Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 2164505" data-attributes="member: 27012">I don't think there is a clear distinction between a moral quandry and a survival problem and think that both instinct and intellect come into play for either one.  In the big nature vs. nurture debate, my position is that we are a product of nature and nurture.By the way, I don't think our instincts are herd oriented.  They are designed to help us deal with social situations involving extended cooperative groups.  If you want to see other similar and different examples outside of primates, take a look at dogs (which share similar instincts because they also live in extended cooperative groups) and cats (which don't because they don't have the same social structure).I think the cognitive functions are built on top of the instinctual functions. Emotion is not a poor attempt to quantify our instinctual motives.  It's a mechanism that allows rapid (and often correct, in many contexts) decisions to be made with incomplete information. It's much like why many chess masters memorize past chess games.  If they notice that the game they are playing looks like a past game that they've seen, they don't have to waste time assessing the possible results of their various options.  Instead, they can instantly use or reject a large pool of options that they already know will either work or not work.  It's a real time saver and works, too.The human brain has the ability to recognize patterns in human interactions and can produce an emotional response that provides a quick assessment of whether the interaction is "fair" or not.  Stereotypes are common for similar reasons.  The objective is to use what little you do know to improve your chances above a wild guess and then play the odds.  Yes, it's easy to think of plenty of cases where emotions, patterns, and stereotypes produce the wrong answer but the alternative, due to the inevitability that we'll have incomplete information, is often not the right answer but something closer to a wild guess.  A wild guess would be wrong more often, as would many guesses that treat incomplete information as though it were complete.  And given how complex life is, we simply do not have the option of waiting until we have complete and accurate information before we make most decisions.  As the LA Times article mentions, Antonio Damasio "showed how people who suffered damage to the feeling centers of the brain--areas such as the amygdala and prefrontal cortices, which are near the brain stem--found it difficult, if not impossible, to make even the simplest choices.  Without access to somatic markers, setting the time for a doctor's appointment or choosing a restaurant for dinner became a torturous process."  Basically, emotions help us make good guesses and may be why we can make guesses at all.  But the flip side of that is that the wrong emotions or absence of emotions can lead us to make wrong guesses and choices.  Thus a lack of empathy and the emotional responses it produces are characteristic of sociopaths, independent of how rationally intelligent they are.Actually, I don't think you can seperate the internal responses from the world view.  I think that they influence each other.  The internal responses influence our world view through emotional assessments while our world view influences our internal responses by filtering the data.  And depending on various things, one can trump the other (in either direction), which is why our rational brain is not entirely at the mercy of our instincts and why culture can influence the way we intuitively respond to things.</blockquote>

Verification