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"It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible. What we know as blind faith is sustained by innumerable unbeliefs."
- Eric Hoffer
It is poetry. Given the context, it is a sentence which stresses the importance of language, to reflect and language and to use it properly. Language has grave consequences.
"LANGUAGE IS MORE THAN BLOOD'
-- Franz Rosenzweig, quoted in the book "Language of the Third Reich; a Philologist's Notebook" by Holocaust survivor Victor Klemperer
"reflecting on your mind using your mind" Can Glasses look at their self? No. What you ought to mean is that you assume other minds are similar to your own.
You're assuming evolution (and natural selection) as a basis for shaping cognition with the robots, and then produce altruism. Why not assume culture and program robots like that and call it evidence for cultural shaping which has nopthing to do with evolution?
My point is, you're trying to prove cognitive evolution via...cognitive evolution while assuming evolution shapes cognition. And to remind you, altruism is culturally shaped. See for example capitalism VS communism or the cult named radiofreedomain which advocates acting towards family as any other human being.
Thank you for the kind welcome. Will read.
You assume implicitly a strict connection between cognition and evolution, while that is what we are trying to prove.
Simplified & short;
If P, then Q.
Q.
Therefore, P.
The question remains, postdictions or predictions? I observe a certain group of people in a culture doing something, then I postdict it with EvPsy or alien control. I observe many people dying around age 80. My theory is that if alines exist, they kill people around age 80. A postdiction with observation, is utterly worthless. It is "just so" storytelling. Observation is not enough in our case, take a walk to the the faculty of sociology. And yet, establishing casual links & correlations isn't important?
EvPsy have no apparent correlation to these behaviors, or cultures who motivate/shape them. Can you think of any falsifiable test for this explanation? Is this science?
Could you find examples of societies who act differently? Yes. Can culture twist/avoid Kin altruism? If so, I can also invent an evolutionary story to fit that culture just as easily. Does EP explain all of these different cultures via natural selection? I did not find any so far. Evolutionary biology always seems to "explain" a narrow provincial behavior and always in postdictions.
What is satisfying? Something accurate enough avoiding ambiguity, taking in account of all of the facts & and provoing an accurate account of the actual cause of behavior (different cultures, sociology, different possible causes - i.e. actually proving it's bio-psy-evolutionary roots that drive such -detailed behaviors- & not local cultures). I could understand wider impulses as relatively probable & testable, but "sacrifice themselves for three brothers but not one", that is one huge kind of a detalied leap. Since when by the way observation is enough? You need to determine the actual cause from all the other possible ones.
I find this to be a major obstacle for the success of this enterprise as a science.
These postdictions are not predictions, I challenge you actually pose a testable prediction/hypothesis for this pseudo-science or provide real reliable examples. "Just so" stories is an excellent category for this "science".
"There is a broad consensus among philosophers of science that evolutionary psychology is a deeply flawed enterprise...Evolutionary psychologists generate evolutionary hypotheses by first finding apparent design in the world, say in our psychological make up, and then presenting a selective scenario that would have led to the production of the trait that exhibits apparent design. The hypotheses evolutionary psychologists generate, given that they are usually hypotheses about our psychological capacities, are tested by standard psychological methods. Philosophers of biology challenge evolutionary psychologists on both of these points" - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy