bd-from-kg

faustuz:

Wow. I might have actually changed someone’s mind? I don’t know what to say. That never happens!

As to the notion that the mother’s behavior (and many other traits) evolved to further the propagation of our genes, that’s not a new idea. In fact, it’s what natural selection is all about. And in the case of the mother, at least, it’s undoubtedly true.

Of course when Dawkins refers to genes as “selfish” he’s speaking metaphorically, as in “Nature abhors a vacuum.”

Yes, I already mentioned kin selection (as well as reciprocal altruism) to you in an earlier post. Whether the act of becoming a priest can be explained in terms of some such mechanism is highly problematic. Natural selection, after all, doesn’t explain all of our behavior, at least not directly. In many cases traits that evolved because they produce behaviors that tend to promote survival or propagation have also produced non-survival-enhancing behaviors as a side effect. Thus, the ability to solve complex combinatorial problems enhances survival, but it also allows us to play chess. Verbal dexterity is useful, but it also results in hypermodern gobbledygook. The ability to throw and hit things accurately has obvious survival potential, but it also allows us to play baseball and basketball.

No. These kinds of theories are almost impossible to test with today’s technology, but it’s certainly possible to imagine technology that would allow them to be checked.

Of course, none of this has much to do with PE or PH. No one seriously claims that the motivation for many actions is to propagate one’s genes, and even if it were, this wouldn’t count as a self-interested motive by any reasonable definition. On the other hand, as I’ve pointed out before, why we have a given desire is an entirely different question from whether it’s self-interested or altruistic (or neither).

bd-from-kg

Mr. Sammi:

This strikes me as a very good way of putting it, probably because it fits in well with my moral philosophy. One way, at least, of being able to desire someone else’s good is through empathetic identification with that person. To the extent that one can vividly imagine the effect that your act will have on someone else, it becomes very easy to want it to be an effect that he will find desirable, for his sake.

I agree with the rest of what you say as well,. though I don’t see the relevance to this discussion. Certainly the last kind of relationship you describe is the healthiest and most satisfying.

faustuz

My mind is easily changeable on this subject, it was never really made up. I’m kind of making it up as I go, throwing out ideas, and seeing what sticks.

Granted. I may have made it sound in my post as if I think this is directly associated with self interest. It is not, or if so it’s in a roundabout way. I will say, nonetheless, that the idea of a selfish-gene is similar in certain ways to self-interest as we commonly understand it. Evolution acts as sort of an invisible hand that makes it almost appear to be willful. This, as we may observe in other forums here at II, is one reason why so many people like to believe in “intelligent design”: evolution appears willful. It is as if something is acting in its self interest, Dawkins calls it the gene. We understand, though, that this is metaphorical.

Another thing to consider is that what is in the interests if the genes and in the interests of the individual seem to coincide in many more cases than they diverge. It is not surprising then that we have evolved a tendency to look out for our self interest via rational means, as well as pleasure and pain to help enforce survival mechanisms even when we aren’t paying attention. Obviously, and I think you’ll agree, PE and PH are applicable, such tendencies did evolve and are part of our psyches, although they aren’t applicable in all cases. It is nonetheless somewhat amazing to me to consider just how effective they are. Lets just keep in mind that a device as complex as this bag of sludge we call a brain is not likely to yield to simplistic theories.

faustuz

What you say here really hits a nerve with me because I’ve really been thinking of the subject of empathy lately. There’s a story behind why I’ve been thinking of it, and I’m going to tell it. I was watching the TV program Futurama about two weeks ago and the episode was about how one of the characters (I don’t watch it enough to remember the character names), who was accidentally cryogenically frozen and then awakened some centuries in the future, found out that his dog had also been accidentally petrified and could also be revived. The kid decides to revive the dog, but then changes his mind when he realizes the dog lived for some 10 years after the kid was frozen and so would have made a new life and probably forgotten him. The last seen of the show was a flashback as the dog stood in front of the store where the boy worked and waited for the kid to return, as the seasons changed. Of course, it was a real tear jerker. My wife commented that she wished she hadn’t watched it, and I felt my eyes watering.

OK, that got me thinking. I believe that few people on this planet could watch that sequence and not feel sad. The writer obviously knew that and intended exactly that effect. There may be a few people on this planet that would not be affected, but I personally don’t want to know them. In fact the scene might serve as sort of a Rorschach test of moral fitness. What this made me realize is that empathy, and its close cousin sympathy, are nearly universal emotions. Not only that, they are extremely powerful emotions. I think that most of our charitable acts could be accounted for considering these emotions. This imagining “the effect that your act will have on someone else” is something most of us do almost impulsively, almost as impulsively as breathing. Everybody cries during the tear jerker (or tries very hard not to). Everybody feels sorry for the sick old man with Alzheimer’s. Everybody wants to help out the starving kids in the TV commercial. It doesn’t matter one’s religion, it doesn’t matter one’s social status, it doesn’t matter one’s education level, it’s there. If anything we often try to suppress it as our more immediate “self interest” issues, or the sheer overload of empathy sources, overwhelm us. Nonetheless, it’s always in there for all of us trying to break out.

Healthiest and most satisfying? Hmmm…, that smacks of egoism and hedonism, but that’s OK.

bd-from-kg

jpbrooks:

Some versions of PE are in this category. (And they have also been criticized, unfairly in my opinion, as being unfalsifiable. This seems to me to be an abuse of the falsifiability criterion.) But versions like 99percent’s are truly unfalsifiable, even in principle. They have been made immune to falsification by defining terms in such a way that it is logically impossible for them to be false.

Not so. Like all theorems of math and logic, it is not a statement about the real world at all. It’s a tautology. (Albeit a far from obvious one; the proof is very complex and ingenious.) That’s why it can be proved independently of empirical evidence. In fact, its very certainty is a giveaway that it isn’t an empirical statement; empirical statements are never certain, just more or less probable.

Hmm. It’s not in one’s self-interest to be happy? I suppose that there are some conceptions of happiness and self-interest for which this might be true, but they are certainly not the ones held by any advocates of these theories that I’m familiar with. This would seem to require something like a moral conception of self-interest: it’s in one’s self-interest to be virtuous or something of the sort. But maybe not. Expound, please.

pug846

You've actually changed my mind on some aspects of altruism as well, although I've never subscribed to PE. I had been meaning to PM you to tell you that your posts in this thread have been *really* well thought out and clear. (Although, you stil need to drop that whole, being moral means being altrusitic, crap. ).

The AntiChris

faustuz
You really should read all the relevant posts in this thread. I think my use of the word "dread" will become apparent. You'll also discover that I have not the slightest desire to defend or promote PE/PH.
I've never argued that the subconscious perception of an emotional payoff renders an act "self-interested". You, and others, may interpret it thus but it's not a term I've used.
I'm not sure what you're saying here but let me explain why bd's grief-ender pill scenario proves nothing.

bd says "If what she ultimately wanted were really to avoid grief, she’d jump at this wonderful opportunity.". This only works if the desire to avoid grief is a conscious desire (and to some extent, ever-present). This is not what I've been arguing.

Secondly, it works on the assumption that the mother could be persuaded that the pill would in no way compromise her ability to care for her children. In order for her to take the pill, she'd have to suppress the very emotion the pill is designed to remove. Can you not see the problem?
I have difficulty even imagining such a hypothetical situation. I have no idea how you can be sure what anyone would decide under such circumsctances.

Chris

faustuz

Please accept my apologies then.
Why do I have the feeling that yet another discussion has degenerated into disagreements over semantic nuances? It seems that neither bd, you nor I are saying anything other than that most mothers will not take the grief ending pill for psychological reasons (perhaps we’ll call it dread). We are all saying (so it would seem) that no reasonable definition of self interest (either rational or to avoid pain or increase pleasure) can explain the mothers choice. That is what bd’s scenario proves, that it is not a “self-interested” decision. Does the consequences of making a certain choice fill the mother with dread? No doubt. It may then be perfectly reasonable to state that here choice was motivated by her dread. Is anybody saying otherwise. (bd, how about you? Am I mischaracterizing your own views here?)
Really? It seems to me that mothers make such decisions all the time. Some become so convinced that they actually take the pill, in fact. Mothers commit suicide, become drunks, etc. The Rolling Stones even made a song about it. I’m myself married to a mother, not to mention that I lived with one for the first 18 years of my life. Sometimes I’m simply amazed that they never took the pill.

jpbrooks

True. Some versions of PE are currently only empirically falsifiable in principle.
So the empirical unfalsifiability of other versions of PE does not, by itself, render those versions of PE false (or "refuted") - which was my original point, but only reduces the status of their claims to that of a proposal.

But this can't be true for the entirety of logic and mathematics. Otherwise, why should we expect logic and mathematics to apply to the real world at all? More specifically, would that mean that Popper's theory of falsifcation is itself empirically falsifiable? The restriction that this empirical falsification theory places on all theorizing seems more like a definition than an empirical observation.

Here is where the distinction between acts done on the basis of self-interest and those done primarily for self-gratification comes into play. Acts done on the basis of self-interest, unlike acts done strictly for self-gratification, need not be acts done primarily and specifically to benefit oneself.

I have to run.

bd-from-kg

The AntiChris:

1. On apparent altruism and actual altruism.

Well, yes, I said that this is what PE advocates claim in my Jan. 14 reply to jpbrooks. But I don’t see why you imagine that this is plausible. Of course it’s sometimes true; the question is whether it’s always true in cases where the only motive the agent is aware of is altruistic. For example, take the soldier who falls on a live grenade. According to your theory, as I understand it, the only motive that he’s aware of is to save his buddies, but he has another, deeper self-interested motive that he’s not aware of . Would you care to explain what this motive might be? And why do you think that there has to be such a hidden motive? Do you have any evidence that it’s always there, lurking beneath the surface? In other words, do you believe this because it’s the simplest, most elegant explanation of the evidence, or do you believe it as an article of faith?

Well, let’s see. (1) Black sees a little girl drowning and swims out to save her. The only motive he’s aware of is a desire to save the girl. But in the back of his mind, lurking just beneath the surface, driving his desire to save the girl, is an awareness that this will probably help him get elected mayor, which he greatly desires. And the reason he wants to be mayor is to get in on the graft and corruption at City Hall. (2) Forester spends years disproving his colleague Green’s theory on turtle migration. He’s convinced that he’s doing it purely to advance science, but his real, subconscious motive is to humiliate Green. (3) Stevens beats his young son regularly for minor misdeeds. He thinks his motive is to discipline him and thereby turn him into a well-behaved young man, but his actions are really driven by a subconscious sadistic streak.

Maybe you can’t see any reason why such acts should not be regarded as altruistic, but I can.

That’s because they usually don’t mean what they say. What they usually mean is that the sight of people in pain and anguish created a strong desire to end the pain and anguish.

To illustrate, suppose that Smith and Jones both see Brown in distress, say because he needs medical treatment that he can’t afford. This causes them some mental discomfort, which both of them naturally want to end. Smith does so by walking away; Jones does so by helping pay for the medical treatment. Now Jones could have ended his discomfort by walking away too, so it is reasonable to conclude that his motive was not simply to end his own mental discomfort, but to help Brown. But Smith’s motive really was simply to end his mental discomfort, so of course he chose the easiest, most cost-effective way to do so.

Now of course you can say that Smith and Jones might not have been able to relieve their discomfort just by walking away; perhaps the memory of seeing Brown’s suffering and the knowledge that it’s continuing would still trouble them. At this point we can try another thought experiment to clarify the situation. Suppose that both of them were offered an amnesia pill that would cause them to forget all about Brown. Smith would accept the offer eagerly, since after all he doesn’t care about Brown; he just wants that dang mental discomfort to go away. But Jones wouldn’t be interested, because what he really desires is not to end his own suffering, but to end Brown’s.

Thus, while on the surface the reactions of Smith and Jones to the sight of Brown’s distress is the same, in reality it’s quite different: their response is to form fundamentally different desires. In some cases this won’t be apparent because the results will be the same. for example, Smith may be unable to “walk away”; the only way to relieve his discomfort may be to help Brown. But he only does so because it’s the only way to get what he really wants, which is to feel better; if another, easier way of getting this result were available he’d take it. In that case, although Smith’s actions would appear to be altruistic, no one who understood that his real motive was strictly to end his own suffering, not Brown’s, would say that it was.

I hope that I’ve made it clear by now why I disagree.

2. On the mother who risks her life to save her child

I think of them as two separate entities because they are two separate entities. A desire for A is not the same thing as a desire for B. The difference should be perfectly clear to anyone when A is a real-world phenomenon and B is a subjective experience. The same is true of “negative” desires: a desire to avoid the real-world situation A is not the same as a desire to avoid having the subjective experience B.

Amazing. Do you really believe that?

It simply cannot be the case both that the grief is caused by the prior desire that the child should live and that the desire that the child should live is caused by the prospect of grief if he should die. In other words, it cannot be that the grief is the cause of the desire and the desire is the cause of the grief. Since the desire (that the child live) is obviously the cause of the grief, the (prospective) grief cannot be the cause of the desire. (Of course this is a bit oversimplified. The grief isn’t caused directly by the desire that the child should live, but by the love that manifests itself, among other ways, in the desire that he should live. But this doesn’t affect the point.)

In fact, the grief itself is proof positive of a desire that the child should live; it wouldn’t exist otherwise.

So you agree that the mother is concerned for the child. But what could this mean, if not that she desires (among other things) that the child should live as an end in itself? Unless you mean that her concern for her child is the same sort of thing as my concern for my riding lawn mower: I wouldn’t want it to be destroyed either. But I wouldn’t grieve over it, especially if I knew that I’d get a new one just as good right away. But what mother’s grief would be assuaged by being assured that she’d be given another child “just as good” as the one who just died? The difference is that the mower has only instrumental value to me, so another mower will serve just as well. But the child has intrinsic value to the mother, so another child will not serve just as well.

And if the mother’s real concern is to avoid grief, why would she be “filled with dread” over the prospect of having this threat lifted permanently? Why wouldn’t she be filled with relief and joy? It really looks as if the only reasonable explanation is that she desires that her child live as an end in itself - for its own sake. Her love for the child and the resulting desire for its welfare is obviously what’s driving everything else – the dread, the grief, the whole shebang.

Not at all. If you were right, she wouldn’t care whether it would adversely affect her ability to protect her children, as long as she was assured that she wouldn’t experience any grief if she failed to protect them.

Now in your reply to faustuz you say:

Let’s ignore for the moment the fact that, as I demonstrate above, the desire to avoid grief cannot be the fundamental, underlying desire here. So far as I can make out, your point is that, since the desire to avoid grief is subconscious, it can’t really affect her behavior. She’s not aware or it, so it won’t enter into the decision-making process. The problem with this is that it contradicts the meaning of the word “motive”. If it doesn’t affect her decisions, it’s not a motive: it’s not something capable of moving her to act one way rather than another. That’s the point of the thought experiment. In real life, the desire to avoid grief will pull the mother in the same direction as the desire to save the child. But if you’re going to say that the fact that she’ll go with the latter motive even in situations where the two pull in opposite directions, you’ve emptied the claim that her real underlying motive is to avoid grief of any content. Like 99percent, you’ve carefully designed your theory in such a way that it doesn’t make any empirical claims, and so can’t be refuted.

To show that this isn’t so, you’d have to describe a situation in which the mother would act differently if her real (i.e., ultimate) motive was to avoid grief from the way she would if her real motive was to save the child. And as soon as you do so, (1) Your claim can be tested (in principle). And even if the test isn’t feasible at present, we can consider whether your claim about how the mother would react is plausible; whether it’s consistent with what we know about human nature. (2) Your claim that the mother’s action can reasonably be described as “altruistic” collapses. If her motive is such that it would sometimes cause her to put her own interests above the child’s, it is not an altruistic motive, so in acting on it she is not acting altruistically.

One final point. You say:

What emotion are you talking about here? According to you the only emotion that comes into play is grief, which she wants to avoid. Any other emotion would (on this account) be driven by her desire to avoid feeling grief. And any such emotion would surely evaporate quickly on the realization that she is not longer threatened with grief, just as the desire of a football player to go all-out, which is based on his desire to win the game, evaporates quickly when it becomes clear that victory is assured.

It seems to me that the emotion that you’re implicitly appealing to here is the mother’s love of her child. You’re saying that the only way to suppress grief at a loved one’s death is to suppress the love itself. This may well be true. (It’s certainly true in the real world; the only uncertainly is about how a hypothetical “grief-ender” pill would work.) And I absolutely agree that most mothers would find avoiding grief by ceasing to love their children unacceptable. But of course love itself involves desiring the good of the beloved for its own sake, which is an altruistic desire. So it seems to me that in your attempt to show that saving one’s child is really based on self-interested desires you’ve ended up appealing to one of the most altruistic desires of all – the desire for the good of those one loves.