How Do You Stall the Progress of Civilization?

[Ťarilis Kalpyren]

Hello there everyone! I have been lurking around the board for quite some time now, but I’ve finally needed to come out of the shadows to ask a question: how can I reasonably stagnate progress?

For the past while I have been undertaking a fairly large project (at least, large in my opinion) – developing in detail multiple inhabited worlds within the same solar system, from the beginning of civilization through to some point in the interstellar-travel-using future. The primary focus of mine so far has been on two terrestrial worlds (one with a race resembling sentient bats, the other with a 'standard', ‘slightly different’ population of humans), and an oxygen rich gas giant - similar to a warmer Neptune or Uranus - where I am working on a hive-mind of colonial flying creatures. (As a side note, I had a hard time imagining how bats went about technology once the bronze age hit more than how a hive-mind of flying creatures developed organically based technology in a world with no ground if you can believe that...)

But right now I am finally turning some more of my attention towards an idea I have been meaning to work out in detail for a while now - a rouge planet set free from its home star approximately 12,000 years ago. The remnants of a once great surface world continue on in the dark depths of the oceans beneath a thick layer of ice, kept warm though geothermal activity. But after so many years, the rouge planet is just nearing the outer reaches of my main solar system, ready for interaction with their first opportunity for freedom from their dark prison.

I am looking for ways to reasonably stall the advancement of, well, everything. Of course progress will still be made over time… just nowhere near the 12,000 years’ worth expected. I would like to have the relative technological levels of this rouge planet and my main terrestrial world within a reasonable distance of each other, and a 12,000 year head start is a bit unbalanced.

So, how would you go about maintaining a multi-millennia dark age with a population that has a near universal literacy level?

[Pogostick Man]

Make everybody basically revert to a life of hunter-gathering in small groups/tribes?

[ol bofosh]

Big Brother.

Edit: oh, and manipulate people into thinking that consumerism is the highest form of life, so they mistake the advancement of "things" (technology, possession, money etc.) with the advancement of people and their culture. With everyone concentrating on the former, no one will pay attention to the latter, which is the where Big Brother can do all the manipulation.

Edit 2: ooh, ooh, The Hunger Games!

Edit 3: And Facebook! A perfect example of seeming technological advancement combined with seeming literacy.

[Buran]

Constant war. Literate soldiers are better. Therefore, everyone is literate, but the planet's resources are consumed, the infrastructure destroyed, and populations reduced through constant, apocalyptic warfare. Throw in some nuclear/chemical/other WMD (mass driver?) attacks, and you've got yourself a post-apocalyptic, hunter-gatherer wasteland, but still with high literacy rates.

[Ever Lurker]

I would like to have the relative technological levels of this rouge planet and my main terrestrial world within a reasonable distance of each other, and a 12,000 year head start is a bit unbalanced.

So this is your goal. I think having a civilization that lives in such hardships to be stalled is totally unrealistic unless you have an alien species too different from humans. For humans, times of need are times where we can expect much progress while times of no need are the times when civilization may stall to some degree.

Why not create a timeline when there are periods of great progress followed by periods of massive disaster or war that brings civilization down? Your goal is having the wanted level of civilization by the time of the rogue planet's arrival to your system, and that doesn't mean your civilization must be stalled for 12,000 years.

[Civil War Bugle]

Have it be hit by moderately large asteroids/have huge volcancic eruptions occur periodically, ones that are big enough to through a lot of dust in the air as so to meddle with sunlight for farming and generally cause trouble, but which are not large enough to make everything go extinct. Have everyone survive but be working so hard on not losing technology and regressing to hunter-gathering societal levels that they don't have time to be making significant new advances.

[Ťarilis Kalpyren]

Make everybody basically revert to a life of hunter-gathering in small groups/tribes?

Reversion to a collection of small hunter-gather groups could work for a long time, but I don’t think it would hold for the entire population of the planet. Progress would likely be made at some point, hunter-gatherer societies do advance once they have surplus resources.

Big Brother.

Edit: oh, and manipulate people into thinking that consumerism is the highest form of life, so they mistake the advancement of "things" (technology, possession, money etc.) with the advancement of people and their culture. With everyone concentrating on the former, no one will pay attention to the latter, which is the where Big Brother can do all the manipulation.

Edit 2: ooh, ooh, The Hunger Games!

Edit 3: And Facebook! A perfect example of seeming technological advancement combined with seeming literacy.

Manipulation like that would be possible for a few nations at most, I can't see the believability in everyone in the world being under such a control. Consumerism as an economic system in this kind of environment would be detrimental – exactly what is needed. Facebook might be a good idea - convince the population to care more about meaningless things through a computer system, and thus leave less time or willingness to work towards advancement. I’m not sure if killing a random few people in a sporting game every once in a while would really put all that much drain on progress…

Constant war. Literate soldiers are better. Therefore, everyone is literate, but the planet's resources are consumed, the infrastructure destroyed, and populations reduced through constant, apocalyptic warfare. Throw in some nuclear/chemical/other WMD (mass driver?) attacks, and you've got yourself a post-apocalyptic, hunter-gatherer wasteland, but still with high literacy rates.

Constant war over precious, needed resources could work either way. Warfare has a tendency to speed up advancement in order to give one the upper hand in combat, but it could also work the other way with infrastructure and population loss leading to knowledge and technology disappearing.

I would like to have the relative technological levels of this rouge planet and my main terrestrial world within a reasonable distance of each other, and a 12,000 year head start is a bit unbalanced.

So this is your goal. I think having a civilization that lives in such hardships to be stalled is totally unrealistic unless you have an alien species too different from humans. For humans, times of need are times where we can expect much progress while times of no need are the times when civilization may stall to some degree.

Why not create a timeline when there are periods of great progress followed by periods of massive disaster or war that brings civilization down? Your goal is having the wanted level of civilization by the time of the rogue planet's arrival to your system, and that doesn't mean your civilization must be stalled for 12,000 years.

While they are different biologically, you are correct – hardship would indeed speed up advancement. Periods of progress followed by periods of decline are definitely a good way to go. Being stagnant for a forward moving 12,000 year period is not realistic, I agree.

Have it be hit by moderately large asteroids/have huge volcancic eruptions occur periodically, ones that are big enough to through a lot of dust in the air as so to meddle with sunlight for farming and generally cause trouble, but which are not large enough to make everything go extinct. Have everyone survive but be working so hard on not losing technology and regressing to hunter-gathering societal levels that they don't have time to be making significant new advances.

Asteroids would certainly disrupt the surface ice greatly, but that might not impact civilization directly after they are reliant completely on what lies beneath that ice. Volcanic eruptions would not affect the air – the air itself has turned to ice. Surface eruptions could occur that boil away areas, but I don’t think anyone would notice all that much. Under the water, geological activity is the entire basis of life, so a random eruption would certainly disrupt things.

All good suggestions, thank you everyone.

[Pthagnar]

Why do you need any explanation? Why is a world of aborigines, africans and indians less plausible than one like ours -- why are we not the fortunate ones? especially since, if you cut off the free energy gracefully given to the planet by its sun, everything on it suddenly gets much poorer.

[kadmii]

Don't give them reasons to advance their technology. Technology advances to solve problems (just look at what fed into the steam engine! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOQATN2nTfk). Never introduce a resource or a key stepping-stone technology.

[Ťarilis Kalpyren]

Why do you need any explanation? Why is a world of aborigines, africans and indians less plausible than one like ours -- why are we not the fortunate ones? especially since, if you cut off the free energy gracefully given to the planet by its sun, everything on it suddenly gets much poorer.

I am not really sure what you mean here Pthagnar... I never said that those cultures are less plausible. But in order to survive indefinitely without the sun, under the water, beneath a thick layer of ice, they would require some technology that only appeared in the modern technological age on Earth. Going low tech in an environment that you literally cannot survive in is not going to work, seeing as they were meant to live on the surface, with air, and sun.

Don't give them reasons to advance their technology. Technology advances to solve problems (just look at what fed into the steam engine! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOQATN2nTfk). Never introduce a resource or a key stepping-stone technology.

Connections is an amazing series, I really like how it shows all of the little intricacies that go into the process of invention! New resources will be hard to discover in such an environment I would imagine, but technologies not directly necessary for survival can certainly be taken away. Perhaps they never conducted research into nuclear energy, for example, prior to being let go from their home star. Once underwater, nuclear testing becomes significantly more dangerous, and might never be accomplished as a result. I had not considered restricting certain technologies like that, thank you.

[Curlyjimsam]

Could there be some sort of religious or social factor which causes new technologies to be avoided? Maybe something like the Amish, or something more extreme - perhaps those in power see technological developments as a threat to their position, and so try their hardest to prevent them?

Another alternative might be to go with the technology being retained but the people having no idea how it works: they know what buttons to press to get certain results but couldn't build new machines from scratch. Obviously the machines in this case are going to have to be pretty well built to have survived for so long with nobody knowing how to make repairs.

[ol bofosh]

Big Brother.

Edit: oh, and manipulate people into thinking that consumerism is the highest form of life, so they mistake the advancement of "things" (technology, possession, money etc.) with the advancement of people and their culture. With everyone concentrating on the former, no one will pay attention to the latter, which is the where Big Brother can do all the manipulation.

Edit 2: ooh, ooh, The Hunger Games!

Edit 3: And Facebook! A perfect example of seeming technological advancement combined with seeming literacy.

Manipulation like that would be possible for a few nations at most, I can't see the believability in everyone in the world being under such a control. Consumerism as an economic system in this kind of environment would be detrimental – exactly what is needed. Facebook might be a good idea - convince the population to care more about meaningless things through a computer system, and thus leave less time or willingness to work towards advancement. I’m not sure if killing a random few people in a sporting game every once in a while would really put all that much drain on progress…

I was in a restaurant today and saw a family with a bunch of kids. The youngest, about 18 months old, was hooked to a computer screen showing a Mickey Mouse cartoon. She was so distracted by it she was unaware of what was going around her, and it reminded me of this. First step, get them hooked to computers psychologically; second step (or however many are needed), get them hooked physically and control their minds!

Keeping the general populace ignorant has been the key to stifling human creativity.

[mouse]

I don't see why you would need to supply a reason at all. The only thing that is certain is that society will change, not that it will "progress."

I firmly believe that intelligence as is currently popularly viewed is a sort of cosmic accident, something that wouldn't naturally have much reason to come about but now that it has it's a self-reinforcing pit. I imagine it's similiar to the gap between multicellular and single celled life, and that multicellular life is probably almost nonexistant in the universe in comparison to single celled (or even non-cellular viroid or crystal-like) life. Consider how long it took for the first multicellular life to appear on our own planet. Single celled life was more than capable of surviving, and is still the dominant life on the planet, but once that multicellular linneage came about it descended into self-reinforced competition with itself to become ever more multicellular, not just in size but in specialisation and dependence upon it's parts. Intelligence is the same thing, unnessessary but once it came about it was self-reinforcing. Organisms have no reason or need to question why they are doing things in order for survival.

Humans remained relatively unchanged for 3.3 million years culturally, it was only about 100,000 years ago that human culture started to change relatively rapidly wih the introduction of complex shelters, dogs, spears, and clothing. Even beyond then, the dominant (well, I don't know if it was the majourity, actually. I do know the ancient Greeks, the Ancient Chinese, and several different aborigines all shared it though. I doknow the progress one is recent, though. Other than descent there were also cyclical and stable state beliefs about human culture.) worldview was that humans had descended from a golden age and the idea humans are progressing is relatively recent from the rennaissance. Even still, progress is an illusion. Progressing towards what? The the idea of progress as it is currently seen is a combination of not nessessarily related concepts that are emphemerically given value by currently dominant culture, there is no intrinsic reason why this must be so. Other possible cultures could have drastically different combinations of values, and even if they thought of "progress" like people now do as a good thing their different combination of values could mean they would see our idea of progress as going backwards. Everything is essentially a religion. The idea that curing disease is a good thing is no different than a religious belief, there in no intrinsic or empirical reason to justify curing disease as a good thing. Other cultures could very well view it otherwise, and curing disease wouldn't be progress in their eyes.

And yet still humans are capable of surviving without any of this stuff, given the right niche. Running prey to exhauation and scavaging carcasses, no clothes or shelter. But I can only think of four places in the world off the top of my head where this is probably possible, the Kalahari, Australia, Southwestern North America, and the Gran Chaco.

As far as your scenario is concerned, I see no reason why they couldn't just live day to day. Beaver don't build skyscapers after all. Imagine if the Pirahã's worldview was the most common instead of this European one. If they have a method that works and they're surviving, then why change it? Certainly change will come about, because cultures are like species, but there's no reason they have to hoard knowledge and build upon it over time. If they've got their daily life using submarines to collect geothermal moss-organisms for food perhaps every century or different styles of submarines or different species of moss-organisms or such might come into fashion, but they don't need to retain all of the previous methods to change to a new one.

Progress is not a nessessity of any humanoid culture, only change is.

[Matrix]

The idea that curing disease is a good thing is no different than a religious belief, there in no intrinsic or empirical reason to justify curing disease as a good thing.

The idea that "curing disease is a good thing" is not "no different than a religious belief". "Curing disease is a good thing" is a moral value. Religious values do not have to do with what is good or bad, they have to do with what is sacred or profane.

Also, why do you even need an empirical or "intrinsic" (whatever that means) reason? Empiricism is not the be-all end-all of reason. But hey, if you're that keen on Empiricism, I can play ball. For example, I can make this argument:

P₁ If a person has a disease, then they are suffering.
P₂ Suffering is bad.
-----------------------------------------------
C Curing disease is a good thing.

Perfectly valid modus tollens syllogism: D S; -S; ∴ -D
And P₁ is a pretty damn empirical reason.
So look, I just gave you an empirical reason to agree that curing disease is a good thing! Granted, it's linked with a moral value judgement reason, and thus is a non sequitur on its own, but it's an empirical reason nonetheless.

Everything is essentially a religion.

Religions are irrational belief sets - that is, they are not based on any sort of reasons, instead being asserted dogmatically, and they frequently contradict themselves. Humans are capable of having rationality in their belief sets - that is, basing their beliefs on reasons and not having those beliefs contradict other beliefs. Therefore, not all belief sets are like religions.

Even still, progress is an illusion. Progressing towards what?

Ideals? Ideals that perhaps happen to also be well-reasoned-out belief sets?

Other possible cultures could have drastically different combinations of values, and even if they thought of "progress" like people now do as a good thing their different combination of values could mean they would see our idea of progress as going backwards.

Yes, the goals of any sort of progress are created by humans. That does not make them illusory or worthless. I've already argued that curing disease is good. To cure disease, we must progress, because being better and better at curing diseases requires better and better technology. Progress is not worthless. We make its worth. If someone desires that life be improved in some fashion, they desire progress. They make that progress worth whatever they think this improvement is worth.

All of that said, OP, if you want your planet's culture to stagnate, you should probably have it be the majority belief (whether elite-imposed or simply memetically, or maybe some other method that i can't think of right now) that everything is the best it can possibly be as-is, that no progress is even possible, let alone needed or desired. They will then stagnate. Imperial China is a great example of this. Around the time that the Ming dynasty stopped sending out their treasure ships, China was the most advanced country on the planet. Everything they had was better than what everyone else had, and so China wallowed in stagnation, because its people believed that no progress was possible, since they already had the best.

[Qwynegold]

So your underwater people already had a high technological level when the planet left its orbit, and so they were able to build underwater dwellings. Maybe the drastic change of environment could have made them devolve? There must have been huge climate changes too, so that could've also helped. So if they went back to stone age level of technology, they would have 12.000 years to progress from there. So you need just one more huge catastrophe to happen to set them back a bit.

[Qwynegold]

Also, if they're stuck in their dwellings and can't easily go explore the sea, that would make them stagnate. And if communication was not possible between different underwater cities, that would also slow them down.

[krinnen]

The premise doesn't sound realistic. Just a few years of advancement matter a lot. Imagine a pitched battle between Bonaparte and Edwin Rommel, for instance. Less than 150 years. Now, in 10000 years, I imagine it would be practically impossible to keep the gap small enough. The only explanation I would consider is them being Amish...

[Torco]

Progress is a religion? sure, why not. except it lacks a shitload of the classical traits of religion, but okay, religion now means any and all beliefs because nothing is true and postmodernity is awesome.

That being said, of course progress is a belief system, one through which we dream a better future and so on and so forth, but it isn't "objectively" better, there's no such thing as objective value judgements, imo. Now what we call progress <or economic progress, which is what we mean here> *is*, contrary to what has been posited here, objectively *different* from other kinds of change... it is change in a specific direction; namely, a direction where human societies -and individuals in them- go from being able to mobilize and incorporate a few atoms and joules to being able to mobilize a lot of atoms and joules, from being able to do just a few things to a few more things, to achieve greater levels of precision; It is ultimately an axis defined by power. How can we know power over nature is what we mean by economic progress?

Imagine you find a planet with three intelligent species on different pieces of the continent: they're abjectly non-terrestrial, so you can't judge the finesse of their calligraphy or the quality of their pottery. But you do notice that, weird as they are, they make contraptions. You notice one of the guys make these huge contraptions, you don't know what they do, but they use a lot of energy and their continent is full of them. The other guys have small contraptions of a completely different nature, they don't really are too visible from your orbit, but from time to time you get HUGE discharges of energy, and you can see by infrared that the interior of the contraption reaches a few million degrees. They seem to be making some chemical into some other chemical, you don't get it very well. the third guys have small contraptions that they just hit their food with.

guys 1 and 2 are arguable: who's more powerful? more advances? who has more economic progress? that's an interesting question, but are the the dudes with the foodclubs not pretty much the guys with the least economic progress?

[Salmoneus]

Not necessarily, no.
The foodclub guys may all go through thirty years of university education, and be artistic geniuses. They may be able to instantly co-ordinate every member of their civilisation to labour in the most efficient way possible to achieve important goals, at the drop of a hat. They may have all but eliminated all forms of disease and illness through the cunning use of self-replicated nanobots that are now so commonplace they don't have to bother making any more. There is no poverty, no war. If they wanted, they could use replicators to make all their food - but they don't bother, because it happens that they all really enjoy hitting things with clubs.

[Basilius]

"Curing disease is a good thing" is a moral value. Religious values do not have to do with what is good or bad, they have to do with what is sacred or profane.

Shit. I thought all values had to do with what is good or bad. I'm a retard.

So look, I just gave you an empirical reason to agree that curing disease is a good thing!

I don't think you did.

You *assumed* (which isn't an empirical thing, is it?) that suffering is bad, and therefore curing disease is good. Even with this, you made a logical mistake: killing the diseased is arguably a more effective way to cancel suffering, and you just missed this option. I suspect, the reason for not considering it was not fully rational.

Religions are irrational belief sets <...>

Not a particularly useful definition (?) of religion. Religion doesn't exclude rationality, and other belief sets don't exclude irrational components (like your assumption that suffering is bad, which I assume to be part of your belief set).

* * *

However, I don't think progress is an illusion. If you know the values of a specific culture, and you know that things have been changing, then you can evaluate the changes in terms of the values.

* * *

Ťarilis Kalpyren:

Anabiosis. They realized that they couldn't maintain the life quality standards they were used to for all the eleven billions of population. Also, they knew that after a dozen KY of space drift they'll reach a potentially colonizable planet system. Life maintenance could be done by (relatively) small teams, and they had enough qualified people for each team not to need to be awake longer than, like, five years.

[Torco]

Not necessarily, no.
The foodclub guys may all go through thirty years of university education, and be artistic geniuses. They may be able to instantly co-ordinate every member of their civilisation to labour in the most efficient way possible to achieve important goals, at the drop of a hat. They may have all but eliminated all forms of disease and illness through the cunning use of self-replicated nanobots that are now so commonplace they don't have to bother making any more. There is no poverty, no war. If they wanted, they could use replicators to make all their food - but they don't bother, because it happens that they all really enjoy hitting things with clubs.

Well, yeah, sure, and they might have built then contraptions the other guys use out of sheer sympathy and guilt out of having enslaved them during thousands of years, after all there's only so much one knows, but I think you're just looking at the surface here: What I mean is that the ability to mobilize energy and matter, by maybe the use of technology, is, if not by itself at least a big part of what we mean by, economic progress. Sure, social progress is a big thing as well, but in the example the astronaut has limited information intentionally: now sure, you still raise the very good points that the preservation of health and the quality of life of members is absolutely a part of what we mean by progress, but my point was that the classical conception of progress revolve around this very objective phenomenon of power and volitional control over matter and energy.

Otherwise put, you know nothing else about this planet, are currently orbiting it, and are told by Earth Mission Control "go contact the most advanced guys on that planet, Sal". do you honestly go for the Clubstick People ?

[Matrix]

Shit. I thought all values had to do with what is good or bad. I'm a retard.

This sarcasm is uncalled for. Please don't spew vitriol around.

I don't think you did.

You *assumed* (which isn't an empirical thing, is it?) that suffering is bad, and therefore curing disease is good.

I did not assume that "suffering is bad". I explicitly stated it. An assumption is something that a given premise implies, something that the premise semantically entails. Furthermore, "suffering is bad" is not the premise I claimed to be empirical. It is clearly not an empirical premise. It is a moral evaluative premise. An evaluative premise is automatically to be considered acceptable and true, under the coherence theory of truth, unless it is contradicted in the argument, or there is some other problem with it. To my knowledge, I have not contradicted the premise "suffering is bad".

The premise I claimed to be empirical was "if a person has a disease, then they are suffering". Now, today in the Philosophy class on critical thinking I am taking, I happened to learn that an if-then statement cannot actually be empirical, because it is expressing the logical equivalent of the evaluative "ought". So, I was wrong in claiming this premise to be empirical. That however does not make the argument the premise is involved in any less deductively valid. It only makes untrue my claim that I could "play ball," that is, give an empirical reason in support of the conclusion that "curing disease is a good thing." However, I still contend that empiricism is not the be-all end-all of reason. For example, physics, as it stands, could not have gotten where it is today on empiricism alone. It needed the brilliant theoretical work of people such as Einstein, Bohr, and Planck, amongst many others.

Even with this, you made a logical mistake: killing the diseased is arguably a more effective way to cancel suffering, and you just missed this option. I suspect, the reason for not considering it was not fully rational.

I did not consider that as an option because killing another human being is another thing that is wrong. I have not made a logical mistake, because "killing a human being is wrong" is an evaluative premise that does not contradict anything else I have said in this thread.

Religion doesn't exclude rationality, and other belief sets don't exclude irrational components

True, but religion is more likely to cause people to have incoherent belief sets than not. Let's take Christianity as an example. Human life being a good thing is something that Christianity espouses - after all, one of the Ten Commandments is "thou shalt not kill". In the Crusades, Christians killed many people, under surface pretense of religion. Therefore, any Christians who participated in or supported the Crusades were essentially saying, "it is not allowed that we should kill, and it is sometimes allowed that we should kill". In fact, anybody claiming to be a Christian at all who engages in or supports the killing of others in some fashion (military, death penalty, etc.) is essentially saying this. This is a textbook contradiction, saying "A and not A".

[Torco]

True, but religion is more likely to cause people to have incoherent belief sets than not.

citation needed

[Basilius]

Matrix: what I don't understand from your reply is whether you can ever concede that you were wrong. Can you?

Shit. I thought all values had to do with what is good or bad. I'm a retard.

This sarcasm is uncalled for. Please don't spew vitriol around.

OK, no sarcasm. You were wrong.

I did not consider that as an option because killing another human being is another thing that is wrong. I have not made a logical mistake, because "killing a human being is wrong" is an evaluative premise that does not contradict anything else I have said in this thread.

Basically, you are saying that it wasn't an option because you don't want it to be, and because you didn't mention it. Do you notice?

Religion doesn't exclude rationality, and other belief sets don't exclude irrational components

True, but religion is more likely to cause people to have incoherent belief sets than not. Let's take Christianity as an example. Human life being a good thing is something that Christianity espouses - after all, one of the Ten Commandments is "thou shalt not kill". In the Crusades, Christians killed many people, under surface pretense of religion. Therefore, any Christians who participated in or supported the Crusades were essentially saying, "it is not allowed that we should kill, and it is sometimes allowed that we should kill". In fact, anybody claiming to be a Christian at all who engages in or supports the killing of others in some fashion (military, death penalty, etc.) is essentially saying this. This is a textbook contradiction, saying "A and not A".

This one is especially nice. You said religion was an irrational belief set; I said it wasn't helpful as a definition; now you are trying to explain how it's still helpful, in another sense; and it isn't. I'm confused; what should I do? Explain why Crusades were a rational solution, within a value set which is arguably a variety of Christianity? And you'll invent another aspect to somehow make your statement valid, even though it's not actually your original statement? And I'll have to explain why that doesn't work, again and again, ad nauseam? For no payment?

BTW, do you realize that values can conflict?

Or do you think they can't, because you can always invent something "rational"?

With your example about suffering you could already notice that this doesn't work. You want only one value to be there? Then you get *rational* solutions like "kill the suffering one". You want to add another value, like "human life is valuable"? OK, but then there will be situations where the two conflict.

You call Crusaders irrational? Sure, it's much more rational to be an Atheist and kill people (than be a Christian and kill people - like it's more rational to kill the diseased than to cure them). This has happened a lot, in case you didn't know. Is that what you prefer?

(And I'm not surprised noticing that essentially religion=Christianity for you.)

* * *

Something hopefully more on-topic...

I don't see why you would need to supply a reason at all.

Even from your cultural-relativist (?) perspective, there seems to be a very obvious answer.

What Ťarilis Kalpyren has undertaken is an artwork, and such projects tend to imply some audience. The genre (Sci-Fi) dictates that the cultural background of the potential audience in this case is such that en masse it will believe in progress. Moreover, most people in that audience will believe that progress is granted.

Therefore, the project needs an internally plausible justification for there being no progress.

* * *

What I mean is that the ability to mobilize energy and matter, by maybe the use of technology, is, if not by itself at least a big part of what we mean by, economic progress.

This is a good idea. Really.

Yet, I don't think it's the only possible one. Like, freedom of movement and ease of access to distant objects seem to be an independent dimension. Having maps and knowing how to use an astrolabe can be more important than steam, with this criterion. Unfortunately, knowledge of this sort is more difficult to measure, compared to energy.

Also, if control of energy is all-important, then we're entering a regress phase: it's becoming more expensive.

[Salmoneus]

I did not assume that "suffering is bad". I explicitly stated it. An assumption is something that a given premise implies, something that the premise semantically entails.

No, premises themselves are assumed. Even axioms are assumed.

Furthermore, "suffering is bad" is not the premise I claimed to be empirical. It is clearly not an empirical premise. It is a moral evaluative premise. An evaluative premise is automatically to be considered acceptable and true, under the coherence theory of truth, unless it is contradicted in the argument, or there is some other problem with it.

Sez hu? You say "killing people is always good" - I'm meant to automatically consider that to be acceptable and true? Bollocks I am. And while you're considering that, kindly run along and tell the logical positivists that evaluative moral premises are acceptable parts of logical arguments.
Coherentism and foundationalism having nothing whatsoever to do, per se, with moral axioms, so I don't know why you throw in that jargon there [and because it's irrelevent, we'll pass over the naive idea that there is such a thing as 'the coherence theory of truth', and note only that coherentism is in any case not a fashionable viewpoint at present].

The premise I claimed to be empirical was "if a person has a disease, then they are suffering". Now, today in the Philosophy class on critical thinking I am taking, I happened to learn that an if-then statement cannot actually be empirical, because it is expressing the logical equivalent of the evaluative "ought". So, I was wrong in claiming this premise to be empirical.

Your 'Philosophy class on critical thinking' was wrong - or else you have been mislead by it against its better intentions. Conditionality is of course a hugely controversial and complicated subject, but it's only (barring perhaps some wild theories) related to the word 'ought' through polysemy and loose manners of speech (that the word is used for both evaluative and deontic aspects in English says nothing about any underlying kinship between the aspects, let alone between the concepts that those aspects serve to represent). Certainly, if-then statements can be empirical - indeed, I don't know what you think 'empirical' means if you don't think if-then statements are empirical - if-then statements are all there is to empiricism! Are you perhaps trying to grasp toward Humean theories of causality and his argument against inductive reasoning? If so, you're doing it very badly. In any case, 'if-then' statements are most often treated as material implication, which sidesteps all that business anyway. In classical logic, [A->B] just means ¬[A^¬B].

That however does not make the argument the premise is involved in any less deductively valid. It only makes untrue my claim that I could "play ball," that is, give an empirical reason in support of the conclusion that "curing disease is a good thing." However, I still contend that empiricism is not the be-all end-all of reason. For example, physics, as it stands, could not have gotten where it is today on empiricism alone. It needed the brilliant theoretical work of people such as Einstein, Bohr, and Planck, amongst many others.

I fail to see the relevence. Modern science is quite distinct from moral reasoning (and the reason you can't empirically show that curing disease is good is that you can't empirically show goodness).

Even with this, you made a logical mistake: killing the diseased is arguably a more effective way to cancel suffering, and you just missed this option. I suspect, the reason for not considering it was not fully rational.

I did not consider that as an option because killing another human being is another thing that is wrong. I have not made a logical mistake, because "killing a human being is wrong" is an evaluative premise that does not contradict anything else I have said in this thread.

If you feel free to introduce as many 'evaluative premises' as you choose, whenever you choose, then you can produce whatever conclusions you feel like! For instance, I could accept the premises 'suffering is bad' and 'diseases cause suffering' (which, btw, is extremely tendentious in the general case - does dying in your sleep from a heart attack cause suffering? But it is a disease. Certain forms of brain condition may also empirically not appear to cause any suffering, may even prevent suffering, yet they are diseases nonetheless), and yet introduce MY 'evaluative premise' "curing diseases is wrong", and bingo, I have the opposite conclusion from you!

Yes, you have made a logical mistake. You cannot just introduce evaluative premises willy-nilly throughout your argument. You state your premises at the first, and the conclusion is true only so long as the premises are true. In this case, your conclusion did not follow from your premises - this is a logical mistake. The fact that you could, if you wanted, think of an additional premise that could allow an argument to lead to your conclusion doesn't mean that your original argument was correct!

In any case, it still doesn't work, because even if you rule out killing - and lobotomies, brainwashing, etc - you still have birth control. Unless you think that birth control is a priori wrong itself (and btw, the more 'evaluative premises' you introduce that have to be accepted one by one and do not follow from one another, the weaker and less persuasive your argument), then the elimination of suffering morally obligates maximum reduction in the birth rate. For a few drops of chemicals in the water, you eliminate all world suffering within a generation!

Religion doesn't exclude rationality, and other belief sets don't exclude irrational components

True, but religion is more likely to cause people to have incoherent belief sets than not.

Citation needed.

Let's take Christianity as an example. Human life being a good thing is something that Christianity espouses - after all, one of the Ten Commandments is "thou shalt not kill". In the Crusades, Christians killed many people, under surface pretense of religion. Therefore, any Christians who participated in or supported the Crusades were essentially saying, "it is not allowed that we should kill, and it is sometimes allowed that we should kill".

This is trivially facile. There are three key objections to this argument:
- there is no contradiction between saying that X is bad and saying that sometimes X is good. Or, indeed, between 'X is good' and 'X is sometimes bad'. In each case, the first proposition of the pair is making a general statement - which is distinct from a universal statement, and hence does not contradict a particular. Some other examples of this: "eating tuna is good" and "eating tune in pregnancy is bad"; "hitting people in the head with a blackjack is bad" and "hitting people in the head with a blackjack to knock them unconscious when they're about to fire a machine gun into a crowd of innocent people is good"; and "dogs have four legs" and "some dogs have three legs".

- the commandment is often considered 'do not murder', and held to refer to unjustified killing, which does not rule out the possibility of justified killing. Hence, no contradiction.

- you assume that these people were 'Christians'. Now, if you're talking about christianity as a mediaeval social phenomenon or group identity, that seems fair enough - but if, as you are, you are talking specifically about people whose moral beliefs issue from christianity, that's just not good enough. The existence of hypocrites is well-observed, but hardly serves as a criticism of the beliefs they are failing to live up to!

In fact, anybody claiming to be a Christian at all who engages in or supports the killing of others in some fashion (military, death penalty, etc.) is essentially saying this. This is a textbook contradiction, saying "A and not A".

This is not a textbook contradiction of any kind - in fact a good textbook will likely include the opposition of generality to particular as an example of what a contradiction ISN'T! It's a textbook fallacy. Remember what Aristotle actually said about LNC: things are contradictory only when they say a thing has and doesn't have a property in the same sense, at the same time, and in the same respect. Arguably all three fail in the case of comparing generalities to particulars.
[P.S. if you really want to bust out the algebra and get into 'textbook contradictions', 'killing is good' and 'killing is bad', even assuming that badness is the negation of goodness, are still not contradictories, only contraries.]