[ExI] Prisoner of bad philosophy: Carl Sagan couldn?t allow > himself to hope

[Keith Henson]

On Sun, Aug 5, 2018 at 8:19 AM,  Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, 5 Aug 2018 at 2:54 pm, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> snip

>> > For some atheists it is upsetting that
>> so many base their lives around religious belief given this, and they feel
>> obliged to tell them why they are wrong at every opportunity; for other
>> atheists peoples? stupidity doesn?t bother them.
>>
>> You wonder a bit why the behavior was selected of telling a person
>> when they have stupid beliefs?  It's not a direct survival trait.
>
> Being rational has survival value. Philosophy doesn?t have direct survival
> value, but it is a side-effect of valuing rationality.

You need to be very careful when thinking about traits that were
selected.  It's genes that are selected.  "Rational" is usually
considered a trait local to the individual.  But people are often
*not* rational from their local viewpoint.  However, if you look at
the world from the viewpoint of a gene, a lot of this non-rational
behavior is resolved as rational (from that viewpoint) after all.

The reason is that genes don't reside only in the individual but in
their children and relatives.  Is it rational to die for your tribe?
Not from the individual's viewpoint!  But it is from the viewpoint of
the genes, it often is if more copies of the genes exist after the
selection event than otherwise would.

Most of human evolution happened in small related groups.  We have a
tendency to interact with people as if they were part of our tribe
since living in groups larger than a village is too recent to have a
large effect on human genes.  I suppose a trait for attempting to
modify non-rational thinking in related tribe members could be
selected.  The cost of trying is usually low.  The genes saved in
relatives are a statistical fraction of the genes you carry.

If you want to consider a recent selection event, consider the
Children's Crusade.

Keith