From: Francois-Rene Rideau (fare@tunes.org)
Date: Thu May 10 2001 - 19:13:10 MDT
On Thu, May 10, 2001 at 10:03:29AM -0700, Neal Blaikie wrote:
> I'm all for my own individual autonomy and freedom (particularly from
> death), but am also concerned about everyone else's
There is no opposition between egoism and altruism.
Don't believe pseudo-philosophers (particularly collectivist ones)
who will have you think so.
See for instance Henry Hazlitt's "Foundations of Morality"
http://www.hazlitt.org/e-texts/morality/
> --not from any altruistic sense, but from a practical one.
What does "altruistic sense" mean? How does it oppose practicality?
You're resorting to false dilemmas between choices that are not even
mutually exclusive.
>> Evolution is fine, fabulous. Natural selection is clumsy, slow, tyranical,
>> and incredibly inefficient. Take it down from the pedestal.
>
> Well put! It's long been my contention that where natural selection ends,
> artifical selection begins
Yet another false dilemma.
Man is part of nature.
Any artificial choice is also ipso facto a natural choice.
If you're going to oppose "natural" to "artificial",
then you must establish a believable assessment of what this
"natural choice" would be in absence of humans.
Which is of course _completely_ meaningless in any case
were human behavior is considered.
> Intelligent agents (ourselves, for instance)
So you think you're intelligent? prove it! I don't believe you, so far.
> then become responsible for their own evolution,
Here's a shameful hysteron-proteron.
There is no way in which intelligence makes responsibility possible.
Quite on the contrary, responsibility is the very principle behind
natural selection that made evolution possible, and that caused
intelligence (or at least, any trace thereof that can be found)
to appear, to begin with.
> I don't see how it could be anything but
> "natural" for us to do so.
Remove your quotes, and consider how "do so" is generic in your sentence.
Then you'll have reached the tautology. Now, move on.
> "plain vanilla natural selection"
Most of the natural selection ain't vanilla.
Although vanilla is indeed the product of natural selection.
> A similar perspective is presented much more eloquently in the last chapter
> of Wyn Wachhorst's The Dream of Spaceflight: Essays on the Near Edge of
> Infinity, a book I would highly recommend.
If your post was coherent with the ideas of this book, then I'd definitely
disrecommend it. But I prefer to think that your recommendation is worthless
in itself, and does not taint a book that might otherwise be admirable.
[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[ TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System | http://tunes.org ]
As far as natural selection applies to the human world, we don't ever get to
"let nature decide", because we ARE part of that nature that decides. Hence,
any claim to "let the nature decide" is just a fallacy to promote one point
of view against others, or to ignore one's responsibilities.
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