*bye!

You messed it up! One of my favorite internet things, "Kthxbye!", you had to go and mess up! Smh. >_<

You're welcome :)

Are you religious? That's the only reason I can think of as to why you would speak the way you do about the subject. Otherwise, isn't the bolded the same as with humans?

Ethics is not the same as morality. Morality is individual and can lead to unethical and/or self destructive behavior, and I would argue that it requires free will. No chimpanzee is going to sacrifice itself because it feels it's "the right thing to do", and a chimp isn't capable of asceticism. As I said before, animal behavior is 100% about self preservation and self gratification.

And no, I'm not religious at all.

I see your point, but think about this: A mother chimp, for example, would probably sacrifice herself to save her young one. The box that was too heavy for one chimp experiment showed that one is able to sacriface their comfort (so to speak) for the benifit of another, even though they don't get anything immediate in return. What about the chimp who refused to take his treat until his friend was treated fairly?

Now you may argue that the motive in the first example is perhaps to ensure the survival of the species, or something along those lines. The second example may have been motivated by future compensation/repayment. My question is, how is that any different from humans?

I'll admit, I probably don't know as much on the matter as you do. Do you see the similarities, though?

Yeah, like de Waal said, the going belief is that it's based on reciprocity and that chimpanzees help one another on the basis that they will be owed a favor in the future. So, it is a matter of survival for both the individual chimp, who expects he will be helped in the future, and for the group, which will continue to operate smoothly. It's a testament to their intelligence and relative farsightedness, not their altruism. The experiment with the tokens showed how cooperation breaks down when one chimp acts like an asshole (unethical behavior). I'd really like to see how empathy would come into play if one color of token gave the chimp selecting the tokens food, and the other color gave only the other chimp food.

But if the most altruism you can expect out of an animal is fighting to save its offspring, that is not actually altruistic from an evolutionary standpoint because propigation of the genes is what is supposed to drive an organism's behavior. Also, animals do frequently abandon their young when the need arises. Even in the most extraordinary of cases - a female gorilla protecting a person from an aggressive male, say, or dolphins saving a swimmer from a shark - it seems that the actual risk to the animals involved is pretty low. Or so it would seem, since I've never heard of an animal actually dying in such a situation, indicating that they don't do something like that unless they're confident of succeeding.

So the difference is that humans can engage in absolutely unethical behavior, or behavior that is against their own interests of comfort or even survival, for the sake of a higher ideal. Maybe it's because, as smart as it is, an ape can't even imagine a higher ideal, but then, I should think that a very high, human level of intelligence would be a prerequisite for having free will. Although I suppose the counterargument can be made that the satisfaction an ascetic gains from adopting a life of celibacy trumps physical pleasure for him, and therefore it isn't actually against their interests in terms of comfort, it's still a remarkable choice, and one that I think supports the idea of man having free will.

I believe that humans don't do this for the sake of said higher ideal, but rather for their self interest. Helping others just so happens to be in one's self interest is all. I agree with the view in the latter half of the paragraph.

I think I understand now your definition of "free will", and I see what you mean.

The free will in the argument vs. determinism isn't the same as the one here, the two aren't mutually exclusive either.

Well, it's not in their self interest in the usual sense of that term if they don't profit from it or expect anything in return. But there are proven psychological benefits to not being a self centered individual, though, and this could be why they feel good about living this kind of a lifestyle. However I wouldn't be so dismissive of the idea that people do try to live up to their loftier ideals, even though there's something else they'd rather be doing.

And that's what is meant by free will. You can make literally any choice you want. You won't, obviously, because you are a person with certain tastes and beliefs and so on. Yes, it's true that these things were developed in large part by factors largely out of your control, some of it when you were just a baby and hardly even aware of what was going on past the tip of your nose. But you are not a slave to instinct unlike an animal which doesn't just make the choices it wants to make, but makes the only choices it could ever make.

Farnsworth Paradox...

there is another thread about this:

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=142384&page=1