[extropy-chat] A vignette on incongruent points of view

[Peter McCluskey]

 rhanson at gmu.edu (Robin Hanson) writes:
>Why should how we feel or what we think about be determined by where 
>we are?   Why shouldn't two friends at the same place at the same 
>time not think about different topics with different goals, if they 
>have different personalities and backgrounds?  You don't have to be 
>the same as me to be my friend.

 Steven Mithen's book The Singing Neanderthals has a partial answer to
this. He claims that music evolved in part as a means of synchronizing
the thoughts of a group. This was important to promote cooperation.
The more people think alike, the easier it is predict each others
future behavior, which makes it easier to predict whether they will
cooperate or defect in tasks such as sharing food with those who had
bad luck hunting recently. In particular, sharing emotions is important
because it helps create a group identity. If one person's joy helps
the group feel joy, and one person's pain causes the group to feel pain,
then it's more likely that people will act to maximize the group's
welfare when it otherwise wouldn't coincide with the individual's welfare.
 Mithen makes this argument about a time period before our ancestors had
anything like modern language, so he doesn't try to say whether these
desires are relics of past needs that modern communication has made
obsolete. I can imagine that language, contracts, etc. have opened up
new ways of promoting cooperation, and that the benefits of having a
diversity of worldviews has changed over time.

 I have a review of The Singing Neanderthals here:
http://www.bayesianinvestor.com/blog/index.php/2006/10/26/singing-neanderthals/
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Peter McCluskey         | Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
www.bayesianinvestor.com| - Richard Feynman