The Impending Death of Modern Capitalism

That works for a casino where all the random activity on the casino floor produces the outcome of the house winning. But calling that teleological only works because we know the intention of the owners. If instead a bunch of monkeys accidentally built a casino, I'm not calling that teleological because all they did was accidentally build something that produced consistent outcomes.

What we call natural selection isn't selection at all. Evolution just kills what doesn't work in that environment at that moment in time. In other words, evolution isn't a selecting process; it's a filtering one. There's no goal, nothing is being chosen or aimed for. There's just random activity and what doesn't work gets filtered out of life. I get that looks like teleology but it's more near surviving for surviving's sake.

You're just running in circles with word games.

Selection vs filtration. They are actually synonyms. A filter determines (selects) what passes through and what does not. Eveolution / natural selection does that too.

I think you have the word selection confused with choice. Natural selection is not conscious ... there is no choice. It just happens naturally.

The strainer selected the pasta -- ergo, pasta is hardwired to survive (from going down the drain).

I don't know what you're saying but that's what I'm hearing.

You really torture the English language.

Of course we eat to stay alive. Our bodies assault us with a hormone called ghrelin when our cells need more raw material for metabolism.

The impulse to eat is part of the simple imperative of life ..... "stay alive".

Survival isn't the biggest thing .... it's the only thing.

'Torturing the english language' is a really good description of how you're misapplying these concepts despite clearly knowing them well.

Without survival, you can't have a species, so survival is a goal, objective, direction, whatever you want to call it.

If survival is a consequence .... what causes it ?

I say it's baked into nature. The very essence of nature.

When you peel back the layers of truth, you apparently finding something deeper. What is it ?

Edit: I have to consider the possibility at some point that you're simply trolling. Some people get off on that.

Except that is only true until you procreate and the prole reaches the age at which it is indipendent.

It's not true automatically later on (unless you staying alive increases the chance of survival and reproduction of your offspring more than the resources you consume would).

Ie an old person or an incapacitated person being hungry is anti-survival of the tribe in the state of nature. Yet it happens regularly. Because pulsions aren't as fine tuned as you would like them to be.

There is a lot of nuance associated with the old or incapacitated person. Competing survival impulses. Those which are best for the individual and those which are best for the tribe.

A lot of men (more than women) decide to take their own lives when they perceive they are no longer useful to the tribe. Sometimes people decide to care for the elderly and sometimes they abandon them.

With lions, older males are killed in succession or left to wander in isolation or with other nomad males. Females are allowed to stay with the tribe until they die.

If survival was the only thing, then there would be no sexual reproduction + variation.

In the beginning, cells were immortal and solely female, which replicated exact copies. Eventually, the female cells traded their immortality for sexual reproduction + variation.

Why did they do this? It was for something more than survival, which was already attained in full.

The chance to level up quality of life at increased risk of death eventually wins out over prolonged low level survival.

Therefore, it’s more accurate to say quality of life (not survival) is the only thing.

Do you equate your level of consciousness with that of a baby? If not, why use that example?

You can deny your impulses for goals and purposes correct?

It's subtle.

Organisms are hardwired to survive due to their ability to mutate.

I'm okay with that phrasing because it makes the distinction between the mechanism of mutation and the resulting adaptations.

That was my initial criticism of your thesis. As I said, I’m fine with your basic conclusion, just not the path you’re taking to get there. The gist of it being: if we alter the environment, we can change our outcome from extinction to survival. You're just using our cognitive ability to impose the equivalent of environmental stressors. But that’s not because we’re wired to survive. It’s because we accidentally evolved brains that can game the system.

But again, there's a big difference between saying, “polar bears and brown bears are wired to survive, period” and saying, “bears are wired to survive due to their ability to mutate.” If their environments suddenly flip-flopped, they'd both go extinct. Probably the same with lions and tigers. That was my point with the scientific process. If we're not happy with what the laws of nature provide, we don't try to change those laws, we simply change the conditions (environment) under which they operate.

I used that example to show how survival behavior doesn’t require intention, goals, or even consciousness. A baby doesn’t suckle to survive ; it suckles because its wired to, and its survival is the consequence.

Sure but those goals are ultimately serving other impulses I value more. Kind of like that adage: In life pain is inevitable. Our choice is the pain of discipline or the pain of regret.

What you're saying does bring up an interesting tie-in to what Nut Nut is arguing. Chimps aren't going to destroy the environment or nuke the planet to death. So if we have the ability to override impulses - the vetted impulses that got us here - wouldn't that make us more not less vulnerable to doing things that undermine our survival. Kind of like a poker player overriding GTO for a live read.

Your view seems to be that, before humans developed self consciousness and intention, life had no consciousness or intention in this world. Is this an accurate description of your view?

I don’t see the benefit of this view compared to the view that life has had intention and consciousness from the beginning. I guess the benefit is you can absolve yourself of any duty to align your desires with the desires of capital ‘L’ Life. You can tell yourself that life has no ultimate purpose you need to tether yourself to.

For me, within the baby, life has the conscious desire to survive even though the baby lacks conscious awareness of it. The way I’ve come to know this is through identifying with life.

I would encourage people here to identify more deeply with life. Directionless evolution is no home for a human being.

I don't want to get into a metaphysical debate. But briefly, I'm an Idealist. I believe the world is in our minds, not the other way around. So no, that's not my overarching view.

But I'm comfortable separating that view from more practical concerns because I don't believe we need everyone to agree on God or any kind of transcendental framework in order to make the world better. I think most people are basically decent until they’re put under pressure--whether from fear, scarcity, or the lure of power and control, or whatnot. So I'm thinking if there were less of that sort of pressure, that higher aspect of ourselves might become more visible on its own.

This is some very immature thinking.

Mutation is part of the natural design. The ability to diversify provides adaptive protection against changing circumstances. Sexual reproduction provides much more genetic diversity than asexual reproduction and hence more resilience to a changing environment.

Everything that we observe is an example of a design that maximizes survival at some level.

The problem with capitalism is that it pits personal survival motives (the individual is programmed to hoard) vs the collective survival need for sustainability.

Humans may go extinct as a result. Our personal competitive survival motives may prove immune to adaptation. We may not be able to live cooperatively.

But life will go on. Alligators have been around for over 100 million years. Humans have only been around for 1/300th of that. From a time perspective ... we're a short term blip in the history of life.

Impulses can not be denied.

It's merely a case of which impulse is greatest.

In your example, the "goals and purpose" you allude to are also impulses.

capitalism is actually the best way society can generate resources, by an immense margin vs all other societal arrangements we tried, and so it's the most pro survival arrangement we ever tried.

especially if you care about survival of the species.

ofc to maximize survival it should be couple with muchore ruthless provisions eliminating people who suck resources without producing them

Woah, woah, woah... settle down there, buddy. Them's fightin' words.

In case you hadn't noticed .... we're built to fight. Survival of the fittest my friend.

The most fit people don't hide from a necessary fight when they are backed into a corner.

Our species is being slowly backed into a corner. Fighting is exactly the natural response to such a circumstance.

I'm not arguing for physical violence. But it's important that we not be afraid to tell each other the truth and advocate for political alternatives to the extinction duopoly of two capitalist parties in the US.

Which is why people like you and radical leftists in general are ******ed losers. Fight to gain for YOUSELF AND YOUR FAMILY, that would be biologically sound.

"fight for society to change completly" is just ******ed. It's not pro fitness.

Embrace familistic individualism as the only morally sound approach to existence. Also called as "libertarianism"

Let's imagine that we lived in a simulation.

And there were two simulators. One who wanted the simulation to end and kill all of the subjects like you and me. Another who wanted the simulation to go on.

How would the simulator who wants to kill everyone off accomplish their goal ? He would brainwash people to only care for themselves at the expense of the whole. He would convince you that libertarianism is morally sound.

Morality doesn't exist. It's just an invention necessary to maintain societal order. The only thing real is life and death.

I'm not sure why you even bother to participate in conversations relevant to the world at large when you profess yourself a proponent of "familistic individualism". Your participation in this conversation does not benefit your family.

I have news for you pal. All humans are family. We all share a common ancestor as does every other form of life on this planet.

Even people who are as ignorant as you are part of that family.

Prior to sexual reproduction, life was not under any serious threat of extinction. It was a stalemate. Sexual reproduction introduced certain programmed death. Again, it wasn’t survival which drove this transition.

Child sacrifice? Mass suicide events? Reality is not so simple.

It's impossible to fuel a growing economy without extracting value from productive labor. No exceptions.

The core difference between the US and USSR economic models is terminology: what the capitalists call "profit" the socialists call "surplus." But both models depend on producing more than they consumed. So whatever we call it - profit or surplus - it's needed to fund everything outside direct production: teachers, science, infrastructure, defense, R&D, etc. Where the models differ is in how that surplus is generated and distributed, ie, central planning and state ownership vs markets and private ownership.

The irony is that each system gravitates toward the other to survive or to become more competitive because each model tends to produce the very problems the other was designed to fix. Central planning drifts toward market mechanisms to solve inefficiency and stagnation, while market economies increasingly rely on state intervention to correct inequality, lack of public goods, and stability. Odd that the masters of the dialectic didn’t anticipate their own system would negate itself. Then again, the Free Marketeeers ended up building a regulatory state just to keep their invisible hand from punching itself in the face.

So maybe there's a best of both worlds. Or maybe their would be if people weren't so adamant about dying on their economic ideological hills.