Foe has this from Oliver Goodenough’s talk at ‘The place of values in a world of facts’ conference/event last Saturday:
“According to Oliver Goodenough… people possess domain-specific capacities in their evolved psychology for tangible property, tied to their emotions. And culture and law have tried to expand the notion of property into other domains – e.g. intellectual property that have much weaker links to the emotions. He therefore argues that intellectual property, although a good idea formally, is too new for people to respect.”
Goodenough’s talk was thought-provoking and delivered at breakneck speed… hopefully the LSE will post the papers soon enough.
In the the mean-time, I have some exceedingly rough notes from Richard Dawkins and Frans de Waals talks…
LSE: THE PLACE OF VALUES IN A WORLD OF FACTS
Richard Dawkins, lse, 11/10/2003 09:38:04
The purposes of life
Intro: Basil Faulty/John Cleese thrashing his car because it has broken down. Why is he personifying a machine? Surely he should thrash the human designers?
Xerxes sentenced the waves to 300 lashes when they sunk his ships.
Projecting agency and purpose on everything -> the human mind
Chinese room argument: doesnt believe it
Make it a real experiment and see if it works.
Existing computers dont have semantic understanding as humans
But what about future computers?
People like me think that people are machines so maybe her shouldnt laugh at basil so readily
We treat other humans not as complex machines, but we have a model of the world where we treat them as purposeful agents. Fact/value inconsistency.
I am being inconsistent
Purpose of punishment:
Benefit offender:
· rehabilitation
Benefit society:
· deterrence
· revenge
· pest control
A materialist should believe in fixing the agent.
Why personify?
Natural selection said that it was a useful illusion for our ancestors.
A model.
Predators must have a diff model than prey
Monkey that has to swing through trees has diff world model from water boatman insect that spends its whole life skimming on water (2d / 3d)
Models governed by use: adaptation
Do dogs and rhinos smell in colour?
We personify because we live in a social world: we swim through a sea of people
The economically useful way to model a person is as a purposeful agent.
So useful, that we personify everything -> our system model takes over everything
Treating people as what we really are is too complicated for the everyday.
[jaques monod, molecular biologist]
[peter atkins]
We read minds by looking at faces -> we model how they feel based on what we intuit from what we see.
Personification helps us understand: peter actins personifying photons to explain refraction. Dawkins himself used the selfish gene as a metaphor (and a book title)
Helps us to relate through metaphors of purpose.
on requireredness [he hadnt realised this was the theme of the day, but briefly]:
[Stuart Kaufman] thought exp: what if we replayed the tape of evolution. Do you get the same thing, over and over?
In Australia tape was played over, from point of mammals taking over from dinos, as a result of isolation. There are species which evolved similarly, in parallel.
How many times has an eye evolved separately, independently over time? = 40 to 60 with 9 different designs.
Same for echo location, venomous stings etc. etc. etc.
Audience q:
are gods useful illusions
As a group level explanation, maybe. Individual level: is it about child brains needing to accept what elders tell them as rule of thumb, this then has second order consequences of excepting religion as a parasitic meme.
Frans de waal
A return to Darwins view of morality
[pic of george w. bush being attacked by a dog]
Animals dont always behave as we want them to we project our values on to them, and extract them back as a process of validation
Ruthless natural selection
Outcomes: nasty nature with social veneer / or social nature through and through
Veneer theory
[Huxley]
Morality is a departure from nature
Uniquely human
Calculated, invented
Combating nature to be moral beings
[Robert wright] moral animal
scratch an altruist and watch a hypocrit bleed ghislein
Evolutionary ethics view:
morality is natural
social animal –evolves into—> moral animal
Reciprocal altruism
Primacy of affect
empathy is too fast to be under voluntary control
unconscious mimicry is fast <40milliseconds
Moral dilemmas activate ancient brain areas in cat scans. Emotional centres activate.
In animals (great apes) he has seen/studied:
· Conflict resolution
· Reconciliation in animals
· Empathy
· Consolation
· Targeted helping: understanding, perspective taking.
· Mirror self-recognition
Tit for tat: reciprocal altruism
Food sharing, grooming
Study over 7000 interactions
Grooming interactions increase likelihood of food sharing
Memory/gratitude
Calculated altruism
Fairness
Bartering tasks in primates (capuchin)
Trading
Grape / cucumber experiment
[in Nature]
Morality is deeply seated
Darwin was right about continuity between animals and humans
There is no veneer.
Veneer theory is a result of mistaken connection between process and outcome.
Process neednt be beautiful or kind to have a good outcome.
Petafloptimism 