How to make other people pay for your stuff

[Poopadoop]

Irrelevant. Reality doesn't matter; perception matters.

You've got it backwards.

Ultimately, evolution only cares about your actions, not what your perceptions or motivations are.

e.g., a schizophrenic hears the neighbor's dog telling him all mailmen must die. He goes on a mailman-killing spree then turns the gun on himself. He has no chance to reproduce. Evolutionary theory doesn't care about the details of his hallucination, or whether it was rational or not. It cares that he's dead and can't reproduce.

Same thing for the soldier. He's also dead and can't reproduce any more. To evolution it's the same outcome for both.

[MadMojoMonkey]

You've got it backwards.

Ultimately, evolution only cares about your actions, not what your perceptions or motivations are.

e.g., a schizophrenic hears the neighbor's dog telling him all mailmen must die. He goes on a mailman-killing spree then turns the gun on himself. He has no chance to reproduce. Evolutionary theory doesn't care about the details of his hallucination, or whether it was rational or not. It cares that he's dead and can't reproduce.

Same thing for the soldier. He's also dead and can't reproduce any more. To evolution it's the same outcome for both.

I guess if evolution was a mind making choices, then anything in this post would be relevant to a conversation about whether or not evolution was selfish, but since evolution isn't a mind making choices, and this isn't a conversation about whether evolution is selfish, then it's a non-sequitur.

Nothing you said prevents any of the participants form already being parents, BTW.


A) Evolution is not a conscious or directed mechanism, it's random changes happening over time.
B) Evolution doesn't have any problems with doing things terribly inefficiently. Killing off 99% of all potential offspring as a "normal" course of action isn't even uncommon in life's many, varied reproductive systems.
C) Even if evolution was about creating a perfectly streamlined life form, with no inefficiencies in the genome (it's definitely not about that), we are not currently at some "end-state" of evolution.

[Poopadoop]

I guess if evolution was a mind making choices, then anything in this post would be relevant to a conversation about whether or not evolution was selfish, but since evolution isn't a mind making choices, and this isn't a conversation about whether evolution is selfish, then it's a non-sequitur..

Of course it's not a mind making choices, but it is making choices in effect. It's not just a fluke that most species are generally pretty good at staying alive and reproducing.

Nothing you said prevents any of the participants form already being parents, BTW.

Being dead definitely prevents one from having more kids though. It also makes it harder to look after whichever kids you already have.

A) Evolution is not a conscious or directed mechanism, it's random changes happening over time.

No-one is ascribing sentience to evolution. I think we're all a bit more sophisticated thinkers than that here.

The changes are only random at the time a mutation occurs. Whether or not any changes carry on to the next generation definitely has a non-random element to it.

B) Evolution doesn't have any problems with doing things terribly inefficiently. Killing off 99% of all potential offspring as a "normal" course of action isn't even uncommon in life's many, varied reproductive systems.

You're kind of hurting your own argument here. The best explanation for why people would be selfish is evolution. If you're saying evolution doesn't affect how people behave, then why can't they do things that aren't selfish?

C) Even if evolution was about creating a perfectly streamlined life form, with no inefficiencies in the genome (it's definitely not about that), we are not currently at some "end-state" of evolution.

No such thing even exists. But evolution has been going on for eons and certainly has an impact. It's not just some chaotic system acting willy-nilly.


Overall, I think where your argument falls down is in its circularity. You seem to say that every action a person takes is generated by their self, therefore selfishness motivates every action. I think you're conflating selfishness with the will here. Certainly every action a person undertakes is internally-generated. It doesn't follow from that that it must be done to fulfil some inner desire of that person.

How does one disprove this hypothesis of yours I wonder? It seems to account for everything and explain nothing. Why are we this way? And what kind of behaviour could a person exhibit that you would say 'well that was a choice clearly more in someone else's best interests and not their own, therefore it wasn't selfish'?