Morality as Neither Learned Nor Innate?

post by cheeseglacier · 2025-04-11T21:55:44.397Z · LW · GW · 1 comments

Contents

1 comment

Consider the concept of buying a new Xbox game, such as Forza Horizon 3. The game disk comes with some preloaded data, including visual assets and hardcoded game mechanics. However, it also contains a checksum or hash, a digital fingerprint that verifies the rest of the game data when you download it from the internet.

This process can be likened to how evolution might have shaped human brain development, particularly in regards to abstract concepts like morality. Due to the limited space in the human genome, it's possible that evolution only encodes enough data in our DNA to create a kind of "checksum"/hash for morality in the human brain. The full contents of morality would be downloaded during childhood from our environments, and then verified against the checksum (or set of checksums) in our heads, similar to how videogames download additional game data the first time you run the game. This would allow for the development of complex moral frameworks without requiring a large amount of genetic data to be stored in our DNA.

So concepts like morality might be neither learned social constructs, nor biologically innate concepts, but rather innately verifiable and subsequently learned through experience. This perspective suggests that our brains are predisposed to recognize and verify moral principles, but the specific details and nuances of morality are acquired through our interactions with the world around us.

1 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.