Roma_1578647145995_K4HZ5S6ACK.j…
@druid
Maybe that's why mice are eating garbage and I'm eating pizza 
@druid
Ok, so a serious answer.
Relating mouse behavior to humans while not automatically wrong, can be a problem when trying to abstract it.
The free mouse has nothing to loose by freeing the other mice, therefore it isn't a selfless act. There is no self-sacrifice. It can also argued that it's a selfish act as it increases the chance of getting a mate. Then there's the question of how much are mice actually even self aware.
That's usually not the case with humans. Humans are much more complicated than mice.
The mouse also does not understand, know or care how that locked mouse got there. It's just doing what's beneficial to the survival of the species in that moment.
Like you said, the reason I'm eating pizza is that my ancestors learned to cooperate, but cooperation requires action from everyone involved, not blind empathy. What do you do with people not cooperating? It also requires a means of communication and a framework on which to communicate.
Mice do not have any of that.
If we want to apply mouse experiments to humans, let's do the mouse utopia. I know you are in favor of providing everyone with means of survival (food, water, shelter).
BTW memetics are a great tool
The objective of the experiment was not to demonstrate that rats would endure a personal cost to helping others, had this been another stage in the experiment I find it likely (though I have no evidence beyond anthropomorphicisation) that we would have observed the same risk/reward mechanisms in play as humans weigh when making such decisions, providing the rats are intelligent enough to understand the factors at play (which they almost certainly are imo considering we now know they have a tonal language that includes contextual tones)
Don't forget, empathy is a reward system too. Even Stirner bears that one out.
The crux of the experiment is the situation in which the rat that is let out of the cage doesn't even get reunited with the rat that freed it. The rat doing the freeing gains nothing and loses nothing except time and energy - the precise things you said people would still put a price on in a post scarcity society.
As for whether this all applies to humans? Of course it fucking does. It's not some huge scientific and philosophical question: "Are human beings capable of empathy?" Of course they fucking are. It's even more trivial to prove in humans than rats. Yet here you are making le funny smug anime girl shitposts (epic for the win) about how the reason we ~overtook~ rats is because their decision to help each other makes them somehow stupid.
You're so ideologically poisoned, so divorced from ordinary human reality that you literally managed to use your political allegiance to sidestep the empathic response for a cute, trapped little animal that even a child would be able to summon up easily. Would past you, you as a little boy, have been able to do that? Would he have been rotten and miswired enough inside as to refer to the trapped animal as an idiotic eater of garbage, an evolutionary stepping stone?
Or is it that you've become so wedded to the fallacy that freedom and empathy are opposed qualities that you'll desperately denounce empathy in order to mount a defense of the freedom you don't have in the first place?
You asked me "what to do with people who don't cooperate" - nothing. Literally. Stop helping others and they stop helping you. We've all cut out shitty "friends" who relied on us for support but then vanished when we needed them. The mechanisms for dealing with selfish people are already inside you, and you deploy them daily without even thinking about it. The most effective way to bypass that response is to create webs of interaction so arbitrary and arcane that we can convince ourselves that all that happens around us must be somehow just. Hinduism does it by teaching that there's a big mysterious afterlife force that reincarnates shitty people as lower castes. Capitalism does it by teaching that failure to provide for yourself in a free market scenario is a personal failing, and its proponents can only sidestep the basic idea of misfortune: a good example would be a mainstream American Republican who, confronted with the reality that some unfortunate people simply get horrific and expensive illnesses early in life and long before they have a hope of paying for treatment, can only shrug his shoulders and resort to vagueries.
Or maybe the likes of you would prefer to handle such an uncomfortable idea by posting grinning Pepe emojis and "shitposting" about natural selection? Bypassing that empathic response using irony again?
Which brings us to memetics. It's a "tool" in the same way that radioactivity is a tool: complex, invisible, prone to leaking, backfiring, causing unforeseen mutations. Think you understand it for long enough to use it and it'll turn around on you before you know it. It already has. Check your symbols and sigils. They're four years old now, and you only hold onto them because no more memes of any actual power have come along in the interim that support your position.
You're incapable of generating them, and you can only use those which emerge organically from the sea of collective mental soup that is the Internet. But the ones you're holding are dead, useless. They're empty canisters. It's like trying to tag a wall with an empty spray paint can.
Look at how memetic traction actually works. It is in constant flux, with ideas and images rising to the surface like bubbles, bursting almost as soon as they're seen.
If controlling and utilising memes was easy, we wouldn't witness pathetic and tractionless corporate memes every day. If it was easy, we wouldn't have cringed at "Pokemon Go To The Polls."
It's effectively psychology, or magic, they're so similar they're almost interchangeable. Thinking you can utilise them effectively with a handful of empty wrappers is absurd.
@druid
Little boy me would simply say "Eww rat, gross". Rodents aren't cute.
I said that because it's a fucking joke. That's not how evolution works.
I'm not arguing if humans are capable of empathy. Obviously they are and because we are able to empathize that much, it can be used as a tool of oppression and exploration.
It's the primary method of getting non ideologues on board with hate speech laws.
Yes. American Republicans (with the big r) are assholes because they are just corporate shills, but most health care costs aren't people getting a terrible illness early or being born with it. Most health care costs are from people living objectively unhealthy lifestyles. That's why tax funded health care works pretty well in places like Japan, because they don't live unhealthy.
This is an another way of weaponizing empathy. Using the sick to get people to pay for someone's shitty life choices.
Another example is grifters crying harrasment to get donations.
If people do not cooperate, so you stop too and leave them and then they suffer consequences of that decision, wouldn't blind empathy say to give them free stuff?
I should have formulated the question better: How do you deal with people actively sabotaging cooperation? Isn't imprisonment a good option? But wouldn't blind empathy say we should free them?
The mechanism for dealing with shitty people are in us, but they only work on an interpersonal level and don't work 100% of the time.
I'm really trying not to use the S word.
Here's a pepe for ya.
@druid
It's called a life
The rats in question in this experiment are subjected to it more than once, they have already learned why the rat is in the cage: because humans keep putting them in there and it obviously bothers the hell out of his friend (they would have formed a social bond through this repeated act of empathy, rats form social groups very easily)
The rat will not know the full extent of why, obviously, but if you think they don't understand what's going on after repeated attempts, you probably don't know very much about them and are trying to argue something you literally know nothing about and just look like a stupid asshole honestly
That's generally how you can tell someone who clings, weakly, to a broken ideology. They have to cover the gaps in what they're saying with a range of self-distraction tactics, like bravado, memetics, or fear of mob retribution if someone says the wrong thing.
Ever seen those fill blown tankies who say shit like "lmao kulaks deserved it XDDD"? That's what they're doing. Deep down, they know they have nothing of use to say. Just like you.