the “heart” answers are generated in the brain as much as any of the other ones.
There are plenty of neurons outside the brain, so I don’t know whether that’s true. Regardles, the motor cortex has somewhere a representation of the hard that”s “in the brain”. Given that panthom limbs can hurt it’s probably somewhere in the motor cortex with feedback channels to the actually body location.
Why should they have any such perception?
That’s a complicated question.
I would preface it by saying that language is evolutionary a recent invention. We are not evolved for that purpose. It’s a byproduct. An accident more than a planned thing. A dog doesn’t need to have a verbalized understanding of a situation to decide whether to do A or B.
It devels into the nature of what emotions are. In academia you have plenty of people who are in a practical sense blind when it comes to perceiving what happens in their body. People who declared blindness as virtue.
If a man get’s an erection and his attention goes to that part of his body, it’s evolutionary useful for the men to do things lead to having sex.
If the same man has an empty stomach and the attention goes to perceiving the feeling of an empty stomach, that in turn leads to different actions.
Somewhere along those lines it made “sense” for evolution to develop a system of emotions where emotions are “located” somewhere in the body. Reuse of already existing neural patterns might also play a huge role. Evolution frequently works by reusing parts that already exist and were build for other purposes.
Years ago in an effort to understand the brain I brought a book called Introducing the Mind and Brain by Angus Gallatly who’s a professsor of Cogntive Psychology.
At the beginning when he recaps the history of the mind he writes:
Homer’s vocabulary does not include mental terms such as “think”, “decide”, “believe”, “doubt” or “desire”. The characters in the stories do not decide to do anything. They have no free will.
Where we would refer to thinking or pondering, Homer”s people refer to speaking to or hearing from their own organs: “I told my heart”, or “my heart told me”. Feelings and emotions are also described in this half-strange, half-familiar manner. Feelings are always located in some part of the body, often the midriff. A sharp intake of breath, the palpitating of the heart, or the uttering of cries is a feeling. A feeling is not some inner thing separate from its bodily manifestation.
At the time I first read those words, I also agreed with the strangeness of the idea. Now years later I’m touch with my body well enough to completely understand why it makes sense to speak that way. I’m not anymore blind. Even on a bad day I can tell apart midriff/stomach, heart and head. I also know people with better kinesthetic perception than myself.
When it comes to return hard questions, why do you think that human have beliefs? The concept doesn’t seem straightforward enough that it was around in Homers days. Do you think dogs have them? Doves? Ants? Caenorhabditis elegans?
Bonus question, when do you think that humans started “believing” in beliefs?
Re: Homer’s vocabulary not including mental terms: this is one of the things that Julian Jaynes points to as evidence of his “bicameral mind”. Do you happen to know whether the book you read has any connection to Jaynes’ work?
The book that I read is mostly an introduction into neuroscience that says a bunch of things everyone is supposed to know and illustrates it with pretty pictures. It begins like a lot of textbooks with talking about the history of the subject. It’s not the kind of book who tries to say something new.
Julian Jaynes isn’t referenced. But the book is from a given that Jayne is widely read I think there a good chance that a Cognitive Psychology professor like Gellatly read him.
In general reading on Wikipedia that Jaynes influenced Daniel Dennett is funny when Dannett says things like that consciousness doesn’t exist or is a lie that the brain tells itself.
The thing that Jaynes calls consciousness might be called ‘ego’ by a Buddhist who wants to transcend it to reach a state of higher consciousness.
At the time I first read those words, I also agreed with the strangeness of the idea. Now years later I’m touch with my body well enough to completely understand why it makes sense to speak that way. I’m not anymore blind. Even on a bad day I can tell apart midriff/stomach, heart and head. I also know people with better kinesthetic perception than myself.
I would say that this is probably a result of different emotions being associated with certain physiological responses. The body reacts to what’s going on in the brain, and the brain gets further feedback from that.
I recognize the responses from various parts of my body when I think, but that doesn’t mean that other parts of my body are doing the thinking for me, or that imagining they are would result in my making better decisions.
When it comes to return hard questions, why do you think that human have beliefs? The concept doesn’t seem straightforward enough that it was around in Homers days. Do you think dogs have them? Doves? Ants? Caenorhabditis elegans?
Bonus question, when do you think that humans started “believing” in beliefs?
Could you make clearer what you mean by beliefs, or what it means to “believe” in beliefs? As-is, the questions seem too vague to adequately answer.
Could you make clearer what you mean by beliefs, or what it means to “believe” in beliefs? As-is, the questions seem too vague to adequately answer.
In Homer’s time there was no concept of beliefs. In this discussion there the notion that people who listen to their hearts somehow develop the wrong beliefs and that’s bad.
So whatever Penn Jillette means when he says “believe”. In case you think that’s no coherent concept, that would also be an answer that I would accept.
I recognize the responses from various parts of my body when I think, but that doesn’t mean that other parts of my body are doing the thinking for me, or that imagining they are would result in my making better decisions.
I’m not arguing better or worse. I’m arguing different. People who listen to their hearts don’t go on killing sprees. They won’t push fat men of bridges. If you think that not enough fat men are pushed of bridges than you might argue against “listening to your heart” but there a very different discussion.
If I’m having this discussion on LW I’m mostly in my head. That’s completely appropriate. If I would be mainly in my head while dancing Salsa, that would lead to a lot of bad decisions during Salsa dancing.
Beyond bad decisions, if the girl with whom I’m dancing is perceptive it will feel inapproriate for her.
I’d like to point out that this is not an established fact. This is a theory which has been debated and I don’t think made it to the mainstream status. It is also my impression that the Odyssey is somewhat different from the Iliad in that regard.
This is a theory which has been debated and I don’t think made it to the mainstream status.
The book from which I took it is a mainstream introduction to cognitive science written by a professor of cognitive psychology that published papers. I read it because someone at in my bioinformatics university course recommended it to me as an introduction. What do you mean with “mainstream status” is that doesn’t count as mainstream?
By mainstream status I mean “generally accepted in the field as true”. Lots of professors publish lots of books with claims that are not generally accepted as true. Sometimes this not is “not yet”, sometimes it is “not and never will be because they are wrong”, and sometimes it is “maybe, but the probability looks low and there are better approaches”.
First I haven’t investigated the issue beyond this one book. If you know of a good source arguing the opposite, I’m happy to look up your reference.
Secondly, I don’t think that’s useful to equate mainstream belief, with consensus belief. I think it’s quite useful to have a term for ideas found in mainstream science textbooks compared to ideas that you don’t find in mainstream science textbooks.
Science by it’s nature isn’t certain and science textbooks can contain claims that aren’t true. If I’m discussing a topic like this I think it’s useful to be clear about which ideas from me come from a mainstream science source and which come from other sources such as personal experience or a NLP seminar.
For the purposes of the point that I made it’s also not important whether Homer in particular had a concept of beliefs or whether I find some African tribe who doesn’t have a word for it.
The point is to go back and question core assumptions and getting more clear about the mental concepts that one uses because one doesn’t take them for granted.
Don’t model human cognition in form of beliefs just because your parents told you that humans make decisions according to beliefs. I think that’s a core part of the rationalist project.
At a LW meetup I made a session about emotions and asked at the start what everyone thought that the word meant. Roughly a third said A, a third said B and the last third had no opinion.
If you are not clear what you mean when you say “believe” and make complex arguments that build on the term, you are going to make mistakes and not see them because your terms are muddy and you are making a bunch of assumptions about which you never thought explicitely.
So whatever Penn Jillette means when he says “believe”. In case you think that’s no coherent concept, that would also be an answer that I would accept.
If we’re talking about Penn Jillete’s conception of “beliefs”, then I would say that he probably has in mind pieces of information that our minds can represent and reason about abstractly, although this is of course somewhat speculative as I cannot speak for Penn Jillette. I would say that this probably doesn’t apply to the other species you named, but may apply to some other existing species, and probably some of our ancestors in the Homo genus.
I’m not arguing better or worse. I’m arguing different. People who listen to their hearts don’t go on killing sprees.
I would regard this as a highly extraordinary claim demanding commensurately extraordinary evidence, and I would caution that this is a case which seems very prone to inviting the No True Scotsman fallacy. First off, how would you determine whether an individual listens to their heart or not, and second, how do you know that individuals who listen to their hearts don’t engage in such antisocial behaviors?
I would regard this as a highly extraordinary claim demanding commensurately extraordinary evidence, and I would caution that this is a case which seems very prone to inviting the No True Scotsman fallacy. First off, how would you determine whether an individual listens to their heart or not, and second, how do you know that individuals who listen to their hearts don’t engage in such antisocial behaviors?
There are people who listen to their heads who go on killing sprees. I believe Christian’s claims is that listening to one’s heart is either uncorrelated or negatively correlated with going on killing sprees.
I believe Christian’s claims is that listening to one’s heart is either uncorrelated or negatively correlated with going on killing sprees.
I don’t believe this is the case; I think the continuation of this discussion in other comments has made it pretty clear that he’s arguing that, while listening to their hearts, people do not go on killing sprees at all.
First off, how would you determine whether an individual listens to their heart or not,
At the moment by observing and checking whether specific qualia are there. If I really wanted to make the proof in numbers, that would require that I systematically calibrate my own perception first and determine sensitivity and specificity of my perception of other people.
I’m also still a person who’s fairly intellectual. There are people with better perception than myself and getting them to do the assessing might be better.
Having a way to get that data via a more automated process that doesn’t need a perceptive human would also be nice. At the moment I however have no clear idea about how to go about measuring or the necessary financial resources to finance that kind of research.
how do you know that individuals who listen to their hearts don’t engage in such antisocial behaviors?
A mix of more theoretical thinking and practical observation of the behavior of people with whom I’m interacting changes when the qualia I’m perceiving suggests that the locus of their attention within their body changes.
I would regard this as a highly extraordinary claim demanding commensurately extraordinary evidence,
I understand that’s an advanced claim. At the moment I’m more concerned with making clear what the claim is than proving it.
If I say that Harry is not going to kill people if he listens to Hufflepuff but might kill if he listens to Slytherin, would that be a strange claim for you? If I say people who always listen to Hufflepuff don’t go on killing sprees would that seem strange to you? Most people you know don’t have the ability to mentally commit to 100% listen to Hufflepuff in every decision that they make in their lifes.
If I remember right Eliezer uses those different persona because it’s popular in systematic therapy to do so
and someone he knows taught him that thinking that way can be useful. Those persona have a different quality than organs that can be perceived kinesthetically but they are not that different.
Lastly it’s useful to keep in mind what extraordinary claim needing extraordinary evidence can lead to. If you take it too far it shuts down people from saying what they honestly believe and instead let’s them argue beliefs that they don’t fully stand behind.
We all have many beliefs that come out of personal experience and not from reading papers. There are areas where the personal experiences differs massively. In those cases we don’t get certainity about what’s true when someone else tells us about how he thinks the world works. Simply understanding the models of other people is still be useful because then you might use that model sometime in the future when it explains something you see better than your other mental models.
If I say that Harry is not going to kill people if he listens to Hufflepuff but might kill if he listens to Slytherin, would that be a strange claim for you? If I say people who always listen to Hufflepuff don’t go on killing sprees would that seem strange to you?
No and yes respectively.
Hufflepuff isn’t a natural category, Harry!Hufflepuff is an abstraction based on Harry filtering his personality through certain criteria and impulses, such as what he conceives of as loyalty and compassion. Do I think that Harry, reasoning through his conception of loyalty and compassion, would go on a killing spree? Unlikely. Do I think that there are people who, reasoning through their conceptions of loyalty and compassion, would go on killing sprees? Absolutely.
A neurological fact that may be of some relevance here. Oxytocin, the chemical associated with triggering feelings of love and affection, has also been found to trigger increases in xenophobia and ingroup/outgroup bias.
Feelings of love and loyalty are not anathema to hate and violence. Rather, they often go hand in hand; the same feelings that unite you with a group can also be those which make you feel you’re united against something else.
Lastly it’s useful to keep in mind what extraordinary claim needing extraordinary evidence can lead to. If you take it too far it shuts down people from saying what they honestly believe and instead let’s them argue beliefs that they don’t fully stand behind.
How so? I don’t take any issue with your stating your beliefs and arguing in their favor. As is, I think that they’re misguided, but that’s because I think the weight of evidence is not in their favor. If you convinced me it were, I would change my mind. I think it would be far more useful for you to defend your belief with the best evidence you think favors it than to simply assert your belief.
Hufflepuff isn’t a natural category, Harry!Hufflepuff is an abstraction based on Harry filtering his personality through certain criteria and impulses
Depends on what you mean with natural. Persona’s like that are probably as natural as beliefs are.
Both aren’t hard coded but develop over time. I would guess for most people on LW persona’s like that aren’t in their conscious awareness. That doesn’t mean they don’t influence decision making.
Especially the persona’s that represents the parents often has a strong effect on people decisions in life.
Feelings of love and loyalty are not anathema to hate and violence.
Hate is usually felt in the midriff/gut/belly/stomach area and not where the heart is.
People also don’t just go at random on killing sprees. It’s the result of a longer process. Men often fail at approaching a hot woman because they have emotions that block them from doing so. It’s necessary to process emotions first, before being able to approach a hot woman.
Simply being attracted to the woman isn’t enough to overrule those other process that prevent that behavior.
If it comes to behavior like killing another person, I would assume that the emotional barrier are even stronger.
Only 15 to 20 percent of the American riflemen in combat during World War II would fire at the enemy.
That suggest that you need a lot more than a bit oxytocin for increased ingroup/outgroup bias. I don’t think
that the US army failed at teaching it’s solider the belief that shooting at the enemy makes sense.
The modern solution to how you get soldier to fire at the enemy is to do desensitation training.
I think I observed in the last year two persons who would qualify clinically as psychopathic. Both appeared to me very absent from their own bodies (description of a qualia that I have). Magnitudes more than the other people with whom I interacted in the year.
Let’s say someone get’s dumped by his girlfriend. His heart hurts very much. Enough that he rather doesn’t listen to it to reduce the pain. He blocks out the feeling by disassociating it. The person also feel very angry in is midrif and wants to act out that anger. That person might kill his girlfriend in revenge. There are probably a bunch of other filters he has to overcome.
I think it would be far more useful for you to defend your belief with the best evidence you think favors it than to simply assert your belief.
I’m thinking you underrate the difficulty of communicating what the belief actually is and not expressing it in a way where you will think that I believe something that’s different from what I actually believe. The Jayses example shows how a word like consciousness might be interpreted opposite from how it’s meant.
I’m essentially trying to explain new phenomenological primitives. Telling someone who’s not well educated in physics that a steel ball thown at the ground bounces back because of springiness in a way that you will be understood is not easy. The idea that the steel ball changes like a spring is not easy to accept. Even for students who believe that their physics teacher tells them the truth it takes time for them to accept that idea.
Some of the literature is very pessimistic about the idea of teaching new phenomenological primitives in physics classes instead of reorganising existing ones even if you are a teacher with authority over student and have plenty of time.
Attempting to do the same thing in an online discussion is ambitious.
There are plenty of neurons outside the brain, so I don’t know whether that’s true. Regardles, the motor cortex has somewhere a representation of the hard that”s “in the brain”. Given that panthom limbs can hurt it’s probably somewhere in the motor cortex with feedback channels to the actually body location.
That’s a complicated question.
I would preface it by saying that language is evolutionary a recent invention. We are not evolved for that purpose. It’s a byproduct. An accident more than a planned thing. A dog doesn’t need to have a verbalized understanding of a situation to decide whether to do A or B.
It devels into the nature of what emotions are. In academia you have plenty of people who are in a practical sense blind when it comes to perceiving what happens in their body. People who declared blindness as virtue.
If a man get’s an erection and his attention goes to that part of his body, it’s evolutionary useful for the men to do things lead to having sex.
If the same man has an empty stomach and the attention goes to perceiving the feeling of an empty stomach, that in turn leads to different actions.
Somewhere along those lines it made “sense” for evolution to develop a system of emotions where emotions are “located” somewhere in the body. Reuse of already existing neural patterns might also play a huge role. Evolution frequently works by reusing parts that already exist and were build for other purposes.
Years ago in an effort to understand the brain I brought a book called Introducing the Mind and Brain by Angus Gallatly who’s a professsor of Cogntive Psychology.
At the beginning when he recaps the history of the mind he writes:
At the time I first read those words, I also agreed with the strangeness of the idea. Now years later I’m touch with my body well enough to completely understand why it makes sense to speak that way. I’m not anymore blind. Even on a bad day I can tell apart midriff/stomach, heart and head. I also know people with better kinesthetic perception than myself.
When it comes to return hard questions, why do you think that human have beliefs? The concept doesn’t seem straightforward enough that it was around in Homers days. Do you think dogs have them? Doves? Ants? Caenorhabditis elegans?
Bonus question, when do you think that humans started “believing” in beliefs?
Re: Homer’s vocabulary not including mental terms: this is one of the things that Julian Jaynes points to as evidence of his “bicameral mind”. Do you happen to know whether the book you read has any connection to Jaynes’ work?
The book that I read is mostly an introduction into neuroscience that says a bunch of things everyone is supposed to know and illustrates it with pretty pictures. It begins like a lot of textbooks with talking about the history of the subject. It’s not the kind of book who tries to say something new.
Julian Jaynes isn’t referenced. But the book is from a given that Jayne is widely read I think there a good chance that a Cognitive Psychology professor like Gellatly read him.
In general reading on Wikipedia that Jaynes influenced Daniel Dennett is funny when Dannett says things like that consciousness doesn’t exist or is a lie that the brain tells itself. The thing that Jaynes calls consciousness might be called ‘ego’ by a Buddhist who wants to transcend it to reach a state of higher consciousness.
I would say that this is probably a result of different emotions being associated with certain physiological responses. The body reacts to what’s going on in the brain, and the brain gets further feedback from that.
I recognize the responses from various parts of my body when I think, but that doesn’t mean that other parts of my body are doing the thinking for me, or that imagining they are would result in my making better decisions.
Could you make clearer what you mean by beliefs, or what it means to “believe” in beliefs? As-is, the questions seem too vague to adequately answer.
In Homer’s time there was no concept of beliefs. In this discussion there the notion that people who listen to their hearts somehow develop the wrong beliefs and that’s bad.
So whatever Penn Jillette means when he says “believe”. In case you think that’s no coherent concept, that would also be an answer that I would accept.
I’m not arguing better or worse. I’m arguing different. People who listen to their hearts don’t go on killing sprees. They won’t push fat men of bridges. If you think that not enough fat men are pushed of bridges than you might argue against “listening to your heart” but there a very different discussion.
If I’m having this discussion on LW I’m mostly in my head. That’s completely appropriate. If I would be mainly in my head while dancing Salsa, that would lead to a lot of bad decisions during Salsa dancing. Beyond bad decisions, if the girl with whom I’m dancing is perceptive it will feel inapproriate for her.
I’d like to point out that this is not an established fact. This is a theory which has been debated and I don’t think made it to the mainstream status. It is also my impression that the Odyssey is somewhat different from the Iliad in that regard.
The book from which I took it is a mainstream introduction to cognitive science written by a professor of cognitive psychology that published papers. I read it because someone at in my bioinformatics university course recommended it to me as an introduction. What do you mean with “mainstream status” is that doesn’t count as mainstream?
By mainstream status I mean “generally accepted in the field as true”. Lots of professors publish lots of books with claims that are not generally accepted as true. Sometimes this not is “not yet”, sometimes it is “not and never will be because they are wrong”, and sometimes it is “maybe, but the probability looks low and there are better approaches”.
First I haven’t investigated the issue beyond this one book. If you know of a good source arguing the opposite, I’m happy to look up your reference.
Secondly, I don’t think that’s useful to equate mainstream belief, with consensus belief. I think it’s quite useful to have a term for ideas found in mainstream science textbooks compared to ideas that you don’t find in mainstream science textbooks.
Science by it’s nature isn’t certain and science textbooks can contain claims that aren’t true. If I’m discussing a topic like this I think it’s useful to be clear about which ideas from me come from a mainstream science source and which come from other sources such as personal experience or a NLP seminar.
For the purposes of the point that I made it’s also not important whether Homer in particular had a concept of beliefs or whether I find some African tribe who doesn’t have a word for it. The point is to go back and question core assumptions and getting more clear about the mental concepts that one uses because one doesn’t take them for granted.
Don’t model human cognition in form of beliefs just because your parents told you that humans make decisions according to beliefs. I think that’s a core part of the rationalist project.
At a LW meetup I made a session about emotions and asked at the start what everyone thought that the word meant. Roughly a third said A, a third said B and the last third had no opinion.
If you are not clear what you mean when you say “believe” and make complex arguments that build on the term, you are going to make mistakes and not see them because your terms are muddy and you are making a bunch of assumptions about which you never thought explicitely.
Yes, and that professor is a professor of cognitive psychology, not history.
If we’re talking about Penn Jillete’s conception of “beliefs”, then I would say that he probably has in mind pieces of information that our minds can represent and reason about abstractly, although this is of course somewhat speculative as I cannot speak for Penn Jillette. I would say that this probably doesn’t apply to the other species you named, but may apply to some other existing species, and probably some of our ancestors in the Homo genus.
I would regard this as a highly extraordinary claim demanding commensurately extraordinary evidence, and I would caution that this is a case which seems very prone to inviting the No True Scotsman fallacy. First off, how would you determine whether an individual listens to their heart or not, and second, how do you know that individuals who listen to their hearts don’t engage in such antisocial behaviors?
There are people who listen to their heads who go on killing sprees. I believe Christian’s claims is that listening to one’s heart is either uncorrelated or negatively correlated with going on killing sprees.
I don’t believe this is the case; I think the continuation of this discussion in other comments has made it pretty clear that he’s arguing that, while listening to their hearts, people do not go on killing sprees at all.
At the moment by observing and checking whether specific qualia are there. If I really wanted to make the proof in numbers, that would require that I systematically calibrate my own perception first and determine sensitivity and specificity of my perception of other people.
I’m also still a person who’s fairly intellectual. There are people with better perception than myself and getting them to do the assessing might be better.
Having a way to get that data via a more automated process that doesn’t need a perceptive human would also be nice. At the moment I however have no clear idea about how to go about measuring or the necessary financial resources to finance that kind of research.
A mix of more theoretical thinking and practical observation of the behavior of people with whom I’m interacting changes when the qualia I’m perceiving suggests that the locus of their attention within their body changes.
I understand that’s an advanced claim. At the moment I’m more concerned with making clear what the claim is than proving it.
If I say that Harry is not going to kill people if he listens to Hufflepuff but might kill if he listens to Slytherin, would that be a strange claim for you? If I say people who always listen to Hufflepuff don’t go on killing sprees would that seem strange to you? Most people you know don’t have the ability to mentally commit to 100% listen to Hufflepuff in every decision that they make in their lifes.
If I remember right Eliezer uses those different persona because it’s popular in systematic therapy to do so and someone he knows taught him that thinking that way can be useful. Those persona have a different quality than organs that can be perceived kinesthetically but they are not that different.
Lastly it’s useful to keep in mind what extraordinary claim needing extraordinary evidence can lead to. If you take it too far it shuts down people from saying what they honestly believe and instead let’s them argue beliefs that they don’t fully stand behind.
We all have many beliefs that come out of personal experience and not from reading papers. There are areas where the personal experiences differs massively. In those cases we don’t get certainity about what’s true when someone else tells us about how he thinks the world works. Simply understanding the models of other people is still be useful because then you might use that model sometime in the future when it explains something you see better than your other mental models.
No and yes respectively.
Hufflepuff isn’t a natural category, Harry!Hufflepuff is an abstraction based on Harry filtering his personality through certain criteria and impulses, such as what he conceives of as loyalty and compassion. Do I think that Harry, reasoning through his conception of loyalty and compassion, would go on a killing spree? Unlikely. Do I think that there are people who, reasoning through their conceptions of loyalty and compassion, would go on killing sprees? Absolutely.
A neurological fact that may be of some relevance here. Oxytocin, the chemical associated with triggering feelings of love and affection, has also been found to trigger increases in xenophobia and ingroup/outgroup bias.
Feelings of love and loyalty are not anathema to hate and violence. Rather, they often go hand in hand; the same feelings that unite you with a group can also be those which make you feel you’re united against something else.
How so? I don’t take any issue with your stating your beliefs and arguing in their favor. As is, I think that they’re misguided, but that’s because I think the weight of evidence is not in their favor. If you convinced me it were, I would change my mind. I think it would be far more useful for you to defend your belief with the best evidence you think favors it than to simply assert your belief.
Depends on what you mean with natural. Persona’s like that are probably as natural as beliefs are. Both aren’t hard coded but develop over time. I would guess for most people on LW persona’s like that aren’t in their conscious awareness. That doesn’t mean they don’t influence decision making.
Especially the persona’s that represents the parents often has a strong effect on people decisions in life.
Hate is usually felt in the midriff/gut/belly/stomach area and not where the heart is.
People also don’t just go at random on killing sprees. It’s the result of a longer process. Men often fail at approaching a hot woman because they have emotions that block them from doing so. It’s necessary to process emotions first, before being able to approach a hot woman.
Simply being attracted to the woman isn’t enough to overrule those other process that prevent that behavior. If it comes to behavior like killing another person, I would assume that the emotional barrier are even stronger.
To seek an example about WWII:
That suggest that you need a lot more than a bit oxytocin for increased ingroup/outgroup bias. I don’t think that the US army failed at teaching it’s solider the belief that shooting at the enemy makes sense.
The modern solution to how you get soldier to fire at the enemy is to do desensitation training.
I think I observed in the last year two persons who would qualify clinically as psychopathic. Both appeared to me very absent from their own bodies (description of a qualia that I have). Magnitudes more than the other people with whom I interacted in the year.
Let’s say someone get’s dumped by his girlfriend. His heart hurts very much. Enough that he rather doesn’t listen to it to reduce the pain. He blocks out the feeling by disassociating it. The person also feel very angry in is midrif and wants to act out that anger. That person might kill his girlfriend in revenge. There are probably a bunch of other filters he has to overcome.
I’m thinking you underrate the difficulty of communicating what the belief actually is and not expressing it in a way where you will think that I believe something that’s different from what I actually believe. The Jayses example shows how a word like consciousness might be interpreted opposite from how it’s meant.
I’m essentially trying to explain new phenomenological primitives. Telling someone who’s not well educated in physics that a steel ball thown at the ground bounces back because of springiness in a way that you will be understood is not easy. The idea that the steel ball changes like a spring is not easy to accept. Even for students who believe that their physics teacher tells them the truth it takes time for them to accept that idea.
Some of the literature is very pessimistic about the idea of teaching new phenomenological primitives in physics classes instead of reorganising existing ones even if you are a teacher with authority over student and have plenty of time.
Attempting to do the same thing in an online discussion is ambitious.