Open Thread: September 2011

Pavitra

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

If continuing the discussion becomes impractical, that means you win at open threads; a celebratory top-level post on the topic is traditional.

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

If continuing the discussion becomes impractical, that means you win at open threads; a celebratory top-level post on the topic is traditional.

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.

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 continu... (read more)

7ArisKatsaris15y

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.

6APMason15y

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.