On Friday, July 18, 2014 3:08:40 PM UTC-4, Gabriel Bodeen wrote: > > On Wednesday, July 16, 2014 8:02:18 AM UTC-5, Craig Weinberg wrote: >> >> So often it becomes clear to me in debating the issues of consciousness >> that they are missing something which cannot be replaced by logic. The way >> that many people think, especially those who are very intelligent in math >> and physics, only includes a kind of toy model of experience. ... This is >> not to say that everyone who doesn't understand the hard problem has >> mindblindness, but I would say it is very likely that having >> mindreading-empathy deficits on the autistic spectrum would tend to result >> in a strong bias against idealism, panpsychism, free will, or the hard >> problem of consciousness. >> > > That's an interesting autism study. Regarding your above speculations > about "consciousness" debates, though, it's important to recognize that > this is a fully reversible criticism. On the one side, empathy deficits > might incline people to have a bias against idealism and so on. But on the > other side, those people could equally well speculate that idealists are > suffering from biases caused by overactive agency detection and an > inaccurate but biologically hardwired theory-of-mind. >
Overactive agency detection is an unsupportable hypothesis as far as I'm concerned. There is a survival advantage to detecting possible danger, but agency is no more likely to be dangerous than it is to be beneficial - detecting friends, family, allies. It is a completely arbitrary and unscientific assumption that a mechanism which treats agency as a threat by default would be a benefit. I did a post about it here: http://s33light.org/post/1499804865 The idea that it a theory of mind which includes subjective phenomena could be as misguided as one which fails to include them doesn't hold much appeal for me. It would be like saying that people who are not color blind might just be hardwired to see colors that aren't 'real'. It's a fallacy which depends on a misplaced expectation of symmetry IMO. > These kind of fully reversible criticisms come up a lot whenever we're > tempted to speculate about the psychological genesis of people's beliefs. > Some other examples include: > * Some Christians tell atheists that they're only atheists because they > want to sin. This is easily reversed to atheists telling Christians that > they're only Christians because they want others to want others to think > they are righteous. > * Some liberals tell conservatives that they're only conservatives because > they hate minorities/women/poor people/etc. This is easily reversed to > conservatives telling liberals that they're only liberals because they're > minorities/women/poor people/etc and they are just going along with the > others in that group because of shared 'tribal' sentiment. > All of those examples might have some truth to them. I don't think that they need to be discarded just because they are reversible. The fact that each side opposes the reversal (conservatives deny the liberal view of conservatism, etc) should not be overlooked also. > The primary point is that psychological explanations of other's beliefs, > whether the explanations are correct or not, aren't actually relevant to > determining the truth or falsity of the beliefs. The secondary point is > that, when we find ourselves tempted to psychologize others rather than > address their criticisms, all we achieve is propagating prejudice. > There is some truth to that, but I think that fear of propagating prejudice can also lead to hiding important truths. The study for me supports my own experiences with people who have a strong materialist-functionalist point of view. It is not to say that it is impossible to have such a view without being autistic, but I do think that there is a significant positive correlation and that this study supports that possibility. Craig > > Gabe > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
