вечная телеология
Nov. 20th, 2017 10:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kostya_hhttp://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/13/book-review-legal-systems-very-different-from-ours/#comment-567318
There’s often a strange correspondence between ‘a mold that’s more rational-self-interest-maximizing’ and seeing things as being “objective” or “scientific”. This is then often extended metaphorically across levels so that we can find an economic incentive for punishing crimes but also, ‘natural-human-desire-for-vengeance is probably just evolution’s solution to this same problem.’ We extend optimisation through the pursuit of self-interest down the scale towards biology and up the scale towards societies. Genes should be understood as if they were rationally pursuing their own self interest and this is an explanation for progress. Ideas should be understood through an analogy with genes as memes, which also act as if they were pursuing a self-interested desire to replicate. Institutions and even societies can be understood as if they were self-interested, competing individuals, and this again drives progress. I think it ends up with a sort of evolutionism that much more closely resembles the Spencerian version than what you’d find in On the Origin of Species. Less “variation under natural selection” and more “survival of the fittest” as a cosmic principle driving an optimising teleological process. It ends up with optimisation caused by competing individuals, not being one theory of society or one aspect of the economy, but a natural law of progress.
There’s often a strange correspondence between ‘a mold that’s more rational-self-interest-maximizing’ and seeing things as being “objective” or “scientific”. This is then often extended metaphorically across levels so that we can find an economic incentive for punishing crimes but also, ‘natural-human-desire-for-vengeance is probably just evolution’s solution to this same problem.’ We extend optimisation through the pursuit of self-interest down the scale towards biology and up the scale towards societies. Genes should be understood as if they were rationally pursuing their own self interest and this is an explanation for progress. Ideas should be understood through an analogy with genes as memes, which also act as if they were pursuing a self-interested desire to replicate. Institutions and even societies can be understood as if they were self-interested, competing individuals, and this again drives progress. I think it ends up with a sort of evolutionism that much more closely resembles the Spencerian version than what you’d find in On the Origin of Species. Less “variation under natural selection” and more “survival of the fittest” as a cosmic principle driving an optimising teleological process. It ends up with optimisation caused by competing individuals, not being one theory of society or one aspect of the economy, but a natural law of progress.
