[Boogster]

Originally Posted by Boogster

A strangely worded answer. 'The survival of the individual is not paramount': but to whom? Genes, obviously, have no thoughts on the matter...

To enlarge upon this, a useful link. The discussion of the disconnectedness of motive and effect was particularly interesting.

On 'unattached' motives:

It's more of a problem -and Buller is quite clear on this -that an Adaptationist account of Jones's behaviour may need to appeal to a motive that explains his action but that Jones didn't actually have; not consciously, not unconsciously, not at all. It's a main tenet of psychological Darwinism that the "ultimate" motivation for an adaptive behaviour is to maximize one's relative contribution to the genetic endowment of one's breeding group. So (still assuming it's an adaptation) what Buller calls the "proximal" cause of Jones's behaviour is that he wants (maybe consciously, maybe not) not to catch his death of cold and he believes (maybe consciously, maybe not) that he won't catch his death of cold if he doesn't get wet.

But the "ultimate" cause of his behaviour is his wanting to maximize his contribution to the gene pool of his breeding group, which requires, inter alia, that he not be dead. That, to repeat, is what Jones really wants, assuming that his umbrella-carrying behaviour is an adaptation; and it's what his ancestors were selected for wanting in the old days back on the savannah.

The trouble is, of course, that Jones wants no such thing -not consciously or unconsciously either.

Jones may never have so much as heard about breeding groups; his ancestors certainly never did.

So, really, what are we to make of motives that explain one's actions even though one doesn't have them? And who is it that is motivated by Jones's genotypic ambitions if it isn't Jones? Notice, once again, that this is a kind of puzzle that is proprietary to Psychological Adaptationism; it doesn't arise for evolutionary explanations of the opposed thumb, or of bipedal gait, or of the anatomy of the retina; that's because neither your motivations, nor your ancestors', nor anybody else's, come into the story about why thumbs work the way they do. It's Psychological Adaptationism, not Adaptationism per se, that is raising this spectre of unattached motives.

So, Adaptionists want us to accept that 'our motivational systems can be designed to cause us to act in ways that enhance our reproductive success without processing information about reproductive success.' But surely...

...that doesn't cut the knot since, strictly speaking and theology aside, nobody did design our motivational system; like Topsy, it "just growed". How, then, is the talk of its having been "designed to cause us to act in ways that enhance our reproductive success" supposed to be construed? No doubt our motivational systems are, often enough, causally implicated in our reproductive successes. But what something causes is one thing; what it is designed to cause is quite another. The point is entirely general. The structure of our nervous system is part of the etiological story about our migraines. It doesn't follow that our nervous system was "designed to" give us migraines; it doesn't follow, and it isn't true.

Thoughts?

(I'm trying to edge the conversation away from the thorny religion thing here, as it really wasn't my intention to drudge through all that again.)