The Thief Thinks Everyone is a Thief
A Saint Thinks Everyone is a Saint
When I play chess against a computer program I assume that the program is trying to beat me and play accordingly. I don't assume that the program is intelligent. I think; what would I do if I was in that position? This is what Daniel Dennett called 'the intentional stance'.
I think the intentional stance is a cognitive capacity that is enabled by a set of neurons in our brain called 'mirror neurons'. Wiki says this about them:
"A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting. Mirror neurons are not always physiologically distinct from other types of neurons in the brain; their main differentiating factor is their response patterns. By this definition, such neurons have been directly observed in humans and other primates,[6] as well as in birds."
I suppose that mirror neurons are at the base of our capacity to imitate each other. Person A watches Person B do something and that stimulates A's mirror neurons. To imitate, Person A acts in a way that makes their mirror neurons feel the same way they did when A watched B.
Imitation is at the core of memetics of course. I take memetics very seriously. I think that memes literally do evolve in the darwinian sense. They provide an example of the evolutionary algorithm at work. It doesn't take tons of time or expensive equipment to investigate memes. But that's not my point here.
I'm pondering the situation where a child gets raised by a thief who gets rewarded by the thief from babyhood for acting like the parent. The child might imitate the parent and become a thief. And the intentional stance would kick in - that the child would feel that others were motivated by the thief would do in that situation.
The opposite works too of course. If the child is raised by a good person they will tend (with variation) to be a good person too. And the same mechanism of the intentional stance would cause the child to assume that others were good people too.
I recently read an article by Mary Trump - Donald's niece. She does have a grudge. He tried to stiff her out of an inheritance. But also she's a psychologist who has watched him for a long time. She puts Trump in the thief category. One might shrug were it not for the disturbing fact that so many Americans support him. He doesn't have to hide that he's a thief - they like him because of it.
It does seem that the thieves are on the ascendant globally at the moment. America is not alone in that regard.
This dichotomy between thieves and saints is like the ancient one between evil and good. My naive view of history is that in the long run the weakness of thieves is that they don't play well together.
But we may not have a long run
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.