It's an interesting point of view, but the assumption that human society is bound to replicate internally the natural law of increasing entropy is quite the naturalistic fallacy. Until now, there hasn't been, to our knowledge, rational processes in our universe, capable of self reflection and decision making regarding their own behavior and organization, so past observations are not really relevant.
Sure, humanity is just another physical process that will ultimately dissolve in a high entropy lukewarm soup, but as long as we have access to low entropy, high energy density sources, we can buck the trend and choose to do quite unoptimal things, such as assigning individual rights to every individual, even those unfit for reproduction.
Zooming out past the current Stelliferous era of the universe and into the distant black hole and dark eras might risk losing quite a bit of nuance about humanity's nature and destiny.
Thank you for summing that up so concisely. I'm going to try to remember the "so you think human nature is something more than physics?" argument for the future.
I certainly agree that human behavior isn't an immutable law of the universe in the same way that, say, gravity is. But, at least to me, it seems that treating it as such gives us a pretty good model for how the world actually works and thus allows us to make accurate predictions about the future.
anyone presenting human social grouping decisions as a law of nature is usually full of it.
the only 'natural ' aspects of the larger social organization of society come from man's evolutionary social upbringing in small groups.
civlization is based on man's 'natural' use of his reasoning and social communication to transcend his 'natural ' 'primitive state'.
there is nothing un-natural at all about trying to change ourselves. it is perfectly a function of man's natural capacities to use reason .
the 'un-natural' lie is that there is anything more 'natural' and therefor valid about how our society is supposed to be based on human biology operating at the higher civilization social level.
biology does play a role in demographics. for example society cannot transcend age demographics except by social level decisions to invent medicine and life extending technology or, the opposite, to intentionally CULL human beings by starvation and other methods ( killing is historically efficient for this purpose but very costly in blowback and resources)
if it is natural for a king and his henchmen to do as he pleases, then what is unnatural about altering human demographics by inventing medicine or by genocide?
do queen termites violate natural law by subjugating the hive only to decide when to split or breakup.
the problem with describing things as natural and 'un-natural' is that it more likely reflects the bias and subjectivity of the person attempting to propogate their views as 'good and bad' more than any meaningful discussion of what qualifies as more primarily and deeply embedded aspects of human behavior versus those that are emergent only at the social and civlizational level.
To me it's not at all "The Last Question", but more like The Matrix, where all human qualities are effectively inferior to those of machines.
Being human is not about being nice and living in harmony. It's about struggle and unfairness, compassion, competition, fights, power, tranquility, hate, love and war. I don't think there is anything rational or reasonable about it.
Ultimately, any sort of action increases entropy. So might as well enjoy it while it lasts instead of thinking of the greater good and how to force humans into this hegemony of cooperation and sustainability.
This is not to say that some of the more base instincts/behaviors shouldn't be squashed, but I think we should stop short of suppressing most of them.
It's a mistake to make any sort of broad claims about human nature because we are products of our material conditions. Hierarchies may have been a part of our past, present and even near future, but I don't think they are an intrinsic aspect of what it means to be human, because if anything hierarchies increasingly give way to egalitarianism the more advanced we become.
I get where you're coming from, but modern society is clearly pushing us away from our own nature in this instance, not towards it.
To establish this, we just need to ask the question of what would happen if the explicit state punishments for murder, rape, etc were removed. The rates would increase significantly, implying that the existence of these measures is attenuating behaviour that's otherwise rather natural.
If chimps received an electric shock each time they tried to murder another chimp, would they murder less often? Yes, because that shock is attenuating their true nature.
Admittedly, "human nature" is a rather fuzzy concept and isn't a scientifically precise term.
Well, we also organize the systems that organize people into hierarchies, and our normative choices are just as "natural." And, to continue this kind of thinking, the mushroom clouds of the next nuclear war will also be nature's means of expression, as was slavery, and also the emancipation of slaves.
Yes, I'm talking about how we justify it now and why we continue to try to use it as our primary system. That is at the very least the sales pitch. I believe it's a sensible idea - trying to ignore or change human nature seems unlikely to work, trying to harness it and direct it seems viable, and works to at least some extent in our current system.
My point was that, while that may be the aim of the system, it's not inherent to it - you are backing up my point by saying that it was not always used that way.
Are we talking semantically (what is the definition of human nature?) or something else?
IE If we find that living within a family group is how humans lived from pre-sapiens times until recent times, does that "prove" that something is human nature (it's how we evolved to behave), isn't human nature (we don't behave that way now) or is that tangental (it proves nothing)?
For the purposes of the thread, I don't think it matters much if we disagree about a technicality. I just wanted to make an analogy about the future being very alien to inhabitants of the present to the point that the ways it will be different and how we'll feel about that will be hard to conceive. Walking through a group of strangers without looking up from your phone (or iStone, if you're a caveman) would have been as weird as walking through a pack of hyenas. Insane.
If a caveman had tried to imagine how he'd feel about that world, he'd probably imagine feeling terrified all the time. Do you play with everyone's kids or ignore them too. Do you have sex with everyone? What happens if you're eating a sandwich? They wouldn't even know which questions are relevant to imagining how they'd feel.
I'm making the case that self culture (JennicCam, Facebook, JustinTV) is the very start of something which is so alien to us that it's hard to address in a non ridiculous way.
The Frankfurt School is fundamentally post-modernist in its approach, and I reject its ideas that the truth has more to do with domination and less to do with objective reality.
Ultimately, human nature derives from evolutionary biology, which in turn comes from fundamental aspects of game theory. That's why, if we contact aliens, I don't think they'll be as alien as some imagine: their society will be driven by the same fundamental generic imperatives that constrain our own and should be recognizable. We're primates, not pure energy beings that we can reprogram at will.
> Are not changed men the product of changed circumstances?
And changed circumstances also arise from changed men, all the way back to homo erectus. Human nature is mutable: genes and culture co-evolve, but with time lags far longer than a few generations that utopian social engineers imagine. Human nature does change over long time scales, but for our purposes, it's immutable.
Might some alternative organization of society do a better job matching our immutable-on-short-time-scales human nature to our technological environment? Sure: it's conceivable. But there's no reason to suppose that the particular forms of societal reorganization that utopians advocate fall into this category.
Historical evidence, on the contrary, suggests that collectivist societies are actually further from the optimum than our present structure, which we arrived at through millennia of trial-and-error and free choice. It's a unique kind of hubris to imagine that you can do better than the distributed choices of billions over centuries.
You're right: sociologists have "looked into" societal reorganization. So have biologists. When we listen to the biologists, we get elegant theories that make sense of both our observations and our failures to remake societies for the better. When we listen to the sociologists, we get the holodomor.
The spectrum reached by "human nature" is probably very similar to what it was 2000 years ago. The actual occurrence of each possible value of it seems to change widely just in a few centuries; some times in decades.
While what you otherwise say is true, I think it is an error to attribute it to the "human condition". There is no proof that humans will inevitably act this way under all circumstances. But, by claiming it to be inevitable, you ensure that you will make no effort for it to be any other way.
It is only if you buy into the denatured myth of "humanity" that has prevailed in modernity. The reality is that we (with all our capacities, including ethical cognition & emotions) did not evolve to exist in faceless societies of billions, spanning the entire globe.
These societies obviously are not feasible in the long-term - that they ever could be is a (false) consequence of that denatured superstition.
I argued that we can't fight human nature and therefore we should find policies that utilize it for the good of everyone. You argue that we as human beings have to change first before we can accept any such policy.
Of course it will be a little bit of both, but seeing as me or anyone hasn't even defined any such new policy, I find it hard to see how you can oppose it yet with religious or philosophical concerns. It may very well be possible today. In fact, it's highly likely because the strategy behind the policy is based on human nature.
Your question is big. The answer I've landed on is little. We're just little furry wiggly wombly tubes struggling against the inevitable pressures of entropy. This is true down to the most basic molecule than can replicate.
Objective moral truths stem from that. The unending dance with entropy. To be the belle of the ball, we also harness that entropic randomness and turn it into dances that are even more powerful.
I feel the urge to thrive and grow and improve. I find myself sympathetic to the expressions of that drive from all life. That is a priori, that emergent empathy that many of us are capable of. I see a neighbor crying, a homeless man sleeping rough, a fearful stranger, and I say to myself, "There but for the grace of God, go I." But I don't stop there, because I see my puppy, I see a bird in the sky, I see a crushed mollusk, a writhing worm, "There but for the grace of God, go I." We're many faces, but still, we're all dancing with the entropy.
Next is the question, "Will this action increase or decrease the entropy in the universe? To the many faces, is this the action of an ally or an enemy?"
Finally, we realize we could superheat everything into crystals and reduce entropy that way. The last vital factor is the synthesis of order and disorder: complexity. These are the fun dances. Art. Learning. Creation.
So, to find objective moral truths, our sieve consists of The Golden Rule, "Am I fucking things up more?" and "Am I making things more awesome?"
Sure, humanity is just another physical process that will ultimately dissolve in a high entropy lukewarm soup, but as long as we have access to low entropy, high energy density sources, we can buck the trend and choose to do quite unoptimal things, such as assigning individual rights to every individual, even those unfit for reproduction.
Zooming out past the current Stelliferous era of the universe and into the distant black hole and dark eras might risk losing quite a bit of nuance about humanity's nature and destiny.
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