work with that and try out some things, sure. But almost nobody has the time, energy and the genius to make that sort of strategy work purely as an individual.



Current society is a bit of a mess, and what you feel is probably quite a "sane" reaction to all of this, you are not alone in any case. There's not a whole lot one can do about it as an individual. Realizing that we're in a bit of a shitty situation regardless of what one does, probably can help to not pile on more self-inflicted guilt on top of that. And then finding like-minded people to hang out with can help as some kind of replacement for that social/cultural structure that has eroded in modern societies.

Homo Sapiens have been around for 200,000 years. They were genetically equivalent to people today. Do you think evolution didn't provide them with the ability to make decisions and act on those decisions? Do you think people 100,000 years ago couldn't act without application of rules, objectivity or teleology? I'm sure they didn't have existential crises or nihilistic feelings. The problems you've identified are overlays on basic human behavior associated, I guess, with modern civilization. — T Clark

As someone philosophically inclined I like Taoism, probably the most philosophical religion of them all in that it is inspired by the same anti-tradition sentiments you typically find in philosophy. Western philosophy too, with Socrates, started of questioning the Gods, the customs of his time. And then Plato made a big deal out of breaking with the Homeric tradition that came before. Reason was the thing to replace it... and the rest is history as they say.

But what I think is getting more and more clear, is that we are in fact predominately 'cultural beings'. We need a culture, language, rules etc etc to prosper, because that is what gave us an edge in evolutionary terms and what was selected for. What this also means, is that because we evolved this set of abilities for cultural learning that is more flexible, we didn't need all these hard-wired traits and instincts anymore unlike other animals... and so we presumably eventually lost a lot of those traits, as tends to happen in evolution with traits that aren't useful anymore.

If true, this is probably still a bit speculative scientifically, then as humans we do in fact need and rely on this cultural superstructure because unlike other animals we lack all of these instinctive algorithmic behaviors. And presumably Homo Sapiens 200.000 years did have those structures, but they weren't really preserved because they were oral traditions for the most part. This would be a modern problem insofar as our superstructure has slowly been dissolved over the past centuries with Protestantism, liberalism, and the scientific revolution/dialectics. That was what Nietzsche was getting at with the dead of God, and the fact that we hadn't understood the real significance of it yet.... nihilism.