I had a teacher in highschool that presented the philosophical argument that no one ever does anything that is truly selfless. The argument was exactly what you mentioned, that if someone is doing something that appears selfless, they’re actually doing it in hopes that someone notices and thinks more highly of them.
This would have been an interesting rebuttal to the argument. If you return a shopping cart in an empty parking lot, does that make you selfless? Kind of like a modern version of a tree falling in a forest…
I’m not doing it for the goodness of my heart or being selfless. I enjoy following the rules.I do it for me, not for the person using the cart next or the store employees. You can argue I’m kind of an asshole for it, actually.
i don’t think true selflessness exists, but i also think that is completely and utterly irrelevant.
Everything is fundamentally fueled by selfishness, but it seems to be a fundamental truth of the universe that cooperation is optimal for an individual if they can achieve it.
for example cooperation is the thing that allows us and animals like ants to be so hilariously more successful than other species, and on an ecosystem level everyone is cooperating since their chemical structures are compatible. If something were to evolve to use mirrored sugar (which is incompatible with the version of sugar molecules we use) then they’d have nothing but themselves to eat and thus promptly starve.
That just reminded me of the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. The author talks about how we beat out other Homo species not due to our intelligence or our strength, but due to our ability to cooperate among large groups. If you took 10 humans and pitted them in a fight against 10 Neanderthals or even 10 chimps, we would lose. But if you took 200 humans against 200 of them, we would win every time.
i would caution against taking that as gospel, afaik we don’t really know why other species died out yet, and we have very clear evidence that our species interbred a whole heck of a lot.
it’s probably a whole host of reasons that led to us surviving alone, including stuff like being able to survive on very little food, and hey maybe we to some degree simply interbred to the point that their species dissolved into ours.
imagine being a buff neanderthal and encountering these strange lithe people with less hair and suddenly that pretty girl in another neanderthal tribe you had your eyes on is completely forgotten.
I had a teacher in highschool that presented the philosophical argument that no one ever does anything that is truly selfless. The argument was exactly what you mentioned, that if someone is doing something that appears selfless, they’re actually doing it in hopes that someone notices and thinks more highly of them.
This would have been an interesting rebuttal to the argument. If you return a shopping cart in an empty parking lot, does that make you selfless? Kind of like a modern version of a tree falling in a forest…
I’m not doing it for the goodness of my heart or being selfless. I enjoy following the rules.I do it for me, not for the person using the cart next or the store employees. You can argue I’m kind of an asshole for it, actually.
i don’t think true selflessness exists, but i also think that is completely and utterly irrelevant.
Everything is fundamentally fueled by selfishness, but it seems to be a fundamental truth of the universe that cooperation is optimal for an individual if they can achieve it.
for example cooperation is the thing that allows us and animals like ants to be so hilariously more successful than other species, and on an ecosystem level everyone is cooperating since their chemical structures are compatible. If something were to evolve to use mirrored sugar (which is incompatible with the version of sugar molecules we use) then they’d have nothing but themselves to eat and thus promptly starve.
That just reminded me of the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. The author talks about how we beat out other Homo species not due to our intelligence or our strength, but due to our ability to cooperate among large groups. If you took 10 humans and pitted them in a fight against 10 Neanderthals or even 10 chimps, we would lose. But if you took 200 humans against 200 of them, we would win every time.
i would caution against taking that as gospel, afaik we don’t really know why other species died out yet, and we have very clear evidence that our species interbred a whole heck of a lot.
it’s probably a whole host of reasons that led to us surviving alone, including stuff like being able to survive on very little food, and hey maybe we to some degree simply interbred to the point that their species dissolved into ours.
imagine being a buff neanderthal and encountering these strange lithe people with less hair and suddenly that pretty girl in another neanderthal tribe you had your eyes on is completely forgotten.