Month: January 2020

The Problem of Evolutionary Psychology, Part #2

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

The basic idea of EP was straightforward enough, that evolution is what has made living things and systems what they are and that psychology is not exempt, that the objects of psychology are evolved things, created by forces associated with evolution, selection, adaptation, etc., I think this is how people think about it, yes? My point, and this is my specialness, be it a disorder or some bit of cleverness, is that that syllogism goes both ways.

That it’s an interaction, that psychology is also causative in this evolution we’re undergoing – and psychology means pain, abuse. I’m saying, if you say we self-domesticate, if you’re saying “civilization,” “law and order,” and/or “parental structure,” then you’re missing it, because those are the things that send us to the therapist, that is not the therapy, not the psychology, that’s the abuse!

We self abuse. We may look domesticated most of the time, but surely you know, domestication isn’t enough. Large, domestic animals are still dangerous – but that is not the point, the point is that this abuse is a part of our evolution, part of who we are, a large part of this who the modern us is, and I don’t see anyone accounting for it. I see it as an unconscious blind spot for everyone, scientists very much included. Again, I see “your mind has evolved, your mind is part of an animal,” and yes, of course.

What I do not see is “your abuse of one another is evolved” because . . . ? Because our abuse of each other doesn’t exist? It’s an accident, or some default that requires no scientific inquiry? Because we do it for “good reasons?”

What I do not see is “your abuse of one another affects you, influences who you are” in evolutionary terms or contexts. We have gotten this far at the level of individual lives, and that is positive, that is proper psychology. But I do not see “your multi-generational (back to at least some period of prehistory) abuse of one another has made your species who they are.”

And that’s what I’m after, that is my contribution.

Again, the existing origin story for our species seems to explain us well enough when things are going well, but it fails to explain when things go sideways while simultaneously refusing to consider thousands of years of abuse, probably hundreds of thousands or more as factors in our evolution. It’s a fair weather explanation and then it either defaults to Christian Original Sin or pretends that somewhere in our animal past we have the sort of madness for huge wars and that it’s “still with us.” This narrative supports moral abuse, and so we are still self-directing our evolution in the wrong direction while we wonder why it isn’t getting better.

We know “nurture” from its negative, we know abuse, and we know nature, so we have a truth table, we think about nature and nurture of a person, we think what are they, and what have they suffered and learned? We think about nature and nurture of a species, we think what are they, and what have they learned? There is a missing element in this table, the most important bit of this picture.

 

 

Jeff

January 29th., 2020

 

Part #1:

The Problem of Evolutionary Psychology

The Problem of Evolutionary Psychology

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

I tried to “do no harm,” tried to live without taking from anyone, without pushing anyone around, without hurting anybody. It hasn’t worked out – well, I mean, I survived pretty well, I’m almost sixty, it is theoretically possible, at least with the running head start of being male and white and let’s say “possessed of a certain low cunning” – it hasn’t worked out that no-one got hurt, or that anyone noticed my attempted passive sainthood. I’ve tried to write the details elsewhere, for today this is the point, not hurting anybody didn’t work out.

Through all my frustration and hurt about it, I have also been wondering why that would be and what I have determined is that you cannot evolve for a negative any more than you can prove one.

I’ve decided that we probably lack the genes to pay attention to things that don’t hurt, that what adaptations is an organism supposed to make to survive a fellow who was never going to hurt you? There may be some attraction there for some sexual selection, and perhaps some adaptation would be necessary for that to be an option – but people, men who offer no harm are not in any large majority, so these sorts of adaptive ideas, these selective forces if they exist, will be weak.

This basic one-sidedness of life, that peace and non-violence do not carry equal power in the world as their opposites, this must audit all of social science, and any social science must concern itself with the more powerful forces, pain, threat, and death, for the simple reason that these things exist, whereas, in scientific terms, as selective forces, or adaptations, or a real measurable thing in almost any way – peace and non-violence do not.

A popular school of thought has it that “nurture,” as a positive thing, a force to improve, or enhance has evaded psychological research for more than a hundred years, and of course this is why, they are trying to prove the negative, looking for an adaptation to a negative (meaning non-existent) stimulus.

Abuse and pain, those are real things, forces with objects and results. Psychology, the real kind, concerns itself with pain and abuse and adaptations to those things. Which brings me to paleopsychology, EP.

You know the old fashioned way of talking about each of our views of life, how we can compare Socrates’ and Kant’s “philosophies?” “ . . . than what is dreamt of in your philosophie,” like that, well, of course psychology is like that too, there is the general term, but we each have one also – and in my EP, all that matters is pain and abuse.

Game theory – this is not psychology – where is the pain? Where is the inner life? When you’re engaging in such basic arithmetic, this is sort of an end run around your inner life, you are doing the very opposite of psychology. Game theory is stripped down conflict, with any psychology carefully pared away.

Civilization, law and order, what we look like when we are “behaving,” this is not psychology – again, where is the inner life, where is pain? I mean, except as theory, threats, deterrents. Most EP sounds like boot camp, interested in everything except the interests of psychology. When that civilized, socially controlled ape they describe is behaving, building institutions, well fed and liberal, sure, the male-centric EP story of the usual sort has an explanation for that, I guess, we avoided the punishment, did the right thing – but in every generation when we succumb to his need for blood and war – you need actual psychology for that.

Because for as much as and as long as we’ve been “civilized,” we’ve been abused and abusing and prone to fits of world destroying rage.

Of course the overall, socially understood version of EP is toxic. That’s sort of a rule: name a thing as its exact opposite, this is how these toxins are made, call a primer on conflict, a version of the Art of War, “psychology.” OK.

I’ve been missing the lede, but the insight here, the part that brought me back to the computer after quite a lull, is that this basic one-sidedness of life, that the power is pretty much all on the dark side, this means that EP is never going to show us the way forward, that the road to peace is simply not in there. A serious look at it will identify the pain, the abuse, and where all that has brought us – a worthy goal, my goal, to be sure – but what it will tell us is what not to do.

And that seems to be the opposite of what the purveyors of EP are saying, isn’t it?

It’s almost like they’re just looking to justify something.

Ending these things always feels like I’m taking some easy way out, somehow, and maybe it’s true. This stuff hurts me, seeing my own nasty conclusions, it’s not so much dropping the mic as just running away from the sound of my own voice – hmmm, same as stuttering.

 

 

Jeff

January 28th., 2020

Part #2:

The Problem of Evolutionary Psychology, Part #2

The Grand Unifying Theory

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

I writ this for Twitter, and that’s all I have lately, apologies.

I think the content is still decent, though.

 

  1. Grown-up, nasty talk, TW: Nazism.

Nazism wouldn’t be resilient if they weren’t onto something, if there wasn’t some awful grain of truth for it to exploit. If you know me, you know, that kernel is the fight, our life of group conflict.

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  1. It was in that fool’s paper, it’s a staple of theirs, that society is “more efficient” when it’s monoethnic, and that’s my proof. Simply living doesn’t lack efficiency, that’s a term for a task, a goal.

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  1. The thing is, humans are at their most efficient when they are on the warpath. I don’t see an endgame, if the rationale is efficiency, it’s the war machine provides this organization and clarity of purpose. NOT an endorsement.

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  1. Who are they if they finish the enemy? What’s a Nazi in a monoethnic world? I believe it’s a war ideology, and it doesn’t end, it’s “goals” are not really goals, constant war is the goal.

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  1. I do think it’s the clarity, the efficiency, that feels like a purpose to them – to people generally, in a less focussed way. Group conflict is central to human life, it’s supposed to be what that giant cranium is for.

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  1. It’s why it’s so easy for us to just hate and blame “the base,” the same way they do us, you’re made for it. It’s so natural, in fact, that it’s probably possible to get us acting like that about an enemy that doesn’t really exist.

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  1. It’s also why that seems enough, to hate and blame and just keep up the never-ending fight between us, the libtards and the Right, again, to live in conflict, unfortunately we have evolved for this, it feels normal.

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  1. So it’s the fight that is the problem, it’s the fight that never ends, that we never really question. Our answer to the downsides of fighting is, fight harder, don’t lose – the fight is unquestioned. “isms” are rationalizations.

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  1. This is why our troubles are so intractable – we haven’t addressed our only real trouble once yet, the fight. We argue about the reasons we fight, every demographic asks, stop fighting with ME, please – but how do we “fight” fighting?

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  1. This is what humans all share, our common problem. We don’t even have the language, see what I had to do there? Not having the language probably means we don’t have the software, unfortunately.

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  1. So the good folks, the woke, the liberals, the socialist purists, whatever era’s name for it works for you, we . . . fight. That wasn’t really the plan, but we can’t know it, the fighting is what we hope to stop, but . . . what else?

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  1. I mean, it’s self defense. You can’t stop fighting or you’ll be wiped out, and we libtards can’t not fight this global fascism, I’m just saying, a fight can never end the fighting, there is no endgame for liberals either.

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  1. The only end to the fight is folks just have to stop themselves, like, willingly. I can’t make you stop fighting, that’s fighting. You have to do that, I have to do that, we all must. One idiot wanting to fight ruins everything.

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  1. Because now we have to lower ourselves to his idiocy and fight him to stop him. This is not a solution, this is the victory of the problem over the solution, really, over all solutions. Problem? – a person fighting.

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  1. Solution – TWO people fighting! Socialized to the level of law and order – ALL people fighting. The problem going viral, taking over the world, this has always been our “solution.” There’s violent folks out there – so fight them.

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  1. A few miscreants want to use violence to push people around, take an unequal share – so we all learn to fight, learn to deal out the deterrents. Self-domestication hasn’t succeeded completely on us as its objects

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  1. – but it has made us all whip-crackers, it’s succeeded in making all of us try to domesticate one another, it’s made horse-breakers of us all. We may or may not be domesticated, but we are all domesticators.

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  1. The group control, the application of rules and punishments, it “works,” to manage unwanted behaviour to some degree – “some degree” means sometimes, and sometimes means intermittently.

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  1. I’ve said before, but I’m nobody: rules and punishments (and rewards) bring intermittent rewards – sometimes it “works,” so we do it all the time. In the experiments with rats etc., these result from false, imposed causality.

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  1. The rat learns that a lever gives a treat, or stops a shock, and when the lever works intermittently (when we interfere), the poor creature seems unable to shed its belief in the lever, in the causality it learned.

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  1. This is parenting, at the personal level, human society at the higher one – breaks my heart, not going to lie. I think I’ve had a peek outside the cage and seen that prick in the lab coat screwing with our lever. Of course, he is us.

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  1. Intermittent rewards are what we get for our systems of morality and punishment, this intermittent civilization, interspersed with war, part-time benefits – but Murphy’s Law seems to apply to everything, like Ockham’s razor,

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  1. and while the rewards of our methods are intermittent, the downsides perhaps are not, benefits come and benefits go, but costs accumulate, to paraphrase and adapt that Irish saint for biology.

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  1. If we were the rat, perhaps it would mean the lever also powered something for us, charged a battery, and that part we like, we don’t stop that. We the rat, may or may not get our grape, but we the scientist, get our battery charged.

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  1. Again, this is self-domestication – but we do not have batteries. It charges our aggression, is the thing. Pretty reliably. And in a pretty well documented fashion if you simply look at it this way, the correct way.

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  1. If we see cause and effect, free of overriding taboos about what those may be, then aggression is an effect, and abuse is a cause – in other contexts, we all know this. It isn’t salient, we think, because we don’t mean to abuse.

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  1. Abuse, we say, is accidental, and so rare. Abuse we say, is wrong, and so rare – all false. Abuse is the force we wield with our slightly more developed concept of “punishment,” of “morality.” Abuse is the main ingredient.

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  1. We mean to, AND there are plenty of accidents AND there are plenty of times when it’s wrong, is the truth. Part of the lie and the myth is that barring accidents and crime, people are basically unabused – the baseline.

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  1. In the old twin study parenting views, this group may be the children of the “authoritative,” middle way parents, certainly that was determined to be the baseline – and no consideration of accidents or wrongful abuse either

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  1. except the qualifying rules. So it’s a baseline – and there is a certain amount, a certain level of punishing abuse which I say has a correlate in a certain level of aggression in the population. Baselines are not zeroes.

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  1. The twin study conclusions seemed to see zeroes. These amounts, these levels, are by no means uniform across society. Generalizations can be made, and indeed it is the business of science to do so,

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  1. and it seems clear that one side of the political spectrum is harder on its children and its subjects than the other, one side more strict on law and order, that in fact, this is the major criteria that divides politics and life.

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  1. Again, this indicates, that in other contexts, we are all aware of this power in our lives. Again, for clarity: these differing levels of belief in punishing means different levels of faith in a system of dependable abuse

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  1. and the intermittent reward of improved behaviour. Of course, it’s very important that everyone behave better intermittently, which, welcome to human society. This is the magic of my Antisocialization theory:

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  1. we are punished, beaten perhaps, by our people, maybe our parents, maybe the neighborhood boys and so our battery is charged and we are ready to fight someone else. This is the dark trick of society.

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  1. full circle perhaps, this is the Nazi: beaten, batteries charged by his Christian parents and/or peers, ready to discharge on someone his society tells him to. And you heard me right: because of our “moral system” of abuse.

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  1. Because we believe in spanking and such. Not kidding. What other creature does, and what other creature has got itself into such straits?

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  1. OK, here it is, my summation, >40 Tweets:

Jeff’s Unifying Theory of Human Conflict

 

Jeff

Jan. 23rd., 2020