I agree, and I think much of the difficulty people have in accepting the result comes from not seeing implicitly assumed norms we are always applying to understand things. I think this runs much deeper than saying humans have something like an empathy module, though, and is a general problem of humans not seeing reality clearly, and instead thinking they see it when in fact what they are seeing (and especially what they are interpreting and inferring) is tainted by prior evidence in ways that makes everything humans do conditional on the priors such that no seeing is truly free and independent of the conditions in which it arises.
That’s fairly abstract, so another way to put it is that we’re constantly seeing the world on the assumption that we already know what the world looks like. We can learn to assume less, but the natural, adaptive state is to assume a lot because it has lead to greater reproductive fitness, probably specifically because it allowed hard-to-make inferences possible only by making strong assumptions about the world that were often true (or true enough for our ancestors’ purposes).
(I think this ties into the story I’ve been telling for a long time about developmental psychology, and the newer story I’ve been telling about human brains doing minimization of prediction error with additional homeostatic set points, but I also think it stands on its own without that, so I write here without reference to them other than this comment.)
I agree, and I think much of the difficulty people have in accepting the result comes from not seeing implicitly assumed norms we are always applying to understand things. I think this runs much deeper than saying humans have something like an empathy module, though, and is a general problem of humans not seeing reality clearly, and instead thinking they see it when in fact what they are seeing (and especially what they are interpreting and inferring) is tainted by prior evidence in ways that makes everything humans do conditional on the priors such that no seeing is truly free and independent of the conditions in which it arises.
That’s fairly abstract, so another way to put it is that we’re constantly seeing the world on the assumption that we already know what the world looks like. We can learn to assume less, but the natural, adaptive state is to assume a lot because it has lead to greater reproductive fitness, probably specifically because it allowed hard-to-make inferences possible only by making strong assumptions about the world that were often true (or true enough for our ancestors’ purposes).
(I think this ties into the story I’ve been telling for a long time about developmental psychology, and the newer story I’ve been telling about human brains doing minimization of prediction error with additional homeostatic set points, but I also think it stands on its own without that, so I write here without reference to them other than this comment.)