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sam0345 comments on Open Thread: September 2011 - LessWrong
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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.
Anthropomorphic terminology for natural selection is standard and well understood. Darwin used it, explicitly making the analogy between conscious breeding and natural. Those who use it correctly demonstrate that they read Darwin. Those who fuss about it inappropriately demonstrate that they did not read Darwin.
I fussed over it appropriately, as Constant seemed to have kept forgetting that natural selection, being blind deaf and stupid, isn't obliged to result in our intuitions of harm coincide with direct influence on reproductive capacity.
And also, indeed I've not read Darwin (Other significant scientists I've not read: Galileo, Copernicus, Newton). Why does it matter for the purposes of this argument whether I've read Darwin or not? You seem to be playing status games (i.e. "haha, I've read Darwin and you have not") instead of focusing on the merits or demerits of the argument itself.
But it will make our intuitions about harm correspond to diminished capability to survive and reproduce well enough. Our intuitions about harm were formed as if for the purpose of ensuring we would avoid impairment to our capability to survive and reproduce, in the sense that our eyes were formed as if for the purpose of seeing.
Darwin then, after explicitly explaining the "as if", made the analogy with a human breeder consciously breeding to a purpose, and then proceeded with anthropomorphic language.