516. Apparent Altruism Without The Myth Of The Free Will
When discarding the myth of the free will, I explained that all apparently moral behaviors is caused by some beneficial motivation, either by serving to reduce dishomeostasis or to stimulate the pleasure center of the brain, either immediately or by anticipation. While I mainly focused on the motivation for the most basic moral behavior of avoiding to harm others, this does not exclude proactive altruistic behaviors like helping others.
The following source compares the diifferent motivation to help of religious with that of non-religious people.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120430140035.htm
When discarding the myth of the free will, I explained that all apparently moral behaviors is caused by some beneficial motivation, either by serving to reduce dishomeostasis or to stimulate the pleasure center of the brain, either immediately or by anticipation. While I mainly focused on the motivation for the most basic moral behavior of avoiding to harm others, this does not exclude proactive altruistic behaviors like helping others.
The following source compares the diifferent motivation to help of religious with that of non-religious people.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120430140035.htm
"But new research from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that the highly religious are less motivated by compassion when helping a stranger than are atheists, agnostics and less religious people.
For highly religious people, however, compassion was largely unrelated to how generous they were,
The results challenge a widespread assumption that acts of generosity and charity are largely driven by feelings of empathy and compassion, researchers said. In the study, the link between compassion and generosity was found to be stronger for those who identified as being non-religious or less religious."
Helping behavior is triggered, when the motivation is strong above a threshold. The motivation of the same subjective strength can consist of very different reasons. When there are two identical cases of a person in noticeable distress, and the religious and the non-religious person engage in the same helping behaviors, this can be both explained very differently, each without a free will.
1. A religious person's motivation can be strongly influenced by religious rules and norms concerning whom to help and how.
A religious person can feel compassion without helping, if the observed suffering is considered as the god's will not to be interfered with. When the religious person helps, this can be caused by the anticipation of a reward after death and/or by feeling dishomeostasis due to the fear of hell in the case of not helping.
2. When another person's suffering triggers a non-religious person's mirror neurons, this causes the compassion by empathy. This means, that the other's suffering is experienced as a state of dishomeostasis, which can be reduced by homeostation.
