We differ in our beliefs on what evidence is available. I assert that it varies from ‘a bias to learn to fear snakes’ to ‘snake naive monkeys will even scream with terror and mob a hose if you throw it in with them’. This depends somewhat on which primates are the subject of the study.
It does seem, however, that our core positions are approximately compatible, which leaves us with a surprisingly pleasant conclusion.
We differ in our beliefs on what evidence is available. I assert that it varies from ‘a bias to learn to fear snakes’ to ‘snake naive monkeys will even scream with terror and mob a hose if you throw it in with them’. This depends somewhat on which primates are the subject of the study.
We also disagree in how much relevance that has to the position you’ve been arguing (or at least the one I think you’ve been arguing).
I’ve seen some people claim that humans have only two inborn fears (loud noises and falling) on the basis that those are the only things that make human babies display fear responses. Which, even if true, wouldn’t necessarily mean we didn’t have instinctive fears kick in later than life!
And that’s why I don’t think any of that is actually relevant to the specific case; it’s really the specifics of the case that count.
And in the specific case of beliefs, we don’t get built-in protein coding for which beliefs we should be afraid to violate. We have to learn them, which makes learning an essential piece of the puzzle.
And from my own perspective, the fact that there’s a learned piece means that it’s the part I’m going to try to exploit first. If it can be learned, then it can be unlearned, or relearned differently.
As I said in another post, I can’t make my brain stop seeking SASS (status, affiliation, safety, and stimulation). But I can teach it to interpret different things as meaning I’ve got them.
Clearly, we can still learn such things later in life. After all, how long did it take most contributors’ brains to learn that “karma” represents a form of status, approval, or some combination thereof, and begin motivating them based on it?
We also disagree in how much relevance that has to the position you’ve been arguing (or at least the one I think you’ve been arguing).
That being, “We don’t need a past traumatic experience to have an aversive reaction when considering rejecting the beliefs of the tribe in which we were raised.”
I agree with the remainder of your post and, in particular, this is exactly the kind of reasoning I use when working out how to handle situations like this:
And from my own perspective, the fact that there’s a learned piece means that it’s the part I’m going to try to exploit first. If it can be learned, then it can be unlearned, or relearned differently.
That being, “We don’t need a past traumatic experience to have an aversive reaction when considering rejecting the beliefs of the tribe in which we were raised.”
I don’t recall claiming that a traumatic experience was required. Observing an aversive event, yes. But in my experience, that event could be as little as hearing your parents talking derisively about someone who’s not living up to their norms… not too far removed, really, from seeing another monkey act afraid of a snake.
Aversion, however, (in the form of a derogatory, shocked, or other emotional reaction) seems to be required in order to distinguish matters of of taste (“I can’t believe she wore white after Labor Day”) and matters of import (“I can’t believe she spoke out against the One True God… kill her now!”). We can measure how tightly a particular belief or norm is enforced by the degree of emotion used by others in response to either the actual situation, or the described situation.
So it appears that this is where we miscommunicated or misunderstood, as I interpreted you to be saying that aversive learning was not required, while you appear to have interpreted what I’m saying as having some sort of personal trauma being required that directly links to an individual belief.
It’s true that most of the beliefs I work with tend to be rooted in direct personal experience, but a small number are based on something someone said about something someone else did. Even there, though, the greater the intensity of the emotional surrounding the event (e.g. a big yelling fight or people throwing things), the greater the impact.
Like other species of monkeys, we learn to imitate what the monkeys around us do while we’re growing up; we just have language and conceptual processing capabilities that let us apply our imitation to more abstract categories of behavior than they do, and learn from events that are not physically present and happening at that moment.
We differ in our beliefs on what evidence is available. I assert that it varies from ‘a bias to learn to fear snakes’ to ‘snake naive monkeys will even scream with terror and mob a hose if you throw it in with them’. This depends somewhat on which primates are the subject of the study.
It does seem, however, that our core positions are approximately compatible, which leaves us with a surprisingly pleasant conclusion.
We also disagree in how much relevance that has to the position you’ve been arguing (or at least the one I think you’ve been arguing).
I’ve seen some people claim that humans have only two inborn fears (loud noises and falling) on the basis that those are the only things that make human babies display fear responses. Which, even if true, wouldn’t necessarily mean we didn’t have instinctive fears kick in later than life!
And that’s why I don’t think any of that is actually relevant to the specific case; it’s really the specifics of the case that count.
And in the specific case of beliefs, we don’t get built-in protein coding for which beliefs we should be afraid to violate. We have to learn them, which makes learning an essential piece of the puzzle.
And from my own perspective, the fact that there’s a learned piece means that it’s the part I’m going to try to exploit first. If it can be learned, then it can be unlearned, or relearned differently.
As I said in another post, I can’t make my brain stop seeking SASS (status, affiliation, safety, and stimulation). But I can teach it to interpret different things as meaning I’ve got them.
Clearly, we can still learn such things later in life. After all, how long did it take most contributors’ brains to learn that “karma” represents a form of status, approval, or some combination thereof, and begin motivating them based on it?
That being, “We don’t need a past traumatic experience to have an aversive reaction when considering rejecting the beliefs of the tribe in which we were raised.”
I agree with the remainder of your post and, in particular, this is exactly the kind of reasoning I use when working out how to handle situations like this:
I don’t recall claiming that a traumatic experience was required. Observing an aversive event, yes. But in my experience, that event could be as little as hearing your parents talking derisively about someone who’s not living up to their norms… not too far removed, really, from seeing another monkey act afraid of a snake.
Aversion, however, (in the form of a derogatory, shocked, or other emotional reaction) seems to be required in order to distinguish matters of of taste (“I can’t believe she wore white after Labor Day”) and matters of import (“I can’t believe she spoke out against the One True God… kill her now!”). We can measure how tightly a particular belief or norm is enforced by the degree of emotion used by others in response to either the actual situation, or the described situation.
So it appears that this is where we miscommunicated or misunderstood, as I interpreted you to be saying that aversive learning was not required, while you appear to have interpreted what I’m saying as having some sort of personal trauma being required that directly links to an individual belief.
It’s true that most of the beliefs I work with tend to be rooted in direct personal experience, but a small number are based on something someone said about something someone else did. Even there, though, the greater the intensity of the emotional surrounding the event (e.g. a big yelling fight or people throwing things), the greater the impact.
Like other species of monkeys, we learn to imitate what the monkeys around us do while we’re growing up; we just have language and conceptual processing capabilities that let us apply our imitation to more abstract categories of behavior than they do, and learn from events that are not physically present and happening at that moment.