Letting things simmer in your head - how not to do it

I read Elbow's suggestions on figuring the ideas out before you start writing. The one I liked in particular was "relinquishing your conscious grip on your material" So I decided to try it: go for a walk and let the ingredients of my particular idea about a-priori ethical principles and evolution to simmer in the pot of my head. The crucial mistake was to take my puppy with me. Sammy, as all other dogs I know, has a very different idea about taking a walk. His energy level was entirely detrimental to any "deep cooking" of ideas...

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  1. Eric Hadley-IvesMarch 20, 2009 at 1:59 PM

    I am also interested in how ethical principles seem to arise out of an evolutionary process. This can work at two levels. Within social systems ideas and values may mutate, and those that seem to lead to social stability and generalized life satisfaction among those who hold the values may tend to be perpetuated and spread. In that way, ethical principles may act like memes and compete with each other. And then, also, the cultural ideas about ethics may impose an actual selection pressure on people, so that those with minds and temperaments most allied with prevailing values and ethics have a survival and reproductive advantage, while those who reject culturally-enforced ethics tend to be at a slight survival/reproductive disadvantage. In this way, culture may shape the way temperaments and mental structures arise out of the physical matter of the brains within a population.

    Or, perhaps culture has selected for people who are adaptable, and can hold values in a given situation that are most likely to give them or their kin a survival/reproduction advantage. That is, culture may help human bodies to evolve to a point where a certain flexibility in ethics manifests out of human brains, where cheating can be exhibited by some people when circumstances allow it, or make it "useful" in some way, but in other cases cheating is suppressed and people act with what a society would call virtue.

    That interaction between culture and ethics is something I do think about. Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin, the discoverers of evolution, also gave considerable thought to the rise of ethics and virtuous behavior. Darwin once write that humans were the only animal that could consider past behaviors, evaluate them in terms of ethical values or desired behaviors, and then decide to change behavior to match an ideal. That was, for Darwin, what distinguished our species from other animals.

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