[ExI] beheadings etc

Keith Henson hkeithhenson at gmail.com
Thu Feb 26 02:40:34 UTC 2015


On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 4:00 AM,  Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

>> William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com> , 24/2/2015 4:29 PM:
>
>> Help me out here.? Although I am a psychologist I am at a loss.?
>
>> Randomly killing school children, adults, worshipers, beheading Christians and other foreigners or other sects of their religion? ......
>
>> Just what message is being sent here?
>
> Why do you assume it is a *message*? Maybe the point actually is just to kill them?

Think about it.  Why do people have wars at all?  What is the purpose?
 We share the war trait with chimps, but humans are not in war mode
with everyone one else all the time like chimps are.

What happened may half a million times since humans split with the
chimps is that we ran into resource limits countless times due to
population growth and then a patch of bad weather or something akin.
The choices once or twice a generation was to fight the neighbors for
their resources or starve.  A fairly simple model shows that fighting
is (on average) better for human genes.

It's hard to think of a section of the world with higher population
growth or poorer resources prospects than that section of the middle
east.  It is no wonder they are trying to kill all the other human
groups.

To go into war mode humans have to be infested with a meme set that
dehumanizes the other group(s).  IS certainly has that, but remember
that the causality runs from the environmental signal to an amplified
xenophobic meme.

Before you think I am particularly picking on the Arabs, the pre WW II
Germans were in a similar spot, and they had a  similar response as
did the Cambodians and the Rwandans to similar signals.

snip

> Basically, the IS is the Nazism of Islam.

Evolved human behavior is mechanistic.

Keith



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