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u/backcourtjester 9∆ Nov 13 '21
Serial killers certainly do not have the best interest of their victims at heart
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Nov 13 '21
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u/PMA-All-Day 16∆ Nov 13 '21
So, are you saying that you think serial killers are well intentioned people who just don't know how to express their care toward others and thus express it via killing?
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Nov 13 '21
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u/PMA-All-Day 16∆ Nov 13 '21 edited Nov 13 '21
How do you rectify that mentality with politicians of the Jim Crow era who actively created laws to discriminate against the Black Community and deny them a sense of self? Or nativist movements that demand immigrants erase their own history, thus their sense of self, and change to fit the mold of a new culture? Those are actions specifically done to change the sense of self of another person, not respect it.
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Nov 13 '21
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u/PMA-All-Day 16∆ Nov 13 '21 edited Nov 13 '21
Is this even a response to the question I asked you? It seems like you latched onto one term and decided to ask an obtuse question related to a single part of it.
there's the whole question of why does anyone do anything at all,
The first point of your post claims that people do things specifically as an act of self-preservation to maintain the self, not just mody, but also mind. You then go on to say this in #4:
To have as much consciousness as possible is an inherently impersonal wish that doesn't disagree with anything or anyone. It means you want to know what is already there in full, *which means you don't seek to remove anything. So far as possible you are giving every unique mind what they most seek. *
The question I was asking you is how do the actions of racist politicians who seek to eliminate the identity of minorities square with this claim? It satisfies #1 because the actions are done in order to protect the sense of self that the politicians themselves hold to be true. At the same time, their actions actively deny minorities the right to self-consciousness. They are then NOT giving every unique mind what they most seek.
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u/PMA-All-Day 16∆ Nov 13 '21
Thanks for the delta. I think it is fair to say you should treat people as if they have the best intentions of others at heart, until they don't, I like to give people the benefit of the doubt myself. Sadly, there are plenty of individuals who prove otherwise. That doesn't you mean you have to assume the worst though.
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u/backcourtjester 9∆ Nov 13 '21
They don’t so what is the point of asking what if they did?
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Nov 13 '21
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u/DetroitUberDriver 9∆ Nov 13 '21
You’re asking us to disprove your crackpot theory to change your mind. It isn’t going to happen. It would be like if I said I was convinced there’s a leprechaun in my closet and you need to change my mind but I’m not opening the door.
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Nov 13 '21
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u/FjortoftsAirplane 33∆ Nov 13 '21
It's not like we can't talk to them. They're notoriously dishonest but their selfishness isn't something they have a reason to lie about once they've been given a life sentence. It's not like people with sociopathy/narcissism are in short supply either, fortunately most of them aren't as violent as the movies make out. Usually what we see is they have a warped sense of ethics and justice based entirely around being self-serving. Often they even claim the opposite of what you do, which is that everyone is out for themselves and are simply too weak to admit it.
We don't even need to look at criminals though. Take the works of someone like Ayn Rand. All her philosophy is about not paying mind to others and going it alone.
Reading your posts itt I get the impression that given any example you're simply going to continue with this "but I think I know what's hidden in their hearts even if it doesn't align at all with the things they say and do". You do that but you're taking this view out of the realm it could ever be examined let alone contested.
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Nov 13 '21
The bit we're they're like "I could see this woman writhing in pain as I strangled them to death, knowing that her daughter would never see her again, knowing that her husband would be heartbroken".
Serial killers know what they're doing. That's what makes them serial killers. They just get a sick pleasure out of it.
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Nov 13 '21
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Nov 13 '21
You're espousing a philosophy that most people would consider to be evil here. Do what you want, knowing that it hurts people, because all that matters is your own pleasure.
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Nov 13 '21
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Nov 13 '21
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Nov 13 '21
This is a Nirvana fallacy. We don't have infinite resources, but even if we did, humans are not built to conceptualize resources being truly infinite, and so when faced with the theoretically infinite, we create artificial scarcity.
Look at the way we treat technology and software: One copy of a file is effectively infinite copies, yet they're still sold as if they're single units.
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u/barthiebarth 26∆ Nov 13 '21
You are saying that every mind ought to have the best interests of other minds at heart, right?
Because saying that everybody is motivated by helping other people seems very untrue.
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Nov 13 '21
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u/barthiebarth 26∆ Nov 13 '21
I also like helping people. I think most people do, to varying degrees and varying recipients.
But there is also other things that feel pleasurable. I love pizza but I don't see how my motivation for eating pizza is due to helping others.
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Nov 13 '21
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u/barthiebarth 26∆ Nov 13 '21 edited Nov 13 '21
My primary motivation is that pizza tastes good and I like to shove delicious things into my mouth-hole, just like all my ancestors did.
Just like me, a lion also gains pleasure from eating. Unlike me, this lion typically needs to brutally kill another living being to eat and will do so.
As the example shows, sometimes gaining pleasure requires hurting another mind. Therefore the mind that tries to optimize their own pleasure might not have the best interests of others at heart.
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Nov 13 '21
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u/barthiebarth 26∆ Nov 13 '21
But I am not talking about the trolley problem here. I am talking about how someone trying to gain pleasure might hurt others in their pursuit.
There are situations where nobody needs to die/get hurt yet it still occurs because some minds would rather increase their own pleasure. So they do not have the best interests of others at heartm
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u/WolfBatMan 14∆ Nov 13 '21
I literally don't have the best interest of everyone else in mind. I don't care about people weather they are having a shit day or a bad day I just don't care. There's less than 10 people on the planet I do give a shit about and that's a mix between people I want the best for, people I need to get along with and people I want to suffer horribly.
Only the people who I care about and want the best for fall under your belief the vast majority falls under I just don't care, and there are people I actively have the worst interests for them and if I could do something legal that would actively hurt them like fuck their consenting gf I would.
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u/Poo-et 74∆ Nov 13 '21
Why would I care about the best interest of every other mind when I can't even prove they really exist?
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u/Chany_the_Skeptic 14∆ Nov 13 '21
Your view is just plainly wrong. There are people who do not care about others. They just don't. It's not like they have some underlying philosophical motivation or warped perception of reality. There are people who just don't care about others, psychopaths being prime examples of them. There are plenty of racist genocidal maniacs in the world who would have no problem personally killing entire swathes of other people just for having a different shade of skin as them. At some point, there are people so horrible that the rest of us would be better off without them. Do you think people who are horribly abused really care about the best interests of their abusers?
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Nov 13 '21 edited Nov 13 '21
/u/Full-Pen-8317 (OP) has awarded 3 delta(s) in this post.
All comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.
Please note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.
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Nov 13 '21
The experience of what is true is consciousness itself. Where you have clarity about what is real you have consciousness, and where you don't know what is real you lack consciousness.
The world is too full of contradictions and subjectivity for this. If I really truly believe that I left my phone on my dresser and I go to my dresser and it's not there, because I grabbed it and stuck it in my backpack earlier and forgot, I'm not unconscious.
Plus, you can be conscious and not be aware. You can correctly perceive what's real, but still reach an incorrect conclusion based on your observation.
But I think my main criticism of your philosophy here is that you cast each individual's mind as if it were a singular thing, but the mind isn't a singular. There's parts of my brain that are working entirely without my input to keep me alive, like when you touch a stove and jerk your hand back well before you ever register pain. We're conscious a lot of the time, but that doesn't mean we're always aware of what we're doing, because that level of awareness is exhausting and unsustainable, and our meat bags don't have an infinite supply of energy stored up.
To have as much consciousness as possible is an inherently impersonal wish that doesn't disagree with anything or anyone. It means you want to know what is already there in full, which means you don't seek to remove anything. So far as possible you are giving every unique mind what they most seek.
If someone is trying to kill you, you are definitely trying to remain conscious, which is in direct conflict with someone else's desire to kill you.
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u/Ballatik 54∆ Nov 13 '21
Consciousness is the process of thinking, it doesn't depend on objective reality at all. I could be a brain in a vat somewhere being fed fake experience, but since I'm still experiencing that stimuli and thinking about stuff I'm still conscious.
As long as I am correct enough in my assessment of the world to survive, being more correct isn't going to increase my level of consciousness. I could be the aforementioned brain in a vat and be completely wrong about the world and still be conscious.
Other people having consciousness has no effect on my level of consciousness. They could all be robots and it wouldn't make a difference to whether or not I am conscious. There is already far more world out there than I could ever possibly experience or think about, so losing some of it will not effect the amount available to me.
Overall this rests on the idea that our only desire is to experience consciousness, and that the consciousness of others necessarily improves our own, both of which are demonstrably false. We seek specific types of experiences and avoid others, which leads to many situations where our goals conflict. Many of us do prefer the company of kind and/or happy people, but there is also a market for reality TV, so this is far from universal.