I am talking about someone from within the tribe who is, or is considering, changing their identifying beliefs to something that no longer matches the in-group belief system. This change in beliefs may be to facilitate joining a different tribe. It may be a risky play at power within the tribe. It may be to splinter off a new tribe from the current one.
In order for any of those things to be advantageous (and thus need countermeasures), you first have to have tribes… which means you already need behavior-based signaling, not just non-reality-linked “belief” signaling.
So I still don’t see why postulating an entirely new, separate mechanism is more parsimonious than assuming (at most) a mild adaptation of the old, existing mechanisms… especially since the output behaviors don’t seem different in any important way.
Can you explain why you think a moral injunction of “Don’t say or even think bad things about the Great Spirit” is fundamentally any different from “Don’t say ‘no’, that’s rude. Say ‘jalaan’ instead,” or “Don’t eat with your left hand, that’s dirty?”
In particular, I’d like to know why you think these injunctions would need different mechanisms to carry out such behaviors as disgust at violators, talking up the injunction as an ideal to conceal one’s desire for non-compliance, etc.
In fairness, the “left hand” thing has to do with toilet hygiene pre-toilet paper, so at one time it had actual health implications.
That’s why I brought it up—it’s in the category of “reality-based behavior norms enforcement”, which has much greater initial selection pressure (or support) than non-reality-based behavior norms enforcement.
Animals without language are capable of behavioral norms enforcement, even learned norms enforcement. It’s not parsimonious to presume that religion-like beliefs would not evolve as a subset of speech-behavior norms enforcement, in turn as a subset of general behavior norms enforcement.
I guess I was just pointing out that it seemed to be in a different category (“reality-based behavior norms enforcement” is as good a name as any) than the other examples.
If I were God I would totally refactor the code for humans and make it more DRY.
You seem to be confusing “simplicity of design” with “simplicity of implementation”. Evolution finds solutions that are easily reached incrementally -- those which provide an advantage immediately, rather than requiring many interconnecting pieces to work. This makes reuse of existing machinery extremely common in evolution.
It is also improbable that any selection pressure for non-reality-based belief-system enforcement would exist, until some other sort of reality-based behavioral norms system existed first, within which pure belief signaling would then offer a further advantage.
Ergo, the path of least resistance for incremental implementation simplicity, supports the direction I have proposed: first behavioral enforcement, followed by belief enforcement using the same machinery—assuming there’s actually any difference between the two.
I could be wrong, but it’s improbable, unless you or someone else has some new information to add, or some new doubt to shed upon one of the steps in this reasoning.
You seem to be confusing “simplicity of design” with “simplicity of implementation”. Evolution finds solutions that are easily reached incrementally—those which provide an advantage immediately, rather than requiring many interconnecting pieces to work. This makes reuse of existing machinery extremely common in evolution.
I’m not and I know.
I could be wrong, but it’s improbable, unless you or someone else has some new information to add, or some new doubt to shed upon one of the steps in this reasoning.
Earlier in this conversation you made the claim:
Er, research please. Everything I’ve seen shows that even monkeys have to learn to fear snakes and spiders—it has to be triggered by observing other monkeys being afraid of them first.
This suggested that if “everything you have seen” didn’t include the many contrary findings then either you hadn’t seen much or what you had seen was biased.
I really do not think new information will help us. Mostly because approximately 0 information is being successfully exchanged in this conversation.
This suggested that if “everything you have seen” didn’t include the many contrary findings then either you hadn’t seen much or what you had seen was biased. I really do not think new information will help us.
I still don’t see what “contrary” findings you’re talking about, because the first paper you linked to explicitly references the part where monkeys that grow up in cages don’t learn to fear snakes. Ergo, fear of snakes must be learned to be activated, even though there appears to be machinery that biases learning in favor of associating aversion to snakes.
This supports the direction of my argument, because it shows how evolution doesn’t create a whole new “aversive response to snakes” mechanism, when it can simply add a bias to the existing machinery for learning aversive stimuli.
In the same way, I do not object to the idea that we have machinery to bias learning in favor of mouthing the same beliefs as everyone else. I simply say it’s not parsimonious to presume it’s an entirely independent mechanism.
At this point, it seems to me that perhaps this discussion has consisted entirely of “violent agreement”, i.e. both of us failing to notice that we are not actually disagreeing with each other in any significant way. I think that you have overestimated what I’m claiming: that childhood learning is an essential piece in moral and other signaling behavior, not the entirety of it… and I in turn may have misunderstood you to be arguing that an independent inbuilt mechanism is the entirety of it.
When in fact, we are both saying that both learning and inbuilt mechanisms are involved.
So, perhaps we should just agree to agree, and move on? ;-)
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.
In order for any of those things to be advantageous (and thus need countermeasures), you first have to have tribes… which means you already need behavior-based signaling, not just non-reality-linked “belief” signaling.
So I still don’t see why postulating an entirely new, separate mechanism is more parsimonious than assuming (at most) a mild adaptation of the old, existing mechanisms… especially since the output behaviors don’t seem different in any important way.
Can you explain why you think a moral injunction of “Don’t say or even think bad things about the Great Spirit” is fundamentally any different from “Don’t say ‘no’, that’s rude. Say ‘jalaan’ instead,” or “Don’t eat with your left hand, that’s dirty?”
In particular, I’d like to know why you think these injunctions would need different mechanisms to carry out such behaviors as disgust at violators, talking up the injunction as an ideal to conceal one’s desire for non-compliance, etc.
In fairness, the “left hand” thing has to do with toilet hygiene pre-toilet-paper, so at one time it had actual health implications.
That’s why I brought it up—it’s in the category of “reality-based behavior norms enforcement”, which has much greater initial selection pressure (or support) than non-reality-based behavior norms enforcement.
Animals without language are capable of behavioral norms enforcement, even learned norms enforcement. It’s not parsimonious to presume that religion-like beliefs would not evolve as a subset of speech-behavior norms enforcement, in turn as a subset of general behavior norms enforcement.
[Edit: removed “enfrorcement” typo]
I guess I was just pointing out that it seemed to be in a different category (“reality-based behavior norms enforcement” is as good a name as any) than the other examples.
If I were God I would totally refactor the code for humans and make it more DRY.
You seem to be confusing “simplicity of design” with “simplicity of implementation”. Evolution finds solutions that are easily reached incrementally -- those which provide an advantage immediately, rather than requiring many interconnecting pieces to work. This makes reuse of existing machinery extremely common in evolution.
It is also improbable that any selection pressure for non-reality-based belief-system enforcement would exist, until some other sort of reality-based behavioral norms system existed first, within which pure belief signaling would then offer a further advantage.
Ergo, the path of least resistance for incremental implementation simplicity, supports the direction I have proposed: first behavioral enforcement, followed by belief enforcement using the same machinery—assuming there’s actually any difference between the two.
I could be wrong, but it’s improbable, unless you or someone else has some new information to add, or some new doubt to shed upon one of the steps in this reasoning.
I’m not and I know.
Earlier in this conversation you made the claim:
This suggested that if “everything you have seen” didn’t include the many contrary findings then either you hadn’t seen much or what you had seen was biased.
I really do not think new information will help us. Mostly because approximately 0 information is being successfully exchanged in this conversation.
I still don’t see what “contrary” findings you’re talking about, because the first paper you linked to explicitly references the part where monkeys that grow up in cages don’t learn to fear snakes. Ergo, fear of snakes must be learned to be activated, even though there appears to be machinery that biases learning in favor of associating aversion to snakes.
This supports the direction of my argument, because it shows how evolution doesn’t create a whole new “aversive response to snakes” mechanism, when it can simply add a bias to the existing machinery for learning aversive stimuli.
In the same way, I do not object to the idea that we have machinery to bias learning in favor of mouthing the same beliefs as everyone else. I simply say it’s not parsimonious to presume it’s an entirely independent mechanism.
At this point, it seems to me that perhaps this discussion has consisted entirely of “violent agreement”, i.e. both of us failing to notice that we are not actually disagreeing with each other in any significant way. I think that you have overestimated what I’m claiming: that childhood learning is an essential piece in moral and other signaling behavior, not the entirety of it… and I in turn may have misunderstood you to be arguing that an independent inbuilt mechanism is the entirety of it.
When in fact, we are both saying that both learning and inbuilt mechanisms are involved.
So, perhaps we should just agree to agree, and move on? ;-)
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.