In the case of your alien-hacked British, they would notice their mass modification and be able to search for a cause. They would be able to scan their own brains and see the electrodes that were implanted by aliens. The idea of repudiating their new emotional reactions would be cognitively accessible, and this would inflect much of their behavior and the politics around the phenomenon.
Even as they outlawed pictures of salmon, they could (for example) put time limits on the laws, fund medical research into safe electrode removal, and make efforts to ensure that their foolish emotional reactions weren’t memetically passed on into subsequent generations.
In the case of Muslims, there are no electrodes, and no hope of removing the electrodes. The material cause of their psychological situation is thus distinct and raises many of the issues from the diseased thinking essay. In practice, the people with the relevant emotional reaction were brought into being by cultural practices that include a philosophic endorsement of their over-reactions. The religious leaders benefit from the installation of this craziness in their followers by cultivating and directing the emotions it produces. People in their culture will publicly praise high fidelity memetic transmission of the emotional reactions and so the craziness can be expected to propagate like something living instead of receding like an injury healed by the passage of time.
The emotional reactions of Muslims to sacrilegious symbols are woven into their identities, and thus in some ways deserve more respect than the alien-hacked British with “photofishophobia”, but in other ways they seem to me to deserve less respect.
Communities potentially have self-regulating agency over time. If a community has chosen to cultivate bad values over years and centuries (and partially succeeded in this project) , then the thing that gives them the most respect as self-regulating humans is to disrespect their poor regulatory choices.
In the case of your alien-hacked British, they would notice their mass modification and be able to search for a cause. They would be able to scan their own brains and see the electrodes that were implanted by aliens. The idea of repudiating their new emotional reactions would be cognitively accessible, and this would inflect much of their behavior and the politics around the phenomenon.
Even as they outlawed pictures of salmon, they could (for example) put time limits on the laws, fund medical research into safe electrode removal, and make efforts to ensure that their foolish emotional reactions weren’t memetically passed on into subsequent generations.
In the case of Muslims, there are no electrodes, and no hope of removing the electrodes. The material cause of their psychological situation is thus distinct and raises many of the issues from the diseased thinking essay. In practice, the people with the relevant emotional reaction were brought into being by cultural practices that include a philosophic endorsement of their over-reactions. The religious leaders benefit from the installation of this craziness in their followers by cultivating and directing the emotions it produces. People in their culture will publicly praise high fidelity memetic transmission of the emotional reactions and so the craziness can be expected to propagate like something living instead of receding like an injury healed by the passage of time.
The emotional reactions of Muslims to sacrilegious symbols are woven into their identities, and thus in some ways deserve more respect than the alien-hacked British with “photofishophobia”, but in other ways they seem to me to deserve less respect.
Communities potentially have self-regulating agency over time. If a community has chosen to cultivate bad values over years and centuries (and partially succeeded in this project) , then the thing that gives them the most respect as self-regulating humans is to disrespect their poor regulatory choices.