Good article. I guess it’s a fundamentally utilitarian case that in some way paints the jealous party as petty- that if they could just will it hard enough, they could get over this immature and useless emotion. I don’t think it’ll happen. Eons of primate evolution have deeply wired most humans in equilateral peer matches for mate guarding. Perhaps if status differentials are high enough or the mating opportunities are plentiful that the jealousy calculus brain region shuts off temporarily. Yet people can feel both, they are not on a unidimensional coordinate where the bad subtracts the good. They exist together. And many people would just prefer not to deal with that on an ongoing basis, and I don’t think there really a good philosophical argument to convince them since the feeling are self validating by definition.
Hi Ari, thanks for the engagement! I'll probably write a fuller response as its own post later, but for now, I just wanted to let you know that I enjoyed reading your post.
Good article. I guess it’s a fundamentally utilitarian case that in some way paints the jealous party as petty- that if they could just will it hard enough, they could get over this immature and useless emotion. I don’t think it’ll happen. Eons of primate evolution have deeply wired most humans in equilateral peer matches for mate guarding. Perhaps if status differentials are high enough or the mating opportunities are plentiful that the jealousy calculus brain region shuts off temporarily. Yet people can feel both, they are not on a unidimensional coordinate where the bad subtracts the good. They exist together. And many people would just prefer not to deal with that on an ongoing basis, and I don’t think there really a good philosophical argument to convince them since the feeling are self validating by definition.
Hi Ari, thanks for the engagement! I'll probably write a fuller response as its own post later, but for now, I just wanted to let you know that I enjoyed reading your post.
Thanks! I look forward to reading to it…
Ari, you've missed a very important fact that completely wrecks the foundation of your argument: the lizard tail would *obviously* be a strict plus.
I appreciate the end of post citation to three additional cases of me being obviously correct!