Friendship is transactional [...] we befriend people because we get something out of it
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I think that humans instinctively execute good game theory because evolution selected for it [...] My claim here is that forming unconditional attachments as a behavior makes sense for insurance-like game theoretic reasons, and that explains why us humans are so into them.
I think these statements have two different meanings. The first is about looking at the individual alone, and seeing “what internal causes lead to what behaviors?” The second is about looking at the individual in the context of the history of the universe, and asking “what caused those internal causes? (an evolutionary process)”
That said, I do think it could also be true that normal humans subtly expect friendships to be transactional, in a way that’s really reducible to some internal cause in them, that they’re not aware of by default. Parts of your post are about this instead, and I think those parts are valid, to the extent normal-humans are really like that.
But as for myself.. I don’t think about my friendships that way, and if I introspect I see things like ‘mutual fun seeking’, which by your account is transactional, but.. it doesn’t feel like this: “I’m doing this just so I have fun. Them having fun too is just a side effect, and they feel the same about me.” We actually care about each other intrinsically.[1]
I agree that evolution probably embedded some ‘shards of personal-gain-seeking’ in our psychology around friendships, but if so I don’t endorse that, and I wouldn’t choose to embrace that aspect of reality and conclude ‘friendship and love are fundamentally about transaction’: I’d treat it as just another bias to try to avoid. A hypothetical version of me in a future utopia would read this post, reason through the above, and then conclude: “But I don’t want to be like that, and my ideal world isn’t like this, so I’m going to change my psychology.”
If ‘caring about each other’ is also labelled as self-interested, then I would say that your argument is secretly the philosophical position of psychological egoism, being applied to the particular case of friendships.
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I think these statements have two different meanings. The first is about looking at the individual alone, and seeing “what internal causes lead to what behaviors?” The second is about looking at the individual in the context of the history of the universe, and asking “what caused those internal causes? (an evolutionary process)”
It’s the same difference between “pursuing one’s values because it’s what they care about”, and “caring about it in the first place because long ago evolution selected for a certain space of minds”. E.g., it would be false to say that I only care about others so I can survive, even though caring-for-others was the surviving policy.
That said, I do think it could also be true that normal humans subtly expect friendships to be transactional, in a way that’s really reducible to some internal cause in them, that they’re not aware of by default. Parts of your post are about this instead, and I think those parts are valid, to the extent normal-humans are really like that.
But as for myself.. I don’t think about my friendships that way, and if I introspect I see things like ‘mutual fun seeking’, which by your account is transactional, but.. it doesn’t feel like this: “I’m doing this just so I have fun. Them having fun too is just a side effect, and they feel the same about me.” We actually care about each other intrinsically.[1]
I agree that evolution probably embedded some ‘shards of personal-gain-seeking’ in our psychology around friendships, but if so I don’t endorse that, and I wouldn’t choose to embrace that aspect of reality and conclude ‘friendship and love are fundamentally about transaction’: I’d treat it as just another bias to try to avoid. A hypothetical version of me in a future utopia would read this post, reason through the above, and then conclude: “But I don’t want to be like that, and my ideal world isn’t like this, so I’m going to change my psychology.”
If ‘caring about each other’ is also labelled as self-interested, then I would say that your argument is secretly the philosophical position of psychological egoism, being applied to the particular case of friendships.