That is where you are incorrect. For I used to be like everyone else until I questioned my way out of empathy for humans.
I’m honestly surprised to hear you say that. Again assuming you’re playing straight with us. As I am with you.
Have you read Ayn Rand? What did you think?
I honestl found her to be a bit foolish to be honest. Too much importance on the individual when there isn’t anything stellar about it.
Say what you want about the tenets of Objectivism, Machinaforce, at least it’s an ethos.
My argument for pro-social behavior goes about like this:
The vast majority of people on Earth today will live out their lives doing nothing that impacts me positively or negatively. Whether they’re people or NPCs truly doesn’t matter in principal or in practice.
Some people will impact me incidentally. The other drivers on the road, the other people in the grocery store, etc. The woman who cooked my lunch a few minutes ago who I’ve never seen before and will likely never see again.
*Functionally *they might as well be NPCs. But if I choose to treat them that way, I devalue them in my mind. It’s a short step from thinking of them as mere NPCs to deciding it’s OK to jump in line in front of them, cut them off while driving, steal from them, beat them, and kill them as I choose.
If I start down that road I’ll end up here: they’re simply obstacles to be overcome / eliminated in my self-interested pursuit of my personal agenda.
The problem is that if it’s morally acceptable for me to do that, then it’s equally morally acceptable for each and every one of them to do it.
I do not want to live in a society where large fractions of the populace think of me as an NPC and are happy to kill me for my pocket change.
So I am obligated to treat them the same way I treat myself. I don’t know or care of their particular motivations, triumphs and tragedies. I merely accept that their goals and challenges are to them exactly as real and important as my goals and challenges are to me.
I’m not obligated to this POV out of sympathy for their humanity, but obligated out of selfish self-interest. Only a society that roundly rejects the people-as-NPCs line of thinking can be livable for most participants.
Anything else is Hobbesian. If you (OP) haven’t read Hobbes’ Leviathan, or at least the Cliff’s Notes I suggest you do. It’s been 500+ years since then and what he has to say about successful societies, their foundations, and their breakdown is still relevant.
I personally am smarter, wealthier, stronger, and when necessary more ruthless than about 95% of Americans. I have fought and killed and watched men die, on my side and (more) on the enemy’s. I do pretty well under the current system, despite being well below the 1% and far, far below the 0.1%. I recognize though that in a Hobbesian world full of people like you have learned to be, I’d do far worse than that.
As skew as the distribution of wealth, safety, and life satisfaction is in America today, under a widely sociopathic society it’d be vastly more so. One would be either a tycoon with a private army or one would be a peon at risk of random death every day for any reason or no reason.
IMO you flatter yourself if you imagine you’d rise to the top of that particular dog-pile.
Lastly … Above I talked of the random faceless masses we each tangentially interact with every day. What of people closer? Immediate family, extended family, neighbors, friends, co-workers, supervisors, subordinates, classmates, etc.? Are they NPCs too? If they are then to be consistent you need to treat all of them the same as the guy on the freeway. After all, they’re just bots.
Or if you treat these closer people differently, you’re admitting they belong in a separate category of human. They’re *not *bots.
Just a bit of thought will show you this dichotomy is logically untenable. The only difference between the, e.g. sister you know and view as human and the woman in the adjacent parking space you think of as bot is that you’ve met one person and not the other.
So logically either everyone is a bot or no one is a bot. Anything else is just cherrypicking for your personal convenience. An ethos should stand for something besides ill-informed and ultimately self-destructive selfishness. It at least should be self-consistent; self-consistency is how we tell sense from nonsense. A sensible argument may be right or wrong, but at least it’s sensible and the truthfulness can be evaluated. Nonsense is perforce wrong from end to end; there’s nothing to evaluate.
If everyone is a bot, then you are a bot. That’s a pretty crippling POV to adopt. It also (conveniently) doesn’t seem to be the one you have adopted.
You can persist in cherrypicking and assume that only you’ve gotten the enlightenment. IOW, everyone but you is a bot. I think that’s a logical mistake, but lets see where it takes us/you.
If you want to go there that leads to two inescapable conclusions:
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Ain’t you special! 7 billion bots and one human. Sucks to be all of us; hooray to be you. You probably ought to buy a powerball ticket or two; you’re sure to win.
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It’s damn lonely being the only human on the planet. You might be relishing your freshly self-erected pedestal right now, but that thrill won’t last.
A great many philosophers in many traditions around the planet have written extensively on this whole topic for many centuries now. You don’t have to take my word for it. If I can see farther than some it’s because I stand on (some of) the collected wisdom of the smartest most insightful humans down the centuries. You might learn to see farther too.
Or have I misinterpreted your motivations and your outlook?
p.s. You’re right that Ayn Rand was an idiot. As she herself said: “Ayn; it rhymes with swine.”
LSLGuy, I never knew how to pronounce Ayn until you just said that…
I can’t wait for the OP’s one-line rebuttal.
Philosophy from what I know is more personal opinion than any sort of truth. Experiment and observation teaches me that power is what matters. It’s the only way to enforce such opinions as truth.
Also I think you are mistaken. I know people have all those things, but it doesn’t matter. It makes no difference to me. Their feelings, emotions, dreams, views. It’s the equivalent of a talking toy. All I’m concerned with is how they can benefit me, and what I might have to do to grease the wheels to get what I want. It’s like how a car doesn’t do anything without a key in the ignition and you to push the pedals. Also without proper upkeep it won’t last long. But if it should be wrecked beyond repair, then I find something else.
I have accepted that the emotional rewards humans bring aren’t worth the investment. Just as I have also accepted that I won’t be understood by people
Oh, plenty of people understand you all right. There are numerous books written about sociopathy.
I would have to disagree with you on the being understood aspect.
Since you view us as all tools, why should we care what you think?
That statement makes no sense.
Makes perfect sense to me. Maybe you just aren’t capable of understanding us poor NPCs.
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”
No, he’s that doesn’t work, he doesn’t believe in philosophy.
And the absolute best. Humanity encompasses both extremes, sometimes in the same individual.
We aren’t the best, there is no best about humans. They suffer from the weight of their intellect and their own innovation.
Also you seem to make some false connection between npc and not caring what I think of them. Even npc’s have useful things to say.
And I said philosophy ultimately boils down to persona viewpoint/opinion. It claims to pursue truth but it’s more like a dog chasing its tail.
This is often true, although not always.
This is not true. Philosophy is a way of trying to discover truth, and among its tools is the observation of patterns. The old school of Natural Philosophy started out observing patterns in nature – like the difference between evergreen and deciduous trees – and building up knowledge that way. To libel the observational part of philosophy as “a dog chasing its tail” demonstrates a staggering ignorance of what actual philosophy involves.
(I almost said “entails.”)
Philosphy can’t even prove whether reality is real, so yes it’s a dog chasing its tail. It’s cannot know whether the way we see things is how they truly are. It’s a school that ultimately proved inadequate to understanding anything.
IMHO, sociopathy is incredibly easy to understand. You just take a normal human being and take out all of the parts that make him care. It’s actually quite boring, as psychological disorders go.
Seems more to it than that. Everyone has it to some degree. The human mind can only hold around 150 relationships at a time. Anyone beyond that is meh.
I’ve heard it’s quite freeing not having that emotional baggage.
Well, yes - that’s what makes it easy to understand. There’s a part of me who, like you, sees other people as nothing more than tools; but there is another, hopefully stronger part, that sees them as human beings and feels a connection with them. I’m sorry you seem to have that part missing.
No, research has shown that people can have, on average, circa 150 *close *relationships at any time. It says nothing about other relationships, and about how people feel about other people in general.
We all feel somewhat estranged from society from time to time, especially in our youth.
The difference recently though, is that among certain groups it’s become cool or even a badge of honor. Like there is something superior about making no effort to socialize or understand others, and rolling your eyes at others who are trying.
But if I were to answer the OP, it would be like this: There are people I like, people I don’t like and a vast majority of people I have no feelings about one way or another, and I’m basically wired up to want to put humans into those brackets.
I wish people would behave more rationally, and certain things like religion and US politics sometimes gives me that feeling, yes, that other people are NPCs. But generally when I actually talk to people, I understand them. We’re more alike than we are unalike.