Posted: Oct 06, 2017 2:01 pm
Cito di Pense wrote:zoon wrote:I don’t think it’s something we just invent, it’s more analogous to language, it’s a way of thinking that’s heavily wired into our brains by evolution.
Whose brains? Do you have any data, let alone a theoretical model? No, I don't think you do. I think you have some opinions. You're taking what people say as evidence for something going on in their brains, and that's fair enough, but the best you can say is that it's something going on in the language centers. I think you're trying to say that it's something more than or just different from that, and you're bullshitting.
That many families involve childcare is, I suppose, something you could call 'hard-wired', but you don't really know that much in detail about how most people treat their children, other than what people say about how they were treated as children. Then you make a big leap to talking about something analogous to language, but implying it's different. I'm not saying your conjecture is automatically wrong, only that you're far to confident in issuing your dicta about 'ways of thinking'.
You'll be bullshitting about this until you get the message about what's involved in bullshitting. The phrase 'way of thinking' is what's nothing more than a bullshit opinion. It doesn't speak about data. That most people aren't constantly beaten by their parents is your best evidence of something hard wired by evolution. If you eat all your children, your species goes extinct. Derh.
In the post you are answering, I cited a review article by a researcher in the field, Michael Tomasello, but you may not have read far enough down the post to notice. A list of publications from Prof Tomasello’s lab at Duke University is here, on “the development and evolution of social cognition, communication, and cooperation”, the experiments are largely on toddlers of around 2 to 4 years old, and on chimpanzees. Michael Tomasello is also co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.
I have also cited the results of experiments by, among others, Joshua Greene, a researcher on neuroscience and morality; a list of publications from his lab at Harvard is here. A 2014 review article by Greene, “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Moral Judgment and Decision-Making”, is here. In that article, Greene says that there’s no evidence for a “moral” part of the brain, rather, different aspects of morality are dealt with in different areas. This doesn’t mean that morality doesn’t exist, but that it is defined at a more abstract, functional level. In the same way, the word “vehicle” refers to a number of very different mechanisms, but this doesn’t show that the concept of a vehicle has no meaning, only that it’s defined at a more functional level.
Joshua Greene wrote:This doesn’t mean that the concept of a vehicle is meaningless. Rather, the world’s vehicles are united, not by their internal mechanisms, but at a more abstract, functional level. So, too, with morality. More specifically, I (Greene, 2013), like many others (Darwin, 1871/2004; Frank, 1988; Gintis, Bowles, Boyd, & Fehr, 2005; Haidt, 2012), believe that morality is a suite of cognitive mechanisms that enable otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation. That is, we have psychological features that are straightforwardly moral (such as empathy, righteous indignation, and an aversion to harming innocent people) and others that are not (such as gossip, embarrassment, vengefulness, and ingroup favoritism) because they enable us to achieve goals that we can’t achieve through collective selfishness. I won’t defend this controversial thesis here. Instead, my point is that if this unified theory of morality is correct, it doesn’t bode well for a unified theory of moral neuroscience. What’s more, as we’ll see, the data increasingly bear out this skepticism. In the early days of moral neuroscience, it was thought, perhaps not unreasonably, that one might isolate the distinctive neural mechanisms of moral thought (Moll, Eslinger, & Oliveira-Souza, 2001) and that the human brain might house a dedicated “moral organ” (Hauser, 2006). These views, however, are no longer tenable. It’s now clear that the “moral brain” is, more or less, the whole brain, applying its computational powers to problems that we, on nonneuroscientific grounds, identify as “moral.”
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From an evolutionary perspective, the double-edged sword of human morality comes as no surprise. Morality evolved, not as device for universal cooperation, but as a competitive weapon, as a system for turning Me into Us, which in turn enables Us to outcompete Them. Morality’s dark, tribalistic side is powerful, but there’s no reason why it must prevail. The flexible thinking enabled by our enlarged prefrontal cortices may enable us to retain the best of our moral impulses while transcending their inherent limitations (Greene, 2013; Pinker, 2011).