What's the point?

[Angrboda]

I see several different aspects to this.

First, even if we have an ideal of what rational discussion should be, or what we should derive from it, these expectations and ideals seem rather far removed from what often drives debaters in these discussions. While rationalism may be a beneficial model or goal, it isn't what drives participation, at least not from my perspective. More mundane things like anger, frustration, desire (as in ego gratification), and so on, these are what drive the intense participation in these debates. Sometimes it's ideals. But what strikes me is, these responses are likely unproductive misfirings of social behaviors which, in their appropriate context are evolutionarily beneficial. Sartre has written that anger is the attempt to achieve what cannot be achieved by normal means, by way of magical means (the attempt to forge a path where no path exists). And the drive to debate, I think, is somewhat similar; it is our social brains' attempt to achieve something in the current context which would have made more sense in an original, evolutionary context. Cohesiveness and agreement is incredibly beneficial in family groups, sexual pairs, and small groups; it's less important on a global scale. But the circuits in our brains which fire when the cues that trigger the "social cohesion" or "mate competition" circuits are given, are also activated in contexts far removed from the situations in which such behaviors are more instrumentally useful. It reminds me of one of the current theories about why we have religion, religious beliefs, and religious behaviors. The neurological or side-effect theory postulates that the behaviors and thoughts that make up religion are composed of other modules of the mind which evolved to serve other purposes; we "imagine" there is a mind inside that human shaped object, even though we don't visually see a mind — this ability to model unseen minds in a human body allows us to conceptualize the idea of unseen mental phenomena in other locations: a thunder cloud, a statue, the sun. So in a way, the drive to argue and debate these things parallels the [hypothesized] source of religious belief: behaviors and components of mind/cognition which serve an evolutionary role in one context and in a certain form, become either excesses and waste, or serve some novel function, when triggered by situations where the original evolutionary instrumental utility of the behavior is not present.

That's one aspect of these debates that interests me, and it's like the elephant in the middle of the room: the more you tell yourself to ignore these cues, the harder it is to do so. Because the emotions are real. The purpose of the emotions may not align properly with why these emotional responses developed, but the emotions are here, and you have to deal with them. I tend to just go with the flow, myself (see below). I'm reminded of something someone at a Buddhist reading circle once said. He remarked that when he was younger that he had watched a scary movie, and how he thought, as a Buddhist, that feeding the mind scary experiences was bound to have negative effects, and that as a Buddhist, it would be prudent for him to avoid such stimulation. My immediate thought was that absent such stimulation, you'll never learn how to manage such emotional content, so avoiding such stimulii makes you weaker, not stronger. And I think that my time on the forum has yielded more benefit in terms of improving me, my skills, teaching me new things, gaining new insights and so on, rather than any possible benefit in terms of changing the minds of adversaries. Moreover, my engaging, and watching others engage, allows them and myself to learn from each other.

Then there's a third aspect. Perhaps it's part of my personality, but it's not uncommon that the substance of a debate will become a temporary obsession with me. Inigo's arguments about morality and ethics didn't interest me explicitly, as I'm not knowledgeable about ethics and don't consider it an area I want to concentrate on; however, as I went about my day, I found myself turning the various parts of his argument over in my mind, analyzing it. It's perhaps impossible for me to think about something without analyzing it. But regardless, the subject occupied my thoughts unbidden. And there are times when someone or some argument will frustrate me to where I find myself pre-occupied thinking about it. However, many times when that happens, I'll flip into a different mode. I'll stop thinking about how to resolve my feelings by manipulating the discussion or things external, and turn it back on myself and ask what is it inside of me that is causing me to react in this way? As a Taoist, someone invested in virtue ethics, and as someone for whom monitoring the causes of my behavior is an essential skill (chronic mental illness), I find doing this both fairly natural, as well as very powerful. As long as you are simply reacting*, you are controlled by the other; when you can get under that and discover how to regain control, you've accomplished something more important than a debate victory. I look upon these experiences and the fruits of such reflections as important opportunities to learn about myself, and to improve who I am.

Or, as Lao Tzu wrote: "Mastering others requires force; mastering the self takes strength."