If drug addicts do not reproduce at a lower rate than non-addicts, and if this equality persists from generation to generation indefinitely so that the average addict has exactly as many great-great-great-great grandchildren as the average non-addict, then we need to seriously rethink the idea that drug addiction is harmful to the addict.
Harm is a concept that best applies to a living creature. A rock can hardly be harmed. Break a rock in half, and you have two rocks, but there’s nothing about the rock that makes this count as a harm. Living creatures can be harmed. What makes something count as a harm in a living creature is that it interferes with biological function. But something is a biological function only if it increases the probability of survival and reproduction (and survival matters only because it is necessary for reproduction—so, in the final analysis, what matters is reproduction). Therefore a harm to a living creature, being something that interferes with biological function, necessarily reduces its probability of reproduction. The flip side of this is that if something does not reduce the probability of reproduction, then it is not a harm.
And if drug addicts are not actually harmed by their addiction, then we must seriously question our intuitions about what is and what is not harm. If they look awful, if they look sick, if they look like walking death, and yet if they reproduce just as robustly as the rest of us, have just as many kids, grandkids, great grand kids, etc, then we need to seriously question our intuition that drugs harm the addict. Once we’ve done that, then we need to seriously question our specific intuition that getting “hooked by superstimuli and stuff” is as harmful as it looks.
However, I actually think we don’t need to seriously question any such things because I really don’t think that drug addicts are unharmed by drugs.
So basically you redefine “harm” to mean “whatever impedes reproduction”—something which grossly does NOT coincide with common human understanding of the word harm. And then using that absolutely different definition, you go on to reach some more ludicrous conclusions, which are however only significant to the extent that people agree to that redefinition.
Which NOBODY does, not even you—because I bet that if someone tortured you to death but at the same time collected your semen to impregnate a dozen women, I bet you’d still consider this a “harmful” thing.
So what the hell is this whole comment of yours about? Downvoted for sheer nonsense.
So basically you redefine “harm” to mean “whatever impedes reproduction”—something which grossly does NOT coincide with common human understanding of the word harm.
Take typical examples of harm. Getting cut. Breaking a bone. Losing an eye. What these all have in common is that they adversely impact one or another function.
But our body functions only because it is a product of natural selection, and natural selection occurs on the basis of reproduction. Our skin is closed to protect against infection, and if it is cut we are exposed to infection, which reduces our probability of survival, which reduces our expected number of offspring. If we lose an eye or break a bone, same thing. Break an animal’s bone, and you’ll reduce the probability that it reproduces. Poke out its eye, and you’ll do the same thing. Harms reduce your ability to reproduce.
Do you really not realize that every part of you that has evolved, every tiny little part, every little mechanism of your body which has a function and which has the potential to be harmed, evolved because it helped your ancestors to survive and reproduce and ultimately to produce you? Every little evolved part of you is part of a reproduction machine, whether you acknowledge it or not. And it follows from this as night follows on day, that if you harm any one of those little bits of you that have a function, then you are harming a mechanism whose function is to help you to reproduce, and so you are harming your own ability to reproduce (to the extent that those mechanisms still function in your generation and are not mere functionless leftovers of an earlier generation).
I bet that if someone tortured you to death but at the same time collected your semen to impregnate a dozen women, I bet you’d still consider this a “harmful” thing.
But in that case I am being harmed and helped. The fact that my murderer is simultaneously also helping me to reproduce (in his own way) does not mean that he has not also harmed me. Taken in itself, the murder reduces my own evolved ability to reproduce, and therefore the murder is a harm. That the murderer also committed this other act which helped me through the introduction of a novel method of reproduction (collecting my semen) does not change this.
So what the hell is this whole comment of yours about? Downvoted for sheer nonsense.
I am surprised that it is controversial that harms adversely impact reproduction. Of course they do. Sure, as someone pointed out, if you have already lost your ability to reproduce, then obviously a harm won’t impact your ability to reproduce—because it was already impacted. But the harm still would have impacted your ability to reproduce had you not already lost it.
Let’s think about it. Imagine some typical harm happening to you, say, somebody throws a stone at you and it hits you in the head. But roll back time. Now roll forward and suppose you duck, avoiding the stone. Why do you duck? You duck because you have evolved to duck. Why have you evolved to duck? Why do we have this duck-when-something-is-flying-at-me instinct cooked into us as firmly as it is? And I do think it’s cooked in (I don’t think it’s learned, though I might be wrong). It’s cooked in by natural selection. But natural selection only cares about reproduction. What, did you think natural selection cared about your happiness? No, it cares about whether you reproduce. Your instincts are what they are because they help you reproduce. Therefore you fear the things you do, you object to the things you do, you consider “harms” the things you do, because they adversely affect your ability to reproduce. Whether you think so or not! Because natural selection doesn’t care what you think, and natural selection made you.
Do you really not realize that every part of you that has evolved, every tiny little part, every little mechanism of your body which has a function and which has the potential to be harmed, evolved because it helped your ancestors to survive and reproduce and ultimately to produce you?
You keep saying things that are both true and utterly besides the point. You suffer from vast confusions of words.
It’s cooked in by natural selection. But natural selection only cares about reproduction.
No, natural selection doesn’t have a mind, and DOESN’T CARE ABOUT ANYTHING.
We care. Natural selection made us to care. But natural selection itself doesn’t give a damn. Thou Shalt Not Anthropomorphize Natural Selection.
Your instincts are what they are because they help you reproduce.
Again irrelevant.
Because natural selection doesn’t care what you think, and natural selection made you.
Gravity also made me, since it held me and my ancestors on the planet, and gravity only cares about mass, by which argument harm must be anything that reduces my mass. Because gravity only cares about mass.
Your argument is nothing but a mishmashed jumble of anthropomorphisms, imaginary duties to the impersonal processes that created, and term confusions.
You’re effectively saying two things: We should redefine “harm” to mean something different than people think when they talk about “harm”, because natural selection intended “harm” to mean something else, and when our human intuitions come in conflict with natural selection’s “intent” we must obediently bow to our creator’s intent.
Well our creator was not just stupid, it was utterly brainless and purposeless and intentionless. So we ought to screw what natural selection thinks, because it DOES NOT THINK.
No, natural selection doesn’t have a mind, and DOESN’T CARE ABOUT ANYTHING.
We care. Natural selection made us to care. But natural selection itself doesn’t give a damn. Thou Shalt Not Anthropomorphize Natural Selection.
Now you’re just being obtuse. Talk about what natural selection “cares about” is obviously nonliteral and has an obvious meaning. To say that natural selection “cares about” A and does not “care about” B simply means that A, and not B, is a factor in natural selection.
We should redefine “harm” to mean something different than people think when they talk about “harm”, because natural selection intended “harm” to mean something else,
That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m saying that the things that we think of as harms (and I listed a few as examples) actually do interfere with reproduction (with obvious but completely understandable exceptions, such as when they happen to people who have already lost their ability to reproduce), whether or not we are aware of this fact or not. It is not a definition. It is a factual claim about the actual things we consider to be harms.
and when our human intuitions come in conflict with natural selection’s “intent” we must obediently bow to our creator’s intent.
No, I am not saying that at all. I am saying that we can be wrong about whether something that looks like a harm, is a harm. It’s certainly possible. Oh, come on, you have got to admit that it is possible to be wrong about whether someone is harmed.
But please not that I also asserted my confidence that drug addicts really are being harmed. Why am I confident? Because while I accept the theoretical possibility of being wrong, I don’t think I actually am wrong. I trust my perception on this matter. When I look at the photographs of meth heads, I have great confidence that they are harmed by their use of the drug. We can in principle be wrong about whether someone is harmed, but in all likelihood, we are not wrong.
And for this reason, I fully expect that if we were to do a multi-generational study of meth-heads, we would find that they don’t do all that well in the reproduction department in comparison to a control group.
That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m saying that the things that we think of as harms (and I listed a few as examples) actually do interfere with reproduction (with obvious but completely understandable exceptions, such as when they happen to people who have already lost their ability to reproduce),
Most of the things we think of as harms also interfere one’s heartbeat, with one’s brainwaves, with one’s breathing, with one’s digestive systems, with one’s sleep patterns, etc, since we’re our biologies and every biological function is interconnected with the other.
Depending how you define your terms, your whole argument is either obviously false (we don’t perceive condoms and contraception to be “harm” though it interferes with reproduction, but we do perceive that being enslaved for breeding purposes is harm, even though it increases the probability of our reproduction) or trivially true (as everything done to us, both good and bad, interferes with every biological function in our bodies).
And for this reason, I fully expect that if we were to do a multi-generational study of meth-heads, we would find that they don’t do all that well in the reproduction department in comparison to a control group.
I also don’t expect they do well in the life expectancy or health or prosperity department, which is a more customary method of determining well-being and “harm” than “number of descendants” is.
Most of the things we think of as harms also interfere one’s heartbeat, with one’s brainwaves, with one’s breathing, with one’s digestive systems, with one’s sleep patterns, etc, since we’re our biologies and every biological function is interconnected with the other.
Indeed, and for this reason, we might be able to measure harms indirectly by looking at heartbeat. A doctor actually does this sort of thing—he looks at your vital signs to see how you’re doing.
Nothing I wrote should be interpreted as excluding these other ways of measuring harms. I was talking about one measure, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t others.
your whole argument [could be read as] trivially true...
Indeed, and I expected it to be read as trivially true, and therefore as the claim I was responding to as trivially false. I wasn’t expecting any pushback on such an obvious point. If drug addicts really are harmed by drugs, we should expect this to show up in lower reproduction. It’s really quite a trivial point.
I also don’t expect they do well in the life expectancy or health or prosperity department, which is a more customary method of determining well-being and “harm” than “number of descendants” is.
Indeed, but these other respects aren’t relevant to the claim I was addressing, which concerned the reproduction of drug addicts.
Okay, you seem to be claiming something and then claiming that you’re not, so just answer me this: if meth addicts systematically out-breed not-meth-addicts, is it still possible their meth addiction is harming them?
Recall that I referred to reproduction to several generations, the point being that the meth addicts need not only produce babies but also raise them well enough that the babies grow up to reproduce—and so on, for many generations.
If meth addicts really did better than the rest of us in that department, then yes, I would seriously question whether meth addicts weren’t actually a superior breed of human. I mean, really, take this very seriously and extrapolate out many generations. After, I don’t know, a hundred generations, the whole planet is populated with meth heads, with just small pockets here and there of non-meth-heads. It’s a bit like the planet of the apes scenario, but with meth heads instead of apes. In this scenario, yes, I would have to seriously question whether meth heads’ addiction is harming them.
But an argument can still be made. For example, it might be that meth-heads, however much better they do than the rest of us, would do even better if they kicked the habit. In that case, they would be better than the rest of us despite their addiction, not because of it. In this case, the addiction would be, possibly, some negative side-effect of an otherwise superior genetic makeup.
Well, now it seems once again that you’re using reproductive success as your criteria for whether or not somebody is being harmed, but you say that’s not what you believe. Maybe it’s better to go full thought-experiment on this, so:
There is a drug called Reproductene. Taking it causes extreme pain, permanently disables your ability to feel happiness, damages your memory, destroys your imagination, and causes you to have strong cravings for more Reproductene. It also creates a new human being with 50% of your genetic code every time you take it. This human being is created an adult already addicted to Reproductene. After taking a hundred doses of the drug and creating a hundred half-copies of you you die. Reproductene is in large supply. Is taking Reproductene harmful?
There is a drug called Reproductene. Taking it causes extreme pain, permanently disables your ability to feel happiness, damages your memory, destroys your imagination, and causes you to have strong cravings for more Reproductene.
Is it awful that that makes me burst into giggles?
But natural selection only cares about reproduction.
No, natural selection doesn’t have a mind, and DOESN’T CARE ABOUT ANYTHING.
Anthropomorphic terminology for natural selection is standard and well understood. Darwin used it, explicitly making the analogy between conscious breeding and natural. Those who use it correctly demonstrate that they read Darwin. Those who fuss about it inappropriately demonstrate that they did not read Darwin.
Those who fuss about it inappropriately demonstrate that they did not read Darwin.
I fussed over it appropriately, as Constant seemed to have kept forgetting that natural selection, being blind deaf and stupid, isn’t obliged to result in our intuitions of harm coincide with direct influence on reproductive capacity.
And also, indeed I’ve not read Darwin (Other significant scientists I’ve not read: Galileo, Copernicus, Newton). Why does it matter for the purposes of this argument whether I’ve read Darwin or not? You seem to be playing status games (i.e. “haha, I’ve read Darwin and you have not”) instead of focusing on the merits or demerits of the argument itself.
But it will make our intuitions about harm correspond to diminished capability to survive and reproduce well enough. Our intuitions about harm were formed as if for the purpose of ensuring we would avoid impairment to our capability to survive and reproduce, in the sense that our eyes were formed as if for the purpose of seeing.
Darwin then, after explicitly explaining the “as if”, made the analogy with a human breeder consciously breeding to a purpose, and then proceeded with anthropomorphic language.
Downvoted for...oh, so many reasons—insults, generic nastiness, worship of authority, trying to argue about words instead of about meanings, mind-projection fallacy… Your level of discourse is miles beneath what I’ve come to expect and want from LessWrong in all possible metrics.
Thou Shalt Not Anthropomorphize Natural Selection.
But Darwin did anthropomorphize natural selection:
If man can by patience select variations useful to him, why, under changing and complex conditions of life, should not variations useful to nature’s living products often arise, and be preserved or selected? What limit can be put to this power, acting during long ages and rigidly scrutinising the whole constitution, structure, and habits of each creature,- favouring the good and rejecting the bad? I can see no limit to this power, in slowly and beautifully adapting each form
to the most complex relations of life.
So, anthropomorphizing natural selection is scientific terminology with well understood meaning among the educated. When using this terminology to the less educated it is necessary to qualify, explain, and clarify, but such qualification and clarification should not be needed among the intelligent and educated.
Metaphorical anthropomorphizing is fine so long as everyone is on the same page about what the metaphor is and it doesn’t lead to any equivocations or confusions. Constant’s use of anthropomorphizing language seems to have lead to him making a very troubling equivocation between what ‘harms’ genes and what harms human beings. One good strategy for clearing up such confusions is moving away from metaphorical language.
Your claim that harms adversely impact reproduction is controversial because of the obvious counter examples. X has already lost their ability to reproduce. X may not even care about reproducing. It’s still harmful to X to strap him down and torture him. Therefore X can be harmed without adversely affecting his ability to reproduce. This is not to mention the imaginable beings who can undergo suffering (and this is not a claim that harm reduces to suffering alone, but that suffering is a kind of harm), but which were not built by natural selection, and which don’t have biology even remotely related to reproducing. There are also counter examples going the other way, equally as obvious. Y doesn’t want to have children. She uses a contraception. She avoids pregnancy. Her ability to reproduce has been impeded, but she quite clearly has not been harmed (indeed, she has been liberated from the shackles of biology by glorious technology).
I don’t think anyone would claim that adverse affects to reproductive ability are completely orthogonal with harm—perhaps a decrease in your ability to reproduce would be more likely to be harmful than not—but to be honest, it doesn’t even look to me like the correlation’s all that strong. What seems downright obvious, though, is that one does not reduce to the other.
Also, natural selection doesn’t care about whether I can reproduce. It’s not a caring-type thing. It’s an optimisation process which doesn’t make use of caring at any point during the process, and I would only care about what natural selection selects if it were important to me to be naturally selected. And why would it be? Producing APMason-like forms is not even close to being my biggest concern.
Your claim that harms adversely impact reproduction is controversial because of the obvious counter examples.
My point is probabilistic (natural selection is about probability) and statistical (in large groups, probabilities become statistical regularities). So let us see how the objections fare.
X has already lost their ability to reproduce.
This doesn’t prevent harm from adversely impacting reproduction probabilistically even if we include the groups that lost their ability to reproduce. Take a large and representative sample of humanity, and harm them all in some way—say, reduce their ability to see. While there will be some who have no ability to reproduce that can be lost in the first place, many—the majority—still have that ability. And so we can see an overall reduction of reproduction in that group despite the fact that some subgroup had already lost the ability.
X may not even care about reproducing.
In a large and representative sample of humanity, many care about reproducing. So, same as above.
It’s still harmful to X to strap him down and torture him.
I would wager that, on average, someone who has been badly tortured does not fare as well in his later life as someone who has not.
Also, natural selection doesn’t care about whether I can reproduce.
Actually it does, in the sense meant. To say that natural selection “cares about” A and does not “care about” B is simply to say that A is a factor and B is not, in determining selection. Obviously, whether you reproduce is a factor in determining whether your genes are selected.
I’m not really sure what you’re trying to argue. At first, it seemed fairly obvious that you were trying to say that harm is that which reduces reproduction. Now it seems you’re saying that harm is that, which, if widely inflicted upon a group, probabilistically reduces that group’s rate of reproduction—but I don’t want to take that for granted. Maybe I’m misinterpreting you again. If suppose what you could be saying is that harming people, in general, tends to make them have less children. I don’t in fact think it’s obvious that there’s any such correlation—having lots of children is not generally a sign of high levels of wealth, health, income, education or freedom—but let’s assume that there is. What does that have to do with drug addiction. When we look at a drug addict we don’t think “poor guy—probably won’t have many kids”, nor indeed would we accept a demonstration of his high reproductive capacity as evidence that being a drug addict isn’t harmful. So, confused as I am, could you state your position one more time, as clearly as you can?
When we look at a drug addict we don’t think “poor guy—probably won’t have many kids”
That’s right. But I was addressing this point:
It is not at all clear that the people resistant to addictive drugs are reproducing at a higher rate than those who aren’t.
Since someone had made this comment, and since I was addressing this comment, then it’s neither here nor there whether we typically think about the drug addict’s reproduction. That comment concerned that question, so regardless of whether it is something we normally think about, it’s something that the commenter was thinking about.
, nor indeed would we accept a demonstration of his high reproductive capacity as evidence that being a drug addict isn’t harmful.
Well, it’s hard to really gather the relevant evidence. To really sort out cause and effect it’s really very weak just to gather evidence from the population like that. So, sure, in the practical world we probably should doubt such evidence unless it was really overwhelming (such as a planet-of-the-apes scenario in which the meth heads take over the planet).
We can easily recognize most harms simply by looking—we can recognize when someone is hurt. E.g., they’re bleeding, or they’re bruised, or they have trouble walking, or they’re disoriented, etc. We can tell. So we don’t need to do a vast demographic study to see whether the particular harm in question would reduce probability reproduction. Nevertheless, I think we can be sure that it would in fact reproduce probability of reproduction, simply by considering it from an evolutionary standpoint. I don’t think there can be any serious doubt that, on average, a recognizable harm does reduce the probability of reproduction (on average, over a large enough population).
I’m quite certain that harms reduce probability of reproduction. This is why I’m quite certain that if drug addicts are harmed by their addiction, this must reduce their probability of reproduction. Obviously, on average. If you come up with crazy scenarios such as one of the commenters did, then in individual cases addiction might lead to enhanced reproduction. For example, if someone puts a gun to your head and tells you they’ll shoot you if you don’t become an addict, then obviously in this specific situation, becoming an addict will increase your average lifespan and, if you’re fertile, will give you more chance to reproduce. But strange hypotheticals aside, I am sure that harms adversely impact reproduction.
The problem is that half the time you make a very strong (and obviously false) claim, e.g. that impeding reproduction is a necessity for something to be considered harmful, and the other half time you make a claim as weak (and trivially true) as “what we call harms tend to be negatively correlated with reproductive success”.
The problem is that you are reading Constant looking for Gotchas, rather than reading him for intended meaning. If you read him as if he was Darwin, his meaning is apparent.
“Apparent” isn’t a function with one parameter isApparent(meaning) but rather two: isApparent(reader, meaning) . See illusion of transparency
If “his meaning is apparent” to you, then perhaps you can attempt to answer all of the questions and hypotheticals that Constant either failed to answer or seemed to me to answer in a contradictory manner. Among other things:
is being enslaved for breeding purposes “harm”?
Is a woman denying you fertile sex doing you “harm”?
Are people using contraception harming themselves? Are they aware of this harm?
If an uFAI reduced us to the intellectual level of cattle to be bred in ranches (but didn’t kill us or reduce our reproductive potential) would it be harming us?
What about APMason’s thought experiment regarding Reproductene ?
If Constant’s meaning is apparent to you (as it is not apparent to me), and you agree with that meaning, then perhaps you can answer all of the above questions.
No one is going to enslave a male for breeding purposes, and the once common practice enslaving a female for breeding purposes is harm. In the ancestral environment, she will in the long term have fewer offspring, since obviously the offspring of freewomen did better, had more assets invested in them, and so forth.
Is a woman denying you fertile sex doing you “harm”?
No. And neither is someone who turns you down at a job interview doing you harm.
Are people using contraception harming themselves?
Sometimes.
Are they aware of this harm?
When they become cat ladies and start giving their cats birthday parties.
If an uFAI reduced us to the intellectual level of cattle to be bred in ranches (but didn’t kill us or reduce our reproductive potential) would it be harming us?
This would require it to first conquer, dominate and rule us, which certainly would harm us. If it subsequently decided to breed us like cattle, this would make its rule slightly less harmful.
What about APMason’s thought experiment regarding Reproductene ?
Thought experiments are apt to be contrary to the ancestral environment.
In the ancestral environment, she will in the long term have fewer offspring, since obviously the offspring of freewomen did better, had more assets invested in them, and so forth.
The words “ancestral environment” were nowhere in the definitions and claims about “harm” that were offered previously in the thread.
If you use the “ancestral environment” context to qualify previous claims about what constitutes harm (by arguing that harm are things that tended to reduce reproductive capacity in the ancestral enviroment), then it follows you ought also use the differences between the ancestral environment and the CURRENT environment (or hypothetical future environments) to figure out how our moral intuitions now about what constitutes harm now is different from what promotes or reduces reproductive capacity now.
I see you plan to insist on this policy of insults and attempts at knocking the other person’s status, whenever you’re asked to offer arguments instead.
You and Constant have not been able to produce a coherent functional philosophy about what constitutes “harm” to people. Repeatedly we give you counterexamples that prove your arguments false. That prove that modern human intuitions about harm coincide little with reproductive success.
To this you only repeat (time and again): “But natural selection produced us, so they necessarily need to.” Which is blatantly obvious in the first part, and blatantly false in the second part.
Natural selection produced us, but no they don’t need to. With numerous examples and thought experiments we show you how the human concept of “harm” does NOT correspond to reproductive success. That modern people do not consider contraception “harm”. That modern people do consider sexual slavery bad.
To this you, sam, only have insults to offer. Your philosophy fails both to correspond with reality, and in regards with any few falsifiable predictions it offers, it FAILS at them too.
tldr; Go away and don’t return until you learn that beliefs should seek to correspond with reality (not with Darwin), and that language should be used to communicate meaning, not insults.
Okay. I get it now. If you really were just saying that bad things happening to people make it less likely they’ll reproduce, well… I don’t necessarily agree. I don’t have the relevant data. But that’s not the position I thought I was arguing against before, I don’t think it can be resolved without more information, and I’m not sure it’s all that important to resolve it. I’ll assume that you’re answer to the Reproductene question is that, yes, it’s harmful, unless you say otherwise.
And it follows from this as night follows on day, that if you harm any one of those little bits of you that have a function, then you are harming a mechanism whose function is to help you to reproduce, and so you are harming your own ability to reproduce (to the extent that those mechanisms still function in your generation and are not mere functionless leftovers of an earlier generation).
I don’t think that argument works given the fact that evolution never looks forward. It doesn’t ask (even metaphorically) if some bodily feature or desire will continue to serve reproduction in the future. So we could easily wind up caring about goals that no longer serve reproduction. (ETA: This requires our environment to have changed faster than evolution could keep up, which however seems clearly true to some degree.) Calling them “functionless” would just beg the question.
Imagine some harm done to the elderly woman. That elderly woman has, let us say, eyes, and can see. So if her eyes are harmed, then this typically means her sight is reduced or lost. Sight has a biological function. We have evolved eyes because it enhances our biological fitness. Biological fitness is our ability to survive and reproduce. Therefore if this elderly woman’s eyes are harmed, then something has happened to her which, had it happened to someone still fertile, would have adversely affected her ability to reproduce. And similarly for other harms done to her.
Harms done to a person are things which would have reduced that person’s ability to reproduce, had that person not already lost that ability due, e.g., to other harms, or to age. Harms done to a young fertile person are things which actually do reduce that person’s ability to reproduce.
Harms done to a person are things which would have reduced that person’s ability to reproduce,
Are you saying that if someone enslaves you and forces you to breed, that doesn’t constitute harm? But a woman not wanting to have fertile sex with you does constitute harm done to you?
Are you saying that if someone enslaves you and forces you to breed, that doesn’t constitute harm?
Yes it does constitute a harm because they are depriving you of freedom, which interferes with the function of your evolved ability to choose.
But a woman not wanting to have fertile sex with you does constitute harm done to you?
That is not a harm done to you by someone else but a failure on your part. You’ve failed to attract the woman, and so you’ve failed in your reproductive role. Your own body has the function of attracting a mate, and if the mate is not attracted, then it is your body which has failed in its function. I suggest a diet, or possibly getting out more.
Yes it does constitute a harm because they are depriving you of freedom, which interferes with the function of your evolved ability to choose.
You said that “Harms done to a person are things which would have reduced that person’s ability to reproduce”. Now you seem to be changing your claim.
That is not a harm done to you by someone else but a failure on your part.
You said that harms done to a person are things that reduce their ability to reproduce. A woman denying you fertile sex certainly reduces your ability to reproduce.
You’re not being consistent with your own argument.
You said that “Harms done to a person are things which would have reduced that person’s ability to reproduce”. Now you seem to be changing your claim.
What I originally wrote was this:
Therefore a harm to a living creature, being something that interferes with biological function, necessarily reduces its probability of reproduction. The flip side of this is that if something does not reduce the probability of reproduction, then it is not a harm.
I am clearly saying that a harm interferes with a biological function. I am not, in that statement, saying that a harm is anything at all that reduces a person’s ability to reproduce. And now I am saying:
Yes it does constitute a harm because they are depriving you of freedom, which interferes with the function of your evolved ability to choose.
Notice the very close relationship between “harm … being something that interferes with biological function...” and ”...interferes with the function of...”
I don’t seem to be changing my claim at all from the beginning to now. At worst, my wording slipped momentarily in some intervening comment. It really shouldn’t be the sort of thing that you seize on for a criticism, if you’re seriously trying to rebut my argument. Instead of opportunistically seizing on a specific slip in wording that I made somewhere in the middle of the argument, you should try to address the argument as it is stated from beginning to end.
Repeatedly throughout the comment I originally responded to, and now again in the text you quote above, --- you argue this:
a harm to a living creature [...] necessarily reduces its probability of reproduction.
And again you say:
If something does not reduce the probability of reproduction, then it is not a harm.
That’s the whole core of your argument. If you are now denying this, SPEAK CLEARLY. Are you claiming the above two sentences as true, or do you consider them a misstatement or otherwise reject them?
Edited to add:
I am clearly saying that a harm interferes with a biological function.
Since every being is nothing but a group of biological functions, all you are doing is saying that harm to a being is something that interferes with it. Or the equivalent statement of “something that does not interfere with a being does not constitute harm to it”.
Which is true but quite obvious, and doesn’t justify any of your subsequent points about addiction being or not being harmful—as addiction quite clearly DOES interfere with people’s biological functions.;
Since every being is nothing but a group of biological functions,
The ultimate function of which (in each individual) is to enhance probability of reproduction.
all you are doing is saying that harm to a being is something that interferes with it.
And since the ultimate function of each function is to enhance probability of reproduction, then harms can in principle be measured by observing reproduction patterns. It would in practice be difficult to do this, but in principle it can be done.
Or the equivalent statement of “something that does not interfere with a being does not constitute harm to it”.
You’ve completely left out the bit about reproduction, which is key.
Which is true but quite obvious,
It’s obvious but also not everything I said.
and doesn’t justify any of your subsequent points about addiction being or not being harmful—as addiction quite clearly DOES interfere with people’s biological functions.
I agree with the bit after the hyphen and this is why I think it almost certainly reduces the probability of reproduction. As I stated.
You’ve completely left out the bit about reproduction, which is key.
I asked you explicitly about whether you believe the sentences that involved reproduction and you didn’t answer. Previously you seemed to be denying them. Now you seem to be reaffirming them—but never clearly enough.
You don’t seem to want to convey clarity, and I don’t have the time for this.
And since the ultimate function of each function is to enhance probability of reproduction,
By “ultimate” you just mean “something that had to get partially optimized by natural processes or we wouldn’t be here discussing this”.
And since the ultimate function of each function is to enhance probability of reproduction, then harms can in principle be measured by observing reproduction patterns.
We’re Godshatter, which means that our minds don’t consider “harm” or “good” a single thing, not even reproductive success.
If you are saying that theoretically our minds (or an artificial mind) could have been made to consider a single thing to be harm: failure in reproduction, then that’s obviously true. An artificial mind could be considered to treat our reproductive success as the only metric for our well-being. One of the most obvious ways for an uFAI to destroy us: It can remove most of our brains and any other desire other than our reproductive drive, and keep us packed up as cattle to be bred (while doing us no “harm” by your definition, as we’d be enjoying reproductive success as its cattle)
But if you’re saying that what actual real-life current-day people consider ’harm” is only what impedes their reproductive success, that’s obviously and unquestionably false. If you truly believe that, then you must bite the bullet and accept that the above-mentioned cattle scenario doesn’t constitute harm.
Once again your words reduce to either trivially true or obviously false.
What we want for ourselves and our descendants is obviously not (or at least no longer) the same a reproductive fitness. The obvious example is contraception. It seems plausible that given environmental factors such as contraception and the modern welfare state that drug addicts might produce at an above average rate. That the human race might perpetuate under these conditions is no reason to rejoice about a future in which humanity is made up of crack-heads.
What we want for ourselves and our descendants is obviously no (or at least no longer) the same a reproductive fitness.
I don’t think any non-human animal ever (consciously) wanted reproductive fitness as such, this being a long-term, multi-generational desire that humans may be the only animal capable of caring about, and I don’t think all that many humans do. On second thought, maybe they do, in the sense that many humans want children and grandchildren. But the things we typically do want by and large enhance our reproductive fitness, so reproductive fitness is, in practice, a good proxy for what we want (though it might be more accurate to say that what we want is a good proxy for reproductive fitness). Good music, for example, comes from good musicians, and a high musical ability is thought to be closely related with sexual selection. Same with athletic ability, intelligence, empathy reliability, trustworthiness, good parenting, and so on and so forth. Pretty much everything we rejoice in about ourselves, Is closely tied one way or another with reproductive fitness.
no reason to rejoice about a future in which humanity is made up of crack-heads.
When I survey the traits that have been and currently still are correlated in the human species with greater reproductive success, I find admirable traits such as those I’ve listed above. You are speculating that at some future date, all these other traits will be swamped by a tendency of welfare crack-heads not to use contraceptives. I don’t have any proof that your scenario is improbable, but still I think it is.
The problem with your comments on this subject isn’t that you dispute the claim that drug addicts are reproducing at a higher than average rate. No one in this thread seems prepared to discuss, in detail that object-level question. The problem is your claim in the comment I replied to that if drug use did not undermine reproduction we should reconsider whether or not drug use is harmful. The reason why others are downvoting you is because regardless of whether or not drug addiction is conducive to reproduction we still have lots of good reasons for considering it harmful and not wanting people to be addicted to drugs.
As for non-admiral traits being selected for—there is an obvious example.
Good music, for example, comes from good musicians, and a high musical ability is thought to be closely related with sexual selection
Castrati: “In the 1720s and 1730s, at the height of the craze for these voices, it has been estimated that upwards of 4,000 boys were castrated annually in the service of art.”
Pretty much everything we rejoice in about ourselves, Is closely tied one way or another with reproductive fitness.
Plus all the numerous male and female religious priesthoods in numerous religions (from Christianity to Buddhism) that take vows of sexual abstinence, and were nonetheless honored for such.
Castrati: “In the 1720s and 1730s, at the height of the craze for these voices, it has been estimated that upwards of 4,000 boys were castrated annually in the service of art.”
I don’t think this in any way undercuts your point, but it is very interesting that the most successful castrati were in fact insanely popular sex symbols during the height of their popularity. They had love affairs and were not infrequently implicated in scandal of one kind or another, although I don’t think they ever got married. Farinelli, the greatest of the great, had rockstar popularity for decades in the 18th century, which came along with sexual status to match. As you might expect, all this business has been written about pretty extensively by historical musicologists in the age of gender studies.
As I’ve said elsewhere, our enjoyment of music seems to be wrapped up in multiple (at times competing) cognitive faculties, and is clearly not reducible to mere sexual/status display, although that is surely a component of it. (It’s not clear to me whether or not Constant was claiming in the grandparent that that is the main or only reason we enjoy music.)
In particular, it’s interesting that there are competent leaders who are pretty serious drinkers. Is it possible that addiction is having too much of a trait which is useful in moderation?
It is not at all clear that the people resistant to addictive drugs are reproducing at a higher rate than those who aren’t.
If drug addicts do not reproduce at a lower rate than non-addicts, and if this equality persists from generation to generation indefinitely so that the average addict has exactly as many great-great-great-great grandchildren as the average non-addict, then we need to seriously rethink the idea that drug addiction is harmful to the addict.
Harm is a concept that best applies to a living creature. A rock can hardly be harmed. Break a rock in half, and you have two rocks, but there’s nothing about the rock that makes this count as a harm. Living creatures can be harmed. What makes something count as a harm in a living creature is that it interferes with biological function. But something is a biological function only if it increases the probability of survival and reproduction (and survival matters only because it is necessary for reproduction—so, in the final analysis, what matters is reproduction). Therefore a harm to a living creature, being something that interferes with biological function, necessarily reduces its probability of reproduction. The flip side of this is that if something does not reduce the probability of reproduction, then it is not a harm.
And if drug addicts are not actually harmed by their addiction, then we must seriously question our intuitions about what is and what is not harm. If they look awful, if they look sick, if they look like walking death, and yet if they reproduce just as robustly as the rest of us, have just as many kids, grandkids, great grand kids, etc, then we need to seriously question our intuition that drugs harm the addict. Once we’ve done that, then we need to seriously question our specific intuition that getting “hooked by superstimuli and stuff” is as harmful as it looks.
However, I actually think we don’t need to seriously question any such things because I really don’t think that drug addicts are unharmed by drugs.
So basically you redefine “harm” to mean “whatever impedes reproduction”—something which grossly does NOT coincide with common human understanding of the word harm. And then using that absolutely different definition, you go on to reach some more ludicrous conclusions, which are however only significant to the extent that people agree to that redefinition.
Which NOBODY does, not even you—because I bet that if someone tortured you to death but at the same time collected your semen to impregnate a dozen women, I bet you’d still consider this a “harmful” thing.
So what the hell is this whole comment of yours about? Downvoted for sheer nonsense.
Take typical examples of harm. Getting cut. Breaking a bone. Losing an eye. What these all have in common is that they adversely impact one or another function.
But our body functions only because it is a product of natural selection, and natural selection occurs on the basis of reproduction. Our skin is closed to protect against infection, and if it is cut we are exposed to infection, which reduces our probability of survival, which reduces our expected number of offspring. If we lose an eye or break a bone, same thing. Break an animal’s bone, and you’ll reduce the probability that it reproduces. Poke out its eye, and you’ll do the same thing. Harms reduce your ability to reproduce.
Do you really not realize that every part of you that has evolved, every tiny little part, every little mechanism of your body which has a function and which has the potential to be harmed, evolved because it helped your ancestors to survive and reproduce and ultimately to produce you? Every little evolved part of you is part of a reproduction machine, whether you acknowledge it or not. And it follows from this as night follows on day, that if you harm any one of those little bits of you that have a function, then you are harming a mechanism whose function is to help you to reproduce, and so you are harming your own ability to reproduce (to the extent that those mechanisms still function in your generation and are not mere functionless leftovers of an earlier generation).
But in that case I am being harmed and helped. The fact that my murderer is simultaneously also helping me to reproduce (in his own way) does not mean that he has not also harmed me. Taken in itself, the murder reduces my own evolved ability to reproduce, and therefore the murder is a harm. That the murderer also committed this other act which helped me through the introduction of a novel method of reproduction (collecting my semen) does not change this.
I am surprised that it is controversial that harms adversely impact reproduction. Of course they do. Sure, as someone pointed out, if you have already lost your ability to reproduce, then obviously a harm won’t impact your ability to reproduce—because it was already impacted. But the harm still would have impacted your ability to reproduce had you not already lost it.
Let’s think about it. Imagine some typical harm happening to you, say, somebody throws a stone at you and it hits you in the head. But roll back time. Now roll forward and suppose you duck, avoiding the stone. Why do you duck? You duck because you have evolved to duck. Why have you evolved to duck? Why do we have this duck-when-something-is-flying-at-me instinct cooked into us as firmly as it is? And I do think it’s cooked in (I don’t think it’s learned, though I might be wrong). It’s cooked in by natural selection. But natural selection only cares about reproduction. What, did you think natural selection cared about your happiness? No, it cares about whether you reproduce. Your instincts are what they are because they help you reproduce. Therefore you fear the things you do, you object to the things you do, you consider “harms” the things you do, because they adversely affect your ability to reproduce. Whether you think so or not! Because natural selection doesn’t care what you think, and natural selection made you.
You keep saying things that are both true and utterly besides the point. You suffer from vast confusions of words.
No, natural selection doesn’t have a mind, and DOESN’T CARE ABOUT ANYTHING.
We care. Natural selection made us to care. But natural selection itself doesn’t give a damn. Thou Shalt Not Anthropomorphize Natural Selection.
Again irrelevant.
Gravity also made me, since it held me and my ancestors on the planet, and gravity only cares about mass, by which argument harm must be anything that reduces my mass. Because gravity only cares about mass.
Your argument is nothing but a mishmashed jumble of anthropomorphisms, imaginary duties to the impersonal processes that created, and term confusions.
You’re effectively saying two things: We should redefine “harm” to mean something different than people think when they talk about “harm”, because natural selection intended “harm” to mean something else, and when our human intuitions come in conflict with natural selection’s “intent” we must obediently bow to our creator’s intent.
Well our creator was not just stupid, it was utterly brainless and purposeless and intentionless. So we ought to screw what natural selection thinks, because it DOES NOT THINK.
Now you’re just being obtuse. Talk about what natural selection “cares about” is obviously nonliteral and has an obvious meaning. To say that natural selection “cares about” A and does not “care about” B simply means that A, and not B, is a factor in natural selection.
That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m saying that the things that we think of as harms (and I listed a few as examples) actually do interfere with reproduction (with obvious but completely understandable exceptions, such as when they happen to people who have already lost their ability to reproduce), whether or not we are aware of this fact or not. It is not a definition. It is a factual claim about the actual things we consider to be harms.
No, I am not saying that at all. I am saying that we can be wrong about whether something that looks like a harm, is a harm. It’s certainly possible. Oh, come on, you have got to admit that it is possible to be wrong about whether someone is harmed.
But please not that I also asserted my confidence that drug addicts really are being harmed. Why am I confident? Because while I accept the theoretical possibility of being wrong, I don’t think I actually am wrong. I trust my perception on this matter. When I look at the photographs of meth heads, I have great confidence that they are harmed by their use of the drug. We can in principle be wrong about whether someone is harmed, but in all likelihood, we are not wrong.
And for this reason, I fully expect that if we were to do a multi-generational study of meth-heads, we would find that they don’t do all that well in the reproduction department in comparison to a control group.
Most of the things we think of as harms also interfere one’s heartbeat, with one’s brainwaves, with one’s breathing, with one’s digestive systems, with one’s sleep patterns, etc, since we’re our biologies and every biological function is interconnected with the other.
Depending how you define your terms, your whole argument is either obviously false (we don’t perceive condoms and contraception to be “harm” though it interferes with reproduction, but we do perceive that being enslaved for breeding purposes is harm, even though it increases the probability of our reproduction) or trivially true (as everything done to us, both good and bad, interferes with every biological function in our bodies).
I also don’t expect they do well in the life expectancy or health or prosperity department, which is a more customary method of determining well-being and “harm” than “number of descendants” is.
Indeed, and for this reason, we might be able to measure harms indirectly by looking at heartbeat. A doctor actually does this sort of thing—he looks at your vital signs to see how you’re doing.
Nothing I wrote should be interpreted as excluding these other ways of measuring harms. I was talking about one measure, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t others.
Indeed, and I expected it to be read as trivially true, and therefore as the claim I was responding to as trivially false. I wasn’t expecting any pushback on such an obvious point. If drug addicts really are harmed by drugs, we should expect this to show up in lower reproduction. It’s really quite a trivial point.
Indeed, but these other respects aren’t relevant to the claim I was addressing, which concerned the reproduction of drug addicts.
Okay, you seem to be claiming something and then claiming that you’re not, so just answer me this: if meth addicts systematically out-breed not-meth-addicts, is it still possible their meth addiction is harming them?
Recall that I referred to reproduction to several generations, the point being that the meth addicts need not only produce babies but also raise them well enough that the babies grow up to reproduce—and so on, for many generations.
If meth addicts really did better than the rest of us in that department, then yes, I would seriously question whether meth addicts weren’t actually a superior breed of human. I mean, really, take this very seriously and extrapolate out many generations. After, I don’t know, a hundred generations, the whole planet is populated with meth heads, with just small pockets here and there of non-meth-heads. It’s a bit like the planet of the apes scenario, but with meth heads instead of apes. In this scenario, yes, I would have to seriously question whether meth heads’ addiction is harming them.
But an argument can still be made. For example, it might be that meth-heads, however much better they do than the rest of us, would do even better if they kicked the habit. In that case, they would be better than the rest of us despite their addiction, not because of it. In this case, the addiction would be, possibly, some negative side-effect of an otherwise superior genetic makeup.
Is that enough of an answer or do you want more?
Well, now it seems once again that you’re using reproductive success as your criteria for whether or not somebody is being harmed, but you say that’s not what you believe. Maybe it’s better to go full thought-experiment on this, so:
There is a drug called Reproductene. Taking it causes extreme pain, permanently disables your ability to feel happiness, damages your memory, destroys your imagination, and causes you to have strong cravings for more Reproductene. It also creates a new human being with 50% of your genetic code every time you take it. This human being is created an adult already addicted to Reproductene. After taking a hundred doses of the drug and creating a hundred half-copies of you you die. Reproductene is in large supply. Is taking Reproductene harmful?
Is it awful that that makes me burst into giggles?
I am taking it as evidence that I may be mistaken.
Sorry, I really have no time to continue.
Anthropomorphic terminology for natural selection is standard and well understood. Darwin used it, explicitly making the analogy between conscious breeding and natural. Those who use it correctly demonstrate that they read Darwin. Those who fuss about it inappropriately demonstrate that they did not read Darwin.
I fussed over it appropriately, as Constant seemed to have kept forgetting that natural selection, being blind deaf and stupid, isn’t obliged to result in our intuitions of harm coincide with direct influence on reproductive capacity.
And also, indeed I’ve not read Darwin (Other significant scientists I’ve not read: Galileo, Copernicus, Newton). Why does it matter for the purposes of this argument whether I’ve read Darwin or not? You seem to be playing status games (i.e. “haha, I’ve read Darwin and you have not”) instead of focusing on the merits or demerits of the argument itself.
But it will make our intuitions about harm correspond to diminished capability to survive and reproduce well enough. Our intuitions about harm were formed as if for the purpose of ensuring we would avoid impairment to our capability to survive and reproduce, in the sense that our eyes were formed as if for the purpose of seeing.
Darwin then, after explicitly explaining the “as if”, made the analogy with a human breeder consciously breeding to a purpose, and then proceeded with anthropomorphic language.
Your argument similarly condemns Darwin.
Downvoted. I’m sure it condemns lots of people, that’s not an argument against it.
You seem to have misunderstood how this community functions in regards to historical figures of the past. We strive to do better than them.
Words mean what the great used them to mean. If you fail to recognize that meaning in context, you are stupid and ignorant.
Downvoted for...oh, so many reasons—insults, generic nastiness, worship of authority, trying to argue about words instead of about meanings, mind-projection fallacy… Your level of discourse is miles beneath what I’ve come to expect and want from LessWrong in all possible metrics.
But Darwin did anthropomorphize natural selection:
So?
So, anthropomorphizing natural selection is scientific terminology with well understood meaning among the educated. When using this terminology to the less educated it is necessary to qualify, explain, and clarify, but such qualification and clarification should not be needed among the intelligent and educated.
Among the many things Darwin did, some could be called science. Anthropomorphizing natural evolution is not one of the science-things he did.
Language means what the great use it to mean. You can disapprove of that usage, but misunderstanding the meaning is not a sign of superiority.
Misunderstanding indeed isn’t a sign of superiority, but neither is being misunderstood.
Metaphorical anthropomorphizing is fine so long as everyone is on the same page about what the metaphor is and it doesn’t lead to any equivocations or confusions. Constant’s use of anthropomorphizing language seems to have lead to him making a very troubling equivocation between what ‘harms’ genes and what harms human beings. One good strategy for clearing up such confusions is moving away from metaphorical language.
Your claim that harms adversely impact reproduction is controversial because of the obvious counter examples. X has already lost their ability to reproduce. X may not even care about reproducing. It’s still harmful to X to strap him down and torture him. Therefore X can be harmed without adversely affecting his ability to reproduce. This is not to mention the imaginable beings who can undergo suffering (and this is not a claim that harm reduces to suffering alone, but that suffering is a kind of harm), but which were not built by natural selection, and which don’t have biology even remotely related to reproducing. There are also counter examples going the other way, equally as obvious. Y doesn’t want to have children. She uses a contraception. She avoids pregnancy. Her ability to reproduce has been impeded, but she quite clearly has not been harmed (indeed, she has been liberated from the shackles of biology by glorious technology).
I don’t think anyone would claim that adverse affects to reproductive ability are completely orthogonal with harm—perhaps a decrease in your ability to reproduce would be more likely to be harmful than not—but to be honest, it doesn’t even look to me like the correlation’s all that strong. What seems downright obvious, though, is that one does not reduce to the other.
Also, natural selection doesn’t care about whether I can reproduce. It’s not a caring-type thing. It’s an optimisation process which doesn’t make use of caring at any point during the process, and I would only care about what natural selection selects if it were important to me to be naturally selected. And why would it be? Producing APMason-like forms is not even close to being my biggest concern.
My point is probabilistic (natural selection is about probability) and statistical (in large groups, probabilities become statistical regularities). So let us see how the objections fare.
This doesn’t prevent harm from adversely impacting reproduction probabilistically even if we include the groups that lost their ability to reproduce. Take a large and representative sample of humanity, and harm them all in some way—say, reduce their ability to see. While there will be some who have no ability to reproduce that can be lost in the first place, many—the majority—still have that ability. And so we can see an overall reduction of reproduction in that group despite the fact that some subgroup had already lost the ability.
In a large and representative sample of humanity, many care about reproducing. So, same as above.
I would wager that, on average, someone who has been badly tortured does not fare as well in his later life as someone who has not.
Actually it does, in the sense meant. To say that natural selection “cares about” A and does not “care about” B is simply to say that A is a factor and B is not, in determining selection. Obviously, whether you reproduce is a factor in determining whether your genes are selected.
I’m not really sure what you’re trying to argue. At first, it seemed fairly obvious that you were trying to say that harm is that which reduces reproduction. Now it seems you’re saying that harm is that, which, if widely inflicted upon a group, probabilistically reduces that group’s rate of reproduction—but I don’t want to take that for granted. Maybe I’m misinterpreting you again. If suppose what you could be saying is that harming people, in general, tends to make them have less children. I don’t in fact think it’s obvious that there’s any such correlation—having lots of children is not generally a sign of high levels of wealth, health, income, education or freedom—but let’s assume that there is. What does that have to do with drug addiction. When we look at a drug addict we don’t think “poor guy—probably won’t have many kids”, nor indeed would we accept a demonstration of his high reproductive capacity as evidence that being a drug addict isn’t harmful. So, confused as I am, could you state your position one more time, as clearly as you can?
That’s right. But I was addressing this point:
Since someone had made this comment, and since I was addressing this comment, then it’s neither here nor there whether we typically think about the drug addict’s reproduction. That comment concerned that question, so regardless of whether it is something we normally think about, it’s something that the commenter was thinking about.
Well, it’s hard to really gather the relevant evidence. To really sort out cause and effect it’s really very weak just to gather evidence from the population like that. So, sure, in the practical world we probably should doubt such evidence unless it was really overwhelming (such as a planet-of-the-apes scenario in which the meth heads take over the planet).
We can easily recognize most harms simply by looking—we can recognize when someone is hurt. E.g., they’re bleeding, or they’re bruised, or they have trouble walking, or they’re disoriented, etc. We can tell. So we don’t need to do a vast demographic study to see whether the particular harm in question would reduce probability reproduction. Nevertheless, I think we can be sure that it would in fact reproduce probability of reproduction, simply by considering it from an evolutionary standpoint. I don’t think there can be any serious doubt that, on average, a recognizable harm does reduce the probability of reproduction (on average, over a large enough population).
I’m quite certain that harms reduce probability of reproduction. This is why I’m quite certain that if drug addicts are harmed by their addiction, this must reduce their probability of reproduction. Obviously, on average. If you come up with crazy scenarios such as one of the commenters did, then in individual cases addiction might lead to enhanced reproduction. For example, if someone puts a gun to your head and tells you they’ll shoot you if you don’t become an addict, then obviously in this specific situation, becoming an addict will increase your average lifespan and, if you’re fertile, will give you more chance to reproduce. But strange hypotheticals aside, I am sure that harms adversely impact reproduction.
The problem is that half the time you make a very strong (and obviously false) claim, e.g. that impeding reproduction is a necessity for something to be considered harmful, and the other half time you make a claim as weak (and trivially true) as “what we call harms tend to be negatively correlated with reproductive success”.
The problem is that you are reading Constant looking for Gotchas, rather than reading him for intended meaning. If you read him as if he was Darwin, his meaning is apparent.
“Apparent” isn’t a function with one parameter isApparent(meaning) but rather two: isApparent(reader, meaning) . See illusion of transparency
If “his meaning is apparent” to you, then perhaps you can attempt to answer all of the questions and hypotheticals that Constant either failed to answer or seemed to me to answer in a contradictory manner. Among other things:
is being enslaved for breeding purposes “harm”?
Is a woman denying you fertile sex doing you “harm”?
Are people using contraception harming themselves? Are they aware of this harm?
If an uFAI reduced us to the intellectual level of cattle to be bred in ranches (but didn’t kill us or reduce our reproductive potential) would it be harming us?
What about APMason’s thought experiment regarding Reproductene ?
If Constant’s meaning is apparent to you (as it is not apparent to me), and you agree with that meaning, then perhaps you can answer all of the above questions.
No one is going to enslave a male for breeding purposes, and the once common practice enslaving a female for breeding purposes is harm. In the ancestral environment, she will in the long term have fewer offspring, since obviously the offspring of freewomen did better, had more assets invested in them, and so forth.
No. And neither is someone who turns you down at a job interview doing you harm.
Sometimes.
When they become cat ladies and start giving their cats birthday parties.
This would require it to first conquer, dominate and rule us, which certainly would harm us. If it subsequently decided to breed us like cattle, this would make its rule slightly less harmful.
Thought experiments are apt to be contrary to the ancestral environment.
The words “ancestral environment” were nowhere in the definitions and claims about “harm” that were offered previously in the thread.
If you use the “ancestral environment” context to qualify previous claims about what constitutes harm (by arguing that harm are things that tended to reduce reproductive capacity in the ancestral enviroment), then it follows you ought also use the differences between the ancestral environment and the CURRENT environment (or hypothetical future environments) to figure out how our moral intuitions now about what constitutes harm now is different from what promotes or reduces reproductive capacity now.
My reply assumed I was speaking to someone at least vaguely familiar with ideas, language, and assumptions of natural selection.
I see you plan to insist on this policy of insults and attempts at knocking the other person’s status, whenever you’re asked to offer arguments instead.
You and Constant have not been able to produce a coherent functional philosophy about what constitutes “harm” to people. Repeatedly we give you counterexamples that prove your arguments false. That prove that modern human intuitions about harm coincide little with reproductive success.
To this you only repeat (time and again): “But natural selection produced us, so they necessarily need to.” Which is blatantly obvious in the first part, and blatantly false in the second part.
Natural selection produced us, but no they don’t need to. With numerous examples and thought experiments we show you how the human concept of “harm” does NOT correspond to reproductive success. That modern people do not consider contraception “harm”. That modern people do consider sexual slavery bad.
To this you, sam, only have insults to offer. Your philosophy fails both to correspond with reality, and in regards with any few falsifiable predictions it offers, it FAILS at them too.
tldr; Go away and don’t return until you learn that beliefs should seek to correspond with reality (not with Darwin), and that language should be used to communicate meaning, not insults.
I have to say, I’m not actually sure that is trivially true, but I was confused as well.
Okay. I get it now. If you really were just saying that bad things happening to people make it less likely they’ll reproduce, well… I don’t necessarily agree. I don’t have the relevant data. But that’s not the position I thought I was arguing against before, I don’t think it can be resolved without more information, and I’m not sure it’s all that important to resolve it. I’ll assume that you’re answer to the Reproductene question is that, yes, it’s harmful, unless you say otherwise.
I don’t think that argument works given the fact that evolution never looks forward. It doesn’t ask (even metaphorically) if some bodily feature or desire will continue to serve reproduction in the future. So we could easily wind up caring about goals that no longer serve reproduction. (ETA: This requires our environment to have changed faster than evolution could keep up, which however seems clearly true to some degree.) Calling them “functionless” would just beg the question.
It is possible to harm childless elderly women, yes?
Imagine some harm done to the elderly woman. That elderly woman has, let us say, eyes, and can see. So if her eyes are harmed, then this typically means her sight is reduced or lost. Sight has a biological function. We have evolved eyes because it enhances our biological fitness. Biological fitness is our ability to survive and reproduce. Therefore if this elderly woman’s eyes are harmed, then something has happened to her which, had it happened to someone still fertile, would have adversely affected her ability to reproduce. And similarly for other harms done to her.
Harms done to a person are things which would have reduced that person’s ability to reproduce, had that person not already lost that ability due, e.g., to other harms, or to age. Harms done to a young fertile person are things which actually do reduce that person’s ability to reproduce.
Are you saying that if someone enslaves you and forces you to breed, that doesn’t constitute harm? But a woman not wanting to have fertile sex with you does constitute harm done to you?
Yes it does constitute a harm because they are depriving you of freedom, which interferes with the function of your evolved ability to choose.
That is not a harm done to you by someone else but a failure on your part. You’ve failed to attract the woman, and so you’ve failed in your reproductive role. Your own body has the function of attracting a mate, and if the mate is not attracted, then it is your body which has failed in its function. I suggest a diet, or possibly getting out more.
You said that “Harms done to a person are things which would have reduced that person’s ability to reproduce”. Now you seem to be changing your claim.
You said that harms done to a person are things that reduce their ability to reproduce. A woman denying you fertile sex certainly reduces your ability to reproduce.
You’re not being consistent with your own argument.
What I originally wrote was this:
I am clearly saying that a harm interferes with a biological function. I am not, in that statement, saying that a harm is anything at all that reduces a person’s ability to reproduce. And now I am saying:
Notice the very close relationship between “harm … being something that interferes with biological function...” and ”...interferes with the function of...”
I don’t seem to be changing my claim at all from the beginning to now. At worst, my wording slipped momentarily in some intervening comment. It really shouldn’t be the sort of thing that you seize on for a criticism, if you’re seriously trying to rebut my argument. Instead of opportunistically seizing on a specific slip in wording that I made somewhere in the middle of the argument, you should try to address the argument as it is stated from beginning to end.
Repeatedly throughout the comment I originally responded to, and now again in the text you quote above, --- you argue this:
And again you say:
That’s the whole core of your argument. If you are now denying this, SPEAK CLEARLY. Are you claiming the above two sentences as true, or do you consider them a misstatement or otherwise reject them?
Edited to add:
Since every being is nothing but a group of biological functions, all you are doing is saying that harm to a being is something that interferes with it. Or the equivalent statement of “something that does not interfere with a being does not constitute harm to it”.
Which is true but quite obvious, and doesn’t justify any of your subsequent points about addiction being or not being harmful—as addiction quite clearly DOES interfere with people’s biological functions.;
The ultimate function of which (in each individual) is to enhance probability of reproduction.
And since the ultimate function of each function is to enhance probability of reproduction, then harms can in principle be measured by observing reproduction patterns. It would in practice be difficult to do this, but in principle it can be done.
You’ve completely left out the bit about reproduction, which is key.
It’s obvious but also not everything I said.
I agree with the bit after the hyphen and this is why I think it almost certainly reduces the probability of reproduction. As I stated.
I asked you explicitly about whether you believe the sentences that involved reproduction and you didn’t answer. Previously you seemed to be denying them. Now you seem to be reaffirming them—but never clearly enough.
You don’t seem to want to convey clarity, and I don’t have the time for this.
By “ultimate” you just mean “something that had to get partially optimized by natural processes or we wouldn’t be here discussing this”.
We’re Godshatter, which means that our minds don’t consider “harm” or “good” a single thing, not even reproductive success.
If you are saying that theoretically our minds (or an artificial mind) could have been made to consider a single thing to be harm: failure in reproduction, then that’s obviously true. An artificial mind could be considered to treat our reproductive success as the only metric for our well-being. One of the most obvious ways for an uFAI to destroy us: It can remove most of our brains and any other desire other than our reproductive drive, and keep us packed up as cattle to be bred (while doing us no “harm” by your definition, as we’d be enjoying reproductive success as its cattle)
But if you’re saying that what actual real-life current-day people consider ’harm” is only what impedes their reproductive success, that’s obviously and unquestionably false. If you truly believe that, then you must bite the bullet and accept that the above-mentioned cattle scenario doesn’t constitute harm.
Once again your words reduce to either trivially true or obviously false.
What we want for ourselves and our descendants is obviously not (or at least no longer) the same a reproductive fitness. The obvious example is contraception. It seems plausible that given environmental factors such as contraception and the modern welfare state that drug addicts might produce at an above average rate. That the human race might perpetuate under these conditions is no reason to rejoice about a future in which humanity is made up of crack-heads.
I don’t think any non-human animal ever (consciously) wanted reproductive fitness as such, this being a long-term, multi-generational desire that humans may be the only animal capable of caring about, and I don’t think all that many humans do. On second thought, maybe they do, in the sense that many humans want children and grandchildren. But the things we typically do want by and large enhance our reproductive fitness, so reproductive fitness is, in practice, a good proxy for what we want (though it might be more accurate to say that what we want is a good proxy for reproductive fitness). Good music, for example, comes from good musicians, and a high musical ability is thought to be closely related with sexual selection. Same with athletic ability, intelligence, empathy reliability, trustworthiness, good parenting, and so on and so forth. Pretty much everything we rejoice in about ourselves, Is closely tied one way or another with reproductive fitness.
When I survey the traits that have been and currently still are correlated in the human species with greater reproductive success, I find admirable traits such as those I’ve listed above. You are speculating that at some future date, all these other traits will be swamped by a tendency of welfare crack-heads not to use contraceptives. I don’t have any proof that your scenario is improbable, but still I think it is.
The problem with your comments on this subject isn’t that you dispute the claim that drug addicts are reproducing at a higher than average rate. No one in this thread seems prepared to discuss, in detail that object-level question. The problem is your claim in the comment I replied to that if drug use did not undermine reproduction we should reconsider whether or not drug use is harmful. The reason why others are downvoting you is because regardless of whether or not drug addiction is conducive to reproduction we still have lots of good reasons for considering it harmful and not wanting people to be addicted to drugs.
As for non-admiral traits being selected for—there is an obvious example.
Castrati: “In the 1720s and 1730s, at the height of the craze for these voices, it has been estimated that upwards of 4,000 boys were castrated annually in the service of art.”
Blessed Virgin Mary
The Virgin Queen
The Maid of Orleans
Plus all the numerous male and female religious priesthoods in numerous religions (from Christianity to Buddhism) that take vows of sexual abstinence, and were nonetheless honored for such.
I don’t think this in any way undercuts your point, but it is very interesting that the most successful castrati were in fact insanely popular sex symbols during the height of their popularity. They had love affairs and were not infrequently implicated in scandal of one kind or another, although I don’t think they ever got married. Farinelli, the greatest of the great, had rockstar popularity for decades in the 18th century, which came along with sexual status to match. As you might expect, all this business has been written about pretty extensively by historical musicologists in the age of gender studies.
As I’ve said elsewhere, our enjoyment of music seems to be wrapped up in multiple (at times competing) cognitive faculties, and is clearly not reducible to mere sexual/status display, although that is surely a component of it. (It’s not clear to me whether or not Constant was claiming in the grandparent that that is the main or only reason we enjoy music.)
Vervet monkeys have drinking patterns similar to humans
In particular, it’s interesting that there are competent leaders who are pretty serious drinkers. Is it possible that addiction is having too much of a trait which is useful in moderation?
Have you read http://lesswrong.com/lw/l0/adaptationexecuters_not_fitnessmaximizers/ ?
I read it the day he posted it, and it made a nice review of a point that I had known for decades.