[ExI] Physics versus psychology

[Keith Henson]

On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 9:51 AM, Mike Dougherty <msd001 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 23, 2010 at 7:55 PM, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It's not difficult to comprehend if you have the background.
>>
>> The human emotional operating system has been under intense selection
>> back to the origin of mammals if not before.  Those who managed to
>> successfully reproduce under conditions then current had "the right
>> stuff."
>
> I propose that the EP explanation for nearly everything people do is
> so simple to accept that I don't feel a compelling need to read many
> of the supporting articles you've posted.  I imagine a child at a zoo
> asking an adult, "Why is that lion eating that gazelle?" to which the
> adult replies, "because it's hungry."  The answer is straightforward
> and simple; since it satisfies the question, no follow-up is required.
>
> In the case of EP, the acceptance of the basic premise is easy - the
> application in its various permutations that is considerably more
> involved.

No kidding.

And there are a lot of things humans do/capacities they have that I
don't understand at all.

The theory says that everything of this sort must have either been
selected or be a side effect of something that was under selection.
It is, for example, hard to make a case for the ability to be addicted
to drugs to have been selected.  But it's easy to understand drug
addiction as a side effect of critical motivational reward mechanisms.

But take hypnosis.  I can't make a case for that either being selected
*or* being a side effect of something that was selected.

There is always the case that some feature could be the result of
random drift but it's not all that likely.

Keith