Capitol Hill Blue Forums Life and Moral Issues Morality & Society Altruism -- a load of piffle?

If one ignores tone . . .

forget the one on the board. The tool (lol) is not working.
type one of these [ and then one of these : with no spaces in between and you get this... [:
You can do it backwards
like this...: and then one of these ], with no space in between of course. to come up with this... :]

There is nothing wrong with the tool Logan It works like it always has: not at all. If you wish to make a tinfoil hat type a colon and a bracket:] or a bracket and a colon either way like I said if you make it smiley you get a tinfoil hat[: if you dont you get one of these:[

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH:]

This question about altruism is part of a much larger question: determinism. In what sense are we free to do anything?

I have grown old and thought much about the subject, but I have never never been able to make much sense of the concept "freedom," nor been able to understand what other people think they mean when they use the word.

"I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul."

On the face of it, it is hard to imagine a statement more ridiculous and childish. On the most charitable interpretation, one may imagine that Henley is expressing the Stoic doctrine that he may face with calmness and fortitude all that life may deal out to him; if that is so, he expresses himself rather poorly and unclearly.

I firmly agree with the more hard-headed view of Herodotus:

"Circumstances rule men; men do not rule circumstances."

The concept of "freedom" seems utterly incoherent, for what could it mean but that something appears in the world without being the result of cause-and-effect? The only sense that I can make of that idea is that things appear out of the blue, with no causal antecedent, utterly at random.

That, I think, is almost the contradiction of what most people mean by free choice, for it means that they have no control over what happens! If all things arise deterministically, through strict cause-and-effect, then we have no control over what happens; and if they arise randomly, by chance, then we also have no control over them! Damned if you do, and damned if you don't!

My objection to the concept of freedom, or free-choice, is enshrined in what Gottfried Leibnitz called, the "Principle of Sufficient Reason": in the outer world, in the realm of thought, and in the soul of any person, nothing arises without a cause, nothing appears "out of the blue."

Step by step, as we have extended our understanding of the world around us, the Principle of Sufficient Reason has been confirmed over and over again, and there is no reason to suspect that it will ever fail.

There is only one exception to this principle, and it is a glaring one. In certain popular formulations of quantum mechanics, quantum events may arise by pure chance, quite randomly, without causation, no hidden variablles even possible.

This is so completely at variance with the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and with everything else we know about Nature, that I think it is a good reason strongly to suspect that the theory of quantum mechanics is incomplete. Albert Einstein objected to viewing quantum mechanics as a complete theory precisely because of its violation of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and I agree with him.

Having said all this, to claim that all things arise through strict causation is not to say that all things can be predicted. There many reasons to think that in many circumstances, complete prediction is impossible. I am particularly interested in one source of uncertainty in the world: the relationship between what one may call System and Meta-system.

There is much to be said about systems and the environments in which they are embedded. This involves some of the most complex and abstruse analysis that human thought has ever undertaken. However, let me indicate one extremely simple way in which we may approach the subject.

We are in the Mesozoic Era. Dinosaurs reign triumphant. Mammals are merely the fading remnants of one of Evolution's dead-ends. There is every reason to predict that some species of dinosaur will eventually become the first intelligent, technological species to arise on Planet Earth. Everything is running along tickety-boo in a completely deterministic fashion. Suddenly, all is changed. Something from outside the neatly running system of Planet Earth makes its appearance; a big boulder the size of a mountain strikes a region of oceanic sedimentary rock, and all bets are off: determinism has failed. Meta-system dictates system.

Of course, strict determinism is reinstated the moment one expands the system under consideration: for instance, to include everything that is happening in the Solar System. This merely postpones the problem of predictability. The Solar System itself is embedded in a wider realm, and that realm in a wider one, on and on, until one is faced with dealing with the entire universe.

In what sense is "Everything" determined? Is the concept "Everything" even logically coherent? These are subtle questions.

Descending to regions of inferior grandeur, quantum events may involve processes that extend through the entire history of the Cosmos, both past and future --- as, indeed, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle would suggest. This may be the key to restoring determinism to quantum theory.

I view altruism as a pure selfless act that benefits the benefactor and does not infringe on others.

The below example does not fit what I view as altruism because the person allowing another person to "cut in line" caused everyone else to have to share in that experience.

If one is to allow another "line cuts", then, the person allowing said "cut in line" needs to ask each and every person behind him/her if it's permissable to allow said "line cutter" in. Else, it's not selfless, its selfish to infringe upon others for a momentary good feel for oneself.


My view of atruism and "line cutting" is the bases that I form for illegal immigration. It's the very same thing: line cutting in front of others.

And I can't even tell the difference!
[: :]

For anyone who spent time here on the subject of Altruism, you might be interested in this recent David Brooks essay on Philosophy and Morality Philosophy and Morality as a function of Evolution
It parallels some of our discussion.

Interesting, Itstarted. I am currently very much engaged in How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer:

Well, think of the cause as being the act of choosing and the effect being the result of that choice. Freedom then would be the freedom to choose.

Circumstances are merely those points of bifurcation (multifurcation?) in life where one is free to choose an action -- regardless of how odious or easy the action may be. While it is demonstrably true that one is not the unencumbered "master of his fate", it is also demonstrably true that exercising the freedom to decide his actions relative to circumstances leaves him with choices he hopes will take him to his desired destiny. He remains free to choose, regardless of whether he eventually fails or succeeds in reaching his destiny (goal, actually since destiny implies determinism).
Yours,
Issodhos