Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Fallacy of Human Freedom

nationalinterest.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 65 posts

Re: The Fallacy of Human Freedom

#21

Post by davidhollander »

Whatever one's thoughts on the article in its entirety, the initial implication that the thinkers listed could not account for Herzen's fish is disingenuous.

Helvetius (one of the listed):

"The free man is the man who is not in irons, nor imprisoned in a gaol, nor terrorized like a slave by the fear of punishment ... it is not lack of freedom, not to fly like an eagle or swim like a whale."

If freedom refers not to the biological limitations and fundamental nature of man, as the author repeatedly asserts during the construction of their straw opponent, but refers to whether man is in chains, then it becomes possible to generate empirical measures demonstrating "progress" in terms of freedom:

At the beginning of the 19th century, serfs and slaves made up 3/4s of the world's population.

Re: The Fallacy of Human Freedom

#23

Post by speeder »

davidhollander wrote: post #21

Whatever one's thoughts on the article in its entirety , the initial implication that the thinkers listed could not account for Herzen's fish is disingenuous. Helvetius (one of the listed): "The free man is the man who is not in irons, nor imprisoned in a gaol, nor terrorized like a slave by the fear of punishment ... it is not lack of freedom, not to fly like an eagle or swim like a whale." If freedom refers not to…

And now beside having more slaves than any other time.in history in absolute numbers without counting prisoners in countries that allow prisoner slavery, like the US, we have people.that would happily.volunteer to.be slave if.they had a guarantee of food, we have sweatshops, we have young people desperately working in jobs they hate to pay student debts Oh, I am not slave, I am free, I am free to work in whatever job I find, or die starved and in debt.

Re: The Fallacy of Human Freedom

#24

Post by islon »

cytokine_storm wrote: post #14
chrischen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skimmed the article... but I thought the point was about idealogical progress? The flying fish thing was a metaphor about human nature (how we behave, not what we can technically accomplish). For example, we've invented better weapons, like guns, but it's still used to kill people. I think the answer to progress is to fundamentally alter human genes (thereby altering fundamental human nature), which the author seems…

I read the article properly and came to the same conclusion. The author (of the article, unsure of the book) is definitely arguing that Progress is a flawed concept because of the frailty of human nature. Genetic alteration and controlled environments might help solve these issues and help overcome the "human nature sucks" argument against the idea of Progress. But maybe the problem is more universal than human natur…

Genetic modifications can't alter human nature. What you'll have is a different species, closely related to humans. You can argue that's just semantics, I can agree to a point but unless you give a proper answer to what does it mean to be human my criticism is still valid.

Re: The Fallacy of Human Freedom

#25

Post by jrkelly »

spitx wrote: post #18
kijin wrote: post #16

> their core belief in progress is a superstition, further from the truth about the human animal than any of the world’s religions. If some someone thinks that the history of humanity has always been one of progress, that's an empirical claim that can be shown to be false. But most of the people who I think promote the idea of progress are actually not like that. The idea of progress is an ideal, not an empirical cla…

Animals with highly developed brains never simply accept their fates. After all, they understand that if they manipulate nature in certain ways, at least some parts of their fate can be averted! Your argument has the appearance of something that's badly contrived (or derived). You may have not chanced on arguments surrounding your premise on "highly developed brains" and natural limits imposed on such brains owing to…

"Argument dismantling the aforementioned" should be required for any long post on HN. Would save lots of endless back-and-forth threads.

Re: The Fallacy of Human Freedom

#26

Post by sandking »

spitx wrote: post #18
kijin wrote: post #16

> their core belief in progress is a superstition, further from the truth about the human animal than any of the world’s religions. If some someone thinks that the history of humanity has always been one of progress, that's an empirical claim that can be shown to be false. But most of the people who I think promote the idea of progress are actually not like that. The idea of progress is an ideal, not an empirical cla…

Animals with highly developed brains never simply accept their fates. After all, they understand that if they manipulate nature in certain ways, at least some parts of their fate can be averted! Your argument has the appearance of something that's badly contrived (or derived). You may have not chanced on arguments surrounding your premise on "highly developed brains" and natural limits imposed on such brains owing to…

False because of the following:

* compression

* symbol substitution

* levels of abstraction

Re: The Fallacy of Human Freedom

#27

Post by cLeEOGPw »

spitx wrote: post #18
kijin wrote: post #16

> their core belief in progress is a superstition, further from the truth about the human animal than any of the world’s religions. If some someone thinks that the history of humanity has always been one of progress, that's an empirical claim that can be shown to be false. But most of the people who I think promote the idea of progress are actually not like that. The idea of progress is an ideal, not an empirical cla…

Animals with highly developed brains never simply accept their fates. After all, they understand that if they manipulate nature in certain ways, at least some parts of their fate can be averted! Your argument has the appearance of something that's badly contrived (or derived). You may have not chanced on arguments surrounding your premise on "highly developed brains" and natural limits imposed on such brains owing to…

Yes, limit for human brain should exist, however anyone with the ideal of progress knows that there are a couple of ways to change that - genetic modification and artificial intelligence are few of the possibilities. So the limits exists only for us, not necessarily for our children. Just like our ancestors at some time in the evolution path had limits that made them incapable of even having language, children of the future might exceed all our limits by a scale we don't even imagine now.

Re: The Fallacy of Human Freedom

#28

Post by digitalengineer »

Svip wrote: post #10
Svip wrote: post #4

As Rob Pike would say; mais oui. I believe in the EU; or rather, I want to believe in the EU, because I want to believe that the European countries can work together and close at that. Politically, economically and so on. But neither am I naïve to believe that the current implementation of the EU is the best solution, nor do I believe that it will ever form into some sort of 'United States of Europe'. Nation states w…

Amusing. Whoever voted my comment down fails to realise that the EU is based on an ideal of humanism. The article in question specifically mentions that Gary has become a Eurosceptic, which falls perfectly in line with his opinion on humanism and progress. One might think that the ideal of humanism and progress is merely to elevate all countries to Western democracies (if we limit humanism and progress to politics),…

Well, it was based on an ideal of humanism. Now? It's been taken over by people with other beliefs. Have a listen what Vladimir Bukovsky (who spent many years in Russian labour camps and psychiatric prisons for defending human rights) feels about this 'new' EU: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM2Ql3wOGcU

He draws some frightning comparisons.

Re: The Fallacy of Human Freedom

#29

Post by rayiner »

What a neat article.

My wife and I have been recently binge-watching the TV show "Jericho." It's not deeply philosophical, but its a nice expression of this quote in the article: "The most basic trait is the instinct for survival, which is placed on hold when humans are able to live under a veneer of civilization. But it is never far from the surface."

Re: The Fallacy of Human Freedom

#30

Post by 4891 »

unimpressive wrote: post #3

A great blog on this theme is Mencius Moldbugs "Unqualified Reservations". Which he describes as an 'anti-democracy blog'. (Where 'democracy' includes supposed populist ideologies like fascism and communism.) Writing from the view that monarchism is a good idea, Moldbug has a strange perspective on just about every topic imaginable. While I'm not sure how much of it I agree with, it's definitely interesting. http://m…

Yes, I was going to say the same thing. If you found this article interesting, you'll likely find Moldbug's perspective very interesting too.
Post reply on HN