From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Tue Jan 14 2003 - 16:13:32 MST
Lee Daniel Crocker writes
> > So, "intuitively" I don't feel the presence of any natural
> > laws (outside physics). I guess I never have.
>
> One can be scientifically rigorous without being pathologically
> reductionist.
Ahem.
> Even in physics one can often aggregate and simplify and apply
> "laws" to complex systems that are useful even though they may or
> may not have direct physical existence in waves and particles.
> In designing aircraft, for example, we have formulas for things
> like lift and drag which are really just shortcut ways of
> describing the aggregate behavior of lots of individual air
> molecules bouncing off lots of metal molecules, all mediated by
> electromagnetic forces. But actually describing the behavior of
> every molecule would be silly--lift and drag formulas work well,
> and enable us to accomplish more with less work. Even something
> as simple as Boyle's law of gases is really just a shortcut for
> the ways gas molecules behave in the aggregate.
Absolutely correct. These patterns have objective existence
whether or not humankind has gotten around to identifying
them and placing them in textbooks, or even whether or not
they are computably compressible. (For example, one "law"
of chess in effect says that you cannot checkmate the
opposing King when he is defended by two Knights and you have
just a Rook, Bishop, and King in less that 322 moves in some
positions---it turns out that this is simply the case and that
there is no explanation, and that we had to use computers to
discover this "law".)
> Speaking of "natural laws" of human behavior is no different,
> really. Human brains are connected in ways we can observe, and
> high-level behaviors have high-level consequences we can observe,
> and we can generalize which of those behaviors lead to results we
> favor. "Natural rights" is just a convenient notation, and is
> no more (and no less) "fictional" than lift or boiling points.
The notation "Natural rights" is very *inconvenient* for many
reason.
First, people do not mean the same thing by it at all. Many
religious people mean something *quite* different from what
ordinary materialists could possibly mean.
Second, it gets very confused with "natural law" as this thread
amply demonstrates.
Third, semantically it would seem to allude to something that
exists in the *same* sense that laws of physics exist, e.g.,
constraints on what is possible. But human anthropology,
much advanced over what it was in Jefferson's day, exposes
this as a complete fallacy: we now know that insofar as
anything like individual rights are concerned, the cultural
variance is incredible.
As you wrote
> Human brains are connected in ways we can observe, and
> high-level behaviors have high-level consequences we
> can observe, and we can generalize which of those
> behaviors lead to results we favor.
It all depends on time, culture, and technical sophistication.
It now appears to me that the extremely wide prevalence of
human sacrifice in almost all early societies---the Druids,
the Babylonians, the Maya, the Aztec, and, God knows, the
early Hebrews, suggests that human sacrifice might have been
a positive thing for early societies, at least in the sense
that it enabled them to prosper (more than their neighbors).
So what then? Are we to follow your reasoning and suppose
that human sacrifice is a part of natural law? Moreover,
I guess that you've got the ultimate argument that we can
use to dispose of the socialists: "You see," we tell them,
"Capitalism is just a part of natural law, resistance is
futile".
Lee Corbin
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 17:35:51 MST