Robert Wright and the Evolution of Compassion
| November 6, 2009 | Posted by Clive Hayden under Biology, Culture, Evolution, Science |
Robert Wright is seen here in a video presentation giving a lecture about the evolution of compassion.
He begins by saying that compassion, love and sympathy had earned their way into the gene pool. Regardless of how any gene could “earn” it’s way into a gene pool before it is a gene (because all genes, by being genes, are in the gene pool), the question that seems taken for granted is Do we have genes for compassion, love and sympathy? These are metaphysical things, so, notice that what he’s doing is taking metaphysical reality and making it material. But in the same way logic and reason are metaphysical, that is, there are laws of logic and reason that are not reducible to laws of physics or chemistry. Do these owe their existence to genes earning their way into the gene pool also? If so, then we have ruled out logic and reason existing on their own, and are subject to an evolutionary process that constantly changes, otherwise it isn’t an evolutionary process. I cannot see how, on the premise of evolution of metaphysics, which includes all mental capacities, all of our metaphysical judgments, to talk of the evolution of compassion and at the same time understand that the ability to reason to this conclusion is just as subject to evolution.
But so would the evolution of being unreasonable and not being compassionate also be subject to the same evolutionary process. Reciprocal Altruism is a contradiction in terms. Reciprocity is interested in what can be done for it in return, and altruism is not. It really means selfish selflessness. All mental states, all contradictory ones, would have the same purchase and the same taproot in evolution. There would exist no greater value to place on any one above another, for that judgment of value would itself be just another evolutionary expression, and why should we listen to it if we think that other evolutionary outcomes, i.e. not being compassionate and being illogical, are also exactly as much a product of the same evolutionary process? In other words, if evolutionary outcomes are on trial, then it won’t do to use, as your judge, other evolutionary outcomes, for that is what is on trial, and the judge cannot be the one on trial, or else the verdict is invalid. If compassion evolved, then so did not being compassionate, and so did any judgment that would try to compare and place value on them, and so would the thinking that there is any such thing as compassion or not; all would be subject to the same trial that it is trying to impose. I would say this is lunacy, but this doesn’t even reach the ground of being. Lunacy is, at least, something. It is a confusion of a standard. This way of thinking doesn’t even reach the ability to have a standard.
35 Responses to Robert Wright and the Evolution of Compassion
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I think seversky at #28 got it.
How can we possibly store data, or perform processes in thin air ? Where is our ‘mind’ ? Does it follow us round like a cloud ? What happens when we die ?, does the cloud sort of drift away ?
Some evidence is needed please.
I thought the story of Phineas Gage (and many like it), should have demonstrated pretty clearly that physical changes to our brain cause changes to our entire nature. This is called evidence.
Mr Vjtorley,
Sorry to come late to your comment, but I think if we can analogize to computer memory at all, then there are analogs to epistimology in the computer arena. One is the checksum, which is used to verufy that a number of memory cells have not changed. The error correcting code is similar. At another level of analogy, we have the database journal.
When these are combined, we have systems that know when they have suffered a ‘stroke’, such as a cosmic ray changing the values stored in memory, and a way of recovering the correct version of that memory.
We also have systems of reasoning that can explain their conclusions going back to ground facts such as “I observed it.” “I was taught it.” “I deduced it through this logical operation.”
Mark Frank, scrofulous, Mr. Nakashima, Seversky, Graham1 and bornagain77,
Thank you all very much for your comments and links. I would also like to offer my sincere apologies for the long delay in my response to you all. Truth be told, I’ve been busy proof-reading a text on optics which is in the process of being translated into English, so I haven’t had much spare time recently.
After reading all your comments, I have to acknowledge that Braude’s original argument that memories cannot possibly be stored in the brain, which I cited above in #13 and #23, is by no means as compelling as I had imagined, although I still think it has a good deal of merit, for reasons I shall outline below.
Scrofulous’ suggestion (#24) that memories stored in the brain may be content-addressable certainly makes a lot of sense, and I think it’s a satisfactory response to Braude’s infinite regress argument.
By the way, here’s an interesting link: A Hybrid Neural Network of Addressable and Content-Addressable Memory by Kinwen Ma in International Journal of Neural Systems, Vol. 13, No. 3 (2003) 205–213.
See also “A DNA Associative Memory Potentially Larger Than The Brain” by Eric Baum in DNA Based Computers edited by Richard Lipton and Eric Baum (Proceedings of a DIMACS Workshop, April 4, 1995) at http://books.google.com/books?.....38;f=false .
I will also take on board Mr. Nakashima’s point that computers can be said to check their own memories, using algorithms such as checksum, and can also recover them. However, it would be a category mistake to attribute the cognitive attitude of skepticism to a computer purely on the basis of its ability to detect and correct its own faults – and I don’t think you would wish to do that, anyway.
Seversky makes the excellent point that difficult as it is to suppose that memories are stored in the brain, our problems are multiplied many times over if we suppose them to be stored somewhere else – e.g. in some immaterial realm. I agree – and so does Braude . That was his whole point – memory isn’t stored anywhere:
What Braude was trying to do was shake off the old trace paradigm which has dominated Western thinking about memory for 2,400 years – just like Plato’s Theaetetus account of knowledge as justified true belief, which was widely accepted until Gettier challenged it. What if the trace is a scientific blind alley? What if it’s a stale idea that no-one has challenged, simply because we can’t imagine the alternative?
Seversky also objects that everything else that remembers, does so by storing data, so it’s a fair bet that our brains do the same:
To my mind, all this argument proves is that if you’re going to store a memory, you’d better store it somewhere safe and stable, over time. Yes – if. And in any case, we know that the brain isn’t like the examples Seversky cites. Whatever human memory is like, it certainly isn’t like “symbols chiseled in stone or clay, inkmarks on parchment or paper, spiral grooves on a disk.” There are no stone tablets in the brain, that’s for sure.
Let’s go back to the other arguments raised by Braude against the storage theory. I would like to point out that even if we grant that human memory is content addressable, severe epistemic problems relating to memory still need to be addressed.
All of you seem to have agreed (or conceded) that if memories are stored in the brain, they are not isomorphic to the events that they are supposed to be memories of.
In that case, it seems we may still legitimately ask:
(1) What makes them representational, if isomorphism is absent?
(2) What makes them memories of one particular event in the past, rather than a host of similar events resembling it, which might have happened instead?
(3) Why should we trust them, if there is no guarantee of their accuracy?
(4) How far should we trust them, if there is no such guarantee?
Now, I will admit up-front that I don’t have a better theory of memory to offer you, so you could throw the same questions at me if you liked.
Mark Frank (#32) questions the legitimacy of Sutton’s request (see #23 above) for an account of how memories can uniquely specify past events, and for a guarantee of their accuracy, on the grounds that we all know memories are often faulty – i.e. partial and inaccurate. True – but we nevertheless rely heavily on them, in court, at work and in everyday life. I would argue that that degree of trust requires a warrant of some sort – and at present there is none. Mark Frank’s answer to the warrant problem is a practical one:
I have to say that this sounds a lot like the coherence theory of truth (an account which fails to give us the truth), with an added evolutionary twist. For I presume Mark Frank would add that if our memories weren’t generally reliable, we wouldn’t be here now. Animals that mis-remember tend to die young, leaving no progeny.
Well, my response is: it’s not that simple. Showing that our memories work and have worked in our evolutionary past isn’t the same as showing why we should trust them. I might have a justified belief that my memory is probably accurate at any given time. But the causal and structural nexus between a memory M and the event E that it’s supposed to be a memory of, remains as mysterious as ever. In effect, the pragmatic justification amounts to saying: “Don’t ask me how it works. It just does, that’s all.”
Will content addressable memory get us out of trouble? Scrofulous (#24) characterises it as follows:
While human memory clearly has much more in common with content addressable memory than with other kinds of computer memory, it behooves us to be skeptical. Where’s the pattern in the brain? That’s the point at issue. And if it does exist, it’s in flux. Sure, there may be a causal chain from the original event to the current memory – but causal chains can sometimes be wayward. (See http://www.blackwellreference......9524_ss1-3 .) It seems that a purely physicalist account of memory offers no way in principle of distinguishing a bona fide causal chain from a wayward causal chain.
Finally, the philosophical problem of how memories stored in the brain could be said to be representations has not been addressed at all.
Graham1, I don’t wish to deny for a moment that brain damage often destroys people’s memories and abilities, and also changes people’s personalities drastically. But what I would predict is that if scientists could somehow repair the damaged brain – e.g. undo a lobotomy or grow back a prefrontal lobe – the ability or memory should reappear. If the storage model is correct, then it shouldn’t: even if the damaged part of the brain grows back, the old pattern in the brain that constituted the memory will have gone forever.
Now that would be an exciting empirical test.
Bornagain77, thank you very much for the links to the articles about Dr. John Eccles and also the article by Dr. Michael Egnor. They were well worth reading.