Or, more politely, about learning to be a better motivated reasoner?
So says Diana Fleischman in the pages of of Nautilus.
Two caveats.
One, she's an ev psycher.
Two, she's working in part off work by Richard Dawkins.
Nonetheless, this delayed nutgraf:
Intelligence is associated with coming up with more convincing bullshit and with being a better liar, but not associated with a better ability to recognize one’s own bias.
Rings largely true in my book. (With caveats!)
First, one cannot say that intelligence, long before the syllogisms of Hellenic Greek philosophy, evolved "for" human rationality.
Second and related, per Kahneman and Tversky, "slow" thinking has high evolutionary cost, so intelligence wouldn't have evolved for that.
Third, per anecdotes, partially related to Julian Jaynes' book, intelligence probably did evolve in part for us to talk to ourselves better. Including couching our lies better.
So, there you are.
Sadly, sociopaths will read this as a huge self-justification.
That said, Fleitman is missing a page. Or two or three.
The first missing page? That is Goleman's varieties of intelligence. Especially when we get to the whole nine types idea, shown in one form here, emotional intelligence and interpersonal intelligence both offer the ability, even if not evolved for that, to detect others' bullshit.
Second, of course, as I've written many times, much of ev psych is pseudoscience. If Fleitman's ideas about why intelligence evolved are based on things like the Era of Evolutionary Adaptation, well, then they're also pseudoscience.
Finally, of course, we're NOT an ev psycher in this corner, nor are we Aristotelian final causers. Human intelligence did NOT evolve "for" better bullshitting, or "for" anything else. It was adapted "for" certain things after it evolved, and that adaptation was part of cultural evolution.
(Doorknob help us if the Ev Psychers try to trump this with a full-on ev psych based version of cultural evolution. Not that that's not already half their program.)
I will give Fleischman credit for not overstating her case, mainly through using the phrase "associated with."
For my take on Jaynes?
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
It's been what, a decade or nearly so, since I last read this, so this review (I thought I had done one, but guess not) is from memory.
That said, I first read it in the early 1990s, when finishing up a graduate divinity degree and transitioning into a secularist.
Academics largely savaged the book at the time, but it's made somewhat of a comeback with them as well as the general public since then. In the world of philosophy, Jaynes' ideas somewhat parallel Dennett's subselves. Similar ideas have taken further root in psychology.
But, the biggie? Jaynes remains less than fully convincing in the when and why of how consciousness originated, both on general anthropology and on philosophy of religion.
The idea that god(s) might originally have been inner voices? Yes, not a totally unreasonable hypothesis.
But, why did these voices become "god(s)" when, as more and more cave paintings showed, some sort of religious experience may well have paralleled, not followed, the development of human language? Not really answered.
Also not really answered is why they STOPPED being internalized and instead became externalized.
Finally, although Jaynes doesn't go heavily into New Agey left brain/right brain stuff, he does drift a bit that way.
At the same time, the book remains provocative enough to get four stars, not three.
View all my reviews
Per Jaynes, and per Fleischman, to the degree she's on to something? Many people often tell themselves the best bullshit. And, per Goleman et al, they are highly lacking in intrapersonal intelligence. As a result, they can often get themselves wrapped around their own axle by someone who is transparent and guileless. Some of the greatest short stories in literature and parables in philosophy are about exactly this.
No comments:
Post a Comment