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Comment by dmos62 | Hacker News Reader

> we want to advance as a species

I'm somewhat weary of people talking of civilization progress as if its definition is obvious and universal.

As far as humans are concerned overall progress has been linked to climbing up fractions of the kardashev scale since fire was invented.

And even before fire, organisms could only become more complex as the energy available to them increased. You can't run a hummingbird or mammalian brains on photosynthesis directly, it's just not energy-dense enough.

> overall progress

This thread is becoming recursive. Is organism complexity progress? Everyone might agree with you, or not. That's because progress is whatever we say it is. It's subjective, in that everyone can have a different view of it, and it's non-constant, in that you can change your mind whenever. Progress is such a loaded word today. I'm hardpressed to find more than a few words with so much cultural baggage. Even someone who agrees that good and evil are in the eyes of the observer, can often say that the definition of Progress is self-evident.

I am saying that for many or perhaps even almost all measures of progress we want to apply, i.e. the specific definition doesn't matter, that progress was either enabled by or directly required more energy being available.

Most quality of life improvements do take energy, and yes, quality of life is subjective, it is conceivable to imagine a mind that takes joy in their child dieing of a preventable disease, some vertebrates eat their young, but overwhelmingly, humans like to see their child get old enough to play and talk as well as laugh and cry.

Things like reliable and easy access to clean water, refrigeration for medicine and food, shelter against the weather, clothing, cleaning mechanisms for the above, all of these are non-equilibrium phenomena and so take energy.

So we either need more sources of power or fewer people. I'm glad that birth rates are falling, but lots of people don't have those basic technological tools, so energy technology will need to be rolled out or our definition of empathy will need to change to allow for lots of people to suffer.

While one would agree with your list of desirable non-equilibrium phenomena, the need for more power or less people is non con-sequitur, as you fail to show how the listed things require more energy than our current world consumption.

AFAIK, more than enough food and clothing for all people is currently produced, shelter and cleaning probably isn't far, refrigeration for medicine and required food wouldn't take much of industrial output and problems with access to clean water is often caused by "progress" and could be solved with more strategy rather than energy.

Either way, I think most of current energy consumption is for things like heating / cooling inefficient homes, manufacturing things people don't really need, inefficient transportation, brain-dead things like making oil from tar sands etc.

Certainly individual conceptions of "progress" will vary, but only the most deranged practitioners of self-loathing would make the argument that gaining the freedom to exit a destiny of brute survival does not constitute advancement.

Progess is a human invention, without us it has no meaning. Complexity is a first order axiom; if you don't adhere to that philosophy then it is not. You are free to move to a remote area and live off the land.

even before fire, organisms could only become more complex as the energy available to them increased

Heck, look at how the complexity of life increased as soon as mitochondria were invented, going from genomes measured in millions of base pairs for bacteria to billions for amoebas once cells were no longer caught in the square/cube trap of respirating over the cell wall.

Right but I'm also weary of the kind of second-guessing about the future and the nature of 'progress' that leads to a kind of epistemological paralysis. Taking an approach of 'it's all very complicated, who knows what the future holds, let's not try to plan for it' is also wrong.

Couldn't agree more. "Advancement as a species" seems to imply a sort of consensus that doesn't really exist.

Exactly. Hegel developed a theory that historical progress goes always forward, or towards better things. Capitalist-based theory says that Capitalism is the inevitable outgrowth from Feudalism, which is false (Meiksins-wood showed that Capitalism is an idea that was enacted through force, not an inevitable outgrowth of the previous systems). Communist theory says that Capitalism inevitably fails and tends towards Socialism, which eventually develops into Communism, which has yet to be shown. People tend to think that Evolution results in better and better organisms, rather than those that convey the best advantages for it's environment. For some reason lot of people tend to think that a society's values will get better over time, and that modern societies are qualitatively better than those from thousands of years ago, rather than just different.

Hell, even here a lot of people believe that technological progress is a linear path towards the future, even when there's evidence contrary to that assumption. Without even reaching for evidence from other fields, it's trivial to find examples of entire theories that have been forgotten and rediscovered. Think of Low-Density Parity-check codes, that were developed in the 1960s and essentially forgotten for 20 or so years. A lot of technology has been found and then lost.

> Hegel developed a theory that historical progress goes always forward, or towards better things.

This is a popular supposition, but is mostly a misunderstanding of Hegel, promulgated by Left Hegelians like Marx. Hegel’s argument was that thought moves toward a greater state of contradiction, not progress, but that this evolved sustainment of the contradiction represents a more rational form.

Todd McGowan at the University of Vermont wrote a whole book on this subject:

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/emancipation-after-hegel/97802...

On the one hand, limitless growth is an unsustainable anti-pattern (when it manifests in the biological realm, we call it cancer).

On the other hand, it's hard to see how civilization could continue to function without the prospect of "growing the pie". If/when we reach a steady state of finite resources, it seems highly likely that the best strategy (individually and tribally) is acquire resources at the expense of one's neighbors (before they acquire your resources first). This has been the default state of nature for nearly all biological history, with occasional exceptions of growth and plenty.

I don't have an answer here, long-term; and where the rubber meets the road, I do think our corporate model of "your business is failing if it's not growing" results in more negative than positive externalities (at least, beyond a certain equilibrium), and should be eyed critically. But the growth model is as much about social mindset as it is real-world wealth generation; and luckily we have lots more progress we can make (both on and off Terra Firma) before we're at risk of fully diminished returns on the growth of sentient well-being. The question is one of intelligent growth (cue Bucky Fuller [0]), rather than a locust-like runaway replicator pattern, which is clearly net-negative even if it looks like growth when zoomed in.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_Manual_for_Spaceship...

Or even if it's actually happening - it's a problem that the Hegelian concept of progression has rooted itself so deeply in the west that we think it's universally held, where other countries find a cyclical nature to humanity and history

Easier to say that when you have anything.

Advancing as a species can merely making sure that everyone got a safe environment, freedoms, access to education and health, etc.

There are still billions of people who barely have the quality of life that most of Hacker News reader does.

If we want the species to get off this mudball, we need newer and better technology, also we need it to head off the climate and pollution crises and raise the quality of health and living for everyone on the planet.

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