> Krimel (insinuating that I don't read the articles I publish on my website): > Did you actually read the article? The thrust of it is that > morality and our sense of beauty arise from our evolutionary > heritage. We are biologically hardwired to sense some things > as good and some things as bad. Reason is a capacity in > humans that evolved much later and it serves primarily to > clarify the built in heuristics that emotions provide.
That's not my interpretation of Brooks and his quoted sources. The only reference to "evolution" relates to morality in the social order. Brooks: "The question then becomes: What shapes moral emotions in the first place? The answer has long been evolution, but in recent years there's an increasing appreciation that evolution isn't just about competition. It's also about cooperation within groups. Like bees, humans have long lived or died based on their ability to divide labor, help each other and stand together in the face of common threats. ..." [Krimel] What I meant to insinuate was that you did not understand Brooks' article nor the context of his quotes. Your reply here suggests I was right about this. Brooks and his sources are saying that the view that only competition drives evolution is wrong. We know that cooperation, is an equally powerful force. Social structures evolve in honey bees and other social insects just as they do in mammals. Acting in concert with others is as effective in insuring the survival of a species as being a bad ass predator. In fact all of nature is an intricate web of independence and symbiosis. Brooks points out that a particular view of evolution, in fact the view Pirsig argues against, is no longer thought to be primary. It is Pirsig's failure to grasp this that mars his dismal evolution chapter in Lila. But social structure and reciprocal altruism are now recognized as successful strategies for evolutionary success. They also give the lie to the view you and Platt champion of the triumph of the individual over the evil forces of society. In fact we inherit the ability and the necessity to respond and interact effectively with others of our kind and these innate abilities shape the kinds of societies that we live in. Emotions are in fact almost unique among mammals. They are critical to the bonding of parents with their young. This is vital for mammals whose offspring are born immature. Among the social primates emotions have evolved that are specifically social in nature; pride and shame, love. We have evolved elaborate means of expressing emotion in the muscles of our faces and the structure of our voice boxes. The vocabulary of facial expression and vocal inflection are the lingua franca of all mankind and this emotional vocabulary is hardwired. [Ham] "Moral judgments," he says, are " ...rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain. Reasoning comes later, and is often guided by the emotions that preceded it." Clearly, he doesn't mean later in evolution, but later in the individual's reasoning process. This statement, incidentally, supports Pirsig's assertion that value is "pre-intellectual" experience. It's also why I distinguish value-sensibility (psycho-emotional awareness) from experience (intellectual cognizance). [Krimel] The ability to instantly process input emotionally is one of the hallmarks of almost all animals but it is especially pronounced in mammals who can read, not only the salient features of the environment, but the emotional state of other members of the species. As I have tried to explain several times now, all sensory input except smell is first routed to the midbrain or "mammalian brain." The amygdala is the midbrain structure that assesses whether the incoming data is "good" or "bad". It does this instantly. All of our emotional responses have a physiological signature that is involuntary, hardwired and genetically encoded. What he says about the priority of processing applies equally to individual appraisals of the world around us and to our evolutionary heritage. We evolved the ability to test our emotional judgments with reason because reason can improve upon the built-in heuristics the emotions provide. Reason allows us to bring the experiences of the past to bear on the circumstances of the present. We abstract rules and logical evaluations, concepts, from our past perceptions and they can often be more effective guides than raw emotional judgments. But the emotional responses are more deeply rooted in the history of our species than in our individual history. When Pirsig talks about the "pre-intellectual" I think he can only be referring to this more ancient and hardwired aspect of our nature. As usual I have no idea what you are talking about. [Ham] The idea that humans are "hardwired to sense some things as good and some as bad" contradicts the principle of free choice. The brain's wiring facilitates the integration of sensory information, not our realization of value. What Brooks is saying is that we form "an implicit preference" for everything we look at. Although the brain is an evolutionary development, "...what our brain has evolved for is to find what is of value in our environment." [Krimel] We are "hardwired to sense some things as good and some as bad" but we learn through experience which specific things to regard as good and which as bad. We come into the world prepared to respond positively to certain things, especially faces and breast milk and negatively to others, loud noises, pain and hunger. We are also prepared to encode our experiences into memory, not only the experience of our senses but our emotional responses to them. We remember not only what happened but whether we liked it or not; what it "felt" like. It is this emotional memory that serves to guide our responses to the present environment. The "principle of free choice" is something of an illusion. Our choices are always constrained not only by what is presented to us in the world but by our biology and our history. As E. O Wilson once put it, the question is not whether or not biology determines behavior but the extent to which it determines it. We are not free to grow wings and fly of our own accord. We cannot run at 100 miles per hour. It is unlikely that we can even train ourselves to enjoy the taste of excrement. These are all biological constraints on free will. The abilities Brooks is talking about result for our biological hardwiring interacting and changing in response to the world that we live in. As I said originally what we do and what we think is the product of our biology, our history and the present circumstances. [Ham] If we were hardwired to sense things as either good or bad, there would be no need to "find our values" but instead would all agree on what is good. In that case, human behavior would be uniform and developing a collective morality system would be superfluous. [Krimel] We are hardwired to experience things as good or bad but we must learn which things are good and which things are bad. The range of possible human behaviors is absolutely constrained by biology. We must have nourishment and oxygen. We can't breathe under water or eat gravel. We cannot have a society that values eating children as Jonathan Swift once suggested. Human behavior actually is relatively uniform and morality serves to make is even more so. Once again this is a case in which static patterns are the ones we value most. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
