I think that’s what saves this species in a way, our short attention span, it stops us from not caring at all; we’ll still say hi to the bus driver and give aid to the latest disaster, but we sacrifice the capability to support long-term problems without reminders (look at the money that goes to groups that focus on long-term aid, that tends to be from communities like a church where a collection plate is handed around and people are reminded weekly).

By the way, ‘felicific calculus’ is a phrase to conjure with!

Please let me explain where I was coming from with my “monkeysphere has extended” comment.
One of the conditions Dunbar observed was the necessity for the groups to be close, citing him from Wikipedia:

“… we might expect the upper limit on group size to depend on the degree of social dispersal. In dispersed societies, individuals will meet less often and will thus be less familiar with each, so group sizes should be smaller in consequence.”

also, later

Dunbar, in Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, proposes furthermore that language may have arisen as a “cheap” means of social grooming, allowing early humans to efficiently maintain social cohesion. Without language, Dunbar speculates, humans would have to expend nearly half their time on social grooming, which would have made productive, cooperative effort nearly impossible. Language may have allowed societies to remain cohesive, while reducing the need for physical and social intimacy

our means of communication are improving, so my guess is that this allows us to reduce the need for physical and social intimacy a little more.

I expect further advancements in our means of communication, from there my tentative “(and it will probably keep extending)”.

On the contrary, we might have reached the maximum communication efficency some time in the past. In that case, we won’t increase our monkeysphere just by helping networking.

I know them in groups, usually into groups of 20-50 people, the brain will assign each group a set of properties (much like how people assign stereotypes to nations) but if you think about that group you automatically remember all the people inside and realise you care about what happens to them.

Think of this, if you kept all your computer files in the base directory of the drive, with your ‘essential files’ in a safe place (your monkeysphere), would you particularly care if you deleted a couple of files at random to install a new game? But if you have them all set out neatly into folders then it’s harder to go and delete the files (providing you stop to open it) since when you open a folder, you recognise the files inside and think “but I might need them!”.

I’ll admit it does break down at a world scale where you don’t know people from X or Y country, so they’re just caricatures. The Monkeysphere is right, it’s almost impossible to get past.

If you visualise a couple of phantom people with a personality but that can be adapted quickly (in your head) to living in X or Y.

Despite being fictional, I’ve found you’ll think twice about acting against the group (I’ve only asked a few people to test this, so the data is just anecdotal really). If your Mr. Khati, who has his own hopes and fears, raises 4 kids and has just lost his job in the floods lives in country X then their plight becomes much more real to you at a base level. You still know he’s not real, you can still rationalise away caring about the floods, but hopefully you’ll donate money to the cause if you walk past a collection box which you walked straight past before.

Sure, you’re still that ignorant ape that struggles to live in a large society, but it makes it that bit easier to regard others – who you don’t know – as being just as human as yourself.

I think the seeking of pleasure is absolutely something that drives evolution, for the reasons you give, but on the whole evolution couldn’t give a shit about lasting happiness. Maybe because of this, humans are remarkably bad at predicting what will make us happy (e.g. despite all the evidence to the contrary there is a widely-held belief that more money will make you happier, which – above poverty level – doesn’t really hold), but we’re pretty good at predicting what will give us momentary pleasure.

The monkeysphere concept covers a different field, and is a very solid concept, although I question the given numbers: new technologies make it much easier to keep in touch and care for more people, so the monkeysphere has extended (and it will probably keep extending).

Tom’s right in that it’s an endless exercise to try and attach evolutionary benefits to every positive action, although it strikes me as a possible idea for a particularly highbrow party game. What I find to be a more interesting question is why happiness emerged at all. Does a mouse feel happiness, or are they limited to contentment when all their basic needs are fulfilled? Babies don’t smile naturally for 6-8 weeks, and only then at familiar objects and people; do they ‘learn’ happiness as they develop? As far as I see it, being able to feel happiness when we get what we want is in itself an evolutionary advantage, regardless of whether the desire itself gives an advantage.

I know I’m also falling down the evo-psych side of things rather than your actual point, but I don’t have anything in particular to say to your actual point. It’s unlikely but possible, Tom Francis or other reader, that you’ve never held the concept of the Monkeysphere (less whimsically Dunbar’s number) as a tool for understanding your surroundings. I think you might enjoy thinking about it. If by some terrible misfortune I ever find myself in a management position, I have promised myself that the Peter Principle and the Monkeysphere will be the primary lenses through which I view all decisions affecting my coworkers.

Somewhere George Orwell is rolling in his grave, but screw him, I’m happy.

I want my money back.

That’s all there is to it. I worked this out after my breakup and realised that I have the choice to be happy, even if people are mean callous bastards. Granted, I worked this out in between throwing up and passing out, but it still works now.

Fede – you might say the joy of exploring alone is related to the possibility of discovering some food, water or shelter, that reading is the general thirst for experiences that might inform our furure decision making and improve our survival chances, and that games are mental training, the way play-fighting is physical training.

At a certain point, of course, attempts to assign an evolutionary drive to every little desire in the modern mind get a bit silly, and while you can always do it, it’s not always terribly informative or useful to do so. At a certain level of rationalisation, you could rationalise pretty much anything into those terms whether it benefitted us or not.

What you can say is that surprisingly often, people’s motives and actions can be understood in those terms surprisingly well. That is useful, sometimes, particularly in making sense of violence or tragedy, or in getting over personal differences.

But what about pleasures that derive from solitude? Like trekking alone in the mountains just to explore or see the view, or reading, or playing (be it any of the miriad solitaire games you can do with almost anything, or even single player games), or …? Wasting time seems to lean more on the bad side, so why do we like it?