This analogy seems like a good one. Let me try extending it a bit. Suppose that in our ancestral environment the only things banana shaped were bananas, and the ability to perceive yellowness had no other fitness benefits. Then wouldn’t it be surprising that we even evolved the ability to perceive yellowness, much less to care about it?
In our actual EEA, there were no human-shaped objects that were not humans, so if caring about humans was adaptive, evolution could have just made us care about, say, human-shaped objects that are alive and act intelligently. Why did we evolve the ability (i.e., intuition) to determine whether something is conscious, and to care about that?
Did we? It’s not obvious to me that evolution actually programmed us to care about consciousness in particular rather than just (a subsection of?) current culture conditioning us that way. I’m dubious that all cultures that assigned a particular group of humans a moral status similar to that of animals did this this by way of convincing themselves that that group was not “conscious”, or had to overcome strong evolutionary programming. Also consider the moral weight that is assigned to clearly unconscious embryos by many people, or the moral weight apparently assigned to fictional characters by some.
Believing that other people are conscious doesn’t require any special selection pressure: it falls out of the general ability to understand their utterances as referring to something that’s “actually out there”, which is useful for other reasons. Also we seem to have a generalized adaptation that says “if all previously encountered instances possessed a certain trait, but this instance doesn’t, then begin doubting if this instance is genuine”.
This analogy seems like a good one. Let me try extending it a bit. Suppose that in our ancestral environment the only things banana shaped were bananas, and the ability to perceive yellowness had no other fitness benefits. Then wouldn’t it be surprising that we even evolved the ability to perceive yellowness, much less to care about it?
In our actual EEA, there were no human-shaped objects that were not humans, so if caring about humans was adaptive, evolution could have just made us care about, say, human-shaped objects that are alive and act intelligently. Why did we evolve the ability (i.e., intuition) to determine whether something is conscious, and to care about that?
Did we? It’s not obvious to me that evolution actually programmed us to care about consciousness in particular rather than just (a subsection of?) current culture conditioning us that way. I’m dubious that all cultures that assigned a particular group of humans a moral status similar to that of animals did this this by way of convincing themselves that that group was not “conscious”, or had to overcome strong evolutionary programming. Also consider the moral weight that is assigned to clearly unconscious embryos by many people, or the moral weight apparently assigned to fictional characters by some.
Believing that other people are conscious doesn’t require any special selection pressure: it falls out of the general ability to understand their utterances as referring to something that’s “actually out there”, which is useful for other reasons. Also we seem to have a generalized adaptation that says “if all previously encountered instances possessed a certain trait, but this instance doesn’t, then begin doubting if this instance is genuine”.