We’re born with a sense of fairness, honor, empathy, sympathy, and even altruism—the result of our ancestors adapting to play the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma.
The keyword here is *sense*, and there’s not a whole lot saying that this sense can’t vanishes as easily as it appears. Interpretting a human as a “fair, empathetic, altruistic being” is superficial. The status quo narrative of humanity is a lie/mass delusion, and humanity is a largely psychopathic species covered in a brittle, hard candy shell of altruism and empathy. If this is true, the entire article is confused.
If you have a strong aversion to this claim, imagine how humanity would appear if you weren’t human(Don’t overthink this—I’m just asking “make an effort to shed pro-human bias”), with how utterly unphased it is by the knowledge that planet Earth has largely been a meat grinder and torture chamber for billions of years for sentient life. It continues to be an engine of mass suffering today, and it’s safe to say the majority of the planet is pretty glib, indifferent, dissociated and detached from this reality. If the gravity of the hell on this planet were felt in an instant, we would all vomit uncontrollably and stab ourselves in the face, but we’ve evolved to be a psychopathic species that just *doesn’t* care that much. It turns out caring or being aware that you’re in fact, in a gradation of hell(at least for many living things around you, which I would argue is hell for you, regardless if you can appreciate it or not) is maladaptive.
“Because we’re discussing an agent that has the freedom to choose between multiple possibilities”
Where is this freedom, exactly? Freedom meaning a lack of being utterly and totally constrained by prior causes.