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Do you think we will ever turn back to eugenics? It has deeply immoral roots and has led to some of the most messed up scenarios in our history, but it is also

Do you think we will ever turn back to eugenics? It has deeply immoral roots and has led to some of the most messed up scenarios in our history, but it is also a crazy powerful tool we have been unable to leverage in a non-evil way. (This is kinda tangential but related) I have a weird theory about humanities purpose: Assuming someone/thing created life (if life wasn't created then it truly is random chaos and we have no purpose), but if life was intentionally made then we were created for a reason. Determining what that reason was will tell us what our purpose is. The only clue we have is evolution. If we can reverse engineer the mechanisms of evolution it should give us clues about why we are here. What is evolution driving us to become? If we can figure that out we might be able to deduce what our purpose is. I feel like one of life's huge leaps forward, on par with single->multicellular, is recognizing that these evolutionary mechanisms exist, furthering our understanding of and leveraging them. Anyway that is a long ramble to say it sucks that we as a species cannot really touch any kind of eugenics without genociding eachother.

throwaway4aday 4y ago
> If we can reverse engineer the mechanisms of evolution Evolution is a very simple process, broadly speaking. You can implement your own model of it fairly easily. Survival is basically the only driving force, only those variations that survive to reproduce will be present in the next generation. It's a useful tool but we shouldn't let it guide us since it is quite blind. > What is evolution driving us to become? There is no destination for the evolutionary process. It's creation by subtraction really, everything that doesn't work gets eliminated. Mind you, it's always only applicable to the current circumstances. What works in one time and place will not always work in another. Hence the constant change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm
DiggyJohnson 4y ago
This is one of the wildest things I’ve read on the internet… this year? Why does a lack of creative design mean human experience is meaningless?
- apsurd 4y ago
  Agree, thank you for being first to say it. That humanity is _converging_ on some "intentional" optimal outcome is dramatically depressing to me in a way that i wasn't prepared to read today. Now i don't know what's left or right, but insofar as my time here is concerned, let chaos blossom! Way more fun
- ericmcer 4y ago
  Haha thanks Well a lack of a creator means we invent our own purpose I suppose, and garner whatever ethereal meaning from that we can. That just feels hollow to me. The idea that we are just biological machines serving the unfathomable aims of some sky daddy is unsettling but suits me better than our purpose being a bunch of lame platitudes about being kind or whatever.
  - 6510 4y ago
    but then sky daddy is the biological machine inventing his own purpose.
fardo 4y ago
>Do you think we will ever turn back to eugenics? As the word is currently used, no, but mostly because it’s seemingly used to represent, in the public consciousness > intentional genetic control we dislike When we do things such as “screening for down syndrome” [1], we are already actively engaged in a eugenics project, but we don’t think of it as one because it’s the kind of intentional genetic control we like. I expect many, many more “genetic controls we like” as medical and biological sciences advance, I think “eugenics” will always be viewed as a dead end. [1] https://www.pennmedicine.org/updates/blogs/womens-health/2012/august/screening-for-down-syndrome https://www.pennmedicine.org/updates/blogs/womens-health/201...
- skissane 4y ago
  > When we do things such as “screening for down syndrome” [1], we are already actively engaged in a eugenics project, but we don’t think of it as one because it’s the kind of intentional genetic control we like. Historically, many cases of "eugenics" involved a lack of informed consent, even blatant coercion. That screening is entirely voluntary–you have the right to say "no", and I know couples who have (due to moral objections grounded in their religious beliefs). That's a very big difference.
  - chii 4y ago
    Yes this! Eugenics is only when someone else decides it for you.
    - pharmakom 4y ago
      it's not encoded in law, but we do have a society where who can have many children is determined by economic factors that are not fully under ones control.
      - chii 4y ago
        lack of economic ability is not the same as someone forcing you not to have children. And you can still have children even when facing economic hardship - lots of people have done it (think immigrant families who start out poor). I would also claim that a lot of western nations subsidize families already, so economic factors is not considered eugenics imho.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gnramires 4y ago
Let me tell you what our purpose is: consciousness. It's to have good conscious experiences. I think we'll soon achieve a pretty good understanding of meaning that we haven't acknowledge in a long time. I think philosophy has been misleading us into thinking purpose/meaning/motivation is not philosophically tractable. But once you acknowledge it's a property of consciousness (which I think is understandable to be a new insight, given we have finally come to terms with being amazing neural machines ourselves), I think it's a matter of studying information and neural experiences, together with a broader view (of survival, sustainability, and ethics) to have a pretty good idea of what it means to have a good life. My current hypothesis is as follows: (1) Richness/Depth of experience; (2) Some kind of notion of beauty; (3) A well-functioning motivation system (which we associate with 'happiness'/'satisfaction'/etc. (4) Sustainability and ethics: ensuring all sentient beings through time and space share this wealth. I hope we can approach a formal theory of ethics and meaning soon. I hope to form a community around discussing and organizing this knowledge (I am notoriously bad with promises though, so if anyone can please help, and join in). Imagine we had a "Super Declaration of [Lifeform] Human Rights", nearly-universally accepted, to guide us! (I think Effective Altruism is a nice step in this direction)
brutusborn 4y ago
I think we are like fish in a pond, we don't have the cognitive tools to understand complex enough ideas to determine our 'purpose.' Seen in this way, 'purpose' is simply a symbol that represents another cognition, so asking the question 'what is our purpose?' is essentially meaningless (like a circular definition). I have been influenced a lot by Taoism and Zen Buddhism in particular, where the focus is less on answers to questions, but contemplating the phenomena of the questions themselves.
- svieira 4y ago
  You're absolutely right - purpose does presuppose another cognition. The good thing is that if we have purpose then there's Someone out there who created us with a purpose. And if that someone wanted us to know what it was, they could tell us in many ways (including by leaving us with a desire for something so innate that we can't substitute anything else for it).
  - brutusborn 4y ago
    I used to follow this logic but I think it is limited by the fact that using desire as a guide for meaning is a cognition that can be overruled by other congitions. E.g. a religious person may decide to forego actions related to sexual desire because their philosophy follows some theology with rules on sexuality. You could argue that the religious devotion is just a more fundamental desire, but I think this leads to a circular definition ("meaning is derived from our fundamental desires" and "fundamental desires are what we find meaningful"). Instead, "what is the meaning of life" can be interpreted as a question with no cognitive answer, and thus in itself meaningless to ask. The question must then be "what is my meaning in life?" which is up to each person to decide. Another question: if we desire something, how do we know that _someone_ gave us that desire? And who gave them the desire to give us that particular desire? I think it's turtles all the way down (but I'm not philosopher so would be keen to hear a rebuttal)
    - svieira 4y ago
      I'm with Aristotle - "all men desire happiness". Nothing else is desired for its own sake, but always for the sake of "happiness". That said, I don't think that knowing that happiness is what we desire tells us very much. We need to go deeper or wider and learn more about the world and ourselves in order to answer the question "in what does our happiness consist". In other words, we need to examine what we have received (since the world and even our selves are experienced as a gift). Which, coincidentally, is one of the ways that we can intuit that someone gave us what we have - because the principle of sufficient reason says that "an effect must have a cause sufficient to explain it" and we are an effect. "If I am a gift receiver, there must be a gift giver, and as their gift is great they must be greater still to be able to give so much away".

throwaway4aday 4y ago

> If we can reverse engineer the mechanisms of evolution Evolution is a very simple process, broadly speaking. You can implement your own model of it fairly easily. Survival is basically the only driving force, only those variations that survive to reproduce will be present in the next generation. It's a useful tool but we shouldn't let it guide us since it is quite blind. > What is evolution driving us to become? There is no destination for the evolutionary process. It's creation by subtraction really, everything that doesn't work gets eliminated. Mind you, it's always only applicable to the current circumstances. What works in one time and place will not always work in another. Hence the constant change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm

DiggyJohnson 4y ago

This is one of the wildest things I’ve read on the internet… this year? Why does a lack of creative design mean human experience is meaningless?

apsurd 4y ago
Agree, thank you for being first to say it. That humanity is _converging_ on some "intentional" optimal outcome is dramatically depressing to me in a way that i wasn't prepared to read today. Now i don't know what's left or right, but insofar as my time here is concerned, let chaos blossom! Way more fun
ericmcer 4y ago
Haha thanks Well a lack of a creator means we invent our own purpose I suppose, and garner whatever ethereal meaning from that we can. That just feels hollow to me. The idea that we are just biological machines serving the unfathomable aims of some sky daddy is unsettling but suits me better than our purpose being a bunch of lame platitudes about being kind or whatever.
- 6510 4y ago
  but then sky daddy is the biological machine inventing his own purpose.

fardo 4y ago

>Do you think we will ever turn back to eugenics? As the word is currently used, no, but mostly because it’s seemingly used to represent, in the public consciousness > intentional genetic control we dislike When we do things such as “screening for down syndrome” [1], we are already actively engaged in a eugenics project, but we don’t think of it as one because it’s the kind of intentional genetic control we like. I expect many, many more “genetic controls we like” as medical and biological sciences advance, I think “eugenics” will always be viewed as a dead end. [1] https://www.pennmedicine.org/updates/blogs/womens-health/2012/august/screening-for-down-syndrome https://www.pennmedicine.org/updates/blogs/womens-health/201...

skissane 4y ago
> When we do things such as “screening for down syndrome” [1], we are already actively engaged in a eugenics project, but we don’t think of it as one because it’s the kind of intentional genetic control we like. Historically, many cases of "eugenics" involved a lack of informed consent, even blatant coercion. That screening is entirely voluntary–you have the right to say "no", and I know couples who have (due to moral objections grounded in their religious beliefs). That's a very big difference.
- chii 4y ago
  Yes this! Eugenics is only when someone else decides it for you.
  - pharmakom 4y ago
    it's not encoded in law, but we do have a society where who can have many children is determined by economic factors that are not fully under ones control.
    - chii 4y ago
      lack of economic ability is not the same as someone forcing you not to have children. And you can still have children even when facing economic hardship - lots of people have done it (think immigrant families who start out poor). I would also claim that a lot of western nations subsidize families already, so economic factors is not considered eugenics imho.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gnramires 4y ago

Let me tell you what our purpose is: consciousness. It's to have good conscious experiences. I think we'll soon achieve a pretty good understanding of meaning that we haven't acknowledge in a long time. I think philosophy has been misleading us into thinking purpose/meaning/motivation is not philosophically tractable. But once you acknowledge it's a property of consciousness (which I think is understandable to be a new insight, given we have finally come to terms with being amazing neural machines ourselves), I think it's a matter of studying information and neural experiences, together with a broader view (of survival, sustainability, and ethics) to have a pretty good idea of what it means to have a good life. My current hypothesis is as follows: (1) Richness/Depth of experience; (2) Some kind of notion of beauty; (3) A well-functioning motivation system (which we associate with 'happiness'/'satisfaction'/etc. (4) Sustainability and ethics: ensuring all sentient beings through time and space share this wealth. I hope we can approach a formal theory of ethics and meaning soon. I hope to form a community around discussing and organizing this knowledge (I am notoriously bad with promises though, so if anyone can please help, and join in). Imagine we had a "Super Declaration of [Lifeform] Human Rights", nearly-universally accepted, to guide us! (I think Effective Altruism is a nice step in this direction)

brutusborn 4y ago

I think we are like fish in a pond, we don't have the cognitive tools to understand complex enough ideas to determine our 'purpose.' Seen in this way, 'purpose' is simply a symbol that represents another cognition, so asking the question 'what is our purpose?' is essentially meaningless (like a circular definition). I have been influenced a lot by Taoism and Zen Buddhism in particular, where the focus is less on answers to questions, but contemplating the phenomena of the questions themselves.

svieira 4y ago
You're absolutely right - purpose does presuppose another cognition. The good thing is that if we have purpose then there's Someone out there who created us with a purpose. And if that someone wanted us to know what it was, they could tell us in many ways (including by leaving us with a desire for something so innate that we can't substitute anything else for it).
- brutusborn 4y ago
  I used to follow this logic but I think it is limited by the fact that using desire as a guide for meaning is a cognition that can be overruled by other congitions. E.g. a religious person may decide to forego actions related to sexual desire because their philosophy follows some theology with rules on sexuality. You could argue that the religious devotion is just a more fundamental desire, but I think this leads to a circular definition ("meaning is derived from our fundamental desires" and "fundamental desires are what we find meaningful"). Instead, "what is the meaning of life" can be interpreted as a question with no cognitive answer, and thus in itself meaningless to ask. The question must then be "what is my meaning in life?" which is up to each person to decide. Another question: if we desire something, how do we know that _someone_ gave us that desire? And who gave them the desire to give us that particular desire? I think it's turtles all the way down (but I'm not philosopher so would be keen to hear a rebuttal)
  - svieira 4y ago
    I'm with Aristotle - "all men desire happiness". Nothing else is desired for its own sake, but always for the sake of "happiness". That said, I don't think that knowing that happiness is what we desire tells us very much. We need to go deeper or wider and learn more about the world and ourselves in order to answer the question "in what does our happiness consist". In other words, we need to examine what we have received (since the world and even our selves are experienced as a gift). Which, coincidentally, is one of the ways that we can intuit that someone gave us what we have - because the principle of sufficient reason says that "an effect must have a cause sufficient to explain it" and we are an effect. "If I am a gift receiver, there must be a gift giver, and as their gift is great they must be greater still to be able to give so much away".