Something BAP mentioned recently and that I see a lot of these days is a tendency to puzzle over what man was like in a 'state of nature'. It is weak thinking and should be discarded. Two prominent examples of this I see invoked are evopsych's "on the ancestral plain" style reasoning and Taleb's Lindy heuristic. There are also older and more harmful philosophical ideas of this flavor, like most of Locke.

A core effort of any gnon theology is trimming away the fat of nomos from phusis — if we want to encode the will of gnon, we must find the actual will of gnon. State of nature thinking should be wholesale replaced with analysis of nature herself (natura naturae). This looks like more biology, paleontology, ultradarwinism, and struggle analysis, less like comparative religion, literary analysis, and anthropology. Show me God in the Cambrian fossil record, not in circumcision as sign of the Davidic covenant.

The mere fact that man has customs which differ from nature means that you have a chance of falsely attributing custom to nature in any analysis of man. There is no nomos in nature other than in man, and Truth is a universal property of natura naturae, so this eliminates a large class of errors in coming to know gnon.

I don't think BAP thinks that 'state of nature' is the sole aim. He's popularizing the idea that our biology and psychology have adapted to a less-innovated-upon state of things.

Should it stay that way? Probably not. We're evolving all sorts of things, from immunity needed to survive the plague, to white skin to survive the northern hemispheres without rickets, to low female IQ needed to stay out of the workforce and reproduce.

Re nomos/phusis - it's "turtles all the way": we make sense of the world with constructed concepts, and in turn we generate those constructed concepts as material artifacts in the world.

A much more important question is the 'ought' - what will be the winning memeset of the future and will it lead to interplanetary life?

>>2365

"State of nature" is a speculative construct introduced by Hobbes and adopted by many subsequent Enlightenment thinkers to justify their favored political arrangements. It was used as recently as 1974 by Robert Nozick as the foundation of his work. It is mostly bogus.

It is quite different from the phusis vs. nomos distinction that was a major theme of the Sophists and other Greek thinkers.

I think a modernized focus on phusis and nomos, using modern biology etc., is the way to go.

This doesn't mean you can or should "get rid of" nomos. You never get rid of nomos. You just try to make it as functional as you can, and that mean reasoning about phusis.