The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [148]
It’s now commonplace in every social science (except maybe economics) that altruism and unselfishness were inevitable among puny creatures like our ancestors if they were going to survive long enough to produce us. The best combination of sociobiology and comparative human/primate ethology that makes this obvious comes from Sarah Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (2009), and Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (2009).
The impact of evolutionary game theory in biology traces back to John Maynard Smith, Evolution and the Theory of Games (1982). The prisoner’s dilemma’s role in how cooperation must have been selected for was first made clear by Robert Axelrod in The Evolution of Cooperation (1984). J. McKenzie Alexander’s Structural Evolution of Morality (2007) gives all the details. And if you are really keen, his website enables you to run your own simulations of all the games that select for moral norms as optimal strategies. Cross-cultural experiments reveal much the same thing, using “cut the cake,” the “ultimatum game,” and other games. Rob Boyd, Joseph Henrich, and others’ work in 15 non-Western societies show this, as reported in Joseph and Natalie Henrich’s Why Humans Cooperate: A Cultural and Evolutionary Explanation (2007).
The role of the emotions in the evolution and enforcement of core morality is developed by Jesse Prinz in The Emotional Construction of Morals (2007). Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen’s Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South (1996) is a lovely study of how local ecologies shape moral norms and how they harness the emotions to impose them on individuals. Robert Frank’s Passions within Reason (1988) links emotions to the design problem of credible commitment in strategic interaction that they solve.
NEVER LET YOUR CONSCIOUS
BE YOUR GUIDE
Blindsight has been troubling philosophers ever since it came to their attention. Check out references to it in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online. Lawrence Weiskrantz has been writing about the phenomenon for at least 25 years. His latest book is Blindsight: A Case Study Spanning 35 Years and New Developments (2009).
Libet’s experiments are well described in an article on Wikipedia, with references to later discussions. Many of these are written by those eager to wriggle out of the conclusion that we don’t have free will. By contrast, in The Illusion of Conscious Will (2002), Daniel Wegner carries Libet’s argument further and adds some more empirical findings to show that the will is an illusion of consciousness. Libet’s results have been strongly substantiated by recent work using fMRI brain imaging, reported in “Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain,” a paper by C. S. Soon, M. Brass, H. J. Heinze, and J. D. Haynes, in Nature Neuroscience (2008). Remember, our take on Libet is merely that his experiment shows that we can’t trust introspection. We have lots of other reasons to distrust consciousness.
The visual illusions in Chapter 7 are used with permission of Dale Purves. For more and better ones, together with links to his further work and the theory of how we see things, check out his website (http://www.purveslab.net/seeforyourself/), especially the link labeled “See for yourself.”
There is a huge literature on “confabulation”—false memories—especially about the self. A good place to start is William Hirstein, Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of
Confabulation (2005).
THE BRAIN DOES EVERYTHING WITHOUT THINKING ABOUT ANYTHING AT ALL
The problem of the Paris neurons and the infinite (and multiplying) regress of aboutness is often called “homuncularism.” The “homunculus”—Latin for little human—was the undetectably