RE: The only reason why organics function is for selfish benefit
February 6, 2014 at 2:58 pm
(This post was last modified: February 6, 2014 at 3:01 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(February 4, 2014 at 8:43 pm)x2theone2x Wrote:(February 4, 2014 at 8:22 pm)Chuck Wrote: No. The only reason why organics function is their functions do not kill them directly or indirectly, before they pass on their genes. That's it. There are all sorts of things going on in your body which do not help you. They just happen because they started happening once upon a time and never weeded themselves out by killing your ancesters. How is that for selfish?
"Selfish" is an unwarranted anthropamorphizing of complex, none-goal directed process.
Thank you for your post, it's actually been the best rebuttal so far in my opinion. What your post has given to me is that I have to give the definitions of the terms I'm using in the original post to better convey my point. I would disagree with "your" definition of selfishness though. Everything is to accomplish a goal when it comes to the human function, even if that goal lasts for one second, is discarded, or altered. One major flaw of your argument is " before they have passed on their genes" that makes me assume some major change in reasoning occurs after that point. I don't see that, if that is truly what you were trying to convey.
I disagree with your characterization "Everything is to accomplish a goal when it comes to the human function".
In fact absolutely nothing is to accomplish a goal when it comes to the human function. Every function arose by chance and remains until it is weeded out. All your functions are just chances that has not yet had the chance to be weeded out.
Selfishness is a distinctly goal related concept. Goal is an abstract human psychological concept. It is widely misused to mentally model non-goal directed process not because it is a good analogy, but because most people are equipped to deal with this analogy.
People feel better about being able to do a job if they feel can use a familiar tool to do the job. Once they are swinging a familiar tool are easily pursuaded to accept whatever the tool produced as being equivalent to the job being done, even if the tool is totally inappropirate and incapable of really doing the original job for which they picked up the tool.
