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Evolutionary biology makes us existentialists + We can't engineer cleverness

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How evolutionary biology makes everyone an existentialist
https://aeon.co/essays/how-evolutionary-...tentialist

EXCERPT: . . . One particularly surprising feature of evolutionary biology is that it lends significant support to existentialism. To make the journey from evolutionary biology to existentialism, let’s start with one of the oldest and most profound of philosophical questions: how do we decide what is right or wrong, good or bad? Many philosophers have warned that no facts about nature can ever provide grounds for claims about values. In *A Treatise of Human Nature* (1739-40), David Hume made a compelling argument that an unbridgeable gap separates fact from value, ‘is’ from ‘ought’. To attempt to bridge that gap is to commit the ‘naturalistic fallacy’: no argument from factual premises can ever secure a conclusion about what is valuable, or about what to do.

In Principia Ethica (1903), the philosopher G E Moore adduced what he called an ‘open question argument’ for a similar constraint on any discourse about value. He claimed that any attempt to define ‘good’ in naturalistic terms – such as pleasure, or ‘utility’, or for that matter a divine commandment – must fail, because it always remains an ‘open question’ whether pleasure, or utility, or that particular divine commandment, really is good. If such a definition were sound, like the definition of a triangle as a three-angled plane figure, then the question would not make sense. ‘Is a triangle really a three-sided figure?’ would merely signal a failure to understand the definition.

Moore’s formulation has given rise to an enormous amount of debate. It is reasonable to object that it begs the question: for if one of those definitions of ‘good’ is correct, then the question is no longer open. But it must be admitted that no definition of ‘good’ in terms of some natural properties is very plausible. Hume’s original ‘is-ought’ gap still gapes.

In practice, of course, it would be hopeless to decide on what is best without reference to facts. [...] But the evidence we attend to is relevant only because certain goals are regarded as unquestionable: health, happiness, life. These values are presupposed, even if they seem too obvious to be articulated, by any practical or moral argument. If money buys happiness, then strive to make money. But only if happiness is the sort of thing you ought to pursue. If food sustains life, then eat! But only if you value life.

So where can we find the justification of general premises about value? If going from fact to values is a fallacy, then we can’t ground value judgments in facts. But if not facts, then what? Non-facts? ‘Alternative facts’, perhaps? One class of truths that are sometimes distinguished from ordinary facts of experience is the class of logical facts. And some philosophers, notably Immanuel Kant in the 18th century, thought that we could somehow extract moral principles from pure reason. That would seem to reduce immorality to a mere logical or mathematical mistake. And, on the face of it, that seems absurd, despite continuing efforts by Kant’s followers to convince us that it seems absurd only because we are not smart enough to get it. This has long been a ploy of philosophers, just as it was among theologians: insist that, if you disagree with their dogma, you must be either stupid or wicked. I prefer to persist in not getting it.

So must we admit that all claims about value, goodness or rightness are arbitrary? No. But if we are to resist that conclusion, we must reconsider the fact-value gap. Perhaps we can think of some facts as enjoying a special status, enabling them to provide plausible though not logically compelling reasons....

MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/how-evolutionary-...tentialist



Even if genes affect intelligence, we can’t engineer cleverness
https://aeon.co/ideas/even-if-genes-affe...cleverness

EXCERPT: . . . Some people are already signing on for this new world. Philosophers such as John Harris of the University of Manchester and Julian Savulescu of the University of Oxford have argued that we will have a duty to manipulate the genetic code of our future children, a concept Savulescu termed ‘procreative beneficence’. The field has extended the term ‘parental neglect’ to ‘genetic neglect’, suggesting that if we don’t use genetic engineering or cognitive enhancement to improve our children when we can, it’s a form of abuse. Others, like David Correia, who teaches American Studies at the University of New Mexico, envisions dystopian outcomes, where the wealthy use genetic engineering to translate power from the social sphere into the enduring code of the genome itself.

Such concerns are longstanding; the public has been on guard about altering the genetics of intelligence at least since scientists invented recombinant DNA. As long ago as the 1970s, David Baltimore, who won a Nobel Prize, questioned whether his pioneering work might show that ‘the differences between people are genetic differences, not environmental differences’.

I say, dream on. As it turns out, genes contribute to intelligence, but only broadly, and with subtle effect. Genes interact in complex relationships to create neural systems that might be impossible to reverse-engineer. In fact, computational scientists who want to understand how genes interact to create optimal networks have come up against the kind of hard limits suggested by the so-called travelling salesperson problem...

MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/even-if-genes-affe...cleverness
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