[lbo-talk] Evolutionary advantage of idealism

andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Tue Jun 6 12:39:38 PDT 2006


Woj expresses everything with great certainty.

The idea that delusional tendencies might be "adaptive" is very Nietzschean. He's call it "life-promoting," though. Inquires into the will to truth, what its origin and value is.

I do rather suspect that evolutionarily speaking, the advantage of delusion is limited; for example, in providing religious solace, and that for much of human and pre-human evolution the greater advantage was in the ability to find out the truth, so as not to, e.g., walk into walls, fall off cliffs, find food, keep the kids from being eaten, etc. But this is speculative, of course. Nietzsche's questions are still good ones.

--- Jerry Monaco <monacojerry at gmail.com> wrote:


> On 6/6/06, Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
>
> > Our pre-historical ancestors spent most of their
> time on enduring the harsh
> > reality - hunger, the elements, and dangerous
> animals, while the amount of
> > time spent on the actual procurement of food or
> escaping imminent danger was
> > only a fraction of the enduring time. Therefore,
> having greater biological
> > capacity to delude oneself translated into a
> greater chance of survival and
> > transmitting the genes responsible for delusional
> tendencies on the progeny.
> > Hence the delusional thinking seems to be more
> prevalent than rational
> > thinking today.
> >
> > Wojtek
>
> Woj,
>
> What you say maybe partially right, at leastI think
> it is. But how
> can you express it with such absolute certainty?
>
> There is very little certainty at all in these
> areas. Nothing that
> you have said about "delusional tendencies" of early
> hominids has any
> evidence behind it at all. It is even hard to try
> to think of ways of
> obtaining evidence for your statements.
>
> As a personal note, sometimes I feel that if you
> would just be a
> little less certain, if you tried to express your
> views a bit more
> flexibly, laying out possible alternatives, I
> wouldn't be so annoyed
> by your particular delusions.
>
> To parody your above point: Your kind of certainty
> probably in general
> provides an evolutionary advantage over uncertain
> people such as
> myself. This is because people who are irrationally
> certain of things
> and see nothing but their own world-view end up
> conquering people such
> as myself who believe that there is very little
> proof, and thus we
> should remain uncertain, about most things that
> matter.
>
> Jerry.
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

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