= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
djcb comments on Guilt: Another Gift Nobody Wants - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (100)
I sort of agree with this; it's temptingly easy to explain away complex higher-level behaviors as adaptations.
But unless I am missing something, the alternative to an evolutionary theory of guilt isn't a non-evolutionary theory of guilt. It's to say "Guilt? Well, obviously if you do something immoral, then you feel bad afterwards, because on some level you know it was wrong." As far as I know once you've reached the point where you really feel like emotions require explanations and you understand that the explanations cannot themselves be mental, evolutionary psychology is pretty much the only game in town.
I'm not saying the particular formulation of guilt presented here is right - maybe it's Tooby and Cosmides' model, maybe it's something else no one's ever thought of, but I think any accurate model of guilt would sound just as reductionist as this one.
Guilt in dogs seems to be mostly illusory.
Yes, agreed -- for common behaviours, it's hard to think of anything but evo-psy. Hypothetically, there could some global environmental factor that influences behaviour -- think gay bomb -- but that's probably not very realistic.
The trouble with evo-psy is indeed how it's hard to distinguish between alternative hypotheses.
Regarding the BBC-article - I think it is more about the dog owners than the animals themselves. But of course, if the only 'evidence' for dog-guilt is the bias of their owners, the case gets very weak.