And how smart were homo sapiens before we domesticated ourselves through war and criminal justice?
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Replying to @garethstack @SteveStuWill
Home sapiens is not the smart hominim, but the programmable one. The ability to move in lockstep (not the capacity for autonomous thought) is what made us more successful than our ancestral cousins.
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Replying to @Plinz @SteveStuWill
Interesting perspective. Certainly collaboration makes us successful, but lots of clades collaborate in sophisticated ways. We could speculate that the intersection point of intelligence & conformity was key to our success, with grim implications. Original point stands though.
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Replying to @garethstack @SteveStuWill
Most of us are the result of thousands of years of selective breeding that optimized for domestication. Domestication is so ubiquitous that we consider mental autonomy a pathology, and are continuously surprised that we are ruled by such pathological individuals.
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Replying to @Plinz @SteveStuWill
I don't accept that autonomy and psychopathy or antisocial personality are synoymous. Concrete neurological inhibitory & learning deficits present in psychopaths. But certainly we do pathologise individuals high on trait openness & behavioral eccentricity
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Replying to @garethstack @SteveStuWill
Psychopathy is usually a maladaptive condition. High functioning sociopathy is often not.
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Replying to @Plinz @SteveStuWill
Not sure psychology has acknowledged such a distinction. Certainly not in the DSM or any psychopathology cognitive research we covered in my undergrad. Interested in your source for this typology
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Replying to @garethstack @SteveStuWill
When I last read the DSM I was surprised about how coarse and non-functionalist it was. The parts that don't deal with sex and drugs are mostly thinking in terms of symptom clusters, not in terms of brain mechanisms and adaptive value.
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Replying to @Plinz @SteveStuWill
That's absolutely true, but it's not for lack of trying. Attempts to reify syndromal disease into neurochemical markers tend to result in failure, as underlying disorders are complex mix of multiple genetic etiologies & environmental factors.
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Replying to @garethstack @SteveStuWill
That may be because psychology does not have a functional layer. Neurochemistry is part of the substrate layer, not of the functional description. It's like trying to explain what goes wrong in a car in terms of its materials, not their particular arrangement.
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That's because the arrangement of the parts of the mind are not directly observable or verifiable by an experiment, so the structural models are either esoteric (psychoanalysis) or incredibly shallow.
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