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In future discussions, you might have better luck eliciting useful responses from people when you don’t pit them to argue against an AI, IMO. It reads to me lik

by lumb63 3y ago

In future discussions, you might have better luck eliciting useful responses from people when you don’t pit them to argue against an AI, IMO. It reads to me like “I didn’t want to put in the effort to generate my own thoughts, but I expect you to: good luck!” That aside I’ll focus on the Maslow point since I think it’s the easiest to discuss and has the most obvious carryover to a lot of the other points. Maslow tells us we have a hierarchy of needs. At the top of that is self-actualization, but we need to fulfill all the lower-level needs before we feel any need for self actualization. I strongly doubt anyone would be disappointed that they are not “actualizing themselves” if they were fighting every day for food, shelter, etc. self-actualization is basically what Ted describes as a “surrogate activity” - a need we have made up because all our “real” needs have been met, and now we have all this spare time with which we have to do something. So we create new needs for ourselves to fill our time. You can carry this concept, of our needs being relative to our position in life, over to a lot of the other philosophies you listed. Concepts like love, generosity, pleasure, purpose, are all relative. From a modern western perspective, generosity might be buying a friend a nice gift, cooking someone dinner, etc. Those are much smaller in magnitude than, say, sharing the limited food and resources you gathered with your tribe so that they can all survive. We today think of pleasure as sex, or achieving a goal, or seeing something that makes us happy in passing. Those probably pale in comparison to the sense of pleasure of knowing a hard day’s work allowed you to live another day in a hostile environment. We think of purpose as what we were put on this earth to do. Had we not all the resources we needed, and had to work for them, I think it’s very reasonable to expect our sense of “purpose” would change to match our capabilities. You can even see evidence of this in modern society by comparing high and low income areas. Children from lower income areas, where their physical and emotional needs are not being met, don’t get as good of grades. Why should they care about who built the pyramids or how to work a Bunsen burner when they don’t know where dinner is coming from?

bbor 3y ago
Sorry if I offended by bringing up the AI - I was trying to use it to offer many possible avenues of more specific disagreement, so I could understand their stance better. Less about convincing or arguing. On the rest of it… I think i asked a bunch of questions last night and am now facing the harsh reality that the answer is “some people see the whole shape of the world and human experience completely differently than I do and always have”. So not too much to discuss lol To illustrate that, consider “ I strongly doubt anyone would be disappointed that they are not “actualizing themselves” if they were fighting every day for food, shelter, etc.”. I find this absolutely insane (no offense). You bring up poor modern people in the end, and I think that’s a great example of my concerns: being poor sucks, not knowing where your next meal come from feels terrible, and watching loved ones die of preventable causes is fucking heartbreaking. The idea that poverty/primitivism would lead to better self-actualization is so, so far from how I see the world that I think debate is impossible Thanks for the detailed response! Appreciate the dialogue, for sure. EDIT: on re-read it appears your point is that if we’re struggling for the lower needs, we won’t miss the higher ones. That’s not my understanding of Maslow, but since his theory isn’t really about happiness at all but motivation, I can’t appeal to the author there. It just seems very counter-intuitive that higher needs would not be missed while struggling to achieve lower ones; for example, does someone without shelter not miss love?
- lumb63 3y ago
  Of course I’m only speculating on how someone who has lived their entire life primitively might feel - I haven’t done that myself. I’m looking at things from the perspective of if I were born into a tribal, primitive society. As you alluded to in your previous post, things clearly change when you’ve lived a modern life. Having lived a modern life, we know that the diseases primitive societies face are preventable. We know that we don’t need to struggle for food. If we didn’t know that, we’d probably feel differently. For example, a lot of primitive cultures have very different relationships and views of death. I think that “going from modern to primitive life” versus “always living a primitive life” is a huge difference.

by lumb63 3y ago

bbor 3y ago

Sorry if I offended by bringing up the AI - I was trying to use it to offer many possible avenues of more specific disagreement, so I could understand their stance better. Less about convincing or arguing. On the rest of it… I think i asked a bunch of questions last night and am now facing the harsh reality that the answer is “some people see the whole shape of the world and human experience completely differently than I do and always have”. So not too much to discuss lol To illustrate that, consider “ I strongly doubt anyone would be disappointed that they are not “actualizing themselves” if they were fighting every day for food, shelter, etc.”. I find this absolutely insane (no offense). You bring up poor modern people in the end, and I think that’s a great example of my concerns: being poor sucks, not knowing where your next meal come from feels terrible, and watching loved ones die of preventable causes is fucking heartbreaking. The idea that poverty/primitivism would lead to better self-actualization is so, so far from how I see the world that I think debate is impossible Thanks for the detailed response! Appreciate the dialogue, for sure. EDIT: on re-read it appears your point is that if we’re struggling for the lower needs, we won’t miss the higher ones. That’s not my understanding of Maslow, but since his theory isn’t really about happiness at all but motivation, I can’t appeal to the author there. It just seems very counter-intuitive that higher needs would not be missed while struggling to achieve lower ones; for example, does someone without shelter not miss love?

lumb63 3y ago
Of course I’m only speculating on how someone who has lived their entire life primitively might feel - I haven’t done that myself. I’m looking at things from the perspective of if I were born into a tribal, primitive society. As you alluded to in your previous post, things clearly change when you’ve lived a modern life. Having lived a modern life, we know that the diseases primitive societies face are preventable. We know that we don’t need to struggle for food. If we didn’t know that, we’d probably feel differently. For example, a lot of primitive cultures have very different relationships and views of death. I think that “going from modern to primitive life” versus “always living a primitive life” is a huge difference.