
Thomas Hobbes: A grim portrait of human nature - pseudolus
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/thomas-hobbes-footnotes-to-plato/
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vivekd
Hobbes is useful for his part in kickstarting political science and the
systematic study of politics. Beyond that I don't know how useful his ideas
are today. Hobbes thought that left to our own devices or in the state of
nature, people would devolve into a war of all against all because of all the
reasons we have for wanting to kill each other. Hobbes gives reasons like
wanting what the other has, or even out of mistrust.

It doesn't take much to see that this is obviously wrong. We have enough data
today to know that even in the state of nature, and in societies, people tend
towards corporation rather than constant self interested fighting. Modern
psychology and social science show that generally people tend towards working
together rather than picking open conflict with one another. Archeology
teaches us that humans evolved into groups and intra-group cooperation for
millions of years. Living in cooperative groups is in our genes.

Maybe the history of nations or groups is a history of conflict, but when you
get intra-group it's largely cooperative.

Of course writing when he did, Hobbes didn't have the benefit of our research
in archeology, social science and psychology. He was working with the
knowledge available in this time and can't be blamed for that.

Hobbes is certainly important for his role in the history of political
discourse. I don't know how much real world value his ideas hold up today in
terms of understanding political theory or the relationship between sovereign
and subject.

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wahern
> Living in cooperative groups is in our genes.

It amazes me that people fail to recognize this, and saddens me that people
fail to appreciate how fascinating it is.

While humans are the most intelligent creatures on the planet by far, our
intelligence still sits on a continuous spectrum, and the basic evolutionary
processes that drove our intelligence are both straight-forward and evident
elsewhere in the animal kingdom, notwithstanding the complexity of the
details.

But our cooperative nature completely defies genetic evolutionary theory.
We're utterly unique in the kingdom of life. All other examples of cooperative
behavior are clearly understood and can even be predicted by standard theory.
But somewhere along the way humans jumped an evolutionary chasm. As
predictably violent and selfish as humans can be, that doesn't diminish in the
least our strange underlying nature. It may turn out to be simple and obvious
in retrospect (in fact, I'd be surprised if it wasn't), but in the meantime it
baffles me that this mystery isn't appreciated more. Answering it could expose
and unlock a tremendous number of doors in anthropology, biology, computer
science, economics, mathematics, physics, psychology, and other domains.

Hobbes fundamental error was thinking that humans are just animals. Which is a
completely understandable mistake as the scientific age is premised on the
notion that the world functions according to basic, shared laws. But as
animalistic as we are, our species is peculiarly alien on Earth. According to
all we know about the mechanics of life, we shouldn't exist. The fact that we
not only exist, but continue to exist in defiance of the fundamental laws of
evolutionary biology as we understand them, should be mind blowing.

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ArtWomb
Terrific backgrounder. At some point everyone must wrestle with Hobbes' "state
of nature". The counterpoints from modern neuroscience seem to suggest a hard-
wiring in the brain for altruism. As well as a blurring of the hard boundaries
between emotion, reason and memory than Hume, Kant or Hobbes would have
imagined possible ;)

An Amygdala-Hippocampus Subnetwork that Encodes Variation in Human Mood

[https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(18)31313-8](https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674\(18\)31313-8)

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wahern
Our altruism is a paradox. It's obviously genetic. And I think it's fair to
say it evolved via natural selection, not gifted by the gods or aliens. Yet
the nature of our altruism seemingly contradicts the mechanics of genetic
evolution. Without resolving this paradox I don't think it's possible to fully
understand either the nature of our altruism or the mechanics of natural
selection. Resolving that question will be like moving from Newtonian physics
to Relativity.

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pseudolus
This has to be the first backgrounder on Hobbes that I've read that hasn't
included his description of the natural state of mankind as being "solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish, and short".

