X-Message-Number: 17114
From: 
Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 12:31:21 EDT
Subject: To Corbin--no vacuum

On 7/25/01 Lee Corbin wrote in part:

 > it is true that I can feel especially virtuous on the completion of some
 >acts of kindness, but I think that it is wrong to argue that this
 >is always "why" I did the act.  Sometimes I really don't have any
 >idea of how I'm going to feel about something afterwards.
 
What I have said is that any CONSCIOUSLY MOTIVATED act is always intended to 
gain satisfaction or avoid dissatisfaction. Acts that are not motivated in 
consciousness, or in similar subconscious ways, can be accidental or 
instinctual or habitual, in which case they may or may not be beneficial or 
harmful from various points of view. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion 
that all of us need to do a great deal more to make our strategies and 
tactics rigorously rational--in parallel with, but not completely dependent 
upon, new information about the brain.

> Sometimes you just want to set things right in the world, and letting
> a trapped motorist go in front of you is one---but so is seeing a book
> on the floor and reshelving it.  To insist that "everyone does everything
 >for a selfish reason", is to imply a calculatedness that doesn't exist.
 
"just" want to set things right? There is always a reason. If the reason lies 
in accident or instinct or habit, then you need to examine whether it is 
appropriate. If the reason lies in conscious motivation, then, in the absence 
of calculation, you are at fault and at risk.

>(Not only that, it's still puerile---sorry---to maintain that everything
> done is for self- interest, because of the utter impoverishment of the
> phrase; I'll allow that "everything occurs the way it does because
> of physical law", but sentences like the one quoted above that use
 >"everything" communicate nothing.)
 
The phrase might be "impoverished" if it were offered in a vacuum, with no 
examples and no suggestions of how to apply it usefully. I have many such 
examples and suggestions. 

> I still would like you or anyone who thinks that our typical (but
> not universal) human sympathy, kindness, or altruism is entirely
> due to self-interest to answer the following question.  Do you believe
 >that humans could eventually be bred to engage in acts of altruism that
 >were not based upon self-interest?  And if so, how do you know that
 >it hasn't already happened (to some degree)?
 
Still a confused question, I'm afraid. Probably people could be bred or 
coerced or trained to do just about anything--so what? At the moment of 
contemplating any conscious act, it still boils down to, "Will this make me 
feel better or avoid feeling worse?" You face the problem and make the 
calculation, or you default.

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society
http://www.cryonics.org

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