There's a lot of anthropomorphism in that. Intention to warn, feeling danger, making decisions... They're indicative of an intricate system, but let's not jump the conclusion of inferring it's a sentient system in the lens of our own experience.
Humans seem to naturally anthropomorphize anything which exhibits systematic yet unpredictable or capricious behavior: Pets, machines, mountains, oceans, weather, planets, ex-wives, etc. We give them names and project a sense of agency to them, because they must obviously act certain ways some times on purpose. It's the reason we have gods, fairies and superstitions. It's why we name our cars and our storms. It's just what we do.
So to me, it makes sense that as we understand something more, being able to predict what and why it does something, the less likely we are to think of it as having some sort of inner being.
I get what you're saying, but it's important to also consider how evolution provides for us as well by giving us neural structures already tuned for things like recognizing faces and recognizing danger. I do wonder how much realtime danger analysis has to do with consciousness.
All I'm seeing is that we tend to follow our instinctual reactions. Which isn't really surprising, considering how close we are to when our survival depended almost entirely on making a snap judgment and executing.
I've always found it hard to believe that any human being that ever lived would even begin to understand the intentions of such an entity. It would be like the ants that you've placed in an ant farm claiming to understand why they were placed in the ant farm in the first place and using that knowledge to control the other ants.
Perhaps, I'm sure it's not a one size fits all type thing, but I would bet that humans (and all animals) are wired to create heuristics for things that could impact their safety, and for more advanced species, heuristics that could indicate something that could help them. And probably throw in some power or ego issues in there too, which might not have any other reason other than to pump up one's self worth.
In otherwords, water is wet. It's very easy to see that tribal behavior is hardwired into the brain. One just has to look at history and current events to see that.
I own a sports motorcycle. One of the first things you learn at the track is that your initial instincts in certain situations are wrong because physics says so. During the course you learn to remold or even completely change your instincts.
I've often wondered what we could accomplish as a species if we could just overcome some of these hardwired / knee-jerk instincts.
We have amazing technology and could do so much more, but we're still stuck with the parts of our brain that are millions of years old.
These aren’t conscious decisions people are making. It’s baked into our chemical systems (read thinking fast and slow for some more context).
Millions of years of survival instincts don’t go away overnight. We are wired to pay more attention to negative things so we don’t get eaten. That wiring is exploited at scale in ways we never dreamed of.
Even in the days before the internet, nightly news crews knew: if it bleeds, it leads.
It's a survivor behavior. Recognize weak and strong elements in the group. Recognize safe places and easy to hunt animals.
Recognizing things is the essence of good decision making. And decision making is the essence of life.
So, yes, the odd for recognizing anything from a gigantic bunch of proteins, water, and subtle mix of heterogeneous chemicals, are very little. But, considering billions of year of billions of dices running, probability was high, don't you think ?
Who knows, maybe it's part of the the low-level threat scanning aspect of our nature. Maybe it has something to do with our capacity for self-consciousness, maybe it's a side effect of being sentient.
I somehow doubt that it's a purely socially ingrained tendency though.
At that point isn't it a bit a matter of semantics? I do agree with your point though. I think the way we think of instincts is far too simplistic and lacks an appreciation for how complex, adaptive, and context-aware instincts are
I think that's definitely a part of it. Our monkey brains process that there is danger, and (naively) find ways to amliorate it in peer groups. We associate in-groups with safety and out-groups with dangers, and both infinitely large and infinitesimally small in (or out) groups would require the brain to do the much bigger work of individual threat analysis.
But again, a "signal" with a high false-positive rate (eg, most people not wearing shoes pose no threat) and false-negative rate (eg, most criminals, especially the dangerous ones wear shoes)
is not a good or meaningful signal. You can't make reliable predictions of danger from it, while attempting to distracts from more useful signals and gives us false confidence.
So not only does it not reveal danger, it gives us false confidence we can reliably detect danger, making us more vulnerable to real danger (eg, serial killers).
The instinct was likely useful as primitive humans (eg, preferring our species or pack to other species or packs), but likely is a detriment in modern society.
I have heard there are MRI studies that back this up. Basically people make instinctual decisions and the rational parts of their brains light up afterwards to rationalize the decision they have already made. I am on mobile but that should be searchable.
Humans are very good at pattern recognition and we're optimized for it. Real calculation takes time and energy and might make us less able to survive.
It's a figure of speech. It's also a bit derisive, since we humans like to think we are so much more rational than that. A more accurate term would be primate social instincts. But this stuff I suspect predates the neocortex.
Haha, I've often had that thought myself. Add to the above the fact that human behavior is probably an order of magnitude more complex than any software system ever designed.
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