[ExI] Physics versus psychology

[Keith Henson]

On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 4:21 PM, Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:
> On 10/24/2010 6:02 PM, Keith Henson wrote:
>>
>> But hypnosis has me baffled.  I can't come up with a reason the
>> psychological trait engaged in hypnosis has any survival or
>> reproductive advantage at all.
>
> It's a while since I look at the literature, but I gather that hypnosis is
> regarded as an instance of attention-capture; the "suggestible" who respond
> best probably exempflify strongly what happens to us all during collective
> episodes of focused attention on a leader or the mood of one's group. In a
> memetic animal like H. sapiens, I think the value of such a trait is pretty
> obvious.

It's not obvious to me.  One of the complaints about EP is that it
uses stories, but stories are translated into mathematical models of
gene selection and then can be tested.

The war selection model depends on population expansion in good times
and wars between groups when the alternative is starving.  The capture
bonding model depends on known rates of kidnapping in hunter gatherer
groups.

Another fact you need to figure into a model is that hypnosis, if it
is under direct selection, results in a mixed population.  Some people
can be hypnotized easily and some are very hard to not at all.  I.e.,
the value of the trait should depend on how widely it already exists
in the population giving a mixed ESS like a number of the models
discussed in The Selfish Gene.

There are other human behavioral traits that thrive only at low levels
of expression because they would not work if everyone was doing them.
To fit an ESS model there must be advantages to *not* being
susceptible as well as being susceptible and the relative advantage
depend on the percentage of the population with the opposite trait.

Other questions.  Is hypnosis or something much like it seen in chimps
and bonobos?  Is susceptibility to hypnosis correlated to genes?  Is
it correlated to other personality traits?

If you can put even the most tentative numbers on this problem it
would help clarify the issues.

Keith