I’m not sure we are talking specifically about the Darwinian meaning, actually. Well, I guess you are, given your comment above! But I don’t think the rest of the discussion was so specific. Kaj_Sotala said:
if our values are an adaptation to our environment (including the society and culture we live in), then it would suggest that as long as we keep evolving and developing, our values will keep changing and evolving with us, without there being any meaningful endpoint.
which seems to me to describe a situation of gradual change in our values that doesn’t need to be driven by anything much like biological evolution. (E.g., it could happen because each generation’s people constantly make small more-or-less-deliberate adjustments in their values to suit the environment they find themselves in.)
(Kaj’s comment does actually describe a resource-constrained situation, but the resource constraints aren’t directly driving the evolution of values he describes.)
We’re descending into nit-pickery. The question of whether values will change in the future is a silly one, as the answer “Yes” is obvious. The question of whether values will evolve in the Darwinian sense in the posthuman era (with its presumed lack of scarcity, etc.) is considerably more interesting.
Well, we are talking about the Darwinian meaning, aren’t we? “Vary gradually”, aka “drift” is not contentious at all.
I’m not sure we are talking specifically about the Darwinian meaning, actually. Well, I guess you are, given your comment above! But I don’t think the rest of the discussion was so specific. Kaj_Sotala said:
which seems to me to describe a situation of gradual change in our values that doesn’t need to be driven by anything much like biological evolution. (E.g., it could happen because each generation’s people constantly make small more-or-less-deliberate adjustments in their values to suit the environment they find themselves in.)
(Kaj’s comment does actually describe a resource-constrained situation, but the resource constraints aren’t directly driving the evolution of values he describes.)
We’re descending into nit-pickery. The question of whether values will change in the future is a silly one, as the answer “Yes” is obvious. The question of whether values will evolve in the Darwinian sense in the posthuman era (with its presumed lack of scarcity, etc.) is considerably more interesting.
I agree that it’s more interesting. But I’m not sure it was the question actually under discussion.