Yosarian2 comments on The Gift We Give To Tomorrow - Less Wrong

44 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 July 2008 06:07AM

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Comment author: Yosarian2 01 January 2013 01:27:53AM 0 points [-]

To explain Gandhi, and altruistic behavior in general beyond what makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint, I would say that we have taken the tools that evolution gave us for very different things (including friendship, love, empathy, and so on) and fundamentally re-purposed them. Our brain, our hardware, is a product of evolution, but our brain has been shown to be very highly plastic and flexible, especially when we are young. Our culture, or education, and our upbringing is a big part of the software we are running on our brain and, to a large extent, we write our own software; not individually, necessarily, but on a cultural level over time.

We have spent a great deal of time and energy over the millennium to try to re-write our cultural software in ways to encourage altruism and good behavior from all. We spend a lot of time trying to instil this in our children, in each other, and in ourselves. Is it really a surprise if we have to some extent succeeded? If you spend a lot of time and energy doing a certain type of thinking, then that part of your brain will tend to develop more connections and become more developed, that has been proven experimentally.