This is a very interesting article, thanks for writing it! I agree with Tim Tyler’s remark that your theory sounds more like a perturbation to a more fundamental theory of consciousness.
You may be generalizing from one example based on personal experience with feelings of tension between a conscious desire to be a utilitarian and unconscious desires that point in mostly other directions, as evidenced by your nice post the trouble with good. It must be remembered that very few people consciously subscribe to normative utilitarianism.
Various issues that your post does not appear to address:
•Sometimes people consciously have overtly selfish goals. Sometimes people even explicitly talk about such goals in public. (I can dig up references if you’d like.)
Relatedly, note that apparent pursuit of altruistic goals can result social expulsion. It’s an oversimplification to say that it’s evolutionarily advantageous to have a conscious mind with noble motivations. This is quite possibly related to your remark “you might dislike people who would make you feel morally inferior and force you to expend more resources to keep yourself morally satisfied.”
•Your theory points to the idea that unusually high commitment to altruistic behavior corresponds to unusually high ratio of conscious mind to unconscious mind. But as far as I know, there’s no evidence that such people are less affected by cognitive biases in general relative to people who do not exhibit such strong commitment to altruistic behavior. Do you think that somebody like Zell Kravinsky who donated the vast majority of his 45 million dollar fortune differs from other investors who made 50+ million dollars primarily in that his conscious mind has been able to harness greater than usual control of his unconscious mind? On the flip side, are people who exhibit an abundance of traits associated with antisocial personality disorder most properly viewed as “people whose conscious minds are thwarted by their unconscious minds to a greater than usual degree?”
•The conscious vs. unconscious division is not binary but gradualist. There are aspects of one’s thinking that one is very aware of, aspects that one is somewhat aware of, aspects that one is obliquely aware of, aspects that one could be aware of if one was willing to pay attention to them, and aspects that one has no access to. This point is of course related to your mention of luminosity.
•The unconscious mind of the average human is not programmed to make him or her survive and reproduce, it’s programmed to make him or her exhibit behaviors and modes of thinking that were historically associated with surviving and reproducing. For men, survival, accumulation of status, resources and sexual partners were historically associated with reproducing, but there are some remaining cognitive features which are now unrelated to accumulation of status, resources and sexual partners.
•It must be remembered that sometimes the best way to improvement to reproductive fitness at the margin is to push away from the global optimum for reproductive fitness, in the direction of a closer local maximum. This is important in thinking about where humans came from, because evolution acts to optimize reproductive fitness at the margin and is not a forward looking process. Eliezer has written at length about these things, for example in An Especially Elegant Evpsych Experiment. This is related to your remark “evolution is a crazy tinker who recycles everything.” I know that you know all of this already.
This is a very interesting article, thanks for writing it! I agree with Tim Tyler’s remark that your theory sounds more like a perturbation to a more fundamental theory of consciousness.
You may be generalizing from one example based on personal experience with feelings of tension between a conscious desire to be a utilitarian and unconscious desires that point in mostly other directions, as evidenced by your nice post the trouble with good. It must be remembered that very few people consciously subscribe to normative utilitarianism.
Various issues that your post does not appear to address:
•Sometimes people consciously have overtly selfish goals. Sometimes people even explicitly talk about such goals in public. (I can dig up references if you’d like.)
Relatedly, note that apparent pursuit of altruistic goals can result social expulsion. It’s an oversimplification to say that it’s evolutionarily advantageous to have a conscious mind with noble motivations. This is quite possibly related to your remark “you might dislike people who would make you feel morally inferior and force you to expend more resources to keep yourself morally satisfied.”
•Your theory points to the idea that unusually high commitment to altruistic behavior corresponds to unusually high ratio of conscious mind to unconscious mind. But as far as I know, there’s no evidence that such people are less affected by cognitive biases in general relative to people who do not exhibit such strong commitment to altruistic behavior. Do you think that somebody like Zell Kravinsky who donated the vast majority of his 45 million dollar fortune differs from other investors who made 50+ million dollars primarily in that his conscious mind has been able to harness greater than usual control of his unconscious mind? On the flip side, are people who exhibit an abundance of traits associated with antisocial personality disorder most properly viewed as “people whose conscious minds are thwarted by their unconscious minds to a greater than usual degree?”
•The conscious vs. unconscious division is not binary but gradualist. There are aspects of one’s thinking that one is very aware of, aspects that one is somewhat aware of, aspects that one is obliquely aware of, aspects that one could be aware of if one was willing to pay attention to them, and aspects that one has no access to. This point is of course related to your mention of luminosity.
•The unconscious mind of the average human is not programmed to make him or her survive and reproduce, it’s programmed to make him or her exhibit behaviors and modes of thinking that were historically associated with surviving and reproducing. For men, survival, accumulation of status, resources and sexual partners were historically associated with reproducing, but there are some remaining cognitive features which are now unrelated to accumulation of status, resources and sexual partners.
•It must be remembered that sometimes the best way to improvement to reproductive fitness at the margin is to push away from the global optimum for reproductive fitness, in the direction of a closer local maximum. This is important in thinking about where humans came from, because evolution acts to optimize reproductive fitness at the margin and is not a forward looking process. Eliezer has written at length about these things, for example in An Especially Elegant Evpsych Experiment. This is related to your remark “evolution is a crazy tinker who recycles everything.” I know that you know all of this already.
Interestingly enough, one way in which WEIRD psychological samples are different from others is that WEIRD samples are less inclined to antisocial punishment.
Thanks for the interesting reference.