Essays: https://fallibleideas.com/
Blog: https://curi.us/
Elliot_Temple
Karma: −46
Eliezer,
Is the unstated premise of your comment that (at least a significant amount of) human psychology is genetic in origin? I agree with you that given some preexisting psychology there are restrictions on what memes are (feasibly) acquired. Without a premise along those lines, I don’t see the relevance of what psychology can do. But any argument with that premise cannot address the question of why you attribute things to genes over memes in the first place.
Eliezer,
“Genes determined the framework which memes exist in” is not an important argument about what sorts of memes we have. I think your intended implication is that genes fundamentally have control over these issues. But genes created brains with the following characteristic: brains are universal knowledge creators. With this established, other parts of the design of brains don’t really matter. Memes are a kind of knowledge and so there are no restrictions on what memes are found in humans due to genetics or some aspect of our brain’s design.
BTW what is the implication of emotions being memes that would be scary? The most notable consequence I see is that people could be more optimistic about changing the emotional part of their lives, which is a happy thought.
Tim Tyler,
Genes and memes are both things on which evolution acts (replicators), but they also have important differences so it’s useful to use different words. In particular, the logic of what sort of behaviors would evolve in people is different if you consider memes or genes. The available replication strategies are different if for genes (which require sex and parenting) and memes (which require older people to communicate to younger people).
Whether something is genetic or memetic is also highly relevant to A) how (by what mechanism) it might influence people’s behavior B) how difficulty it is for someone to change that trait.
Eliezer,
You attribute a lot of things to genetic evolution, and nothing to memetic (cultural) evolution. What is the reasoning behind disregarding memes? Is there an argument that none of our emotions, and others things discussed, are memetic?
It’s worth considering how
And evolution certainly gets a chance to influence every single thought that runs through your mind!
works (if it does). Just because evolution created minds in the first place does not necessarily imply it has retained influence over everything that happens in them. For example, if a person builds a house that doesn’t necessarily give him influence over the termites in the walls.
Sir Roger Penrose—a world-class physicist—still thinks that consciousness is caused by quantum gravity. I expect that no one ever warned him against mysterious answers to mysterious questions—only told him his hypotheses needed to be falsifiable and have empirical consequences. Just like Eliezer18.
There’s nothing wrong with proposing the hypothesis. The problem is believing and supporting it while it’s pending. That it hasn’t been refuted yet is no reason to take that side of the issue. (Arguably it has been refuted, because there are known criticism of it which no one has answered, but never mind that.)
Similarly, discarding other open/pending hypotheses because, what, he likes this one? That’s obviously unreasonable.
You seem very impressed with love, as our entire culture is. Might that be a bias?
It’s hard to point to concrete ways that love helps people (cooperation, parenting, and various other things are perfectly possible without love).
It’s easy to point to many known ways that love hurts people. First, there are broken hearts and divorces. Then there’s external pressure on who we love or not (if you don’t love me I’m going to leave you; if you love her, I’m going to leave you). And then there is the theory that my love for you gives you obligations to me. People use love as a claim on others. When people love you they start wanting things from you, like time and attention. People also use your love as a burden for you (if you really loved me, you would...).
All these bad aspects of love are commonly ignored and disregarded, rather than seen as urgent problems that ought to be, and can be, solved. If love is a great thing we ought to be able to get it to stop hurting people so much and so often. That people don’t have a problem-solving attitude towards love, and instead close their eyes to its flaws, is a sign that points to people having biased views on love not rational views.