I'm not a heavily invested scholar but my understanding of Dao and Wu Wei is that it does strive for perfection, it's just that perfection is harmony with nature and divine providence.

The descriptions of the ultimate government using Wu Wei is that the ruler at the very top should do nothing at all because nothing needs to be done - in the ideal government, the ministers diligently carry out duties, and their subordinates do the same, and the country prospers without need for a directive from the ruler.

"Effortless action" here doesn't mean doing nothing, it means that no additional effort need be expended because acting in harmony with the world and the Dao creates a divine experience (not even necessarily positive - there's a measure of Stoic-like acceptance of harm as also being part of what nature is).

I think (not 100% sure) there is a "perfect" world under the Dao, but it's one that's effectively without thought - all persons just, by their nature, act in accordance with the Dao and what will be will be.

> However, CB is too slow to play a complicated arpeggio, react to a 100-mph baseball, or make a 20-ft jump shot.

I don't think this is related to flow; these are trained motor skills that the brain learns to "run" like a "process" where the many motor signals get bundled into a couple abstract concepts that you do, kinda like how practicing enough with a tool you can "just swing it" without consciously thinking about counterbalance to the weight or the extra effort in the wrist etc.

Flow specifically involves choices being made in response to external or internal stimuli, but with some form of altered consciousness. It's the altered consciousness that's essential here - a pianist can play a full piece of music without entering a flow state, even a piece that they know by heart.

Off-topic: what is this post doing in r/philosophy? It only briefly discusses just the idea of what flow is, which is more of a psychology topic, and has a super shallow analysis.

Imagine that honeybees had philosophers and ethicists. Would it make sense for a worker bee philosopher to start her examination of morality based on herself and herself alone? Her whole concept of survival is intrinsically dependent on the queen and on other workers; she also can't breed. Before even discussing her concept of ethics, all of her core values are inseparable from her position in her hive society.

I'm not even proposing moral relativism here, I'm saying that any human conception of morality is inextricably connected to humans as social creatures. Even a self-centered individual has to bear that in mind as well - if "building a legacy" is a valuable goal to some specific, fully selfish individual, it's important to note that there's no such thing as a legacy without other members of society to experience or remember it into the future.

Assumptions about philosophy that start and end with the individual consciousness are IMO not "more rational" but instead something inhuman. How can a fully isolated human even be considered the same kind of existence as someone in a collective?

This is an aspect of "natural law" and "social contract" discussions that I think gets buried when people start focusing on individual positive/negative rights. If you're the only conscious individual around, there is no value in a concept of "rights" to begin with - a "right" only even has meaning when it affects another conscious being. Conjuring up some idea of "rights" one has when fully isolated and then applying that as a foundation for rules in a group is nonsensical - a fully isolated human could never have the language to conceive of "rights" (or even language at all).

Accordingly, conceptualizing what, if any, natural rights exist necessarily must begin with people in a group, not in isolation. Putting a human in a vacuum and then considering how they would behave at that point in a thought experiment is creating a non-human and then trying to give it the same label.

No human has ever or will ever exist in a vacuum. The tabula rasa foundational approach to ethics is fatally flawed, in that these presuppositions of "well if I were a singular person I would want XYZ" are 1. skewed by the value system you actually developed by whatever point in your life you're currently at and 2. literal impossibilities and not only do not but cannot reflect humanity.

Every person at minimum has one parent, and humans evolved to exist in communal groups. Any approach to ethics that starts with "in a vacuum" and ignores the simple fact that all persons have social connections from the instant they're born is starting from the wrong place.

It seems to me that this post is conflating the use of the good/evil dichotomy for selfish ends (like controlling populations) with the dichotomy itself.

Natural selection was perverted into eugenics, but that doesn't make it untrue or not useful as a concept on its own?

I'm also perturbed by what appears to be circular reasoning in this take. The existence or non-existence of moral absolutes is a metaphysical question on the same level as "is there such a thing as divinity?" and the arguments here which reduce the idea to how the dichotomy is in usage, e.g., "to control," implicitly presume that there is not a moral absolute and there is only the social aspect.

Well that doesn't answer the question of whether good/evil is a meaningful dichotomy when you're already assuming it isn't other than its effects on the societal level.