"Most basically, because humans are only just on the cusp of general intelligence."
I've been pondering this issue lately independently. Humans are basically the minimally conscious and intelligent creatures that could take over a planet. We're barely able to hold together our current society, and there's no particular guarantee that we're even necessarily capable of that (see the vanityfair article about Greeks currently on the homepage and remember they're the same species as every other human). A relatively morbid thought in some ways, even though it isn't a guarantee that we can't go further yet.
" Humans are basically the minimally conscious and intelligent creatures that could take over a planet."
I believed this about a year ago and thought myself well and properly cynical.
Then it was pointed out to me that humanity is the minimally conscious and intelligent population such that, with some random genetic shuffling, you wind up with 2-5% capable of taking over the planet, and pulling the rest up with them.
While I am a broadly cynical person, I do not mean this as a "we are certainly doomed post" to wave about my self-hating credentials; I rather dislike people who do that and consider self-hatred a pernicious and dangerous meme, not something to be rolled in. I rather see it as a cautionary tale about our need to be careful; we are not certainly doomed, but if we run about as if our success is ensured, an attitude that manifests itself in a lot of political debates in various ways, we will get ourselves into trouble.
I did mean the population, since of course we have rather significant variation in personal intelligence.
I like your line of thought. When we talk about what's lacking from the world that prevents us from "holding our current society together", we tend to imply qualities that are somehow isolated from "intelligence": Morality, altruism, idealism, etc.
It's... hopeful to think of these qualities as evolved forms of intelligence - and that as we progress away from the "cusp of general intelligence" towards a more veteran status of intelligence, we will exhibit more of these qualities naturally.
I do not believe in altruism as a proper virtue. One can cause damage trying to help people. Intention is not good enough.
I also believed that humans are intrinsically self-interested even if human beings couldn't exist without other human beings. No man is an island but every man is an individual worthy of respect and dignity.
Everything everyone ever does can be viewed as self-interested in the appropriate lens, but it's for precisely the same reason that that lens doesn't give you more information on how to predict people's behaviour.
A father risks his life to save his daughter. Did he do it for his daughter? Or did he do it because it made him feel better? Or to avoid feeling terrible if he didn't act? Or because genetics compels him to take care of offspring sharing, on average, 50% of his genetic distinctiveness?
There may be a causal chain in these things, genetics -> love -> joy of helping, fear of loss from not helping -> acting on behalf of another.
But we lose much of our descriptive, analytic and predictive powers if we insist on only looking at what we think are the first movers in this chain. It's not productive to try and predict the weather on the basis of quantum theory; for practicality, we look at the system at higher levels of abstraction, with their own conceptual bundles, and yes, their own names.
So I can agree with you that, in the most facile and base senses, altruism is not a "proper virtue", and that humans are "intrinsically self-interested". But I can also say that some humans are more altruistic than others, and that some humans are less self-interested than others, because saying these things expresses more information than trying to describe how one human seems to have a causal chain whose self interest leads him to seem paradoxically less self-interested and more altruistic, etc. etc.
In other words, I'm talking about personality at the conceptual level of personality, using its generally accepted meanings of words, rather than pedantically hammering away at first principles of selfishness.
Perhaps a more complete definition of altruism would be this: you are altruistic to the degree that your personal welfare is driven by your observations of the welfare of those around you, and the level of action you take as a result.
This satisfies both the commonplace meaning and the annoying but correct sophomoric objection.
One can also cause damage from being selfish. I'm not sure what your point is, no one's claiming that just wanting to help people is good enough. You have to actually help people.
> I also believed that humans are intrinsically self-interested even if human beings couldn't exist without other human beings. No man is an island but every man is an individual worthy of respect and dignity.
Agreed to an extent, and your last point is why a lot of altruists want to help the poor and downtrodden instead of just the individuals they happen to like. It's a straw-man form of "altruism" that treats individuals as scum.
Haven't rats taken over the planet? Ants too. Birds also. We just live in different ecosystems.
You might say but they do not have consciousness. I do not think we actually know that. As for intelligent, they manage to survive and live in groups and communicate and have structures.
I think the goal of evolution is colonizing the planet. Once that we are capable of constructing a world-wide network (communications and transport) and colonizing the whole planet then we discover the need of not destroying the planet. We try to be self-sustainable. It begins a race against the clock, a feed-back signal marks the start (scarce resource are getting exhausted). If the feed-back is delayed because we are not enough intelligent to see what is coming then the race is over. We have no time to response and the clock signal announces the end.
The question is: we are more intelligent that a monkey but perhaps not enough intelligent to not destroy our planet.
I've been pondering this issue lately independently. Humans are basically the minimally conscious and intelligent creatures that could take over a planet. We're barely able to hold together our current society, and there's no particular guarantee that we're even necessarily capable of that (see the vanityfair article about Greeks currently on the homepage and remember they're the same species as every other human). A relatively morbid thought in some ways, even though it isn't a guarantee that we can't go further yet.