Tag: natural law

Nature and Its Paperwork

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We humans pride ourselves on being civilised. Unlike animals, we don’t let biology call the shots. A chimp reaches puberty and reproduces; a human reaches puberty and is told, not yet – society has rules. Biologically mature isn’t socially mature, and we pat ourselves on the back for having spotted the difference.

But watch how quickly that distinction vanishes when it threatens the in-group narrative. Bring up gender, and suddenly there’s no such thing as a social construct. Forget the puberty-vs-adulthood distinction we were just defending – now biology is destiny, immutable and absolute. Cross-gender clothing? “Against nature.” Transition? “You can’t be born into the wrong body.” Our selective vision flips depending on whose ox is being gored.

The same trick appears in how we talk about maturity. You can’t vote until 18. You’re not old enough to drink until 21. You’re not old enough to stop working until 67. These numbers aren’t natural; they’re paperwork. They’re flags planted in the soil of human life, and without the right flag, you don’t count.

The very people who insist on distinguishing biological maturity from social maturity when it comes to puberty suddenly forget the distinction when it comes to gender. They know perfectly well that “maturity” is a construct – after all, they’ve built entire legal systems around arbitrary thresholds – but they enforce the amnesia whenever it suits them. Nietzsche would say it plainly: the powerful don’t need to follow the rules, they only need to make sure you do.

So the next time someone appeals to “nature,” ask: which one? The nature that declares you old enough to marry at puberty? The nature that withholds voting, drinking, or retirement rights until a bureaucrat’s calendar says so? Or the nature that quietly mutates whenever the in-group needs to draw a new line around civilisation?

The truth is, “nature” and “maturity” are less about describing the world than about policing it. They’re flags, shibboleths, passwords. We keep calling them natural, but the only thing natural about them is how often they’re used to enforce someone else’s story.

Which Laws of Nature are Fundamental?

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Reading Dennett has gotten me down a rabbit hole. I decided to take a break from book-reading and spend the day reading essays and blogs and watching YouTube vids such as this one. The question posed by the title is Which Laws of Nature are Fundamental? The topic I find curious is an established dichotomy where intelligent design or multiverses are the only possible reasons why we as humans are here to question our existence.

Full disclosure: I don’t pretend to be a physicist, so although I have tried to keep current on, let’s call it, lay physics, there is much I don’t know. But that doesn’t make me stop questioning propositions.

In the case of intelligent design versus multiverses, I feel that both go overboard. I don’t particularly cherish Occam’s Razor, but I do find it apt here. As David Deutsch states in this piece, intelligent design only manages to kick the can down the kerb.

In a nutshell, intelligent design arrives at a place with a claim that all of this can’t have been the result of chance and random events, so [insert the entity of your choosing] had to have designed and constructed it, leaving open the question of how that entity came to be. This is a spin on the age-old issue that many defenders of intelligent design-like theories seem to cling to: The universe cannot have spawned from nowhere, so its genesis must have been due to an intelligent (read: divine) entity without recognising or admitting the circular reasoning involved.

On the other hand, the multiverse solution—which I don’t entirely rule out—also seems unnecessary. In another nutshell—or perhaps repurposing the first—, the main idea is that there are many if not infinite parallel universes. Given the large number—in the manner of the infinite monkeys typing Shakespeare’s sonnets, at least one is bound to be configured just so to enable life and humans in particular.

Typing Monkeys

I don’t subscribe to intelligent design in the least. I dismiss it as implausible. And whilst multiverses may exist, I fail to see why there can’t be a single universe—this one—that just so happens to be configured. If it had been configured any other way, there would have been no life as we know it—and certainly no human life and no life to question how it get there and why.

In my mind, just because we can ask why doesn’t mean there is an answer or that we can find it. More to the point, even in a world of cause and effect, the results can be emergent on one hand and multlivariant on the other. So whilst we want to discover a causal chain of A ⇒ B ⇒ C ⇒ n, it is not likely so linear. Humans do understand the notions of stochsticism and chaos, but we don’t necessarily know how to deal with them causally. Moreover—and Deutsch has specialised in the quantum space—, our understanding of quantum processes is extremely primative. We are probably operating more from conjecture than knowledge, but one needs to start someplace. The trick is not to believe you’ve reached India when you’ve only just departed Spain.

Pressing Questions

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Here is a list of questions I want to answer:

  1. Given that there is no inherent meaning to life, why are humans so driven to find it?
    • Evolutionary biology may offer some insights, but then the question turns to which is the cause and which is the effect?
    • Is it merely a function of language and cognition?
  2. Other than circular logic arguments—namely, to posit ‘I prefer it that way’—, what is the logical justification for the exclusivity of property ownership if not the divine or nature vis-a-vis so-called workmanship ideal?
  3. Why do Libertarians frame the equality debate between opportunity and outcome and side-step equality of condition and ontological equality, the other sociological categories of equality, especially when the ‘all men are created equal‘ claim is ontological in the first place?
  4. What to do with the logical fallacy, Appeal to Tradition?
  5. How to get beyond Wittgenstein’s language problem and the insufficiency of language? In my experience, most people accept and use language uncritically. Is everything just an arbitrary function of language? As language is an arbitrary construct, and meaning may change over time and dialect, how can we create a meaningful basis for argument?
    • For example, when we say we expect a ‘just’ society, justice means different things to different people. A typical use is to equate ‘just’ to ‘right’, but as there is no absolute right, there is no absolute just. Moreover, people tend to invoke just and justice, when they mean ‘my way’ and ‘vengeance’, and so the frame is relative to the framer.
  6. What is the way to get past injecting concepts such as value and income into premises and arguments?
  7. Accepting for the moment the concept of ‘state’, what is the optimal number of states, and why have more than one?

Workmanship Ideal or Convenience?

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One of the biggest issues I have with modern, Western political theory is Locke‘s so-called ‘workmanship ideal‘, a concept stemming from the Enlightenment belief that a maker of something should be the rightful owner of something. The Age of Enlightenment (AKA Age of Reason) was supposed to have divorced science from other rationale, whether divine rights (as ascribed to kings) or something else. The problem—the same problem Descartes had in his Discourses—is that God (even if vis-a-vis ‘nature‘) is injected exogenously and irrationally into the works. Philosophers even into the 21st century, if barely, have concluded that this concept breaks down when we attempt to secularise it, but we are subjectively comfortable with the notion. Of course, the more our beliefs lean towards ‘higher powers‘, intelligent design and the such, the more comfortable we are apt to feel.

I was originally inspired to write this when researching Rawls and happening upon Ian Shapiro‘s Yale open course, The Moral Foundations of Politics. James Murphy has this to say in his essay, The Workmanship Ideal : A Theologico-Political Chimera?

What’s in Store for 2017?

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Going into 2017, I am going to focus more attention on Universal Basic Income (UBI) otherwise known as minimum income. Providing everyone with a safety net in the spirit of life, liberty, and happiness. Hopefully, this will take some focus away from or redirect the negativity I am anticipating under the Trump regime, but I make no promises, expressed or implied. I’ll attend to the detractors as well.

I’ve been peripherally aware of the concept of UBI for a couple of years now—Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots and Erik Brynjolfsson’s The Second Machine Age, among others. Although I don’t envision it as a permanent solution—after all, what is permanent? —but it is a solution that works within the existing (and woefully wanting) economic framework. It does, however, have a way to go relative to the current socio-political constructs.

The solution is not permanent primarily because the current economic system based on markets, supply, demand, income, and production is tenuous, so building on a platform of shifting sand is bound to fail—not because it is a bad idea considering the given system, but because the system itself is faulty. Capitalism is a house of cards, a tenuous MacGyver-ed system held together with spit and bubble gum (and who knows what else). I don’t have a replacement system in mind, and most people are not quite ready to abandon their cherished ragdoll owing to indoctrination, propaganda, and escalating commitment.  Entropy is at play, and the establishment needs to apply more and more external force to keep it together. We can look to history and the French revolution of 1789 as a guide—or perhaps the fall of tsarist Russia. These systems were inherently unstable.

Regarding these societies of serfs, the gutting of the middle class and the expanding inequality along with technological trends seems to have a trajectory along a vector to return us there, and the results can be expected to be as disastrous.

The United States was founded during the so-called Enlightenment with dashes of a Calvinistic work ethic and rugged independence, whatever that means. ‘Enlightenment,’ like ‘modern’, is a flattering term given to self-describe a period, but this description is mostly wishful thinking. I am not opposed to much of the thought that came from the Enlightenment, from Diderot to Locke to Montesquieu—thoughts such as freedom and separation of powers—, hijacked by the likes of Franklin and Jefferson on these shores, but they, too, were built on shaky grounds—the grounds of gods or God, and nature—, so our laws are built upon nothing; this is worse than shifting sand: at least there was sand to shift.

Language tries to obfuscate the divine with the euphemism nature. From so-called ‘natural laws’ we derive property rights, but take away the premise of natural law, and we lose the basis for such an assertion. And don’t get me started on the further foundationless logical leap to intellectual property rights.