All life, including human life depends on the DNA’s ability to copy (replicate) itself.
The second step was intelligence and speech, where hominids and early humans who randomly invented new things could explain and teach it to each other, thus copy the idea from their own heads to other people’s heads.
(This is why I don’t think the Yudkowsky/LW model of intelligence is right. A species could have infinite technological progress by random brute-force tinkering, by trying everything in every combination, as long as they have enough capability to write down what worked and in every generation to learn all that and then tinker some more. Thus, intelligence is more about teaching and learning than about figuring things out, although of course model-building could be seen as a process of copying, of the most important features of a thing, too. “Intelligo” means “I understand”, i.e. “OK, thanks, I managed to copy your idea into my head”.)
The third step was writing and literacy, where ideas could be copied forever and widely distributed. Thus, culture, religion and science became possible.
The fourth step, Gutenberg. The fifth step, the Internet.
Everything that matters rests on copying.
Reproduction is copying (genes) and thus sex is about copying. Fighting a war is about copying, first in the training and drilling and weapons manufacturing way, but even battle strategy depends on copying the enemy commander into a model in our head and trying to predict his moves that way. Religious faith depends all on copying, holy books, social traditions, it is remarkable that in Christianity only God does not copy, but creates ex nihilo, but according to René Girard’s mimetic violence theory, even Jesus’ role can be interpreted as way to put an end to a particulary vicious form of copying: vengeance-escalation, mimetic violence.
There is hardly anything that would not rest on copying.
Philosophy professor Ruth Millikan’s insight that everything that gets copied from an ancestor has a proper function or teleofunction: it is whatever feature or function that made it and its ancestor selected for copying, in competition with all the other similar copiable things. This would mean Aristotelean teleology is correct within the field of copyable things, replicators, i.e. within biology, although in physics still obviously incorrect.
Darwinian Reactionary drew attention to it two years ago and I still don’t understand why didn’t it generate a bigger buzz. It is an extremely important insight.
I mean, this is what we were waiting for, a proper synthesis of science and philosophy, and a proper way to rescue Aristotelean teleology, which leads to so excellent common-sense predictions that intuitively it cannot be very wrong, yet modern philosophy always denied it.
The result from that is the briding of the fact-value gap and burying the naturalistic fallacy: we CAN derive values from facts: a thing is good if it is well suitable for its natural purpose, teleofunction or proper function, which is the purpose it was selected for and copied for, the purpose and the suitability for the purpose that made the ancestors of this thing selected for copying, instead of all the other potential, similar ancestors.
If the proper function of a horse is to carry riders or draw carriages, sorry, open sleighs, it’s December, and look pretty while doing so and be docile and so on, because breeders selected their ancestors for these traits, then a good horse is one that is good in these because these ware what a horse was selected and copied for.
And the same way we have better and worse citizens, and better and worse women and men in general.
What was humankind selected for? I am afraid, the answer is kind of ugly.
Men were selected to compete between groups, the cooperate within groups largely for coordinating for the sake of this competition, and have a low-key competition inside the groups as well for status and leadership. I am afraid, intelligence is all about organizing elaborate tribal raids: “coalitionary arms races”. The most civilized case, least brutal but still expensive case is arms races in prestige status, not dominance status: when Ancient Athens buildt pretty buildings and modern France built the TGV and America sent a man to the Moon in order to gain “gloire” i.e. the prestige type respect and status amongst the nations, the larger groups of mankind. If you are the type who doesn’t like blood, you should probably focus on these kinds of civilized, prestige-project competitions.
Women were selected for bearing children, for having strong and intelligent sons therefore having these heritable traits themselves (HBD kind of contradicts the more radically anti-woman aspects of RedPillery: marry a weak and stupid but attractive silly-blondie type woman and your son’s won’t be that great either), for pleasuring men and in some rarer but existing cases, to be true companions and helpers of their husbands.
We can, of course, try to revolt against nature, but at least understand what it makes – a replicator going against the function it was selected for… something I would not take lightly.
I suppose a revolt against nature would work if you would 1) change the environment, so adapted behavior is no longer functional 2) change the selection mechanism 3) wait a long time.
In other words, if we were transhumans or a humanoid race descended from the homo sapiens but evolved away from it, living in space habitats, we could and should behave really differently. But we feel any sort of romantic attachment to living on this Earth the way we were meant to, or if we want to fix the decline here and now that technology gets any chance to get to that kind of level, we have to work within the natural framework.
“The result from that is the briding of the fact-value gap and burying the naturalistic fallacy: we CAN derive values from facts” Be very careful here. Yes, virtues are natural, but it still doesn’t mean we can derive an ought from an is. Just because humanity was selected for something doesn’t mean we have to live that way, or especially that we ought to force people to live a certain way. Also, people are probably designed to be violent and be peaceful, to defect and cooperate. It’s extremely complicated. On the other hand, some people seem to have what I call “deathwish values” here: https://darwinianreactionary.wordpress.com/2014/02/25/the-shakers-deathwish-values-and-autonomy/
and I don’t think they can be reasoned out of them. Some values, like having children, must inherit the earth, and I think part of what we are trying to do is cultivate a group of people who dedicate themselves to living by these survivable values.
It sounds like you’re going through the excitement I went through when I realized the implications of these ideas.
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>It sounds like you’re going through the excitement I went through when I realized the implications of these ideas.
Yes. As Mark Pearlman wrote, there are many modern teleological philosohpies. Why did you choose Millikan? Because she is the closest to actual science? This is where my excitement comes from: we were waiting for a unification of philosophy with science for a long time. In the long run, science should make 99% of philosophy irrelevant. This strikes modern readers as weird, but for Aristotle there was no difference between investigating ethics and investigating fish. So this sounds like an important step of importing a lot of science into philosophy.
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> Yes, virtues are natural, but it still doesn’t mean we can derive an ought from an is.
We can, that is what the enthymeme is for.
Full syllogism:
A) Lifting weights incorrectly leads to injury (fact)
B) Injury is bad (value)
C) Therefore lifting weights incorrectly is bad.
Enthymeme:
All reasonable people agree that injury is bad, at least inside the community I am talking to, and those who don’t think is bad can go somewhere else. Hence the value part can be implied and the syllogism shortened to the enthymeme form: lifting weights incorrectly is bad because it leads to injury.
And people do this all the time, in normal life, it is only pro philosophers who don’t do this.
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Hmm. Reading this made me snap to a definition of teleofunction, or final cause, that I think is more widely generalizable than yours (though a superset). (I’m taking ‘teleofunction’ and ‘final cause’ to be synonymous; if this is wrong, then I’m misunderstanding your use of ‘teleofunction’ and I invite correction.)
The final cause of a thing is the reason why that thing, rather than some other thing.
This fits the easy definition regarding manufactured objects; the reason why any given thing is just the purpose for which it was manufactured. A chair was made for the purpose of sitting on; this is why the chair is a chair; and thus, the final cause of a chair is to be sat on. Similarly, the reason why a heart is a heart is to pump blood; though it was created for this purpose by an evolutionary process, rather than a process of design (assuming naturalism, anyway), it can still be coherently said to be purposeful.
It may fall down somewhat in the more esoteric and Thomistic applications of ‘final cause’, but I don’t particularly understand those anyway. But if you do subscribe to a theism in which physical laws were crafted for the purpose of enabling interesting things to happen in the universe, it works there too. I think the major difference with your definition is simply that it needn’t refer to a copy of anything; if I create something from first principles, it isn’t a copy, but it still has the final cause of whatever I made it for. (Unless you consider that to be a copy of the image I formed in my mind, but then you just take the problem one level back; presumably the final cause of my mental image of a thing is at least related to the final cause of the instantiated thing.)
Thanks for the article.
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>The final cause of a thing is the reason why that thing, rather than some other thing.
That is the essence or substance, not the final cause. Substances correspond to formal causes in Aristotelean philosophy.
Once could say that this stuff is a way to do the modern scientific stuff and reduce everything to efficient causes, but retain / reinvent substances, this time coming from efficient causes. A substance of a non-living mountain being the result of the sum of the efficient forces that shaped it, they made it what it is, while the substance of a replicator (living being) is the reason it got replicated for (final cause).
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I think you are getting most of the force of your argument from the concept ‘ethymeme’.
In the end, humans are not selected to compete, bear children or anything like that; these are the instrumental selection, rather than terminal children. The selected humans are the ones that are best at copying, whether they do that by lifelong marriage, sperm and egg donations or cloning.
I can imagine many highly pathological ways to be much better at reproducing than others. The ethymemes prevent this, but they are very dependent on your social circles.
Your main mistake, I think, is your underestimation of the LW model. The LW model is about efficiency: quickly selecting the best. Biological evolution is a very inefficient copy/select mechanism; it takes vast spans of time to do anything. Societal evolution (as in politics) is a lot faster, social evolution (as in norms) even faster, but the fastest is technological evolution. Note that all these four are nested systems; bioevolution dominates long time scales, but acts on the same things as others, which each dominate shorter time scales.
If you nest two copy/select mechanisms, then the fast one can exploit the slow one. Society is built to fit our biology, our norms are built to fit society (and biology) and technology is built to fit our norms (and society and biology).
The things you mentioned, like competition, were mentioned for a good reason: humans like them. They are, in a sense, our fundamental values (along with several other ones, that you didn’t mention). We have those values because they allowed us to reproduce more. However, our biology (and therefore fundamental values) have not catched up to our technology (which determines our ability to implement those values). Therefore, we can implement them much better with modern technology, using modern norms in modern society.
Needless to say, I am not a reactionary.
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>I think you are getting most of the force of your argument from the concept ‘ethymeme’.
I very much like that concept, that is an excellent way to derive values from facts. Do you have a problem with it? Aside from the fact that an enthymeme is not universally compelling but only within a group of people who already share a lot of values, but why should arguments be universally compelling? Looking at the history of the past few hundred years, perhaps we will be arguing forever if we keep trying to make universally compelling arguments, perhaps it is better to have in-group arguments now and groups learn to agree to disagree.
>However, our biology (and therefore fundamental values) have not catched up to our technology (which determines our ability to implement those values). Therefore, we can implement them much better with modern technology, using modern norms in modern society.
I am not sure I understand it. Implement them – implement what? Biological values? Via modern norms? How?
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“I very much like that concept, that is an excellent way to derive values from facts. Do you have a problem with it?”
There are advantages and disadvantages to enthymemes.
First, I don’t see any good reason to distinguish between enthymemes (which, afaict, means ‘moral memes’) and more general memes. If you have a good reason, please do share, because that sounds really interesting.
Basically, the advantage of memes is that they usually are here for good reasons, even if you don’t know them. They are essentially cultural information, and the information in any above average quality culture is obviously going to be above average quality.
However, I wouldn’t really call obtaining information from said memes ‘deriving’; I’d rather call it learning. You *learn* morality from enthymemes.
Now, there are several disadvantages. For example, enthymemes will frequently contradict each other, e.g. people who disagree whether freedom or security is more important. To solve these contradictions, you need to have some underlying theory that justifies each of the memes, so you can compare the justifications and see which are most important in the specific situations.
Another disadvantage is that if you don’t derive values by other means than enthymemes, you will be stuck with whatever bad values you have. Obviously, that is not a problem if you don’t believe in the existence of bad values/moral evolution. (Which I do believe in, because I’m a progressive. :P)
“Aside from the fact that an enthymeme is not universally compelling but only within a group of people who already share a lot of values, but why should arguments be universally compelling? ”
Well, *assuming* that the discussion is actually about some real specific question, there should be a correct answer, and any good argument should be related to this answer, and so if the argument is not universally compelling it is not a good argument.
The problem is that the discussion might actually not be about some real specific question. In that case one has to wonder why there is even a discussion; a negotiation seems more appropriate. (Though to be fair, most things that are supposedly discussions about questions actually look more like negotiations.)
“I am not sure I understand it. Implement them – implement what? Biological values? Via modern norms? How?”
Well, it could be a good idea to be concrete.
One biological value might be “My ingroup should not slowly starve to death while being infected by deadly diseases and attacked by insects.” In post-industrial times, we solve this with technology (which was invented via social norms that allowed accumulation of knowledge etc.), while in pre-industrial times it wasn’t solved very well.
There are other plausible biological values, but most claims are obviously going to be controversial. I think they’re similar to what Robin Hanson calls forager values, and that Robin Hanson’s farmer values are essentially what happens when people with forager values have to battle against a Malthusian trap. I absolutely expect that you will disagree with this, because this is a somewhat prog way of seeing things.
Anyway, Robin Hanson’s forager/farmer thesis is essentially that people naturally gravitate towards forager values (i.e. forager values = biological values), but that human values are sufficiently plastic that other value sets that work better (i.e. farmer values) can become common in places where you are very resource-limited.
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”marry a weak and stupid but attractive silly-blondie type woman and your son’s won’t be that great either”
Seems to be a trend that is occurring. With the implication that there is a strong incentive to select for intelligent men and dull women. Even if in the short-run it results in sons that are not as impressive as their fathers.
If more intelligent men reproduce and more intelligent women do not. Then this may be what happens.
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It is great that you mention horses. Some thousand years ago, a “good” male horse was one that that was vicious and aggressive in defending its herd, making equally vicious offspring etc.
Then the environment changed, and now the male ancestor of all existing horses is one who was probably a very “bad” horse by your standards, probably a loser at biting and kicking his ways to exclusive mating opportunities but more suitable to live as a captive of humans.
Did it at that point acquire a new telos and became good? What happened to the wild horses’ telos? And are you certain your backward looking analysis of what makes a valuable man is not similarly outdated?
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Darwinism is already teleological..
Modern Darwinian evolutionary theory is proud that it has cast off the quaint Aristotelean notion of teleological cause, causa finalis. Instead, it sticks to the strict scientificity of efficient cause. Or so it claims. Evolution is said to proceed via natural selection that selects the successful living species that are generated by chance mutations of genes. The criterion of success is simply that a species survives, for there is a so-called ‘struggle of survival’ among the species.
Teleological explanation, by contrast, is said to ‘explain’ the successful features of living beings that allow them to survive in terms of their purposeful design by some maker or other. For instance, the beaks of certain species of finches would be designed to be adapted specifically to a certain environment, thus enabling the finches to successfully survive to the point of reproduction. (If you don’t believe this is how teleology in evolution is thought about, listen to the reputable philosopher of science, Michael Ruse, in his recent lecture on the Gaia Hypothesis.) Evolutionary theory pooh poohs the ‘ridiculous’ idea of teleological design.
But is evolutionary theory too quick to assume airs of superiority?
First of all, its claim to stick to efficient causality is shaky, since the mutation of species relies essentially on chance, i.e. contingency. In Aristotle’s thinking this is change _kata symbebaekos_, i.e. change that just ‘comes along’ (from _symbainein_ ‘to go along with’). Mutations just ‘happen’, without any cause at all being able to be named, let alone any efficient cause. Contingent being, i.e. the mode of being _kata symbebaekos_, is opposed in Aristotle to being _kath’ auto_, i.e. being according to itself, or being in itself, intrinsic, essential being. Thus e.g. human being is ‘according to itself’ being that ‘has the logos, language’, whereas whether a human being is white is contingent; whiteness just ‘comes along’ as an accidental attribute to human being.
Second of all, and more importantly, that life has a _telos_ does not boil down to the notion that each species were purposefully designed. Purpose (_hou heneka_) in Aristotle is not to be equated with _telos_, since it is only one kind of _telos_. The scientists miss this. Furthermore, they overlook that they already unwittingly name the _telos_ of life, of course, without thinking at all about it, for they say there is a ‘struggle for survival’. This means life is essentially a will to live. According to Aristotle (and today, modern science is by no means beyond Aristotle, but abysmally ignorant of his thinking), life is that mode of being characterized essentially by _metabolae kath’ auto_, i.e. by movement/change from within itself. Living beings move/change by themselves, rather than having to be moved by something else. Aristotle has four kinds of movement/change according to i) where (locomotion), ii) how much (growth and decay) iii) how (qualitative change, such as when a dog learns a new trick or a tree’s leaves change colour) and iv) what (reproduction). The last named is a synonym for survival of the species. Life is that mode of being that strives to perpetuate itself.
Now, the evolutionary scientists’ next move is to pooh pooh the idea that life could be characterized as essentially a will to live. Where’s the will? they ask. Have you asked a plant lately what it wants? But there are different levels of will. Will that sees what change it wants and strives to get it is purposeful will. Wishing is a will that doesn’t strive. Urge or drive is blind will, but nevertheless directed toward some end, some _telos_. Living beings are essentially characterized by the urge to survive. This urge includes the drives to flee or otherwise avert life-threatening danger, to nourish themselves, to reproduce.
So scientific evolutionary theory, albeit implicitly, smuggles in from the outset the _telos_ of all life: the urge to survive. Life is that mode of being with the urge to perpetuate its own self-movement. All living beings strive essentially to bring themselves into presence and maintain this self-moving presence for as long as possible. One aspect of life’s self-movement is reproduction itself, through which the species itself is propagated.
Evolutionary theory is at a loss to account for the essence, the nature of life itself as self-movement. Its apparatus of efficient causality must capitulate before this self-presencing of life itself. This does not prevent it, however, from blindly and vainly seeking the efficient causes of life itself through, say. molecular biology, thus maintaining the efficient causal hierarchy for the ultimate scientific explanation of the cosmos from physics through chemistry to biology (and then on to explaining human consciousness itself as some complicated kind of neuronal processing).
Modern science is in its essence wedded to efficient causality, i.e. to effectiveness, and it will defend to the bitter end this betrothal to the will to effective power — that is, until there is an historical occasion for an alternative way of thinking to make inroads against its dogma. Modern science’s arrogant over-self-confidence is the present-day form of superstition that reigns in the universities right through the media to everyday prejudices.
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Not sure I understand your point, but if teleology requires a maker, the process of evolution as such could be easily called such a maker. I mean, just because it is distributed and does not have a lasting personal identity, why, if you look into e.g. Buddhism they say even we don’t have one.
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>I still don’t understand why didn’t it generate a bigger buzz
I thought “the only morality is civilization” is all about bridging the fact-value gap using the replicator idea. The reasoning goes like this:
For moral reasoning to exist, there has to be language, and more specifically written language. Written language is a product and tool of civilization. Therefore civilization and only civilization selects morality. Thus morality is good insofar as it helps the replication of civilization itself. Hence, *the only morality is civilization*.
Isn’t this the core of NRx?
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