[_h4xr]

Define "Selfishness" in this context.

In a broad sense, it's very hard to argue that selfish genes don't explain most human behavior. Certainly, I would spend my time differently if I weren't the result of a couple billion years of brutal gene-versus-gene competition.

[neilk]

Genes might be selfish, but that doesn't mean the organisms that they create will be. Selfish genes also created the ant colony, where it doesn't make much sense to talk about an ant's individual behavior as self-interested. I'm only suggesting that we are more like ants than educated people currently believe.

Furthermore, humans have language, and can even ask themselves questions like "what would so-and-so do?" Our minds are filled up, it seems to me, mostly with the thoughts and data supplied by others. So I wonder if it makes sense to say that we are all individual minds.

[_h4xr]

Okay, that's what I suspected. At the right level of abstraction, you can certainly find non-selfish activities. But a gene's-eye-view is the most significant view, because in the long term anything that doesn't adhere to that view is extinct.

Certainly a complete sociopath will still have non-selfish internal organs. But it's highly reductionist to claim that a sociopath is not sociopathic because his heart generously pumps blood to his other organs.

What looks like generosity generally falls into a few categories of gene-level selfishness, e.g. kin altruism, in-group altruism, reciprocal gifts, etc. Our evolutionary inheritance doesn't allow for pure altruism; that's a bug that gets fixed by selfish groups out-reproducing.

[neilk]

You're arguing against a point I didn't make. I'm not arguing for the existence of pure altruism, or denying the importance of genes. I'm saying that selfishness doesn't explain human behavior very well. It's an argument against the common model of human beings as rational economic actors. For the most part our motivations lie elsewhere, and we don't behave as homo economicus unless we are in weird and artificial situations.

I'm also making a more subtle point about the difficulty of delineating where a person ends and society begins. This is a much fuzzier concept for me, but I have a hunch that it doesn't make sense to say that a human personality is entirely contained in the body that we normally associate it with, any more than crashing waves are contained within a rocky shore. The body gives rise to this funny thing called a mind, and yet minds don't seem to be stored just in one brain.

I did not understand your point about the sociopath; it seems to be making my argument for me, that the driving forces at one level of organization tell you little about the next level up.