Originally Posted by PhilosopherStoned
It has bearing on if you are representing a legitimate scientific theory or not. That is pretty much my only interest at this point. Admit that you are not speaking based of a "well established" scientific theory and I pretty much go away.
Nobody has ever claimed that evil is something real and tangible. You are misrepresenting my position by saying otherwise. Terror Management Theory is well established in more than one way, and though there have been notable criticisms, the jury is far from out (as I will show you later.) I really think a stringent science man such as yourself should show more discipline and take an unbiased approach. You are clearly caught up in trying to prove me wrong.
Do I really need to point out the blatant double standards in those two paragraphs? Off topic possibly but shit like that has always pissed me off. And for the record, intelligent people do question if things are evil and wonder if they're thinking rationally.
Yes, I'm afraid you are going to have to point this out to me. For the sake of this discussion, lets pretend that I can't read your mind, so please just spell it out for me. Just treat me like a fucking moron.....wait, you are already doing that.
Intelligent people question their motives? That's debatable. The only intelligent people who might make a practice of observing their own behavior would be people well educated in psychology, even then it is hard to stay disciplined unless you are really motivated.
What percentage of the world's population would you consider intelligent? What about the hoards of uneducated people living in third world coutries?
A word like evil does not add clarity but only confusion. As for the tooth fairy thing, if someone were to claim that the tooth fairy is inextricably linked to human consciousness or accuse people of denying its existence, then I would probably (justifiably) accuse them of believing in it. Also, your point about the human brain is bogus. I actually can perfectly well deny it because a culture has to have a concept of "evil" before I can ascribe it to a phenomenon. Which physical construct within the brain was that again?
The meaning of evil and how it is perceived is perfectly clear. I think you are the only one who is confused.
Which physical construct of the brain is responsible? Is that a serious question or another useless distraction? I can't point to one area of the brain and say "evil lives here." There is obviously a very complex set of interactions taking place, something which would certainly involve more than one construct and more than one area of the brain. Neuroscience has made great strides as of late, but it isn't that good yet. A psychological theory doesn't need to pinpoint the exact location within our brains responsible for the behavior to be valid. It only needs to prove that people will act a certain way given certain circumstances, to put it simply. That is what most social psychology theories entail.
You can't deny evil any more than you can deny the Holocaust. As I said earlier, unreal concepts manifest themselves in real ways (you seem to ignore all of my good points.) The tendency of humans to perpetrate violent or disriminatory acts which, to a human being, would be interpreted as evil, logically have to derive themselves from a construct(s) in our brains. To deny the existence of evil is to deny this simple fact. A brief overview of human history will reveal a very definite pattern of violence, this is an irrefutable fact. This is why an interdisciplinary approach is so important, it can only add credence to the theory.
So again, you are not working off of a legitimate, "well established" theory, correct? All you have to do is admit that you were using the line "well established scientific theory" to exercise power over someone because it sounded good without having any idea what it means for a scientific theory to be well established and I'll go away.
You have cited a single 11 page article as the sole means of denouncing this theory, without apparently knowing that propents of TMT have since published responses to this paper. (I feel very validated by this response because it raises some of the same concerns I had while reading the critique by Kirkpatrick.)
http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/EP05476519.pdf
The critique you keep referencing appears to be nothing more than a logical analysis without much of an empirical basis.
In addition to this, TMT theorists are apparently continuing to revise their theory:
"In addition, human creativity, growth, and genuine acceptance of death cannot be explained easily by TMT. For this reason TMT theorists have recently proposed a theory of growth that should complement TMT. The individual is striving not only to protect oneself against the terror associated with death awareness but, in addition, to develop and expand. Between the two motivations, to grow and to protect, there is a dynamic balance. Growth is also likely to engender awareness of one's limitations and, therefore, to make one more susceptible to death terror. On the other hand, the same growth, via creation of meaning, provides the means to deal with the terror."
http://www.deathreference.com/Sy-Vi/...nt-Theory.html
Also, I looked up a list of publishings dealing with TMT since the Kirkpatrick paper was published in 2006. There have literally been dozens upon dozens of psychology papers published in the past four years from outside of the circle of "creators" which either draw on information from TMT or base their entire study on the theory. Apparently the Kirkpatrick paper didn't have much of an effect.
I would take him more seriously because he's a scientist that understands evolution and so is qualified to talk about things like human nature and the like. "Benefit the small societies from which it evolved" is group selectionism which does not lead to a proper theory of natural selection: appealing to it is the sort of mistake that amateurs that are in over their head often make. It sounds like Becker was one.
Becker won the pulitzer prize for one of the books I keep referencing. Do they hand out pulitzer prizes to amateurs who propose unfounded theories? Ernest Becker is an extremely well respected scientist who is praised for his high standards for empirical evidence. You are really just digging yourself into a deeper hole with every post you make like this, taking such a definite and derogatory stance. You didn't know any of this existed a few days ago and now you're pretending to be an expert? It's pretty obvious that your understanding doesn't extend very far beyond a few google searches.
Also, TMT claims that the existential fear of death is crippling: that's why we needed to develop the postulated terror management apparatus. This is the WHOLE POINT of TMT. Oddly enough you later go on to speak down to me by accusing me of a) only having read the wikipedia article, b) probably not having even read that. DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT TMT IS?
The dynamic as a whole is not crippling, so the analysis that this could not evolve seems to me to not be based on anything other than a professional opinion. Kirkpatrick himself refers to severl "by products" as the cause of this dynamic. Could a brain which evolved a great deal due to sexual forces develop negative "side effects?" Just like a peacocks tail could get it killed? Such traits would seem maladaptive from a survival perspective, as Kirpatrick says, yet they somehow evolved. One thing I know about evolution is that it doesn't predict the future, it couldn't therefore anticipate the rise of civilization as the result of heightened levels of consciousness. It increases our brain size and increases our awareness with no regard for the future, meaning no regard for how these traits may fare in a civilized context.
No, you should read DuB's post (and the articles linked therein). TMT postulates the existence of and a specific mechanism for the regulation of existential death related terror, one consequence of which is an increase in ingroup favoritism in response to mortality salience. It is only this last part that can be measured. Kirkpatrick and Navarrete propose another theory to explain this phenomenon that does not depend on this terror management apparatus. They also do quite a nice job of taking TMT apart one piece at a time. It constitutes an introduction to modern evolutionary thought that even a psychologist could understand (Couldn't resist. There are smart psychologists that don't need such a gentle introduction. DV has a few of them as members, DuB and O'nus being the obvious two). Seriously though, TMT is pretty much dead after that article. The only reason it's going to get any research funding after that is because most of the people that make that sort of decision don't recognize that evolutionary biologists and not psychologists have the final say on what can and can't constitute human nature and so will fail to see just how dead of a theory TMT actually is.
I did read Dub's post, did you? It seemed to me to be pretty neutral. The only article which provided a definite alternative was the Kirkpatrick paper, and I think I pretty well addressed that earlier. As for the uncertainty management theory, it seems to be more of an augmentation of terror management theory than a distinct alternative. They actually lend a lot of credence to TMT throughout the paper and call it an "important" theory.
"Seriously though, TMT is pretty much dead after that article."
I would really like to know how you could possibly think you have a right to make such a judgment.
You misunderstood. The theory of TMT is that the underlaying cause of the things you listed is existential angst. The more I look into it, the more it strikes me as bullshit but I didn't call TMT itself dualistic bull. Juroara called your whole good and evil trip dualistic bull and I have to agree with that. That's not TMT though as TMT doesn't address good and evil.
Do you wanna know what the most infuriating aspect of this conversation is? It's that your main argument (other than the ever so descriptive "it's bullshit" argument) is that this is all "dualistic bull," but you don't seem to realize that not a single alternative theory describes the nature of good and evil as anything other than dualistic. Even Kirkpatricks assessment leaves a dualistic relationship between good and evil. And yes, TMT does support this dualistic view, whether you realize it or not.
In fact, I was watching a video the other day of Philip Zimbardo (the guy who did the Stanford Prison experiment) speaking at TED about "why normal people do evil things." Can you guess what the very first words to come out of his mouth were? Loosely quoted, he said "There will always be good and evil in the world. That is just an irrefutable fact of human nature. Evil is the yin to good's yang." Can you think of a more perfectly dualistic example than yin and yang?
I'm sorry but this is just a bunch of liberal arts bullshit that I'm questioning and one scientific theory that was pretty much reduced to a joke by the paper by Kirkpatrick so it looks like my initial instinct was pretty good.
I think you just need to get over yourself. I'm honestly trying to have a serious discussion but it is hard when you keep touting your ego.
It's a fallacy perpetrated by our education system that idiots can't get books and papers published. I once had a debate with a "cognitive scientist" that argued that group selectionism is the way to go. This is a man that had "decades" of "research" experience and had published countless papers. Yet he was a complete idiot. Citations are pretty much useless unless they refer to actual research experiments or arguments which you don't care to include. Saying "My professor (didn't) said" is neither of these.
This guy isn't an idiot, he is the chair of the psychology department and he specializes in the field of research we are discussing. He is a reliable source, so I think you can stop bitching now.
The liberal arts fluff is all this nonsense about a paralyzing fear of death and good and evil and existential angst. Read the paper for the alternative mechanism:
I mentioned that it conforms to modern evolutionary theory, which A PRIORI makes it superior. That was pretty not vague and pretty intelligible. Or do you just want to ignore conflicting points by accusing them of being unintelligible? That's not very scientific. All this 'nitpicking' that I'm doing is the sort of thing that a "well established" scientific theory should be able to handle easily. It's only annoying when, instead of giving clear answers, you have to demean the other person and posture harder.
Hasn't anybody told you not to put all your eggs in one basket? Do you have anything other than Kirkpatrick? I think we have established that the findings of that paper are not conclusive. Calling this "liberal arts fluff" is just a cop out in my opinion. You don't have enough prior knowledge of this "liberal arts fluff" to seriously address it, so you have to devise a way to take it all down with one fell swoop, essentially dodging the whole issue.
The fact that it is through technology that that pattern ended makes it a good analogy. Why wouldn't mind control be a valid alternative. I'm not saying that I'd want it but it demonstrates that, in theory, it's perfectly possible to solve this 'problem' without waiting for genetic evolution to take place. Genetic engineering is another alternative. It's also possible (indeed likely) that all of this nonsense about good and evil is really just a bunch of bullshit and that it's a simple cultural phenomenon: change the culture and you change the behavior. The only thing that's been demonstrated is increase in ingroup favoritism in response to mortality salience! All this liberal arts fluff that you're trying to extrapolate from it in unsupported.
There are a couple of things I find to be disturbingly off the mark in this paragraph.
1.) What use is speculating about future technology to a theory of psychology? You could theoretically cut and past that argument into any psychological study and it would be equally valid. "Who cares how people discriminate against minorities, in the future we will just implant mind control devices in everyone's mind to stop them from discriminating. Brilliant!" It doesn't tell us anything about what we are trying to learn. Im not disagreeing with your conclusion that it is a "valid possibility," Im just showing it to be a "weak-ass argument." It is such an obvious cop out.
2.) I find this statement to be especially perplexing: "It's also possible (indeed likely) that all of this nonsense about good and evil is really just a bunch of bullshit and that it's a simple cultural phenomenon: change the culture and you change the behavior." If we are searching this thread for the statement which would best qualify as bullshit, bar none this takes the cake. Change culture? How exactly do we change culture? Culture can't be anything other than a reflection of human nature. It is clear that social evil can only exist in a structured context, a.k.a. society or civilization (which is the reason for my "stupid animal" statement.) This isn't a situation which can be "changed," however. Any amount of structure will inevitably facilitate social violence, which I have already stated on more than one occasion.
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