"It is conditional on various things, such as attractiveness and fidelity"
This is also wrong, since people stayed married into old age. You are behaving as if today's vulgarity is natural. There were more checks in place in the past anyway, a mentally ill hunchback like my father would not have been allowed to reproduce, and if he did, they would have killed him.
When it comes to sexuality, Andy Nowicki is the only living auhtor worth reading, as he is anti-sex. Esp. his "Confessions of a Would-Be Wanker" and "Notes Before Death".
Wow, I never knew that the existence of exceptions proves that a general principle is incorrect. So, because some birds have broken wings, it is wrong to say that birds fly. That's a great insight. It could only be produced by a very special person.
While there are certain guiding principles for each concentric circle, do you think that if man is to ultimately survive (and thrive) in the long-haul, evolution will require of him to expand the application of unconditional love as the guiding principle beyond simply his own family? If, as you said, we "encompass the entire universe," could it be that this is in fact man's inherent, evolutionary purpose - and therefore, the purpose of the entire universe that we are?
No. There is no telos to life or the cosmos. Each individual organism has its own purpose. We can create collective values. That's what society is based on. Collective values are solutions to problems of cooperation.
To maintain modern civilization, with advanced technology, we need new collective values. But those values would not include unconditional love. Even in the family, unconditional love is mostly toward children, not parents, spouses, etc. The reason love for children is unconditional is that those children carry the purpose of the parents (reproduction). So, unconditional love for one's children is really love for oneself. It's all selfish.
To maintain modern civilization, we need to understand and accept these circles. For example, we need to accept the distinction between individual values and collective values. We need to understand that individuals are selfish, and that what is good for the individual is not necessarily good for the collective, and vice versa. That's beyond the scope of this comment, of course, but I've written about it elsewhere.
You, as a subject, encompass the universe, but only in the sense that your subjectivity is a totality (to you). From your perspective, everything is about you. It doesn't follow that you encompass the objective universe. Objectively, you are tiny speck in a vast universe.
I think you are trying to fit a religion onto reality, and it's not going to fit. That's why all religions are dishonest and unrealistic. People don't want to stare into the abyss. Religion offers them a fake alternative. But if you want to honestly understand reality and the human condition, you need to stare into the abyss.
I'm definitely not attempting to "fit a religion onto reality." I've reasoned my way out of the contradictory delusions of religion, thankfully. I happily wear the badge of heretic, and I'm all about staring into the abyss.
> There is no telos to life of the cosmos.
Wouldn't you argue that the telos of life or the cosmos is to survive - to continue it's existence? Human beings, like all living things, are ultimately reproduction machines, as you say. Spinoza had a similar argument with his idea of conatus - the striving to persevere in being. You admit that "children carry the purpose of the parents (reproduction)."
> Unconditional love for one's children is really love for oneself. It's all selfish.
Is the conatus which drives me actually selfish? Because it's not my personal existence which I'm continuing by laboring to maintain a marriage and raise 8 children. And I certainly have no hope for any egoistic afterlife in a mansion in the sky. It's ultimately aimed at the selfless continuation of the human race, is it not? I would say those who don't extrinsically value reproduction are in fact the selfish ones. It would be much easier to forgo a life of labor and sacrifice to do my part to reproduce and instead live a hedonistic life.
> To maintain modern civilization, with advanced technology, we need new collective values.
Do you think there are any intrinsic values to human nature? Or, like religion, are all values merely extrinsically imposed or socially agreed upon?
Thanks for your thoughts and writings. You are a breath of fresh air for sure.
I don't believe that there is a telos to the cosmos. Organisms have purposes because of the cycle of reproduction. The form of an organism was selected to have the effect of reproduction. There is a causal cycle in the abstract form: seed to plant to seed to plant, etc. Evolution creates forms that reproduce themselves. That bootstraps purpose out of causality.
You are driven by emotions that evolved to generate reproductively selfish behavior. We are social and family animals, so we have emotions to generate social and family behaviors, such as caring for children. Those emotions have reproductively selfish functions.
So, yeah, if you are raising 8 children, you are being reproductively selfish (and reproductively successful). Reproduction isn't instrumental to something greater, such as the continuation of the human species. Purpose exists at the level of the organism, not the species.
There is a principle called the selection of the stable (which I talk about in that book), which applies to some physical systems. For example, the Sun is stable for a long time, because there is a balance between gravitational collapse and thermal expansion, which regulates the rate of nuclear fusion. If you look around, you see things that are stable, because stable things persist. You could call that a kind of telos, but it is not the same as biological telos, which is reproduction, not survival or stability. Both involve loops.
Intuitive values arise out of emotions in an environment. Emotions are the deepest level of normativity in the brain. Certain values will naturally arise in most environments. Everyone values food, shelter, comfort, etc. But valuing reproduction is not natural. As we change the environment, individuals need new values to make them act adaptively. We also need new collective values to guide social action. These would be explicit values, and not necessarily intuitive at first. However, we also get values from culture, and social validation can change some values. Collective values are entirely social/cultural.
Thanks for the recommended readings. I’ll check them out.
> Valuing reproduction is not natural. As we change the environment, individuals need new values to make them act adaptively.
By “act adaptively” do you mean actions which lead to reproduction? How can reproduction not be natural? And why would we want to promote values that are unnatural?
Furthermore, if reproduction is unnatural and selfish, wouldn’t these new values promoting reproduction themselves be natural and selfless? If so, why wouldn’t people act intrinsically upon them, according to their nature?
Of course reproduction is natural. Valuing reproduction is not natural. E.g. it is natural to love your child -- that is a natural value. It arises intuitively. It is natural to want to avoid death. It is natural for a man to want sex with a beautiful woman. These values arise intuitively. Most people do not value reproduction, because it doesn't arise intuitively from experience. It's too abstract.
The motivation mechanism consists of many different emotions or drives, which motivate different types of action. There is no "reproduction drive". So, most people have no desire to reproduce. They want to eat when they are hungry. They want to be wealthy. They want sex and love, etc. If they have children, they love their children.
Yes, "act adaptively" means actions that contribute to reproductive fitness.
Reproduction is natural and selfish, at least biologically. There are other notions of "selfishness". See:
It seems the motivation mechanisms (consisting of different emotions or drives) are biological adaptations - they contribute to reproductive fitness. They are a means to an end (i.e., reproduction).
The problem, so far as I can tell, is not that we (as modern humans) don’t biologically value reproduction, but rather that we don’t psychologically (or energetically or socially) value reproduction. Our emotions have biologically positioned us for reproduction, but we fail to make the affirmative choice to actually reproduce.
In this sense, couldn’t it be said that we intrinsically but not extrinsically value reproduction? We effectively suffer from cognitive dissonance. We are selfishly raging against the (reproductive) machine.
"It is conditional on various things, such as attractiveness and fidelity"
This is also wrong, since people stayed married into old age. You are behaving as if today's vulgarity is natural. There were more checks in place in the past anyway, a mentally ill hunchback like my father would not have been allowed to reproduce, and if he did, they would have killed him.
When it comes to sexuality, Andy Nowicki is the only living auhtor worth reading, as he is anti-sex. Esp. his "Confessions of a Would-Be Wanker" and "Notes Before Death".
Too bad you can't read or think, because this essay is actually quite relevant to you.
"like the love of a parent for a child. "
This is also wrong, people can hate or abandon their chid. My father never cared about my existence. This here is kindergarten philosophy. Sieg Gott!
Wow, I never knew that the existence of exceptions proves that a general principle is incorrect. So, because some birds have broken wings, it is wrong to say that birds fly. That's a great insight. It could only be produced by a very special person.
While there are certain guiding principles for each concentric circle, do you think that if man is to ultimately survive (and thrive) in the long-haul, evolution will require of him to expand the application of unconditional love as the guiding principle beyond simply his own family? If, as you said, we "encompass the entire universe," could it be that this is in fact man's inherent, evolutionary purpose - and therefore, the purpose of the entire universe that we are?
No. There is no telos to life or the cosmos. Each individual organism has its own purpose. We can create collective values. That's what society is based on. Collective values are solutions to problems of cooperation.
To maintain modern civilization, with advanced technology, we need new collective values. But those values would not include unconditional love. Even in the family, unconditional love is mostly toward children, not parents, spouses, etc. The reason love for children is unconditional is that those children carry the purpose of the parents (reproduction). So, unconditional love for one's children is really love for oneself. It's all selfish.
To maintain modern civilization, we need to understand and accept these circles. For example, we need to accept the distinction between individual values and collective values. We need to understand that individuals are selfish, and that what is good for the individual is not necessarily good for the collective, and vice versa. That's beyond the scope of this comment, of course, but I've written about it elsewhere.
https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2022/07/bootnecking-modern-civilization.html
You, as a subject, encompass the universe, but only in the sense that your subjectivity is a totality (to you). From your perspective, everything is about you. It doesn't follow that you encompass the objective universe. Objectively, you are tiny speck in a vast universe.
I think you are trying to fit a religion onto reality, and it's not going to fit. That's why all religions are dishonest and unrealistic. People don't want to stare into the abyss. Religion offers them a fake alternative. But if you want to honestly understand reality and the human condition, you need to stare into the abyss.
Thanks for the comment.
I'm definitely not attempting to "fit a religion onto reality." I've reasoned my way out of the contradictory delusions of religion, thankfully. I happily wear the badge of heretic, and I'm all about staring into the abyss.
> There is no telos to life of the cosmos.
Wouldn't you argue that the telos of life or the cosmos is to survive - to continue it's existence? Human beings, like all living things, are ultimately reproduction machines, as you say. Spinoza had a similar argument with his idea of conatus - the striving to persevere in being. You admit that "children carry the purpose of the parents (reproduction)."
> Unconditional love for one's children is really love for oneself. It's all selfish.
Is the conatus which drives me actually selfish? Because it's not my personal existence which I'm continuing by laboring to maintain a marriage and raise 8 children. And I certainly have no hope for any egoistic afterlife in a mansion in the sky. It's ultimately aimed at the selfless continuation of the human race, is it not? I would say those who don't extrinsically value reproduction are in fact the selfish ones. It would be much easier to forgo a life of labor and sacrifice to do my part to reproduce and instead live a hedonistic life.
> To maintain modern civilization, with advanced technology, we need new collective values.
Do you think there are any intrinsic values to human nature? Or, like religion, are all values merely extrinsically imposed or socially agreed upon?
Thanks for your thoughts and writings. You are a breath of fresh air for sure.
I don't believe that there is a telos to the cosmos. Organisms have purposes because of the cycle of reproduction. The form of an organism was selected to have the effect of reproduction. There is a causal cycle in the abstract form: seed to plant to seed to plant, etc. Evolution creates forms that reproduce themselves. That bootstraps purpose out of causality.
You might find this book interesting. It's all about biological purpose and how it arises: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BPXJ85W7
You are driven by emotions that evolved to generate reproductively selfish behavior. We are social and family animals, so we have emotions to generate social and family behaviors, such as caring for children. Those emotions have reproductively selfish functions.
So, yeah, if you are raising 8 children, you are being reproductively selfish (and reproductively successful). Reproduction isn't instrumental to something greater, such as the continuation of the human species. Purpose exists at the level of the organism, not the species.
There is a principle called the selection of the stable (which I talk about in that book), which applies to some physical systems. For example, the Sun is stable for a long time, because there is a balance between gravitational collapse and thermal expansion, which regulates the rate of nuclear fusion. If you look around, you see things that are stable, because stable things persist. You could call that a kind of telos, but it is not the same as biological telos, which is reproduction, not survival or stability. Both involve loops.
Intuitive values arise out of emotions in an environment. Emotions are the deepest level of normativity in the brain. Certain values will naturally arise in most environments. Everyone values food, shelter, comfort, etc. But valuing reproduction is not natural. As we change the environment, individuals need new values to make them act adaptively. We also need new collective values to guide social action. These would be explicit values, and not necessarily intuitive at first. However, we also get values from culture, and social validation can change some values. Collective values are entirely social/cultural.
I have an essay on the different types of value: https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2023/05/what-is-value.html
Thanks for the recommended readings. I’ll check them out.
> Valuing reproduction is not natural. As we change the environment, individuals need new values to make them act adaptively.
By “act adaptively” do you mean actions which lead to reproduction? How can reproduction not be natural? And why would we want to promote values that are unnatural?
Furthermore, if reproduction is unnatural and selfish, wouldn’t these new values promoting reproduction themselves be natural and selfless? If so, why wouldn’t people act intrinsically upon them, according to their nature?
Of course reproduction is natural. Valuing reproduction is not natural. E.g. it is natural to love your child -- that is a natural value. It arises intuitively. It is natural to want to avoid death. It is natural for a man to want sex with a beautiful woman. These values arise intuitively. Most people do not value reproduction, because it doesn't arise intuitively from experience. It's too abstract.
The motivation mechanism consists of many different emotions or drives, which motivate different types of action. There is no "reproduction drive". So, most people have no desire to reproduce. They want to eat when they are hungry. They want to be wealthy. They want sex and love, etc. If they have children, they love their children.
Yes, "act adaptively" means actions that contribute to reproductive fitness.
Reproduction is natural and selfish, at least biologically. There are other notions of "selfishness". See:
https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2015/04/altruism-and-selfishness.html
It seems the motivation mechanisms (consisting of different emotions or drives) are biological adaptations - they contribute to reproductive fitness. They are a means to an end (i.e., reproduction).
The problem, so far as I can tell, is not that we (as modern humans) don’t biologically value reproduction, but rather that we don’t psychologically (or energetically or socially) value reproduction. Our emotions have biologically positioned us for reproduction, but we fail to make the affirmative choice to actually reproduce.
In this sense, couldn’t it be said that we intrinsically but not extrinsically value reproduction? We effectively suffer from cognitive dissonance. We are selfishly raging against the (reproductive) machine.