[FRIAM] do animals psychologize?

[Marcus Daniels]

How did they forget to invite a nihilist to that Harris/Peterson panel? 

A nihilist might observe that a multi-cellular organism can have billions of states and the interactions between billions of different organisms is exponentially larger still.
There's no reason to think in the evolution that led to humans to this point has tested all possible ways for groups to form and dissolve, or even sparsely sampled the possibilities.   To Peterson, that God is the wisdom of humankind (and mostly men it seems), is just confusing the samples that have been seen so far (and captured in some stupid volumes) with the samples that could be made if we are all Free to be You and Me.  But the samples cannot be even be taken in a socially conservative regime because it prevents it.

I have no idea what Harris is talking about things being obviously good or bad.   First world problems can be pretty horrific w.r.t. to addiction, suicide, and inequality.   Sit outside at a McDonalds in most any city for half hour or so and you'll eventually notice someone finishing out garbage for their dinner.   

So there,

Marcus

On 9/13/18, 4:04 PM, "Friam on behalf of uǝlƃ ☣" <friam-bounces at redfish.com on behalf of gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

    I ran across this paper when I typed the subject into Google:
    
      Animal rights, animal minds, and human mindreading
      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2563326/
    
    I thought I'd troll with it, here, since we've had so many discussions of monism and behaviorism.  The question came up in this:
    
      Sam Harris & Jordan Peterson - Vancouver - 1
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jey_CzIOfYE
    
    I don't know where the question came up in their discussion. But it's clearly relevant for evolutionary psychology.  If we could prove that non-human animals don't psychologize, then many of Peterson's arguments might hold some water. (Especially in light of what they're calling "metaphorical truth" ... e.g. "cargo cults".) Personally, it seems to me the idea that they *don't* psychologize is preposterous.  Even without assuming a fine-grained spectrum between humans and our nearest non-human relatives, it seems reasonable that our "mind reading" is simply a more reflective (deeper) algorithm for the prediction of the behavior of others (or ourselves in counterfatcual situations).
    
    -- 
    ☣ uǝlƃ
    
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