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Why are we in the West so weird? + Best philosophical science fiction

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Cognition all the way down: How to understand cells & tissues as agents with agendas (Daniel Dennett)
https://www.scivillage.com/thread-9224-p...l#pid38366


Best philosophical science fiction in the history of all Earth
https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/20...on-in.html

INTRO: I'm putting together a new anthology for MIT Press, with the working title Philosophy and Sci-Fi, with co-editors Rich Horton and Helen De Cruz. Our original title idea was Best Philosophical Science Fiction in the History of All Earth, and that title, though a mouthful, captures our ambitions. We would love suggestions of your favorite philosophically themed science fiction stories. We hope that the anthology will be attractive both to SF fans who love idea-based stories like Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" and Daniel Keyes "Flowers for Algernon". We also hope that people who teach classes with titles like Philosophy and Science Fiction will want to use it in their teaching. Send us your syllabae! We're curious what stories philosophers have been successfully using in their teaching, for possible inclusion... (MORE)


Why are we in the West so weird? A theory
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/12/books...nrich.html

EXCERPTS (Daniel Dennett): . . . According to Joseph Henrich, some unknown early church fathers about a thousand years later promulgated the edict: Don’t marry your cousin! Why they did this is also unclear, but if Henrich is right — and he develops a fascinating case brimming with evidence — this prohibition changed the face of the world, by eventually creating societies and people that were WEIRD: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic.

In the argument put forward in this engagingly written, excellently organized and meticulously argued book, this simple rule triggered a cascade of changes, creating states to replace tribes, science to replace lore and law to replace custom. If you are reading this you are very probably WEIRD, and so are almost all of your friends and associates, but we are outliers on many psychological measures.

The world today has billions of inhabitants who have minds strikingly different from ours. Roughly, we weirdos are individualistic, think analytically, believe in free will, take personal responsibility, feel guilt when we misbehave and think nepotism is to be vigorously discouraged, if not outlawed. Right? They (the non-WEIRD majority) identify more strongly with family, tribe, clan and ethnic group, think more “holistically,” take responsibility for what their group does (and publicly punish those who besmirch the group’s honor), feel shame — not guilt — when they misbehave and think nepotism is a natural duty.

[...] the line between WEIRD and not WEIRD, like all lines in evolution, is not bright. There are all manner of hybrids, intermediates and unclassifiable variations, but there are also forces that have tended to sort today’s people into these two kinds, genetically indistinguishable but profoundly different psychologically.

WEIRD folk are the more recent development, growing out of the innovation of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, the birth of states and organized religions about 3,000 years ago, then becoming “proto-WEIRD” over the last 1,500 years (thanks to the prohibition on marrying one’s cousin), culminating in the biologically sudden arrival of science, industry and the “modern” world during the last 500 years or so. WEIRD minds evolved by natural selection, but not by genetic selection; they evolved by the natural selection of cultural practices and other culturally transmitted items.

[...] One of the first lessons that must be learned from this important book [Why Are We in the West So Weird? A Theory] is that the WEIRD mind is real ... Many of the WEIRD ways of thinking, Henrich shows, are the result of cultural differences, not genetic differences. And that is another lesson that the book drives home: Biology is not just genes. Language, for instance, was not invented; it evolved. So did religion, music, art, ways of hunting and farming, norms of behavior and attitudes about kinship that leave measurable differences on our psychology and even on our brains.

To point to just one striking example: Normal, meaning non-WEIRD, people use left and right hemispheres of their brains about equally for facial recognition, but we WEIRD people have co-opted left-hemisphere regions for language tasks, and are significantly worse at recognizing faces than the normal population [...]

The centerpiece of Henrich’s theory is the role played by [...] the Roman Catholic Church’s ... prohibitions of polygamy, divorce, marriage to first cousins, and even to such distant blood relatives as sixth cousins, while discouraging adoption and arranged marriages and the strict norms of inheritance that prevailed in extended families, clans and tribes. “The accidental genius of Western Christianity was in ‘figuring out’ how to dismantle kin-based institutions while at the same time catalyzing its own spread.”

The genius was accidental, according to Henrich, because the church authorities who laid down the laws had little or no insight into what they were setting in motion [...] Around the world today there is still huge variation in the societies where cousin marriages are permitted and even encouraged [and not] ... There are good reasons for supposing that our early hominin ancestors were organized for tens of thousands of years by tight kinship relations, which still flourish today in most societies. So what happened in Europe starting in the middle of the first millennium was a major development...

This is an extraordinarily ambitious book [...] There has long been a hostile divide between physical anthropologists, who have labs and study hominid bone fossils, for instance, and cultural anthropologists who spend a few seasons in the jungle learning the language and ways of a hunter-gatherer tribe ... Henrich is a cultural anthropologist but he wants to do it right, with controls, experiments, statistics and factual claims that can be shown to be right or wrong...

The virtues of having a theory to guide investigation are vividly displayed. [...] one can wonder what percentage of the world’s population is WEIRD today. The normals are turning into WEIRDs in droves, and almost nobody is going in the other direction, so if we WEIRDs aren’t the majority yet, we soon will be...

A good statistician (which I am not) should scrutinize the many uses of statistics made by Henrich and his team. They are probably all sound but he would want them examined rigorously by the experts. That’s science. [...] This book calls out for respectful but ruthless vetting on all counts, and what it doesn’t need, and shouldn’t provoke, is ideological condemnations or quotations of brilliant passages by revered authorities...(MORE - details)
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