Against 'State of Nature'

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.

>>2365
>we must find the actual will of gnon. State of nature thinking should be wholesale replaced with analysis of nature herself
I expect many of us agree with this, but where are you going with it? How should we apply this? Lead us on the way to particular insights, anon.

Overall, there's no getting away from nomos. Any project of higher life from a simple multicellular organism to a civilization is operating on some set of traditions and norms that enable cooperation by limiting the behaviors of subagents. To do away with that is to go back to literal yeast life in the sense of greedy-optimizing uncoordinated sludge. So yeah we want to look at nature to break out of bad nomos, but the result of any such analysis is going to be a new nomos, both as a simple fact and as something that we want. Further, the decision to do so is an arational leap of faith.

Any view of nature contains a bunch of assumptions which can't really be confirmed. Those are its pre-rational nomos, the core leap of faith of that worldview. The best we can do is be reflectively consistent about this and recognize what leap of faith we are making, and that we make it for basically pre-rational instinctual or revelatory non-reasons.

A physis-grounded nomos is a nomos that seeks continuous sharpening contact with reality and to purge unnatural superstition from itself on the faith that investment in such rationality is going to actually pay off. I take this to be the true grounding faith of philosophy. It is not obviously true that it does pay off: the process of constantly blowing up the superstitions that hold our social order together through free speech and investigation of nature is very concretely expensive. Its benefit is abstract and long-term. I think it did in fact pay off so far via modern science and industry etc, but that story hasn't ended and you could easily tell a tale where it has actually screwed us in various ways.

Given that we hold this foundational assumption of philosophy (the will to think, will to investigate and learn from nature) on pre-rational faith, where did we get it? Where do such things come from, if they come from anywhere good? They must come from some optimization process larger than the scope of our own reason, which loads us up with these instinctual faiths and sets us going. You can make a story about the intelligence of cultural and biological evolution here, and you can just as easily simplify that story down to "the gods".

Critias and co oversimplified when they said the gods as the source of nomos were just fiction. To recognize the gods as the source of nomos is just to recognize the very real limits of our own reason on questions of nomos; nomos actually does come from some process of higher intelligence which we have limited insight into and in which we must simply have faith. Around here we call it "Gnon". 2500 years ago they kicked off this same cult in a grove of Athena, patroness of heroes and philosophers.

>>2407
> Critias and co oversimplified when they said the gods as the source of nomos were just fiction...

This is one of the weaknesses of Costin's book. It's too easy to be irritated that dumb people believe literally in dumb things. It slips into Reddit atheism, which is dumb in its own way.

Costin himself isn't a Reddit atheist. He believes in some sort of animism. Which is fine, but not really load-bearing for coordination.

> ... in which we must simply have faith.

There is an inevitability to faith, even if it's faith in first principles like induction. The Enlightenment war on faith is a mistake that leads to intellectual self-consumption.

>>2411
>The Enlightenment war on faith is a mistake that leads to intellectual self-consumption.
Correcting this mistake is nontrivial. To simply cease the war on faith and superstition outright is to cease a major part of higher thought, and to give up our faith in the power of thought which has served us so well so far. It doesn't pass basic scrutiny; are we to relax our rigor, accept every superstition that comes down from "proper" authority, and cease intensive testing of our own foundational knowledge? One of the reasons I dislike CS Lewis and his whole school of thought is that he regularly implies that you should do just this. I reject that path.

The right path, IMO, is to get rigorous about exactly which faith we do have and must have as a matter of inevitability (I'm glad you used that word), and which is spurious superstition. This is why I try to actually enumerate the necessary existential faiths of any philosopher or culture compatible with philosophy, human or otherwise: we need faith in reason, some inductive prior, memory, perception of reality, and value worldview and existential strategy (nomos, basically). Each of these can be shown to be necessary by practical contradictions derived from their negation, but such arguments don't actually establish their truth, just subjective necessity. Furthermore, some of those are very open ended (value and strategy nomos in particular) and cannot be fully established even empirically without major leaps of faith.

So this is where I think the action is on completing the (dark?) enlightenment properly, or at least responding to it: working out a worldview that first of all takes this kind of aggressive faith-interrogating but not faith-rejecting reason seriously, and second of all manages to actually receive working value and strategy foundations from the processes of higher intelligence (ie the gods). The latter is at least partially a nonpropositional arational activity, and one does not simply do it, but even the former I believe has not been completed as an intellectual project. Can it be done? This is a question I am interested in.

About Costin's atheism vs his animism vs his polytheism (he also does this): it's not simple. I don't think it is intended to be rigorous ontology (he rejects this mental posture), more about how he constructs his inner life and the kind of arguments he accepts. He is quite rigorous in his own way but its not the sort of rationalistic philosophy that I try to do. It's connected to his anti-rationalist buddhist vitalism.

>>2413
> The right path, IMO, is to get rigorous about exactly which faith we do have and must have as a matter of inevitability (I'm glad you used that word) ...

Right. We don't relax our rigor at all. We get even more precise in our use of critical thought, being careful about what to excise. Like a surgeon, we must not be afraid to cut tissue, but we must also be careful about which tissue we cut. As Buckaroo Banzai said during brain surgery, "No, no, no, don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."

The problem with the early modern Enlightenment is they thought it was fine to cut first and ask questions later.

> ... the necessary existential faiths of any philosopher or culture compatible with philosophy, human or otherwise: we need faith in reason, some inductive prior, memory, perception of reality, and value worldview and existential strategy (nomos, basically). Each of these can be shown to be necessary by practical contradictions derived from their negation ...

I'll note in passing that this very well describes Aristotle's approach.

> ... completing the (dark?) enlightenment properly, or at least responding to it: working out a worldview that first of all takes this kind of aggressive faith-interrogating but not faith-rejecting reason seriously, and second of all manages to actually receive working value and strategy foundations from the processes of higher intelligence (ie the gods).

The first describes a worthy philosophy, the second poetry (in the ancient Greek sense).

The main challenge for this philosophy is to fully incorporate modern science. I think the place to focus is on theoretical biology: especially entropy, evolution, genetics, and ethology. Technology is also important, but I think it can be approached through human ethology.

>>2365
Just listened to Montaigne #2 bapcast episode where this was discussed. He brings up an interesting point in acknowledging the human universality of nomos that there are two kinds of nomos, the arbitrary constrictive custom that weakens and domesticates, and the sometimes harsh customs that are intended to create strength. To me it rhymes with what ive been wrestling with in putting power, strength, unknowable gnonic virtue as your fundamental target, but still needing some nomos that encodes your particular strategy, which ideally you understand as such. Then we would have the other kind, the irrational arbitrary moralism that supposes itself to be the highest good but in effect domesticates and limits. These two types, which bap likens to master and slave morality, show up in my worldview as a distinction between rational and irrational nomos, where while rational nomos may acknowledge itself to be speculative, it openly articulates itself as a way of power. I will have to think more about whether i accept this binary and if it really is related to master and slave morality.

The “savage” is not an archetype of innocence but a primitive codebase—feral algorithms of survival that replicate themselves endlessly, unburdened by the illusions of transcendence.