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Is genuine altruism possible?

 
 
fresco
 
  1  
Reply Sat 25 Oct, 2003 05:40 pm
JLN

(Does Searle actually use the word "world" in your summary? If so he could be indulging in "semantic shifting" as in the case of the two sentences: 1. John is easy to understand. 2. John is eager to understand. The word "John" funtions as different semantic units using the same marker. Alternatively Searle could be leaning towards our own discussions of "interactionist reality".)
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cicerone imposter
 
  1  
Reply Sat 25 Oct, 2003 05:43 pm
Our biology allows us to interact with our environment, but how we perceive our environment can differ greatly from the 'average.'
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JLNobody
 
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Reply Sat 25 Oct, 2003 05:59 pm
truth
Craven, interesting twist. While you insist that the individual is not thinking in terms of the actual middle but on the basis of a perceived middle, I still feel that this "subjective middle" implies polar extremes. Notice I say implied extremes. What I am talking about here is tacit models, implicit cultural assumptions, unconscious schemes, etc. which make up most of a culture, the part of the iceberg not seen. I prefer your reference to "average" (and like "median" it impies a continuum). The person's "middle" might be a tepid water temperature or a hot one for coffee or a bath. In any case, implicit is the notion of extreme heat and extreme cold.
You will agree that the concept of "up" implies the complementary notion of "down." But when I look at the sky that does not, in itself, imply "down", but if I THINK that I am "looking up" that does imply "looking down." In actuality, of course, there is simply the raising of eyes to observe a bird in flight. It might be argued that looking at a bird in flight is identical to looking up (at a bird in flight), and therefore I cannot bracket the "up-ness" of the action. But what if I go outside to observe a bird in flight from the terrace of a penthouse; here I might be looking "down" to see the bird. Observing a flying bird does not entail looking up. I better quit here. I suspect a bit of insanity is approaching. Rolling Eyes
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JLNobody
 
  1  
Reply Sat 25 Oct, 2003 06:15 pm
truth
Fresco, I don't recall the precise statement (of Searles), but as I discussed it here, I was thinking of your interactionist model. Searles sacrifices neither the objective World (that existed before my birth) nor its subjective nature (as I perceive and make sense of it). It's consistent, I think, with Sartre's principle: existence precedes essence, i.e. the formless/meaningless objective world "exists" before we give it our psychological and cultural meanings, its "essences." Both exist and require each other. I have no patience with the positivist image of the world, a world in which things come with meanings apriori. But I also have difficulty with a purely idealist epistemology, one that argues that we create meaning on the basis of nothing, i.e., there is no world "out there" to which we are responding. What say you?
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rufio
 
  1  
Reply Sat 25 Oct, 2003 06:30 pm
Fresco, it's not John that is different semantically, it's the rest of the sentence.

John is easy to understand
(subject) (copula) (adjective)

John is eager to understand
(subject) (copula) (adjective) (infinitive)

Anyway.

CI, I don't even know if we have differing opinions. I haven't been able to get that far in a discussion with any of you.

Craven, that's an interesting way of looking at it, but I don't think there are necessarily two poles for everything. For instance, you might say that the utter lack of photons is a pole, but what is the opposing pole? Even conceptually, that doesn't make any sense. In any case, to say that something is brighter or darker than your present surroundings, you would have to know the quality that makes something brighter or darker, in knowing that, you would intuit the pole(s).
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Craven de Kere
 
  1  
Reply Sat 25 Oct, 2003 06:33 pm
Re: truth
JLNobody wrote:
Craven, interesting twist. While you insist that the individual is not thinking in terms of the actual middle but on the basis of a perceived middle, I still feel that this "subjective middle" implies polar extremes. Notice I say implied extremes. What I am talking about here is tacit models, implicit cultural assumptions, unconscious schemes, etc. which make up most of a culture, the part of the iceberg not seen. I prefer your reference to "average" (and like "median" it impies a continuum). The person's "middle" might be a tepid water temperature or a hot one for coffee or a bath. In any case, implicit is the notion of extreme heat and extreme cold.


I'm multitasking today and haven't explained myself well but you picked it up for the most part. Lemme just clarify somethings.

When I spoke of middle AND average it was because some only think that their average is the middle while it really rests in the extremes.

It was just to make sure that the wrongly assuming extremis't's muddle was taken care of.

And yeah, it does in fact imply an extreme, but my lil trip was that the extremes implied might not be the real ones, they are projected from the median.

e.g. Palestinians and Israelis are so deep in their conflict that their criteria for extreme is so sad that it's funny. "No no, killing baby girls is wrong but killing baby boys is fine, they will grow up to be our enemy" said the child weirdly satisfied with his perceived morality.


Quote:
You will agree that the concept of "up" implies the complementary notion of "down." But when I look at the sky that does not, in itself, imply "down", but if I THINK that I am "looking up" that does imply "looking down."


I digress but the point of up and down is actually the best possible example for my lil trip about projecting out of the median. Up and down as concepts are projected by the lil fella in the middle with sky = up and ground = down.

Once removed from that tiny scope the human realized the very concepts were flawed.

That would be a pergect example of a concept that was projected from man'd average while the real extremes actually would destroy the very concept.

Quote:
I better quit here. I suspect a bit of insanity is approaching. Rolling Eyes


Don'tcha ever quit. I enjoy reading you.
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Craven de Kere
 
  1  
Reply Sat 25 Oct, 2003 06:35 pm
rufio,

You might note that I'm not arguing the poles. I'm actually suggesting a notion that is as far from the poles as it gets.
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rufio
 
  1  
Reply Sat 25 Oct, 2003 06:43 pm
But you are assuming the poles.

Anyway, do you think it's possible to conceive of something as non-universal without also conceiving of it's lack? Or vice versa?
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Craven de Kere
 
  1  
Reply Sat 25 Oct, 2003 06:55 pm
Fair enough, I'll address your example:

Quote:
For instance, you might say that the utter lack of photons is a pole, but what is the opposing pole?


The existence.

Quote:
Even conceptually, that doesn't make any sense.


I disagree. It serves as the Null Hypothesis and while a Null Hypothesis can be characterized as senseless the very method through which sense and sensibility is determined should include it.

---

BTW, I realized that I'm still unclear JL, in the up/down example the reason why I say the extremities are not the basis of comparison is because the actual extremities contradict the whole notion. i.e. if one goes "down" far enough one ends up "up".

But I just went outside to smoke and saw a woman in a baseball jersey with enormous breasts. And that got me to thinking, in sports our basis of comparison is almost always an extreme ("best") and I thought of many other examples of that. So my median as a basis for comparison has its exceptions to be sure.
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rufio
 
  1  
Reply Sat 25 Oct, 2003 07:00 pm
If the existance of photons is the other pole, though, than there is no middle ground. I am talking about all possible states of photons. The bottom limit is zero, since there can't be negative photons, but there is no top limit.
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Craven de Kere
 
  1  
Reply Sat 25 Oct, 2003 07:07 pm
Binary logic has no middle ground. But you now touch on something else, whether poles exist at all. The point is that in the human mind they do, and they need to.
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rufio
 
  1  
Reply Sat 25 Oct, 2003 07:10 pm
But you're not talking about absolute poles anymore, are you?
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Craven de Kere
 
  1  
Reply Sat 25 Oct, 2003 07:12 pm
I don't think I had been.
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rufio
 
  1  
Reply Sat 25 Oct, 2003 07:15 pm
Ahh, because that's what I was talking about. What do you mean by poles, then?
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Craven de Kere
 
  1  
Reply Sat 25 Oct, 2003 07:24 pm
It's a subjective extreme based on a perceived middle. Burn to death and freeze to dath are not the extremes of temperature but for a human they can represent a pole.

Crazy is a subjective pole... and to address the topic altruism is a subjective pole as well. I happen to think that as an absolute pole it only exists as a concept but in practicality it exists as an extreme in a spectrum, Mother T was in this pole even though limited self-interest means that the pole was not absolute.

But in binary logic there are absolute poles. Yes and no.
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rufio
 
  1  
Reply Sat 25 Oct, 2003 07:47 pm
But suppose someone who was more altruistic than Mother Theresa came along. Would the pole move? People freeze to death at different temperatures depending on what they are wearing. Does that pole then move? What's the point of identifying a pole if it moves all the time? All you can really say in that case is how people compare to yourself - you can't compare people and situations to each other, because you have no standard of comparison.
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Craven de Kere
 
  1  
Reply Sat 25 Oct, 2003 08:31 pm
That made little sense to me, but I will address the pole. The end of an object occupies space. There can't be an extremity without encompassing degrees unless you simplify.
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cicerone imposter
 
  1  
Reply Sat 25 Oct, 2003 09:22 pm
Brighter and darker are bad examples of trying to find concensus. Each person experiences different levels of bright and dark based on how much time one has spent in the dark or in light - our pupils adjust accordingly. When we first walk into a dark theater, it's almost impossible to see anything unitl our eyes adjusts to the darkness. When we walk out of the theater into bright light, we have to squint to see anything. Different people have different abilities to see grays and colors, and some are even color-blind. Trying to define normal in light or darkness would be difficult.
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JLNobody
 
  1  
Reply Sat 25 Oct, 2003 09:33 pm
truth
Just got back from a block party where some of the residents were talking about their war experiences over beer and food. Now I read your comments and I'm suffering an attack of the bends.
I guess there are more dualisms than extreme poles of a spectrum. There is the binary duality of off and on, stop and go (no, that implies degree of speed), but, as Craven acknowledges the poles are subjective and for that reason I, too, do not grasp Rufio's meaning when he talks about moving the poles. Are you referring, Rufio, to reified "real" poles or changing perceptions of conceptual poles?
C.I., your right, our biology allows us to interact with our environment (actually, it forces us to interact with the environment). Our very perception of our environment is a function of our unconditioned and conditioned nervous systems. And perceptual differences within our biological species vary with psychological and cultural conditioning. Is that what you were saying, with fewer words?
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Craven de Kere
 
  1  
Reply Sat 25 Oct, 2003 09:38 pm
I think rufio was talking about the poles as if they were a mathematical point on a line segment allowing a single value to occupy it, suggesting that at the pole varying degrees of extremity wouldn't be possible.

Thing is, i think most people consider the extremities as more of the red zone on the football feild. It's part of the end, but there is a very real difference between being on the 5 and on the 1.
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