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virus: Human motivation was SURVIVAL: An impulse behind transhumanism?
« on: 2006-06-30 23:21:24 » |
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Am posting this to the virus list because the extropy-chat list is broken
(not generally, but it won't accept my postings recently due to what I this
is a misconfiguration). --Keith
At 09:30 AM 6/30/2006 -0700, Jef wrote:
snip
>Keith, I agree with you that Maslow operated without the benefit of
>current thinking in evolutionary psychology (and it shows), but
>wouldn't you agree that his hierarchy of needs still generally holds
>and was intended to be descriptive while evolutionary psychology is
>intended to be explanatory?
No. It does not hold, and if it is going to be considered science,
description and explanation have to be in harmony.
I dislike being hard nosed about this, but there comes a time when you just
have to junk older models for better models.
Contrast Maslow's "A Theory of Human Motivation (1943," with Azar Gat's
article: <quote>
THE HUMAN MOTIVATIONAL COMPLEX: EVOLUTIONARY THEORY AND THE CAUSES OF
HUNTER-GATHERER FIGHTING
Azar Gat
Part I: Primary Somatic and Reproductive Causes
At the centre of this study is the age-old philosophical and psychological
inquiry into the nature of the basic human system of motivation. Numerous
lists of basic needs and desires have been put together over the centuries,
more or less casually or convincingly. The most recent ones show little if
any marked progress over the older, back to Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, 6
(e.g. Maslow 1970 [1954]; Burton 1990).
In the absence of an evolutionary perspective, these lists have always had
something arbitrary and trivial about them. They lacked a unifying
regulatory rationale that would suggest why the various needs and desires
came to be, or how they related to one another.
Arguing that the human motivational system as a whole should be approached
from the evolutionary perspective, this study focuses on the causes of
fighting. It examines what can be meaningfully referred to as the 'human
state of nature', the 99.5 percent of the genus Homo's evolutionary history
in which humans lived as hunter-gatherers.
In this 'state of nature' people's behaviour patterns are generally to be
considered as evolutionarily adaptive. They form the evolutionary
inheritance that we have carried with us throughout later history, when
this inheritance has constantly interacted and been interwoven with the
human staggering cultural development.
snip
</quote>
http://cniss.wustl.edu/workshoppapers/gatpres1.pdf
[Well worth reading--several times!]
Maslow is just wrong in his analysis of human needs saying that ones higher
up the list will trump lower ones..
1. Physiological
2. Safety
3. Love/Belonging
4. Esteem
5. Actualization
In order to save family members, particularly children, but other close
relatives according to Hamilton and Haldane's relatedness criteria, people
will ignore safety and even put themselves in places where they will be
killed (overriding 1 and 2 for 3).
Likewise in attempting to gain status (#4) males particularly will ignore
their safety and even psychological needs.
Maslow *did* recognize that status seeking was a human need, in that I have
to give him credit. But he had no idea of *why* or how it might override
others of his list. To understand that you must go to evolutionary
psychology and the hunter gatherer environment in which it evolved and
consider how genes for such behavior would have had a selective advantage.
You simply are not going to get anywhere trying to understand drug
addiction, Stockholm syndrome, suicide bombers or war with Maslow. And if
you don't understand a problem chances are better than 50-50 that actions
you take on the basis of the wrong model are going to make the problem
worse. I.e., D.A.R.E.
There is a difference between honoring influential people of the past and
following their models that are now known to be incomplete or just wrong.
Best wishes,
Keith Henson
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