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>Do you think we will ever turn back to eugenics?

As the word is currently used, no, but mostly because it’s seemingly used to represent, in the public consciousness

> intentional genetic control we dislike

When we do things such as “screening for down syndrome” [1], we are already actively engaged in a eugenics project, but we don’t think of it as one because it’s the kind of intentional genetic control we like.

I expect many, many more “genetic controls we like” as medical and biological sciences advance, I think “eugenics” will always be viewed as a dead end.

[1] https://www.pennmedicine.org/updates/blogs/womens-health/201...

> When we do things such as “screening for down syndrome” [1], we are already actively engaged in a eugenics project, but we don’t think of it as one because it’s the kind of intentional genetic control we like.

Historically, many cases of "eugenics" involved a lack of informed consent, even blatant coercion. That screening is entirely voluntary–you have the right to say "no", and I know couples who have (due to moral objections grounded in their religious beliefs). That's a very big difference.

> That screening is entirely voluntary–you have the right to say "no"

The child doesn't, though, and, if you'll excuse my frankness, I think the abortion affects his/her future the most out of all the parties involved.

If you'll excuse my frankness, at the point of screening it's much more an idea of a child, than an actual he/she.

I see what you're saying, and appreciate you sharing that perspective.

We could say that before conception, everyone agrees there is no child, and at birth, everyone agrees there is a child, so there is maybe a "spectrum" between "idea of a child" and "an actual he/she".

Your use of the wording "much more" sort of supports this "probability distribution function" idea of what a child is, and it seems like a helpful philosophical framing of this difficult and important question.

What I would say, though, is that if society is going to pick a point along that spectrum to base policy decisions on, then there is an imbalance between the risks of placing that point too early versus too late.

Too early means that some women's decisions will be unreasonably restricted, whereas too late means that some human being's lives will be unreasonably terminated.

The philosophically humble thing to do under such uncertainty would therefore be to err on the side of an earlier point, and in fact the earliest point possible, lest future generations look back on us like the slave owners or eugenicists of previous centuries.

Yes this! Eugenics is only when someone else decides it for you.

I think this is exactly the kind of revisionist history Faro's post was talking about. "that was eugenics, this is NUgenics"

Lack of informed consent was never central to eugenics

it's not encoded in law, but we do have a society where who can have many children is determined by economic factors that are not fully under ones control.

lack of economic ability is not the same as someone forcing you not to have children. And you can still have children even when facing economic hardship - lots of people have done it (think immigrant families who start out poor). I would also claim that a lot of western nations subsidize families already, so economic factors is not considered eugenics imho.

How would you feel about a free test for $genetic_marker coupled with taxes for parents that have children with $genetic_marker? Surely that would count as "forced"?

GP said that we do have a society right now where economics is a eugenic factor. Please name one instance of the pattern you described in society today. I'm not aware of any tax on generic markers.

In practically any country with socialized healthcare you will be strongly encouraged to terminate a child that might turn out unhealthy, and in a lot of them you will lose "benefits" (on which you depend because you were forced to pay mandatory social insurance before, taking away your ability to save/invest by yourself) if you don't listen/go to the doctors as "you are supposed to because that's the system". Where I live in Central Europe, going to the gynecologist and listening to their recommendations is a requirement to get full parental social benefits - and the policy most certainly is also based on what's economical for the state/"the system", and only parents that were previously working can get the benefits.

Additionally, you will have to pay the full price for any treatment that's outside their recommendations, this often turns out higher in absolute prices than in any US hospital - even though the people are much poorer.

Then once an unhealthy child is born they often don't get the full benefits of socialized healthcare as they should according to the constitutions, the administration will say "the system works in a different way and you went outside it, so you need to take care of it yourself" and the parents are forced to pay for treatments and medical equipment by themselves because what "the system recommends" is not nearly enough (we are talking about US$ millions of additional out-of-pocket expenses in some real world cases that I follow locally). That could be interpreted as a form of tax too, especially since you are forced to pay mandatory health insurance in most of these countries.

Let me tell you what our purpose is: consciousness. It's to have good conscious experiences.

I think we'll soon achieve a pretty good understanding of meaning that we haven't acknowledge in a long time. I think philosophy has been misleading us into thinking purpose/meaning/motivation is not philosophically tractable. But once you acknowledge it's a property of consciousness (which I think is understandable to be a new insight, given we have finally come to terms with being amazing neural machines ourselves), I think it's a matter of studying information and neural experiences, together with a broader view (of survival, sustainability, and ethics) to have a pretty good idea of what it means to have a good life.

My current hypothesis is as follows: (1) Richness/Depth of experience; (2) Some kind of notion of beauty; (3) A well-functioning motivation system (which we associate with 'happiness'/'satisfaction'/etc. (4) Sustainability and ethics: ensuring all sentient beings through time and space share this wealth.

I hope we can approach a formal theory of ethics and meaning soon. I hope to form a community around discussing and organizing this knowledge (I am notoriously bad with promises though, so if anyone can please help, and join in). Imagine we had a "Super Declaration of [Lifeform] Human Rights", nearly-universally accepted, to guide us! (I think Effective Altruism is a nice step in this direction)

> If we can reverse engineer the mechanisms of evolution

Evolution is a very simple process, broadly speaking. You can implement your own model of it fairly easily. Survival is basically the only driving force, only those variations that survive to reproduce will be present in the next generation. It's a useful tool but we shouldn't let it guide us since it is quite blind.

> What is evolution driving us to become?

There is no destination for the evolutionary process. It's creation by subtraction really, everything that doesn't work gets eliminated. Mind you, it's always only applicable to the current circumstances. What works in one time and place will not always work in another. Hence the constant change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm

This is one of the wildest things I’ve read on the internet… this year?

Why does a lack of creative design mean human experience is meaningless?

Haha thanks

Well a lack of a creator means we invent our own purpose I suppose, and garner whatever ethereal meaning from that we can.

That just feels hollow to me. The idea that we are just biological machines serving the unfathomable aims of some sky daddy is unsettling but suits me better than our purpose being a bunch of lame platitudes about being kind or whatever.

but then sky daddy is the biological machine inventing his own purpose.

Agree, thank you for being first to say it.

That humanity is _converging_ on some "intentional" optimal outcome is dramatically depressing to me in a way that i wasn't prepared to read today.

Now i don't know what's left or right, but insofar as my time here is concerned, let chaos blossom! Way more fun

I think we are like fish in a pond, we don't have the cognitive tools to understand complex enough ideas to determine our 'purpose.' Seen in this way, 'purpose' is simply a symbol that represents another cognition, so asking the question 'what is our purpose?' is essentially meaningless (like a circular definition). I have been influenced a lot by Taoism and Zen Buddhism in particular, where the focus is less on answers to questions, but contemplating the phenomena of the questions themselves.

You're absolutely right - purpose does presuppose another cognition. The good thing is that if we have purpose then there's Someone out there who created us with a purpose. And if that someone wanted us to know what it was, they could tell us in many ways (including by leaving us with a desire for something so innate that we can't substitute anything else for it).

I used to follow this logic but I think it is limited by the fact that using desire as a guide for meaning is a cognition that can be overruled by other congitions. E.g. a religious person may decide to forego actions related to sexual desire because their philosophy follows some theology with rules on sexuality. You could argue that the religious devotion is just a more fundamental desire, but I think this leads to a circular definition ("meaning is derived from our fundamental desires" and "fundamental desires are what we find meaningful").

Instead, "what is the meaning of life" can be interpreted as a question with no cognitive answer, and thus in itself meaningless to ask. The question must then be "what is my meaning in life?" which is up to each person to decide.

Another question: if we desire something, how do we know that _someone_ gave us that desire? And who gave them the desire to give us that particular desire? I think it's turtles all the way down (but I'm not philosopher so would be keen to hear a rebuttal)

I'm with Aristotle - "all men desire happiness". Nothing else is desired for its own sake, but always for the sake of "happiness".

That said, I don't think that knowing that happiness is what we desire tells us very much. We need to go deeper or wider and learn more about the world and ourselves in order to answer the question "in what does our happiness consist". In other words, we need to examine what we have received (since the world and even our selves are experienced as a gift).

Which, coincidentally, is one of the ways that we can intuit that someone gave us what we have - because the principle of sufficient reason says that "an effect must have a cause sufficient to explain it" and we are an effect. "If I am a gift receiver, there must be a gift giver, and as their gift is great they must be greater still to be able to give so much away".

I agree on the importance of exploration and introspection to find meaning.

However, your interpretation of existence as a 'gift' is simply your own cognition, unrelated to the reality of experience. The tail is wagging the dog here. The duality of giving and receiving are just two linked concepts. If 'you' didn't create the universe, 'someone' must have! But then who made them? The buck has to stop somewhere, or maybe it doesn't exist.

That's right, the buck _has_ to stop somewhere. What else might we discover about this uncaused cause?