Oh yeah and Iambiguous, if you and I are going to interact, it would be nice if we could move away from a zero-sum game toward a non-zero game. So far so good on this thread.
Yes, but, again, from my frame of mind, given a particular social, political and economic situation viewed from a particular subjective point of view.
However the mind learns language, what then to make of the language that Chomsky employs in regard to, among other things, political economy, the military industrial complex, American imperialism, capitalism etc. The left wing/right wing ideological conflagrations.
As for all of this, my own interest still revolves more around exploring it given the the evolution of human psychology over the centuries going all the way back to the caves. And, in regard to any particular psychological reactions that any particular one of us might have to a specific set of circumstances, what can serious philosophers determine as the optimal – or perhaps the only truly rational – reaction.
Again, it is not at all clear to me what you mean by this distinction.
So, as I suggest above…
I already did. See my posts above. I’ll give more examples. War is zero-sum. So are competitive sports. Buying and selling is mostly non-zero-sum except when one of the parties is getting ripped off. Marriage is supposed to be non zero sum, and divorce laws are mostly designed to make divorce non-zero sum as well since there are often zero sum reactions when romantic relations go south.
In relation to evolutionary psychology, the point is to show how cooperative behavior evolved and is adaptive among social species. Social Darwinism is a misappropriation of Darwin’s theory.
How are these specific examples from your own life? And how in particular does “non-zero social compromise” play itself out “for all practical purposes” when the discussion shifts from winning a war to establishing whether the war is morally just? Or in discussions regarding gender roles said to be most rational in regard to a good marriage? Or in debates regarding American football where some see it as a despicable sport that appeals more to the savages in us? Or the political attacks on capitalism…as with the arguments from those here like PK and promethean?
Or in regard to the arguments I make pertaining to identity, value judgments and political economy as this has played itself out psychologically over the centuries from nomadic cultures through to our postmodern, postindustrial world.
For example, take Frances FitzGerald’s book Fire in the Lake:
“This landmark work, based on Frances FitzGerald’s own research and travels, takes us inside Vietnam-into the traditional, ancestor-worshiping villages and the corrupt crowded cities, into the conflicts between Communists and anti-Communists, Catholics and Buddhists, generals, and monks and reveals the country as seen through Vietnamese eyes. With a clarity and authority unrivaled by any book before it or since, Fire in the Lake shows how America utterly and tragically misinterpreted the realities of Vietnam.”
I recall one segment in which she spoke of a community in which the pronoun “I” was all but nonexistent. Everyone in the village thought of himself or herself as basically a part of “we”.
Or this…
"The society into which the American Marines were marching valued the group above all else. The personal pronoun that defines the American way of life, “I,” does not even exist in Vietnamese, rather, one refers to oneself according to one’s relationship to the person to whom one is speaking. Duty, not individuality, held precedence in this culture, thus reflecting Vietnam’s Confucian influence. An individual “was less an independent being than a member of a family group that included not only living members, but also a long line of ancestors and of those yet to be born.”
… from “INTO THE DRAGON’S LAIR”: CULTURE, COUNTER-INSURGENCY, AND THE COMBINED ACTION PLATOONS IN VIETNAM
A Thesis by
Aaron Thomas Peterka
soar.wichita.edu/bitstream/hand … sequence=1
Chapter Two
A BLENDED CULTURE AND A SHADOWY FOE
And, psychologically, isn’t that clearly seen in the organic historical evolution of human communities where in more “primitive” types the emphasis was far more on “we”, whereas with the advent of capitalism that shifted over to “I”. And then Marx’s prediction that through the class struggle playing itself out in the Industrial Revolution it would shift back to “we” – the working class – again.
And how in the modern world it has all become a complex intertwining of both.
Robert Trivers: Parental Investment, Reciprocal Altruism, Self-Deception
Fortunately I’ve never fought in a war. I played in competitive sports notably baseball and football as a kid. I don’t follow competitive sports as a spectator. Like most people I buy and sell things just about every day. I’ve been married and divorced. I suppose evolution contributed to my behavior in all these matters just like it did for everyone else. How it does so is the subject of this thread.
I don’t see how evolutionary psychology could help us decide if a war is morally just. It may help us understand why we fight wars and perhaps why we need to justify doing so. We can look at analogous territorial behavior in other primates for example.
Evolutionary psychologists ask the question: are human males and females born to form enduring bonds with one another? The answer is hardly an unqualified yes for either sex.
But it’s closer to a yes for both sexes then it is in the case of chimpanzees for instance. In every human culture on the anthropological record marriage whether monogamous or polygamous permanent or temporary is the norm and the family is the basic unit of social organization.
Human fathers everywhere ordinarily feel love for their children. That’s not true of chimp or bonobo fathers who don’t seem to know which offspring are theirs.
Parental love leads human fathers to help feed and defend their children and teach them useful things.
So at some point extensive male parental investment entered our evolutionary lineage. Men are not as high in male parental investment as women. But we’re higher than the average primate.
Rough and tumble play is something we have in common with other social mammals. So attempts to stop it are more likely to simply drive it underground. And competitive sports are big money makers–increasing the motivation to continue them.
So the armchair moralizing people who about the violence send the injuries is a kind of cost benefit analysis. Evolutionary psychology is more likely to come up with a plausible explanation for why we do it then to provide a pat answer to solve the problem.
Yeah it seems like the modern individualism of Western society is mostly a late breaking development of the last five centuries. That’s more likely the result of cultural evolution than natural selection.
Okay, but from my frame of mind, individual reactions to interactions of this sort are rooted in the complex entanglement of genes and memes. We all come into the world hard-wired to react to the world around us mentally, emotionally and psychologically. That has probably not changed significantly going back to the caves. Which is basically Satyr’s point in regard to things like race, gender, ethnicity and sexual preference.
What has changed [dramatically] is the organic, historical evolution of political economy. The explosion of social, political and economic memes that, profoundly and problematically, in my view, are embodied in our “modern” world, in dasein. Human interaction in more technologically and scientifically “primitive” Third World communities still around today, compared to human interactions in the industrial West.
What can evolutionary psychologists tell us about rational and virtuous behaviors here?
For example, you note that you were fortunate not to have fought in a war. But doesn’t that depend on the war? Doesn’t that depend on the experiences you have in the war? Some would argue that they were very fortunate indeed to have fought in the war against Hitler and the Nazis. While in Vietnam I knew soldiers who insisted they were fortunate to have fought against the Communists. Same psychology but different conclusions.
In that case, it is of less interest to me than to others. My interest in human psychology revolves around the arguments I make in my signature threads. “I” in the is/ought world. Why we fight wars given particular sets of motivations. For instance, if you are embedded in the military industrial complex and earn big profits from a war economy, that is very different motivation from those who see the war from an ideological or moral perspective.
Same for marriage and gender roles and sports. Human psychology here as it has basically unfolded biologically given the laws of nature, or, instead, more as embedded/embodied in the evolution of human interactions given very different types of social, political and economic communities creating very different ways in which to construe the human condition.
My main point is that the manner in which particular individuals in our modern world make a distinction between “I” and “we” and “them” – emphasizing one over the others – is rooted far more subjectively/subjunctively in dasein than in anything that psychologists or anthropologists or naturalists or philosophers or ethicists or scientists or religionists etc., can tell us.
But only in regard to particular contexts construed from particular points of view. What can the “experts” establish as more or less true objectively for all of us, or as derived more from the personal opinions that I root in dasein.
I have been reading an article that makes my eyebrows raise a little for both sides of any evolutionary psychology argument presented in it. It sent my head into thinking about a bunch of other things - using my imagination to do some cross-application of fundamentals contained within. For anyone interested in reading it…
…I will post it here: Can We Blame Our Bad Behavior on Stone-Age Genes?
…fair warning…I don’t consider it a short article…for those interested in the venue that it is presented on: Newsweek - newsweek.com ~ I have no desire to cross-check facts here today…
…I have no idea how good Newsweek is and quite frankly at the moment I don’t care - I just needed something detailed that I can pick apart and use my own brain to avoid becoming brainwashed on…
I am doing research for a novel - it is a fantasy about first humans - among the many things that crossed my mind, I wondered about whether caveman raped women - unpleasant thought but it is what it is. Contained within the article is rape and killing of women and children - more unpleasant thoughts. I had to stop here and there not to let my mind be fooled by the article’s contents. Best approached with an open mind and a strong mind - I would suggest making consideration and not letting it sway your beliefs - it is too easy these days to get caught up in justifications based on socially constructed material or assumptions that our being is entirely biologically based.
I don’t find this material pleasant to consider at all - but maturity should be able to save the day for any reader, so to speak. Read it if you wish and make up your own mind - I have no desire to enter this discussion at this point in time and I am most certainly not easily baited right now so responding to me will be met with ignorance on this subject specifically unless I make it obvious I am interested to engage in dialogue that is. Good luck.
According to evolutionary theory individual differences are a product of genes and the environment. Memetic behavior seems to play a part in that.
Right, we’re hardwired. Evolution produced that hard wiring. And that hardwiring is the material that selection has to work with now.
Every individual has a unique genetic makeup with the exception of identical twins. And every individual has a unique point of view within the physical and social environment.
That’s even true of the early life of siblings in the same family. The first born is the only child until the second child is born. That situation is never the case for the second child, and so on for subsequent siblings.
Within the constraints of the evidence and logic of biological and psychological research, evolutionary psychologists provide more or less plausible models of how rational and virtuous behavior survives because it is adaptive to the social environment. Such a theory has to account for individual differences which are observed.
My emotional reaction to war is preponderantly negative. In your terms that’s because of the unique combination of genes and memes that I am.
However I do recognize that war is not an unambiguous evil. The nation state I live in is a product of war as are most if not all of them. The arms race that wars produce spins off technological advances that make life better.
The ancient Greeks observed how war hones the warrior into a high degree of moral perfection known as the hero. The ethos Sparta versus that of Athens. There are still many more militant types than me around who think like that.
So I don’t claim universality for my opinion. Nor will I abandon it for the opinion of the crowd or the herd.
Instead, I’m kicking it around with you.
The evolutionary test of the individual is its own survival and reproduction. As with the individual gene and the individual organism so with the individual meme. And that within a unique niche the physical and the social environment.
Thanks for sharing the article. It’s highly relevant to the discussion at hand.
Evolutionary psychology can help us understand why we behave the way we do. Using it as justification for illegal or immoral acts is another matter.
So-called social Darwinism does that. But it’s a misnomer since it’s incompatible with Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
Dawkins selfish gene theory has been similarly applied as justification for infidelity. But society with its laws mores and standards of social behavior is a product of evolution too.
So the matter is controversial within that process of human interacting in their present state of evolution. For one overview of the situation by an evolutionary psychologist see Steven Pinker’s book “The Better Angels of Our Nature”. Here is Pinker discussing evolutionary psychology and so forth [youtube]https://youtu.be/TxSkoSItI4c[/youtube]
Again, my interest here revolves less around the “theoretical” speculations of evolutionary psychologists and more around how they might examine the behaviors chosen by members of a village community in, say, the Amazon rain forest – a community that revolves far more around “we” – compared to the behaviors that those of us in the “modern world” – communities that revolve far more around “I” – would choose.
There is the human psychology embedded in the evolution of biological life here on planet Earth, and then there are the vast differences embedded in the memes embedded historically and culturally in the evolution of political economy here on planet Earth. Those like Satyr insist that, in terms of things like race and ethnicity and gender and sexual preference and almost everything else, the social constructs of the liberals are at odds with the “natural behaviors” championed by those in his KT clique.
It is here, given particular sets of circumstances, that I wish to explore the actual existential parameters of human psychology.
Yes, the part of our identity that is rooted experientially in dasein embracing conflicting political prejudices. What to make of evolutionary psychology then?
Yes, this particular historical context and this particular culture. And then our own. The same psychological components rooted in the brain’s hard drive by and large but the software programs – the memes – are, in many respects, very, very, very different.
What are the evolutionary psychologists to make of this given particular contexts?
Without evolutionary and cognitive theory, all you would have is descriptions of the behavior of the Amazon villagers and those of us in modern communities. You already have that or you wouldn’t be talking about it. The history of the West transformed the porous self of traditional societies with their personalism and enchantment to the modern buffered disenchanted self of the impersonal universe.
This reminds me of the current (and probably very ancient) effort to supplant reality with artificial social propaganda - such as “race is entirely social - nothing to do with biology” - “gender is merely a personal decision - not a genetic determination.”
In order to try to control reality (to gain Godwannabe total authority) - “we must instill totally artificial beliefs” - “reality is only what you believe - and we should control what you believe - for your own good - of course”.
That too separates man from nature (intentionally) - natural responses from artificially coerced behavior (usually leading to revolt). “All for the good of” - someone - of course.
Again, this could not be further removed from the “for all practical purposes” intent of my own exploration into evolutionary psychology.
Imagine taking this assessment to the Yanomami people along with a comprehensive description of the world most of us live in and noting behaviors that seem to overlap and behaviors that do not. What could the evolutionary psychologists tell us about this given the components of your moral philosophy and the components of mine.
If that doesn’t interest you, fine, but it is basically all that interest me. In other words, given the arguments of scientists and philosophers and anthropologists and sociologists and political scientists and psychologists etc., “how ought one to live”?
Just out of curiosity, I wonder what evolutionary psychologists might convey about someone who creates The Coalition of Truth and then goes around making observations about those who refuse to think exactly as he does about, well, everything, right?
It might not be an actual “condition” but, surely, it is very, very close to being one.
You would have to show how anything that I asserted led you to those conclusions. Evolutionary psychology proposes to show how human behavior is the result of natural selection. In contradistinction to your conclusions, to the degree that behavior results from natural selection it is not socially constructed. So evolutionary psychologists seek to differentiate what is the result of biological evolution from social constructs that are due to cultural evolution.
Well you already have that don’t you? I mean that’s the Dasein that you are. You believe that it is embedded in your own subjectivity and that you can’t claim objectivity for it. But such uncertainty is the nature of human existence at least for us moderns. Within the horizon of Dasein are the more or less theories of science like evolutionary psychology purports to be. We assimilate them or accommodate or reject them according to the Dasein that we are. Sometimes they can be radically transformative as when you converted from Christianity to your present state of mind. But that’s as much a function of what Dasein brings to the table as it is to propositions of the science. More of Dasein than the propositions in fact.
They seek to see why people behave in the way they do. They distinguish natural evolution from artificial evolution (social mandates and consequences) in that effort. And they find that people’s naturally produced design conflicts with social demands. And that conflict leads to -
My point was merely that social constructs get misused to create wealth, power, and control for some to oppress a great many more. And that effect creates the “road rage”, massacre , “let them die”, school shootings, and rioting types of reactions. And it is headlong getting worse - because the intent has always been to create an artificial environment to escape natural reality. The current CRT effort is a perfect example.
I am not opposed to artificial structures to protect against natural responses - but I am against the misuse of the art.
When artificial social constructs lead to too much conflict with natural design - someone messed up - bad things happen on mass scale - but often intentionally (Marxism for example is the effort to intentionally create division and revolution in order to obtain communist control).
The Chinese CCP effort is much more subtle with the intent of modifying the genetics so that people know nothing but obedience to the regime. They supplant the natural responses with chosen artificial responses - avoiding the conflict. What do the evolutionary psychologist have to say about that? - when none of the behavior is any longer “natural evolution”.
For starters observe this: The moral roots of liberals and conservatives - Jonathan Haidt youtu.be/8SOQduoLgRw Then step out of the moral Matrix.
or
Here’s more info if you are not convinced: youtu.be/6gZ5UD1hFM4 The Rise of Populism and the Backlash Against the Elites, with Nick Clegg and Jonathan Haidt
and still more: Jonathan Haidt’s Moral-Political Psychology
Helping us understand liberal and conservative value systems
psychologytoday.com/us/blog … psychology
“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. " J.S. Mill