Random Question of the Day Thread

[Alex]

Yesterday. Since he could afford to buy cigarettes I told him I wasn't giving him any money.

Reminds me of a story a friend told me. She was leaving a McDonalds and there was a homeless person begging for $1 so he could go inside and buy a Hamburger as he "hasn't eaten in days". She had just bought a few and gave him a burger. As she walked away he threw the burger after her missing her head by inches.

We have a homeless shelter of sorts in our town. People living there have to pay a monthly rent (about €100). The housing is meant as a temporary solution and only has one toilet and one bathtub. It is inhabited mostly by alcoholics and a few younger jobless people. I know a guy who's been living there for five years. He told me he is waiting for his parents (both in their seventies) to die so he can move into their house and collect the inheritance.

There is a homeless guy who begs in the town next to the one I grew up in. He has been given a fully furnished house but walked out of it as he prefers being homeless.

[ER]

I kind of figure even if a person is homeless for negative reasons like drugs or indolence, that person is living through the consequences of those choices in a tough scenario, being on the streets, so even when I don't give someone money I try to at least treat that person politely, remembering it's still a human being. (I have encountered some vile homeless people, though.)

One scenario that's haunted me for sixteen years, there was this funny homeless guy in Austin, his name was LaMont, and everybody liked him, seemed an old soul sort, kind of reminded me of a sitcom character who'd be billed as Homeless Black Dude #4, and one day I found out LaMont had third-degree burns all over his body because the makeshift shelter he stayed in caught on fire while he was passed out drunk. He died after two weeks. That was awful.

[chefzombie]

this afternoon. the gentleman who i save aluminum cans for tapped on the door to say thank you, we chatted about Y&R for a few minutes and he said he'd try to come by and rake out my flower garden this weekend. i've known him for about 10 years, he's a very nice guy. he just can't be inside for long.

[ER]

Who is worserererer, Cousin Oliver or Scrappy Doo?

[chefzombie]

oooo...that's a tough one... hhmmm... i'd have to go with cousin oliver, i think.

[ER]

"When I was an atheist I said the argument against God was that the world was cruel and unjust, then it came to me to consider how I arrived at that thought. A man cannot know a line is crooked lest he first have some notion of straight."

CS Lewis said this, or very close to this in his work Mere Christianity, and for some reason I woke up today thinking about that, the notion of conscience, of "should" and how much these ideas would seem contrary to a universe governed strictly by the logic of survival of the fittest. In a natural world ruled only by the strong surviving, where did altruism come from?

Is it yet another evidence of God?

[Alex]

Nah, altruism has benefits towards the survival of the species as a whole rather than the individual and can be witnessesd across a variety of species but not universally so. If god had a hand in it, I would imagine it would either be confined to solely his supposed favourite children or present across the full spectrum of life, not present more or less randomly.

[RCMerchant]

^ What he said!

[ER]

Thanks for your thoughtful answer, Alex, but I'd have to question what you wrote. I am not sure one sees altruism in nature so much as definable acts of species preservation overriding self-preservation, which is common. The other day for instance I watched a mother leopard stay on the ground fighting hyenas til her two cubs were safely up a tree, then she climbed herself: that's species preservation in action, however heroic or noble her courage. (She was brave!)

Altruism in non-humans.... I don't know. Self-sacrifice can be a feature of species preservation, and a dog nobly dying for his master contains a certain amount of that but altruism.... There I don't know, since the dog may or may not be dying out of love but is likely seeing it as protecting his (human) pack leader, assuring the pack lives on.

Despite psychologists trying to say altruism is a myth and altruistic acts are motivated by the pleasure they bring in the one undertaking them, I would say altruism does exist and is only found among humans, since it requires a certain amount of conscious reflection to do something that rewards another yet transcends mere species preservation. To bestow something good without any perceivable self-reward, that is by definition altruism. If "mortal sin" requires understanding and reflection, doesn't a selfless virtue also require understanding, if only in allowing the doer to understand that the deed is in fact "selfless"?

Perhaps the truest examples of altruism are those on a small scale in which life and death (and therefore possibly species preservation) do not come into play in the matter.

What about someone grudgingly and uncheerfully giving someone else her Play Station 4 "just because" without any return expected and without much happiness coming in return, but done simply because it seemed like the right thing to do?

How would that further the species and how would that profit the joyless giver since it was sacrificial and did not provide happiness to her? What would be a natural motivation in an act of grudging charity except some X-factor within humans that comes out as "should"?

How would blind nature, noteworthy mostly for cruelty, manufacture "should" in a scenario that does not further a species or even an individual?

Me...honestly I see something higher as answer to the puzzling equation, though I could of course be wrong.

[Alex]

Don't forget that there is increasing proof that we have no such thing as free will, although it has not yet been proven conclusively. Altruism, in this case, is reduced to a series of impulses generated either as a response to nature (because such acts are hard-wired into our DNA), or nurture, because we are brought up with examples of this around us. Many of the most 'successful' people in the world have reached their position by simply lacking this instinct and being able to screw over other people with no feelings of guilt. They achieve this success however, at the expense of the species as a whole.

I would say many animals are quite capable of a rich emotional life. Animals can certainly feel hate and fear. Love is simply a series of chemical reactions in the brain. I see no reason, despite the declarations of various religions that animals have no soul that they can't experience the finer emotions in life too. Indeed we are just beginning to understand just how much many species feel. We give ourselves too much credit and the rest of the world not enough if we declare that only we can experience these things. Where is the profit from a species point of view when a Dolphin saves a drowning human? Or when an animal adopts a baby/cub/whatever from another species? Elephants have been known to remember people who have shown kindness and cruelty to them with decades passing in between encounters. And yet these creatures are also capable of acts of violence. Dolphins have been known to engage in acts of torture against Porpoises which may be the best-known example. Clearly there is some function by which these animals choose when to kill and when to be kind.

In answer to your point about someone letting someone else play a computer game, I find that answer remarkably simple. You are still contributing, on however a small scale to the development of another living being by showing it kindness, and thus engaging in what is a species-wide imperative for what we would define as (mostly) correctly functioning people, much as our very own Trevor does when he is being Uncle Zombie.

Neither altruism or its absence is unique to the human race. We, in our hubris like, to tell ourselves we are something special. Sometimes we come up with very complicated ways to try and convince ourselves it is true but is it really? Or are we just assuming it is because we say so? Despite what is said, we have no concrete proof to deny other creatures that which we attribute ourselves. We are just animals, who happened to evolve in a certain way that specialised in one particular organ while other animals went down other routes. We were not alone on that path, as there is plenty of evidence of other species of humans who were either wiped out or bred into the homo sapiens we know today. Those other species showed evidence of the same kinds of family life we experienced, and I would be very surprised if they did not experience the same range of feelings as we do. It is just a shame that we don't seem to have any pureblood versions running around today.

[RCMerchant]

^ What he said. Animals love me. My dog loves me.
To be so arrogant that God meant us to be the Master Animal is ...arrogant.   We are the best in the universe? And why is that?
" Because the bible tells me so!"
Well, that's a good argument!
That is some magical thinking s**t there.

[Alex]

Ah, if only I could give you karma RC.

[ER]

^ What he said. Animals love me. My dog loves me.
To be so arrogant that God meant us to be the Master Animal is ...arrogant.   We are the best in the universe? And why is that?
" Because the bible tells me so!"
Well, that's a good argument!
That is some magical thinking s**t there.

We are the masters of animals because the world is ruled by survival of the fittest and we are the fittest and therefore we are superior. If we weren't it'd be self-evident because something else would become apex predator over us. QED. And if you notice I did say dogs love. Of course dogs love. Even cats love...themselves.

You can't have it both ways. You can't say you believe in evolution and then deny the global apex species when its domination is so glaringly obvious. In fact given that nature drives species on in competition without mercy, the very fact you seem to be troubled by the notion of your species' dominance argues my case that we have a conscience that seems to transcend nature, and it's coming out in your compassion toward lesser beings that nature alone would want you to dominate.

[Alex]

I was more trying to argue to altruism is a feature of species beyond the human race and indeed that animals are capable of showing mercy beyond their species boundary. I am not troubled by our dominance, but instead what we do with it, and our lack of forethought and that engaging in acts that benefit others without benefiting themselves is wider spread in nature than we give it credit for. I do not believe we are as special as we like to think. We are merely a species that has become overly dominant and have become a threat to not only the existence of other creatures but to our continued existence as a species. This is something we need to address before it is addressed for us. It may well be that science will come up with some miracle cure for the various problems we are going to increasingly face, or it may be that the problems we are creating will accelerate beyond our ability to compensate for.

My money is on that we come up with something that temporarily fixes things, but causes more problems further down the line.

[RCMerchant]

^ What he said. Animals love me. My dog loves me.
To be so arrogant that God meant us to be the Master Animal is ...arrogant.   We are the best in the universe? And why is that?
" Because the bible tells me so!"
Well, that's a good argument!
That is some magical thinking s**t there.

We are the masters of animals because the world is ruled by survival of the fittest and we are the fittest and therefore we are superior. If we weren't it'd be self-evident because something else would become apex predator over us. QED. And if you notice I did say dogs love. Of course dogs love. Even cats love...themselves.

You can't have it both ways. You can't say you believe in evolution and then deny the global apex species when its domination is so glaringly obvious. In fact given that nature drives species on in competition without mercy, the very fact you seem to be troubled by the notion of your species' dominance argues my case that we have a conscience that seems to transcend nature, and it's coming out in your compassion toward lesser beings that nature alone would want you to dominate.

None of that convinces me that their is an invisible Being in the universe that created us like some comic book Watcher.
 I may be a weirdo, but I don't drink that Kool-Aid.
And I don't want or care if you change your mind about this or that. I just don't like when someone tries to push it on me. That's annoying. I got churches knocking on my door. I'm polite and say some dumb s**t, like " I gotta wash dishes." or if they are real pushy I invite them in, and put on  back round music. I did it with Jehovahs. To their credit, they sat down for a minute. I said nothing.
I'm not a Atheist, a Satanist, or any "ist". It's all nuts. Religion seems to me just to be politics.
Christians and Muslims shed lots of blood trying to force folks to bow to their god. f**k that.
All religion is based on control.
It's used as a tool.  Religion is politics then, its politics now.
By the way- did I ever say I believe in evolution? You just assumed I do.  In fact you don't know jack s**t, when it comes down to it. And neither do I. And the only way we find out is when were dead! That works out well!  

The only thing I believe is that the human race, if it was created by a god,-well...he f**ked up!
In his own image? We are? Good job ,God! Thank you for your Invisible Holy bulls**t!

http://youtu.be/PSZxmZmBfnU
	Small | Large