Quote from: RE on Apr 22, 2024, 04:28 AMAnother way of putting it is, human nature is an expression of social organization. Circular reasoning arbitrarily relates/equivocates two things. Nothing arbitrary about saying that the wealth created by the poor is what enables the rich to eat and live better than the poor not genes or innate character.Quote from: jupiviv on Apr 22, 2024, 01:31 AMHuman nature is what human society makes of it, hence not really human nature.
That is a circular argument I won't bother giving any credibility to by debating it.
QuoteYou seem to be more or less agreeing with me except for the part about connections in the brain being genetically determined at birth. As for us being most successful under simple social structures, well those lead to where we are now and current hunter-gatherer societies are as fucked as the rest of us. The minuscule population of genuinely isolated peoples are allowed to live that way by other people. And even if those other people magically vanished, there will always be a need and a desire for more complexity and universality else we wouldn't have transitioned from one to the other when allowed to do so by circumstances.QuoteThe alternative view, yours, is to bring in a third factor which in the post 19th century world tends to be some combination of 1> genes 2> culture and ideology, ie culture/ideology sublimated out of social determinations (at least the direct material/economic kind). I disagree, but without erring in the opposite direction. Those things can and do affect what people become, but I'm unaware of any compelling evidence or theory indicating they override or at any rate function independently of socio-economic constraints and incentives.
Lack of anybody else proposing a theory has never been an impediment for me, I just make my own theories based on what I observe in behavior, both in the animal kingdom and in human society. There are analogues all over the place in survival strategies for different species, and homo saps demonstrate many of them at different times under different circumstances. Stockholm Syndrome is a classic example, where captives come to identify with their captors. Imprinting is another, catch a child early enough in development al sorts of odd behaviors can manifest later. And so on and so forth. All of these macro effects come from associations made in the brain by neurons, all mediated by connections that are genetically determined at birth, then react to stimuli along the way. More or less of various neurotransmitters get produced, further developing a given personality. Depending of the nature of the environment, it will develop in many different ways. Your example of slaves in a slave society would be one of a myriad of possible outcomes. All I am saying is that generally we were most successful as a species under the least complex social organizations. That would be the baseline of human nature. All the rest are environmental factors determined by therule set and organization of the society.
Another point that complicates the picture - simpler nomadic tribes invaded more complex settled tribes and created even moar complex empires/kingdoms.
QuoteHaving five toes, or being a living organism needing food/air... is very different from personality, talent and rational thought and learning. It's a truism that genes determine who we are and are influenced by environment. The contention is about the terms of that interaction. So far nothing from you explaining why Homo Saps living in complexity surpassing hunting-gathering are innately dumb and evil.QuoteMost of the bio/gene stuff was soundly debunked in the 70s and 80s by people like Stephen Jay Gould. The debates today are derivatives of derivatives of the original. We know that genes are not blueprints, that individual genes have diverse expressions across the whole phenotype, and also that Mendelian inheritance patterns only work as they should in theory for artificially regulated and purified lineages.
All genes do is code for proteins. We really have no clue how genes program the shysiological structure of the body or brain, why we have 5 fingers and toes, opposed thumbs, a large cerebral cortex, blah blah, but we know all Homo Saps have them unless their genetic code is wickedly messed up. All our brains are built in basically the same way and respond to stimuli the same way. Human nature begins inside this structure and is circumscribed by it. It is genetic, we are born with it before ever being exposed to language or social structures. Once we pop out of somebody's vagina, we each begin to develop inside that social setting, so thereafter things can change quite a bit. We nevertheless still have the structure and neuroons and transmitter system we were born with no matter what. It can and does adapt and change along the way, sometimes irrevocably. That doesn't mean there isn't a best or at least better set of social conditions for that brain to operate.
QuoteI admit the decadent part was a bit mean-spirited. The argument itself isn't personal at all. You are in fact reproducing the logic of the liberal-capitalist mode of surplus accumulation, even while being critical of it. Liberalism assumes a contradiction between human nature and scarcity, and postulates the state as a regulating/harmonizing force. (The problem being human nature is a self-serving assumption and scarcity is a historical category.) You're just swapping out the state as a regulator with a future situation of less complex organization caused by collapse.QuoteYou're expressing the logic of decadent bourgeois liberalism when you postulate an impartial biological lottery, combined with a substratum of flawed human nature being the downfall of civilizations throughout history. If you'd lived in the middle ages, these ideas would have been incoherent (e.g the idea of 'history' as we use it simply did not exist back then). To sum up, your opinion on innate human nature is itself a product of socially determined human nature. Funny ain't it? :)
Now you're devolving into ad hom argument, name calling me as a "decadent bourgeois liberal". I thought that kind of nonsense went out of style in the 1920s. Shall I retaliate and call you a commie pinko leftist? I don't live in the Middle Ages, evidenced by the fact they didn't have the internet back then. Obviously I argue based on what I know about the world and biology, behavior and neurochemistry based on stuff that has been elucidated over the last few hundred years. If you consider scientific knowledge to be bourgeois, I plead guilty.
My point about the middle ages was you/whoever would have justified innate human nature using the hierarchical logic of feudalism instead of the cynically regulated globalised 'markets'. Both are wrong, for that same reason. But one thing in favor of the earlier forms of self-justification - at least they were more honest. They had no use for the 'rational' social darwinism of the 20th century.
QuoteBut you do see it as A New Hope (TM) with different possibilities, and the best/only way out of the current situation which has exhausted it's own. 1000 breeding pairs won't have FFs but there'd be a whole bunch of other stuff they could use to build more complexity. My view is that the current situation is the best way out of itself, while also being resigned to bitter soul-crushing disappointment. Speaking of which I might be (reluctantly) alive to at least witness the general direction of how it ends/up.QuoteHunting-gathering could well be the future... although the level of destruction it would take to get there is likely to cause extinction, not to mention lingering effects of industrial civ like pollution bio-diversity loss and radiation with no means to ameliorate let alone erase them. But even if it happens, it cannot be the solution cus if it was we wouldn't have come to this point to begin with. And it still wouldn't be caused by 'human nature'.
Don't know if it will be the future or the solution, I never said it would be. I merely said it was the type of organization we were most successful with as a species. Would it necessarily lead to the same outcome if we did end up returning to that style of living? No, it can't, because fossil fuels were a onne time shot for homo saps, the earth won't have time to collect them up again for another round of burning. Also, surviving Homo Saps would not be the same as the original cro-magnons that bootstrapped up from stone tools. Some knowledge gained over the millenia will persist. It's not definitive that the same mistakes would be repeated if there is enough left for 1000 breeding pairs to survive this knockdown, as there were 75,000 years ago.
Neither of us will be around to find out thoough, so it's a moot point.
RE