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Comment by ilt

15 hours ago

But cheating is not wrong when it comes to survival of the fittest, like nature in its most elemental form. Morality is very unique to humanity but not other animal forms. In nature, maybe, cheating is the norm not morality.

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ilt

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kennywinker  15 hours ago

Watch out, your human exceptionalism is misleading you. Plenty of animals have a sense of morality (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6404642/).

For social animals (humans included) behaving morally can be adaptive behaviour. Your fitness is increased by group fitness.

  • joe_the_user  15 hours ago

    Certain animals, usually social species, have a sense of solidarity, morality and fairness. But even in species where this exists, cheating also happens. Both ethics and unethical behavior is adaptive.

    Notably, present human society has allowed tremendously unethical leaders to rise to the top of given nations and organizations despite the average person usually having basic ethics.

    • tough  12 hours ago

      Wouldn't politics be precisely a sector of human endeavour where being amorally unfair is an advantage to achieve your goals? If the other guys are lying, and everyone is gonna believe everyone's bullshit anyways, might as well get good at lying yourself.

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HarHarVeryFunny  14 hours ago

Animals learn - bite the owner, or overstep the e-fence, and you'll be punished for it and not do it again. LLMs don't learn, and anyways don't feel punishment.

Animals, humans included, don't really have "morals" - they have survival instincts that result in behavior that may be viewed as moral, but whose origin is indeed survival of the fittest and millions of years of co-evolution.

e.g. Males don't typically fight to the death over territory or females, but this isn't because they have some morality code over unnecessary death - it's because death-match fighting endangers themself just as much as the other guy, and so evolution has selected against that level of uncontrolled aggression.

Evolution is also (really primarily) selecting for things that help the survival of the species, not the individual, and much of what you may think of as "morality" comes from that - avoidance of behavior that is detrimental to the social group/species, not just the individual.