You may wonder why you got downvoted. I didn’t, I upvoted. But I know the local culture. There is a strong intention to overcome biological or other limitations. Maybe we can have it both (as can be seen in the other comment).
I also think there has been a memetic evolution. A co-evolution of people and culture.
One argument that always seemed most convincing to me in favor of “progress is real” is Darwinian one: ultimately, success should be measured via “survival of the fittest.” [bold by me]
I think you are right that the current value systems result from evolutionary processes. That describes them decently. But you cannot derive a “should” from that. If we engineer values, the evolutionary pressures stop, and more complex processes start to take over. We could conceivably freeze culture in place or speed up change.
Thanks for your comment! From this and other comments, I get the feeling I didn’t make my goal clear: I’m trying to see if there is any objective way to define progress / values (starting from assuming moral relativism). I’m not tryin to make any claim as to what these values should be. Darwinian argument is the only one I’ve encountered that made sense to me—and so here I’m pushing back on it a bit—but maybe there are other good ways to objectively define values? Imho, we tend to implicitly ground many of our values in this Darwinian perspective—hence I think it’s an important topic.
I like what you point out about the distinction between prescriptive vs descriptive values here. Within moral relativism, I guess there is nothing to say about prescriptive values at all. So yes, Darwinism can only comment on descriptive values.
However, I don’t think this is quite the same as the fallacies you mention. “Might makes right” (Darwinian) is not the same as “natural makes right”—natural is a series of historical accidents, while survival of the fittest is a theoretical construct (with the caveat that at the scale of nations, number of conflicts is small, so historical accidents could become important in determining “fittest”). Similarly, “fittest” as determined by who survives seems like an objective fact, rather than a mind projection (with the caveat that an “individual” may be a mind projection—but I think that’s a bit deeper).
yeah, that could be a cleaner line of argument, I agree—though I think I’d need to rewrite the whole thing.
For testable predictions… I could at least see models of extreme cases—purely physical or purely memetic selection—and perhaps being able to find real-world example where one or the other or neither is a good description. That could be fun
You may wonder why you got downvoted. I didn’t, I upvoted. But I know the local culture. There is a strong intention to overcome biological or other limitations. Maybe we can have it both (as can be seen in the other comment).
I also think there has been a memetic evolution. A co-evolution of people and culture.
But I think you commit a kind of Naturalistic Fallacy (see also Mind Projection Fallacy) here:
I think you are right that the current value systems result from evolutionary processes. That describes them decently. But you cannot derive a “should” from that. If we engineer values, the evolutionary pressures stop, and more complex processes start to take over. We could conceivably freeze culture in place or speed up change.
Thanks for your comment!
From this and other comments, I get the feeling I didn’t make my goal clear: I’m trying to see if there is any objective way to define progress / values (starting from assuming moral relativism). I’m not tryin to make any claim as to what these values should be. Darwinian argument is the only one I’ve encountered that made sense to me—and so here I’m pushing back on it a bit—but maybe there are other good ways to objectively define values?
Imho, we tend to implicitly ground many of our values in this Darwinian perspective—hence I think it’s an important topic.
I like what you point out about the distinction between prescriptive vs descriptive values here. Within moral relativism, I guess there is nothing to say about prescriptive values at all. So yes, Darwinism can only comment on descriptive values.
However, I don’t think this is quite the same as the fallacies you mention. “Might makes right” (Darwinian) is not the same as “natural makes right”—natural is a series of historical accidents, while survival of the fittest is a theoretical construct (with the caveat that at the scale of nations, number of conflicts is small, so historical accidents could become important in determining “fittest”). Similarly, “fittest” as determined by who survives seems like an objective fact, rather than a mind projection (with the caveat that an “individual” may be a mind projection—but I think that’s a bit deeper).
I think you should make clear that you are describing natural selection effects and not derive any norms from it (“should”).
It would also be nice if you could make testable predictions (“if this effect continues, then we should see more/less of...”).
yeah, that could be a cleaner line of argument, I agree—though I think I’d need to rewrite the whole thing.
For testable predictions… I could at least see models of extreme cases—purely physical or purely memetic selection—and perhaps being able to find real-world example where one or the other or neither is a good description. That could be fun