From: tucker@mitre.org (William Tucker)
Subject: Re: what IT is?
Keywords: Re: what IT is?
Organization: The MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA, USA
Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1992 22:52:23 GMT


Hi -

You (Daniel Kranowski) wrote: 

     <daniel@vtserf.cc.vt.edu>


     But why do they do it?  For what reason other than selfless,
  altruistic Love?  I hold that it is love, but not selfless.  It is the
  human invention of Mutual Benefit, without which the institutions of
  society could not exist.  The lover's self is so constituted that he 
  feels pleasurable sensations from knowing he has brought pleasure to
  someone else.  He may undergo certain physical discomforts to receive a
  greater emotional satisfaction that comes from expressing his love.  A
  word on love from "duty": attraction to duty is as valid an attraction
  as one to physical pleasure.  It all depends upon his hierarchy of 
  pleasures, determined for him by his DNA and by his upbringing.  Indeed 
  I am the same way.  In my life I have taken great pride in my efforts 
  to be nice to people, and to understand them (though it was not usually 
  successful), but I've come to believe that all this does not make me a 
  "good" person.  It's just the way my personal Clockwork Orange was 
  shaped.  Perhaps I should be more of an asshole (I'm sure I am 
  occasionally), but I can't help wanting not to be one.  I am locked in a 
  self that was made for me.


I wonder (William T.):


Have you ever been affected by someone else? Have you ever paid attention to the
way you feel and determined if all of your feelings and thoughts are in fact emanating from you? Do you think it might be possible for someone to percieve 
another persons emotions directly and want to stop the distortion caused by the
others pain, by easing that pain? If those things were true or possible as I just stated them it would sort of blow your altruistic or selfish model out of the water. Things get a little fuzzier then don't they. Then selfish and selfless becomes things of degree rather than absolutes. One can not be selfless when one is connected, and one can not be selfish when one is not unaffected. I guess that's why I tend to look askance at philosophy and metaphysics that ignore the fact that questions about perceptio



n directly affect philsophic discussion. I don't think most people ever look to see why they feel
the way they do, they spend too much time analyzing "old data" to be able to percieve. By old data I mean interpretation of events taken as fact that have
not been updated recently. For example:

How many people pay attention to the way they walk............or has it been 
automatic since the age of two? Your body has changed a lot since that time. Is 
the way you walk now good for you? How can you not be aware of something that 
you do all the time? Is it possible that there are other things that go on all 
the time that you're not conciously aware of?

Especially people that do a lot of abstract thinking, it becomes habitual mode of operation. They can truthfully say they are not aware of feeling anything outside of themselves because they interact with the world through the buffer of their model of the world rather than direct experience. Just ruminating.....
....thanks.

Wm T.

.standard disclaimer




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