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Notes -
How about a pallet cleanser?
In the other thread a few people brought up surrogacy, and maybe I've spent too much time with TERFs, but am I the only one that overwhelmed with the feeling of Lovecraftian horror whenever it's brought up? The feeling is even more uncanny, because it's like I slept through some great societal debate where everybody decided it's actually a lovely thing that should be celebrated. Although maybe it's not all that bad, there's a certain "how it started, how it's going" quality to the NYT headlines. In any case the casual way it's supporters talk about surrogacy freaks me out even more than militant pro-choicers.
Then there's the whole slippery slope thing:
Love is love, we have a right to get married just the same as you! - Yes I agree!
We also have a right to adopt! - Sure! I mean I have my issues with adoption in practice, but in principle if there are kids without parents, and willing gay couples to adopt them I don't see an issue.
We also have a right to biological children! What? Do you expect us to be ok with not having children?
Wait what? Yes I do! I'm all for tolerance, and living and letting live, but you're not going to make me see this as a lovely family moment, and anyway I don't remember signing on to turning a fundamental human experience into an industry when I supported the gay rights movement. Accept the limits of your biology, and move on.
Which brings me to Dase's idea "postrat «don't mean-spiritedly dunk on a rationalist» challenge (impossible)". Indeed, I can't help myself, and even though I used to be rat/rat-adjacent, I find myself having growing disdain for the entire philosophy. There's a meme that's slowly gathering momentum, that all the trans stuff, and 72 genders is just a foot in the door for transhumanism, and after I heard the idea for the first time, I can't seem to unsee it. This twisted ideology will drive us to throw away our humanity, turn us into a cross-over between Umgah Blobbies and the Borg, or trick us into committing suicide, because there's a subroutine running on some GPU somewhere, that's somewhat similar to the processes in our brains. Given the utter dominance of the trans ideology, the vindication of the slippery slope argument, and the extrapolated trajectory of these ideas, I believe we have no other choice - Transhumanism must be destroyed!
You yourself commented a few months back about doing a 'double-take' when reading some of my recent writing, suggesting (in different language) that I was becoming 'radicalized' on a few topics. One area you've counter-radicalized me is the conversation around falling birthrates in the west, and frankly, I'm coming to align more with the TwoXChromosome worldview that it's just a trojan horse for social control.
Don't get me wrong, I'm more concerned about the birthrate than I was. I'll even grant that surrogacy makes me uncomfortable, though more because I dislike the idea of disempowered people (surrogates in the third world are even more gross) being exploited in yet another way.
However, in the last 24 hours, we've had two comments explicitly shaming people who want to have children, specifically because the way they're trying to have children is aesthetically displeasing to you.
The limits of our biology are changing by the year. Will you make your children accept the limits of their biology and watch them be crippled by polio, or something? As Doglatine put it when seeing the reflexive support amongst locals for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, your position is boiling down to a reactionary rejection of anything the left and/or mainstream like, rather than a prospective, constructive worldview. So with that in mind, I have to ask: If, tomorrow, I invented a way to boost the birthrate comfortably above replacement (or to whatever arbitrary value you want), it's eugenic, it's whatever you want it to be - but it doesn't involve traditional, cis-het men repeatedly sticking their penises inside conventionally attractive cis-het stay-at-home tradwives followed by 9 months of pregnancy discomfort and childbirth - are you going to be joyful that we solved our demographic problem and charted a course towards our brave new future of eugenic John Von Neumanns? Or are you going to be upset that we didn't do it the way you wanted and those nasty degenerates are still having buttsex and dying xir hair blue?
If your answer is the latter (and I suspect for many of the Katja Grace haters it is), then yeah, I have to say TwoX are probably right about you.
Still reactionary. Have you ever laid out a positive vision for what you want the future to be, since you don't like mine? I'm curious to hear what you actually want as opposed to talking about those awful people doing things that you don't like.
You two seem to have an underlying philosophical difference that is causing this confusion. I would hazard a guess that Arjin, whether explicitly or not, has a Natural Law understanding of humanity. Curing children of polio is good, because humans are supposed to be healthy. Giving children tentacles and an extra set of eyes that can see infrared is bad, because humans aren't supposed to have tentacles or infrared eyes. If you give them tentacles and infrared eyes, are they still human?
Those who don't understand things in terms of Natural Law don't see the problem. To them there is no way humans are "supposed to be" so we can do whatever we want and be just as human as ever. Curing polio is the same kind of thing as transforming someone's body shape radically, or whatever. To someone with a Natural Law understanding, it is not at all the same kind of thing. One is fixing something that is wrong with someone, the other is creating things that are wrong with someone, insofar as wrong is deviation from what it means to be a human. Polio is a deviation; transhumanism is a deviation.
Similarly, humans naturally form families where a child has a mother and a father, because both sexes are needed to procreate and humans are the kind of creatures that care about their kids. If you don't care about your kids, then somethings wrong with you. If a kid doesn't have a mother or a father, then something's wrong with that family. Similarly, mothers are supposed to get pregnant, carry their child, and then care for it and raise it and be part of its life. If for some reason she can't (if she died in childbirth, if she's an unfit mother, if she is unwilling to care for the child) then adoption can happen, but adoption is not ideal. It's a deviation from how it should be. So deliberately creating situations where mothers bear children that aren't their own, for the purpose of giving them to someone else, is pretty "un-Natural" in the Natural Law sense.
Your primary disagreement is philosophical, that's where the debate would be most fruitful.
I think you've hit the crux of the problem.
But this is a weird example of "against Natural Law" to use, isn't it? The polio virus isn't artificial. It's been infecting people for thousands of years. It doesn't even seem to have a zoonotic reservoir (one of the reasons why eradicating it is possible, ironically), so Mother Earth or Nature's God or whatever specifically pointed that bomb at millions of human targets. This is all about as far from "unnatural" as it gets.
In fact, for decades polio could have been used as a cautionary tale against trying to fight Natural Law! Historically most poliovirus infections were in infants and toddlers who had better odds of recovery, but we started being much more careful (dare I say unnaturally so?) with our sewage and cleaning up our drinking water, so we lost our early exposure and our population immunity, and then we started seeing epidemics in older age groups with much higher risks of paralysis. It would have been a clear case of hubris and nemesis, except we were able to follow up the sanitation improvements with vaccinations not too long afterward.
You don't really understand what Natural Law is, if you think that just because something happens in nature it is Natural, in the Natural Law sense.
It's an understandable mistake to make. English is a terrible language for these things. Natural used to mean according to something's nature, but now it also means "not artificial" or a vague "animals and plants and stuff".
I explained this once already over on ACX, so if you don't mind I'll just copy over my comments from there:
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What does Natural Law have to say about population-specific human traits, or individual mutations, which are adaptive in one environment but maladaptive in another. For example: dark-skinned descendants of American slaves, after moving to the northern half of the United States en masse during the Great Migration, found that they and their children and grandchildren were suffering high rates of Vitamin D deficiency and related debilitating conditions such as rickets; their highly-melanated skin, optimized by thousands of years of evolution to block out the oppressive and omnipresent African sunlight, could not effectively absorb the far more limited sunlight available in the cloudy and dark Northern winters. What had been an extremely advantageous trait in one context became an equally disadvantageous trait in a different context. And in the mirror-image counterpart to this scenario, Israel, until very recently, had the highest rates of skin cancer in the world, as a result of a largely Ashkenazi Jewish population - genetically mostly descended from pasty-skinned Central/Eastern Europeans - being transplanted to a very sunny climate. To this day, Australia does have the highest rate of skin cancer in the world, for very similar reasons.
Another example is something like the cluster of mutations that make someone like Yao Ming, or Giannis Antetokounmpo, two very abnormally-tall NBA players. Yao Ming’s extreme height, and Giannis’ massively long arms and enormous hands, make them ideally-suited to play modern NBA basketball. However, these same mutations would come with debilitating drawbacks in a different environment; firstly, the massive caloric load needed to feed them would make them extreme burdens in a harsh environment where food is scarce; their height would also be a massive disadvantage in, say, the Amazonian jungle, where they would constantly be smacking into trees, alerting predators and prey alike. In Yao Ming’s case, he also suffered from a number of injuries to his feet and ankles due to the extreme pressure out on his lower body by his height, significantly shortening his career. These men are very fortunate that they live in a period of human history wherein their atypical qualities could be harnessed into blessings, instead of being life-threatening curses. And on the flip side, the vast majority of Yao’s countrymen in China evolved to be significantly shorter than the global average, since they evolved in the frigid climates of Siberia, where a short and compact body allows for the optimal distribution of body heat. (The “yellow” complexion we associate with East Asians is also a result of the evolutionary pressure created by this same environmental history; it’s due to a thin layer of subcutaneous fat optimized similarly for preserving body heat.)
So, is it “natural” for humans to be dark-skinned, or to be light-skinned? And is it “natural” for them to be tall, or to be short? These questions are unlike questions of the type “is it natural for humans to be healthy, or to be sick?” While some human traits/conditions are purely negative - it is strictly worse to have a flu than it is to not have a flu, and it is strictly worse to have no legs than it is to have two legs - many traits and conditions provide complex sets of tradeoffs, and sometimes whether or not a trait is good or not is entirely context-dependent. Autism, at least of the high-functioning “Asperger’s” variety, is another extreme example of a particular way that some humans are, which provides both massive benefits and significant penalties, both at the same time. I don’t really have a good idea about what Natural Law has to say about those sorts of things. Maybe the sorts of traits and mutations that would be extremely advantageous for human beings trying to survive the ravages of long-distant space travel would be horrendously disadvantageous - even monstrous - here on earth.
I also think it’s amusing that you brought up dogs in the context of Natural Law, given that *nearly every extant dog breed in existence is the profoundly unnatural result of a millennia-long project of directed/molded evolution orchestrated by humans, which has produced bizarre chimeras which could never have emerged in Nature, and which bear essentially no resemblance to their ancestors of even a century ago in some cases. There are no wild pugs or lhasa apsos. The bulldog and the chihuahua are nothing remotely like wolves, nor are they all that much like each other. Do advocates of natural law look at a dachsund and feel existential Lovecraftian horror at the blatant perversion of the natural order which such a creature represents? Think what had to happen to turn a wolf into that!
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You're hitting another of English's terrible ambiguities here - do you mean "abnormality" in the positive or normative sense? If the former then it's easy to think of counterexamples (again, including polio exposure!). I'd guess from
that you take a normative meaning, which lets us escape from nature red in tooth and claw, but then that other commenter's "Anyone can claim Natural Law is whatever they want" criticism suddenly sounds quite fair. Infrared vision doesn't sound better than Mark 1 eyeballs to you, but it does to me. I'd need technological help to get it myself, but I also needed that help to escape thousands of years of polio. Which of us is right?
Whether we think of "best" or
the question jumps out: in whose judgement? Perhaps this made immediate sense in a polytheistic world, where a God of Humans might intend them to be healthy while a God of Disease intends polio to spread, and "naturally" we humans want to side with the first guy? But a monotheistic God made that poliovirus too, and in that world "He must have intended it" would seem to be a far safer assumption than "He might not have been paying attention that day". In an atheistic world we could almost get back to the polytheistic case, but not quite - we might try to anthropomorphize evolution, but we still don't end up with an Evolution of Humans that we can side with vs Evolution of Disease; we only have an Evolution of Particular Currently-In-Some-Humans Genes, which isn't universal enough or, ironically, human enough, to form a basis for a Natural Law. Even if Darwin won the argument in one sense, that only suggests that we were asking the wrong question.
Even the "Currently-In-Some-Humans" category gets fuzzy when you look through prehistory. I'm may only be a few dozen trivial mutations from a selection of my parents' genes, and so on with each stage of their ancestors, but do that a million times and we're looking at tree-hopping monkeys. The nature of my ancestors at that point was that they were four-legged animals! At what point did their increasingly-bipedal descendants become "unnatural", and then "natural" again?
Yeah, you're still not grokking Natural Law.
Set aside whether God intended humans to get polio. Lets focus down to ground level here. What does it mean for a human to be sick? How do we know if someone is sick?
Well, we know someone is sick because we have an idea of how healthy humans are supposed to be, and sick humans differ from that. Healthy humans breath easily, humans sick with a chest cold hack and cough and wheeze. Healthy humans are about 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit: if you're much hotter or colder than that, you're sick. If you found someone whose leg is black and putrid with necrosis you say to yourself "That doesn't look right. This person is sick."
Yet all of these judgements require us to have an idea of how a human is supposed to be. What a "natural" human is like. When we compare sick humans to the "natural" human, we can see something is wrong. What's more, we believe that it a bad thing to differ from the "natural" human. We don't consider having a leg that is black with necrosis to be just as good as having two legs that are operating normally. Without our conception of a "natural" human, distinguishing sick from healthy is impossible. They're just different kinds of humans that have different ways of being.
Yet it doesn't seem that our idea of healthy and sick is arbitrary. Our concept of the "natural" healthy human seems to correspond to something real. It does seem that humans are "supposed" to have two legs, and that our digestive system is "supposed" to provide us with nutrients, and that our heart is "supposed" to pump blood through our body. It doesn't seem that a heart that stops pumping is just as good a heart as one that keeps pumping. Regardless of whether the heart was created by a mind or by blind evolution, it isn't arbitrary to say that the heart's "purpose" is to pump blood. Or that human's have two legs. Or that eyes that see are better than eyes that are blind.
So in that sense, regardless of whether God intended humans to get polio or not, we can say that a human sick with polio has something wrong with them: to be sick with polio is not "natural" to humans.
I hope that helped.
You've glossed over the question of "how do we define 'humans'" - even repeating "human's have two legs" after my questions about bipedalism. "Humans have two legs" sounds right from my point of view, just like "neohumans have infrared vision" would from theirs, but an Ardipithecus ancestor might think I was just an unnatural change, hopelessly bad at palm walking on my dwindling forelegs. From my ancestors' point of view, am I a natural human, or a deviation from Australopithecus? This question is isomorphic to "will any transhuman descendants of mine be natural transhumans, or deviant humans", save for special pleading.
If we're going to focus on the ground level, look at what we literally find in the ground. Fossils, of a connected web of species, none of which exist except as a series of changes to their ancestors. "Don't make biological improvements" is positively false, and normatively it isn't a "Law" that would preserve some definition of human, it is a rule under which humans would never have existed. Setting aside God(s) doesn't make this idea of Natural Law more defensible, because even just setting aside Young-Earth Creationism begins to make it incoherent. "What is natural for humans" is a dissolved question once you realize that the implicit presupposition of a well-defined "humans" category in space-time is a false premise. Anthropocentrism might have been a reasonable null hypothesis, before we knew any better, but at this point "why are nearly-human creatures so unnatural" makes about as much sense as "why are the stars so tiny". The stars aren't tiny, but realizing that for all but one of them requires perceiving things so far away in space that it requires careful thought for us to realize the exception is just another star rather than a special singleton category of "sun". Non-homo-sapiens hominids aren't unnatural, but realizing that for all but one of them requires perceiving things so far away in time that it requires more careful thought for us to realize the exception is a single link in a chain rather than a special singleton category of "human".
Even "how do we define 'healthy'" isn't a trivial question either.
Do we? Not a rhetorical question - has the Hygiene Hypothesis been definitively refuted? Last I heard, there was evidence that "never get an infectious illness", even aside from increasing the dangers of any later infection, might also increase the risk of asthma and other autoimmune disorders.
And that's just counting the microorganisms which generally cause illness - breeding completely "germ-free organisms", with no microbiome at all, is even more fraught. For some for the very same microorganisms which cause illnesses in rare excess, the absence of those microorganisms seems to cause autoimmune inflammatory disorders if they're removed. Animals have evolved with asymptomatic infections of dangerous bacteria for so long that we don't actually have the capability of remaining healthy while uninfected! Are pathobionts' presence mandated by Natural Law? Is the answer immutable, or contingent on whether we can discover a safer artificial substitute to expose our immune systems to, like we did with polio?
I strongly agree, and since human hearts have a distressing tendency to stop pumping before the rest of the human is ready, I hope neohuman hearts are more capable. By your definition, that would make them more "natural" than us, right? Similarly, it also doesn't seem that an eye whose sensitivity stops at 750nm is just as good as one that can see to 800nm or 850nm. We might thus conclude "neohuman eyes and hearts are more natural than human ones", or at our most justifiably parochial we might say "neohuman eyes are natural to neohumans, human eyes are natural to humans", but for us to say "neohuman eyes are unnatural" would make about as much sense as a non-primate mammal saying "primate eyes are unnatural" (does anyone really need a third visual opsin?) and less sense than a typical bird or fish saying so (wouldn't you agree that losing two independent dimensions of color vision wasn't just as good as keeping them, even if we eventually reevolved one dimension back?).
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Maybe a pithy way would be to say "it's natural law, in the sense that it's in the scorpion's nature to sting frogs".
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