4 ms·

I think your identification of individuality and a measure of uniqueness is a mistake. We're not individuals apart from others, the others are presupposed. The

by sigg3 6y ago

I think your identification of individuality and a measure of uniqueness is a mistake. We're not individuals apart from others, the others are presupposed. The I is an abstraction in the sense that it presupposes social terms to understand itself. You need a reference, like culture, to be correctly understood as "alternative" (although 'peripheral' in terms of some specific aspects is more correct). If you're not in a community at all, you're not going to reproduce. Actual individuality is merely recognizing the exercised autonomy by an agent. You are still an individual even when you behave according to existing mores you did not create. (The extra social esteem bestowed to relative difference is a cultural trend and a historical phenomenon. It does not determine our species, only our current conditions and predicaments.)

ElFitz 6y ago
I fail to see how your arguments contradict my words. Each ant constantly exercises it’s autonomy. Would you nonetheless argue that it has any individuality in the way the gp intended the word?
- sigg3 6y ago
  I make two points that "contradict" here: Primarily, I argue that we're a social species and cannot employ individuality without a culture and community. This contradicts any notion of being artificially programmed by a deus ex machina. On the contrary, we program and reprogram each other reciprocally and continuously. A strong AI shaping of human kind would be parasitic to existing practice, not a new thing. Kind of like how propaganda presupposes a practice of telling the truth. Second, and perhaps wrongly so, I address the seeming notion of difference being a moral good; a sentiment I interpret in your final sentence. I might very well have misunderstood it. Being different is not good, in and of itself. Striving to be different seems to be a recipe for unhappiness, because the internal resources cannot explode the context without a major risk of ending up in social vacuity, where your actions are systemically misinterpreted and the individual itself misinterpret his or herself on the rebound. The so-called historical individual in Hegel , Nietzsche's grand most free of all superman, relies on contingent reality to succeed; in other words, the successful "being different" is a harmony of the individual's actions and intentions with existing but as of yet unexpressed social trends. Again, individuality presupposes sociality, completely opposing the view that "true individuality" is so rare. It's unfair to the ant to talk about them in human terms, and I am not an expert in ants. But a human being expressing her taste is an expression of her individuality, even though it's exactly the same thing "everyone else" think as well. What matters is that it expresses her as an individual, not that it differs from the majority.

by sigg3 6y ago

ElFitz 6y ago

I fail to see how your arguments contradict my words. Each ant constantly exercises it’s autonomy. Would you nonetheless argue that it has any individuality in the way the gp intended the word?

sigg3 6y ago
I make two points that "contradict" here: Primarily, I argue that we're a social species and cannot employ individuality without a culture and community. This contradicts any notion of being artificially programmed by a deus ex machina. On the contrary, we program and reprogram each other reciprocally and continuously. A strong AI shaping of human kind would be parasitic to existing practice, not a new thing. Kind of like how propaganda presupposes a practice of telling the truth. Second, and perhaps wrongly so, I address the seeming notion of difference being a moral good; a sentiment I interpret in your final sentence. I might very well have misunderstood it. Being different is not good, in and of itself. Striving to be different seems to be a recipe for unhappiness, because the internal resources cannot explode the context without a major risk of ending up in social vacuity, where your actions are systemically misinterpreted and the individual itself misinterpret his or herself on the rebound. The so-called historical individual in Hegel , Nietzsche's grand most free of all superman, relies on contingent reality to succeed; in other words, the successful "being different" is a harmony of the individual's actions and intentions with existing but as of yet unexpressed social trends. Again, individuality presupposes sociality, completely opposing the view that "true individuality" is so rare. It's unfair to the ant to talk about them in human terms, and I am not an expert in ants. But a human being expressing her taste is an expression of her individuality, even though it's exactly the same thing "everyone else" think as well. What matters is that it expresses her as an individual, not that it differs from the majority.