I'm a philosophy PhD with some background in the philosophy of biology, so I guess I'll give a stab at this.How do we define what is an instinct and what isn't? Is fear an instinct? Is nausea an instinct? Are introversion or extroversion instincts? If you could toggle or remove any of the above, would you want to? Would doing so make you more or less human?
I would say that an instinct is a trait that was originally an acquired skill, but whose development, over generational time, became at least partially canalized as a result of the Baldwin Effect.How do we define what is an instinct and what isn't?
The Baldwin Effect works roughly like this: Let's say that there's a certain skill which, if you learn it, will increase your reproductive success. A wide variety of individuals can learn this skill. But some individuals have brain structures that more closely resemble the brain structures of people who already have learned this skill. These individuals can learn the skill faster and easier than others who aren't so lucky. Throw evolution into the mix, and you eventually get people who "come out of the box" already having that skill.
Note that I did say that the development of this skill is at least partially canalized. Plasticity plays an important role in development, and the environment an organism develops in can have a powerful effect on the final phenotype. (Not to mention fun things like epigenetics.) In other words, whenever the question is "nature or nuture?", the answer is generally a loud "YES."
I would say that fear is an emotion. Don't ask me to define emotion, or I'll cry. (Seriously, I know some philosophers have been looking into this, but I haven't looked into it yet. It is on my to-do list, though.) And my quick horseback judgment is that nausea is partially an emotion, partially a bodily reaction. Or something. Whatever.Is fear an instinct? Is nausea an instinct?
Fear or nausea wouldn't be an instinct in and of itself, but experiencing fear or nausea in response to a certain type of stimuli easily could be. It's certainly the case that we can learn to experience fear or disgust in responce to some stimulus. (This is essentially the basis for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.) And, thanks to the Baldwin Effect, that the development of that learned "skill" could become canalized and instinctive. So, to give an example, perhaps humans do have an instinctive fear of objects that move in a snake-like manner. But, if so, this instinct can almost certainly be modified by nurture.
Going the other direction, a subject could easily be trained to associate a new stimulus with one that they already instinctively fear or are disgusted by.... And I would point out that moral disgust is closely related, neurologically speaking, with gustatory disgust. (I would hazard the guess that it would be difficult for the development of a given kind of moral disgust to become tightly canalized - culture mutates too fast for the Baldwin Effect to keep up with in this case.)
I would say that they are personality traits, not instincts as such. There probably is some genetic component at work, but too complicated of one to sort out neatly. I would point out that introversion and extroversion form a spectrum, and if there is evolutionary pressure one way or the other, that would probably cause a shift in the baseline used to measure it as well. Introversion vs. extroversion is more of rheostat than a toggle.Are introversion or extroversion instincts?
Don't think I would change any of the traits you mentioned. I do have the odd phobia or two I wouldn't mind deleting.If you could toggle or remove any of the above, would you want to?
I would say that being able to change your own settings might promote freedom. (Although it would probably be a good idea to have "save points" built into the process. It would be a Bad Thing if you could give yourself a permanent case of schizophrenia by accident.) Your parents setting your traits for you in advance, on the other hand....
What might be a good way of doing it would be if the parents could set their child's "initial state" (including what the child 'naturally' wants to be like), and then allow the child to change those settings as they mature. (Had an interesting conversation with a young woman who was conceived in vitro once, so I have thought about this.) The same might be true for sentient robot citizens.
Depends on what you mean by "human." The more I learn about biology (and the philosophy thereof), the more I come to believe that species are not natural kinds.Would doing so make you more or less human?
At least according to Ernst Mayr, modern biology defines species in terms of interfertillity. Two populations are of the same species if (and only if) they could have babies together, and those babies could have babies. Species identity is not a transitive relationship: There's lots of cases out there where Population A can have kids with Population B, and Population B can have kids with Population C, but Population A can't have kids Population C. Population A is the same species as B, and B is the same species as C, but A and C aren't members of the same species.
There's named species, but that's really just an arbitrary human convention. For each named species, there's a type specimen that defines it, and you're a member of that named species just if your population is interfertile with the type specimen's population. For Homo sapiens, the type specimen is Carl Linnaeus. Which suggests that the entire history of biology is just a conspiracy to get Carl Linnaeus laid by time-traveling blue-skinned space-babes.
Toggling some setting would only make you less human (in a strictly biological sense) if the new setting would make it more difficult for you to have kids with baseline humans. This could have some social implications - quite a few social problems could probably be solved in the long run by intermarriage.
But, other than that, who cares? A pair of gonads in a jar could, in principle, be "a human," biologically speaking. But the wonder twins don't constitute a person. Florence Ambrose from Freefall isn't biologically "human," barring some rather radical/magical medical intervention. But she is certainly a person, and one I wouldn't mind having as a neighbor.
When you use "human" in this context, you probably aren't using it in the strict biological sense. So the question then becomes - in what sense are you using it? Time to do some conceptual analysis, I suppose... Some questions to get the ball rolling: Why is it important whether you're "human" or not? What are some paradigm examples of things that aren't "human"? What are some paradigm examples of things that are "human," but are not members of Homo sapiens, in the sense I defined above?
(Incidentally, this is what pisses me off about Charles Xavier from the X-Men, at least in the First Class continuity. As far as I can tell, there is no reproductive barrier between "mutants" and "humans." But Xavier claimed that mutants are a separate species, which will inevitably replace humans. Thereby creating the category of "mutant" as a socially constructed category, much like "Black" and "White," and setting up the stage for anti-mutant prejudice. In reality, I would think that the best solution to the "mutant problem" would be to accept them as full members of the human species, and allow the X Factor to naturally spread through the entire human population, taking the rest of the "human" genome along for the ride. Assuming that the X Factor actually confers differential reproductive success, something which hasn't been established yet... And, if it doesn't, well, that's a self-correcting problem. By definition.)
