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Friday, February 24, 2012

Intuition and its limits

In regard to a conversation I had about my objective morality post:

We may have in our selves certain moral ( and psychological and physical) instincts. I would like to break these down into two sets the evolutionary intuition and the cultural intuition. The difference should be simple to explain yet examples will be much more complicated to discover. We might want to call the evolutionary "universal" but I am avoiding this for two reasons: these ideas may only apply to us, and we may find cultural ideas that have spread everywhere that are not necessarily evolutionary.

The definitions are as follow; evolutionary intuition is that which rises from the nature of our animal selves the ability to love and recognize distress in the faces of others, the ability to know about how far you can jump etc.

The cultural intuitions are things you are taught either implicitly or explicitly by the groups you are in while growing (and to a lesser extent while grown) The best example I have of this is the reaction we share to power outlets.

Sometimes the cultural can override the evolutionary and sometimes it can't
These limits to our evolutionary psychology can de described. We have a sort of "Paredolia of action". If we are running a trail in the woods and a tree root trips us there is some degree of wanting to ask the tree why it tripped us. When really we just didn't notice the root. We also tend to ascribe complex intensional agency on other inanimate objects or simple animals. We also reserve certain traits as distinctly human when they may be apparent in other creatures.

Our evolutionary physics serves us well for playing baseball but does not help us when discussing quantum mechanics or relativistic ideas. It also would need to be retrained for living on a space station. Playing catch in a rotating reference frame and remembering we have our mass even without our weight.
Our evolutionary morals will likely have similar defects when dealing with a world different than that from which they were derived. Some carryovers may be of a benefit others of a detriment but most will likely carry a mixed bag of behaviors into our current and future culture.

Still there may be realms of inquest for which our current intuitions are not equipped or non existent. Probability and statistics do not seem to have an evolutionary correlate nor do they seem to be well represented culturally. Naturally then we must create a form of them that can be taught to children and teach this to voters.

This begins to lead us to the ideas of literacy in a subject. I will deal with that idea in another post or this won't ever be published.

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