there is no such thing as a selfless act

[Joeof1]

Intent to do good acts are to make yourself feel better or to gratify some sort of internal conclusion about emotional outcome from said altruism. From this it's hard to make any other conclusion about altruism other than that it does not exist and is merely a linguistic trap to deceive others into giving without regard of their own well being. People whom are altruistic by their own accord do so out of some internal need...

 

[7ca5p]

You cant cheat anyone but yourself. It's the intent your judged by, not the deed.

Overly simplistic.

Imagine you are dying and are found by a stranger. If this stranger saved your life because they wanted to torture you, but then you escaped just after they saved you - would you then ignore the fact that you would have died were it not for that person?

Does that mean the important fact that they saved your life is just deleted from memory?

After all, there intent was to be evil, but the act was one of pure goodness, saving a life.

Then you can tell your grandchildren how evil the person who saved your life was, despite them not being able to exist without the intervention of that person.

 

[Foreigner]

My understanding of "self" is that it's an artificial and transient construct. It comes and goes. My theory is that "self" evolved as someting utilitarian for the sake of interacting with a complex physical world; it exists as a relational referent for navigation and survival strategy.

There are moments when you're a "you" and other moments where self is absent. We know this because when we meditate, self disappears. Therefore, meditation is a selfless act. So is sleeping.

Maybe people have a hard time understanding selflessness because we live in a degenerate time where semantics, logic and pure rationality are used to justify everything, and selflessness is not rooted in logic. A creative person doing an abstract work may have no method at all, or no inherent selfish desire. They simply channel creation.

Have you ever watched yourself doing something, and you don't even know why you're doing it? Where is self in that moment? Or better yet, why does self (ego) lack awareness in that moment?

Whether or not you believe in selflessness comes down to whether or not you believe the ego-based self is real and the be all and end all of perceptual reality. My experience of self (and ironically, I am "self" talking as I say this), is that it's transient to such a degree that it can only be a program like all the other thought streams happening. None of them are the real you. If you believe mind is real and the only aspect of consciousness, then selflessness cannot possibly exist because self is all there is.

If you find a calm space and quiet the mind, it will be evident that there's no self in there. And while I am not an enlightened being, I can surmise a level of spirituality where one is closer to pure action than mind, and is thus capable of many selfless acts; and not only grandios ones, but mundane everyday tasks.

A good example is a baby sitting in the middle of the road with a car heading toward it. Many people's desire to save that baby is going to be based on instinct, or, at a higher level, compassion. There is no mind involved there. There's simply action, as there's no time to think about all this semantic crap. You just act and that's that.

A heart-centred person living in a compassionate consciousness does things just for doing them, and not because of any reward. But it's going to be difficult to convey this to people not in that consciousness, because their reality is still based on a clingy self that makes constant, irrational demands. In other words, selfishness. Ayn Rand succinctly describes the overwhelming majority of humanity who do NOT cultivate heart consciousness. We may see glimpses of it, like in how people interact with their children, but as an over-arcing consciousness that coordinates entire lives? Most people just aren't there. They haven't done the necessary inner work to overcome fear, sex drives, and emotional baggage... thus their motivations shall remain selfish, and thus humanity as a whole remains in a suffering paradigm.

 

[chimneysweep]

Overly simplistic.

Imagine you are dying and are found by a stranger. If this stranger saved your life because they wanted to torture you, but then you escaped just after they saved you - would you then ignore the fact that you would have died were it not for that person?

Does that mean the important fact that they saved your life is just deleted from memory?

After all, there intent was to be evil, but the act was one of pure goodness, saving a life.

Then you can tell your grandchildren how evil the person who saved your life was, despite them not being able to exist without the intervention of that person.

The stranger's intent was bad that cannot be changed. Intent & outcome are two completely different aspects of a deed.

 

[chimneysweep]

Intent to do good acts are to make yourself feel better or to gratify some sort of internal conclusion about emotional outcome from said altruism. From this it's hard to make any other conclusion about altruism other than that it does not exist and is merely a linguistic trap to deceive others into giving without regard of their own well being. People whom are altruistic by their own accord do so out of some internal need...

No its much deeper than that. You cant manipulate intent, its the inner motivation why you are doing something.

 

[naughtynicknails]

My understanding of "self" is that it's an artificial and transient construct. It comes and goes. My theory is that "self" evolved as someting utilitarian for the sake of interacting with a complex physical world; it exists as a relational referent for navigation and survival strategy.

There are moments when you're a "you" and other moments where self is absent. We know this because when we meditate, self disappears. Therefore, meditation is a selfless act. So is sleeping.

Maybe people have a hard time understanding selflessness because we live in a degenerate time where semantics, logic and pure rationality are used to justify everything, and selflessness is not rooted in logic. A creative person doing an abstract work may have no method at all, or no inherent selfish desire. They simply channel creation.

Have you ever watched yourself doing something, and you don't even know why you're doing it? Where is self in that moment? Or better yet, why does self (ego) lack awareness in that moment?

Whether or not you believe in selflessness comes down to whether or not you believe the ego-based self is real and the be all and end all of perceptual reality. My experience of self (and ironically, I am "self" talking as I say this), is that it's transient to such a degree that it can only be a program like all the other thought streams happening. None of them are the real you. If you believe mind is real and the only aspect of consciousness, then selflessness cannot possibly exist because self is all there is.

If you find a calm space and quiet the mind, it will be evident that there's no self in there. And while I am not an enlightened being, I can surmise a level of spirituality where one is closer to pure action than mind, and is thus capable of many selfless acts; and not only grandios ones, but mundane everyday tasks.

A good example is a baby sitting in the middle of the road with a car heading toward it. Many people's desire to save that baby is going to be based on instinct, or, at a higher level, compassion. There is no mind involved there. There's simply action, as there's no time to think about all this semantic crap. You just act and that's that.

A heart-centred person living in a compassionate consciousness does things just for doing them, and not because of any reward. But it's going to be difficult to convey this to people not in that consciousness, because their reality is still based on a clingy self that makes constant, irrational demands. In other words, selfishness. Ayn Rand succinctly describes the overwhelming majority of humanity who do NOT cultivate heart consciousness. We may see glimpses of it, like in how people interact with their children, but as an over-arcing consciousness that coordinates entire lives? Most people just aren't there. They haven't done the necessary inner work to overcome fear, sex drives, and emotional baggage... thus their motivations shall remain selfish, and thus humanity as a whole remains in a suffering paradigm.

I don't think you quite understand what self is. It's not ego.

It's a very complex mix of conscious and unconscious. What you needs to survive, what you want to survive, what you need to be content, what you want to be content, what you need to be happy, what you want to be happy, and so on.

Not everything is a conscious act or even thought. But that doesn't mean your "self" isn't doing it.

 

[chimneysweep]

So who or what was Shakespeare referring to when he wrote something like "unto thy own self be true"

 

[naughtynicknails]

A persons moral code, i suspect.

 

[Foreigner]

I don't think you quite understand what self is. It's not ego.

It's a very complex mix of conscious and unconscious. What you needs to survive, what you want to survive, what you need to be content, what you want to be content, what you need to be happy, what you want to be happy, and so on.

Not everything is a conscious act or even thought. But that doesn't mean your "self" isn't doing it.

Conscious or not, self comes from the brain, and is learned. When you talk to your mother, a different set of neural patterns will engage compared to when you talk to your best friend, your boss, a group of people, etc. Outwardly you seem like the same person engaging but inwardly the brain has a different set of heuristic networks and responses spanning many different learned situations, and "self" cannot be found in any of them. Yet we all have an experience of an observer that sees the events unfolding.

There is no evidence, scientific or otherwise, that self is real. The experiencer watching self is something else entirely. I disagree that ego and self are separate, but that's a semantic distinction that isn't worth arguing over.

Right now I'm just debating the idea that all humans are inherently selfish and there is no such thing as altruism. If we can't prove at a basic level than self even exists than that opens the door for most of our lives actually being selfless. Besides which, there is evidence for many selfless acts and tasks, from the mundane to the great, in our history.

Humans who believe that other humans can only be selfish are selfish. They're projecting their inner reality outward. Someone who is compassionate sees the world as being filled with compassion. It's just a product of perspective.

 

[7ca5p]

No its much deeper than that. You cant manipulate intent, its the inner motivation why you are doing something.

So would you be grateful for your life? Would you tell your children to be grateful for their lives? Or would you inform them that you and they only existed because of an evil intention? Would that render their whole existence evil?

Would you be ungrateful for your own life? Would your existence from then on be tainted with evil?

Imagine they've saved you're life, and perhaps you never even realised their malicious intentions. Would you then think how great they were? And how malevolent they were as a being?

These are the questions that led me to say you were being too simplistic.

I think this whole "Good Vs Evil" thing is a distinctly human trait, that the grand cosmos doesn't even care about.

 

[naughtynicknails]

Conscious or not, self comes from the brain, and is learned. When you talk to your mother, a different set of neural patterns will engage compared to when you talk to your best friend, your boss, a group of people, etc. Outwardly you seem like the same person engaging but inwardly the brain has a different set of heuristic networks and responses spanning many different learned situations, and "self" cannot be found in any of them. Yet we all have an experience of an observer that sees the events unfolding.

They are all part of self, though. I would say that self = you. What you think, what you believe in, how you behave, your memories, your hopes, etc etc. Your brain = you. There may be different parts of it, sure. There's the how i talk, behave and think when I'm angry. There's the way i talk, act and think around different people. But they are all me.

I disagree that ego and self are separate, but that's a semantic distinction that isn't worth arguing over.

I didn't mean to sound like ego and self are entirely separate, but they are definitely not the same thing. Ego is just a piece of self.

 

[L2R]

Intent to do good acts are to make yourself feel better or to gratify some sort of internal conclusion about emotional outcome from said altruism. From this it's hard to make any other conclusion about altruism other than that it does not exist and is merely a linguistic trap to deceive others into giving without regard of their own well being. People whom are altruistic by their own accord do so out of some internal need...

so people who jump in front of trains to help strangers from the tracks do so after considering the post gratification?

8)
sure.

 

[kaywholed]

so people who jump in front of trains to help strangers from the tracks do so after considering the post gratification?

8)
sure.

the human brain is a fucking amazing computer. you can run parallel apps, suck up high def sensor data and process everything hella fast.

in an instant a human can process the outcomes of what to do: help and become a hero, try to help and die, do nothing, and model each scenario in numerous variation to choose the best path.

 

[Joeof1]

so people who jump in front of trains to help strangers from the tracks do so after considering the post gratification?

8)
sure.

On a sub-conscious level they acted because they thought they could and could not stomach watching a person die without acting, so yes.

 

[L2R]

^the mind doesn't work like that. we have intuitive responses programmed by our lives up until any specific point of action/non-action. there is no subconscious rationality at work.

the human brain is a fucking amazing computer. you can run parallel apps, suck up high def sensor data and process everything hella fast.

in an instant a human can process the outcomes of what to do: help and become a hero, try to help and die, do nothing, and model each scenario in numerous variation to choose the best path.

it's good but its not that good.

all there is time for is a sense of confidence and the impression of "i can help"... that's it.

 

[naughtynicknails]

so people who jump in front of trains to help strangers from the tracks do so after considering the post gratification?

8)
sure.

Knowing they'd die or thinking they MIGHT?

Huge difference.

Shame it's impossible to ask someone that thought about it long enough to make a conscious decision to kill themselves for a stranger.

 

[L2R]

Tell me what you think the difference is and how it is relevant.

 

[Joeof1]

^the mind doesn't work like that. we have intuitive responses programmed by our lives up until any specific point of action/non-action. there is no subconscious rationality at work.

Which is not true, it's part of the fight or flight motives and yes you can train yourself to take actions and make decisions that quickly. I know, because the military actively does this, I went through the training myself.

The majority of the training for the trigger pullers is target identification and threat assessment. Which are both rationalizations processed by your sub-conscious. The majority of CQB training is exactly that. You are teaching your sub-conscious to process the situation and working the CNS engrams to recruit proper patterns for whatever the desired response is so that once the choice is made the action is essentially automatic.

Tell me what you think the difference is and how it is relevant.

Because despite what you think yourself, people can and often do process information that quickly and do make assessments, whether they are aware of it or not.

 

[L2R]

Get back at me once you've done some actual study of the mind. It's clear you don't understand what I am saying. You're not even responding to what you think you are responding to.

 

[Joeof1]

Get back at me once you've done some actual study of the mind. It's clear you don't understand what I am saying. You're not even responding to what you think you are responding to.

Get back at me when you have an actual rebuttal instead of this appeal to authority fallacy nonsense. I'm not one of these kids that will be impressed by your display of presumed superiority here. I have been here just as long as you, and have done more than just "studied the mind".

The vast majority of military training is simply teaching how to think on the move like that.