Okay, so the added context is the description of the physiological responses. What I quoted was the lead researcher's conclusions about those responses (the only pertinent detail). Your opinion of what those responses means is irrelevant. You're claiming that there is a consensus, and the expert is stating this study only shows "an intense focus".
Regarding the expert in question, “Therefore, Hoehl's study claimed, humans' innate fear of these animals could serve as a defense mechanism.”
Yep, that's another point for me. The specific emotional response you're trying to prove is learned according to the expert you cited. Thanks for the added context.
It’s so cute how you just continually claim victory without any substantiation. To “learn quickly that snakes and spiders are associated with…” means that the association preceded the learning.
Since you pointed out the grammatical error in his quote, I'll cite a study of his so you can see that I interpreted correctly what he was saying:
David Rakison
We have a propensity to focus on certain shapes. While focused, we are more likely to learn fear if something presents as dangerous.
So here is what your source says:
We, along with other theorists, propose that humans’ perceptual template serves two purposes, one in infancy and early childhood and one throughout the lifespan. First, it facilitates learning early in life such that fear responses can be rapidly associated with the stimulus in question when conspecifics’ behavior is observed... Second, in childhood and beyond it allows for rapid identification of a potential threat. This automatic ‘‘attention-grabbing’’ characteristic of fear-relevant stimuli could engender quicker reaction to threatening situations. Work on adult humans’ ability to detect quickly fear-relevant stimuli supports this view.
The point is that there are fear-relevant stimuli, not merely that we are more likely to learn fear when focused, lol. Now one debate is about whether fear-relevant stimuli or stress responses count as fear in themselves. Whatever the answer to that question, it doesn’t affect our argument. You claimed that we are motivated by pleasure and pain. I claimed that we are motivated by deeper things, such as desire and aversion. Whether or not we want to classify inherent stress responses as fear, you’re still wrong. Either way, the inherent response to fear-relevant stimuli presents a case where we are not being motivated by pleasure and pain.
Heck, my point was about aversion, not fear. Since fear is arguably based on pain, the fear-relevant stimuli better supports my initial point than fear would have. The pre-experiential infant is influenced by fear-relevant stimuli in a way that has nothing to do with anticipation of pleasure or pain. This proves my point, it doesn’t undermine it.
But it's not even clear why you would be interested in this case. Indeed, upon losing the argument about the infant you would probably just claim that the pre-cognitive baby is not acting rationally, just as the man who dives in front of the bullets is not "acting rationally."
Here's another source.
Aposematic
Your link is broken.
Those aren't the same thing as fear. You must really need for our feelings about second order things to be innate for your argument to work, huh?
This was just a minor tangent that you decided was super important, and now that we have followed it to its bitter end it turns out that you are wrong. Again. Usually nit-pickers at least manage to win the petty points they pick.
You didn't "point out why pleasure fails". You just keep spitting out examples of things you personally can't imagine have anything to do with pleasure. You even got to the point where you had folks not even seeking anymore, but merely acting without thinking, to show that folks aren't always seeking pleasure. Okay, but the reason we act the way we do is because we've associated certain kinds of acts with pleasure.
Sure I did. I pointed to scenarios where the action is clearly not motivated by pleasure and you claimed those scenarios don’t count. You claimed that the person who sacrifices their life is either acting for pleasure without knowing it or else not acting for any rational reason at all.
Ever heard of "So's Law"? You always strawman when you get desperate. I hope it's just because you stop thinking so clearly when you feel you're losing and it isn't because you're lashing out at me since you know it irritates me so. (see what I did there?)
Nah, this is just like last time when I demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that you were committing the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent (
link). You just ignored it and pretended it didn’t happen.
Running around the internet smashing all the kids over the head with arguments when they don’t know the difference between a syllogism and a sausage is as useful as running around America smashing all the kids over the head with a stalk of celery when they don’t know the difference between nutrition and Nutella. I make a counterargument and you flounder and make irrational assertions. At that point I’m done. Nothing more needs to be said. If you want to hold that “the vast majority of our actions are irrational then you can go with that.” If your unfalsifiable dogma about pleasure and pain is that important to you then there is obviously no point in arguing.
The difficulty is that you are like a dog distracted by a squirrel. You contentiously latched onto an argument about innate aversion and convinced yourself that everything hinged on that argument. You didn't maintain perspective or pay attention to how the argument fit into the bigger picture. It is a classic case of eristic.
