I don’t do selfishness. Partially this is because I don’t believe in personal identity, partially because I feel like there’s no fundamental difference between me and anyone else, and partially because it doesn’t make sense to me intuitively. As such, I try to help myself as much as is necessary to help people in general.
I agree with you about personal identity but I don’t think this ontological fact implies that people have no reason to behave in ways we call ‘selfish’. A person’s seemingly irrational concern for ‘themselves’ can be regarded as a proxy for concern about the various projects that person is involved in, which would go awry in their absence.
(However, I suspect this is only a small ingredient of the psychological explanation for why people behave ‘selfishly’, and to the extent that other factors are involved, they are non-rational. But let’s put this in perspective—the decision to digest or throw up your stomach contents is also non-rational. For the most part the ‘decisions’ made would seem ‘sensible’ to an outside observer. However, when your body is determined to make the ‘wrong’ decision one can’t (always) override it with free will alone. (It certainly doesn’t make sense to try to ‘talk your stomach round’, or ‘punish’ it if it chooses the wrong action.) Similarly, it’s to be expected that a person who shares our view about the non-existence of identity will continue to act selfishly for hidden reasons, even when this has nothing to do with ‘advancing their projects’.)
It’s only when we start talking about cryonics, teleportation and cloning that the hidden absurdity of ‘selfhood’ comes to light.
It’s only when we start talking about cryonics, teleportation and cloning that the hidden absurdity of ‘selfhood’ comes to light.
What absurdity? Here’s you, Neil, and that’s Tyler. It’s possible to tell who of you two is Neil and who is not. A copy-Neil might be about the same thing as Neil, but this doesn’t interfere with the simplicity of telling that Tyler is not the same thing. You can well care about Neil-like things more than about Tyler-like things. It’s plausible from an evolutionary psychology standpoint that humans care about themselves more than other people. By “myself” I mean “a thing like the one I’m pointing at”, and the rest is a process of evaluating this symbolic reference into a more self-contained definition; this simple reference is sufficient to specify the intended meaning.
What I meant was that the common situation whereby a person both (i) believes in persisting subjective identity (sameness of Cartesian Theater over time) and (ii) attaches massive importance to it (e.g. using words like ‘death’ to refer to its extinction), doesn’t obviously or frequently give rise to irrational decision-making until we start talking about things like cryonics, teleportation and cloning.
I apologise for the unclarity of my final sentence if you took me to be saying something stronger.
A person’s seemingly irrational concern for ‘themselves’ can be regarded as a proxy for concern about the various projects that person is involved in, which would go awry in their absence.
I think you might be under the illusion that desires are rational,
Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions. - David Hume
I agree with you about personal identity but I don’t think this ontological fact implies that people have no reason to behave in ways we call ‘selfish’. A person’s seemingly irrational concern for ‘themselves’ can be regarded as a proxy for concern about the various projects that person is involved in, which would go awry in their absence.
(However, I suspect this is only a small ingredient of the psychological explanation for why people behave ‘selfishly’, and to the extent that other factors are involved, they are non-rational. But let’s put this in perspective—the decision to digest or throw up your stomach contents is also non-rational. For the most part the ‘decisions’ made would seem ‘sensible’ to an outside observer. However, when your body is determined to make the ‘wrong’ decision one can’t (always) override it with free will alone. (It certainly doesn’t make sense to try to ‘talk your stomach round’, or ‘punish’ it if it chooses the wrong action.) Similarly, it’s to be expected that a person who shares our view about the non-existence of identity will continue to act selfishly for hidden reasons, even when this has nothing to do with ‘advancing their projects’.)
It’s only when we start talking about cryonics, teleportation and cloning that the hidden absurdity of ‘selfhood’ comes to light.
What absurdity? Here’s you, Neil, and that’s Tyler. It’s possible to tell who of you two is Neil and who is not. A copy-Neil might be about the same thing as Neil, but this doesn’t interfere with the simplicity of telling that Tyler is not the same thing. You can well care about Neil-like things more than about Tyler-like things. It’s plausible from an evolutionary psychology standpoint that humans care about themselves more than other people. By “myself” I mean “a thing like the one I’m pointing at”, and the rest is a process of evaluating this symbolic reference into a more self-contained definition; this simple reference is sufficient to specify the intended meaning.
What I meant was that the common situation whereby a person both (i) believes in persisting subjective identity (sameness of Cartesian Theater over time) and (ii) attaches massive importance to it (e.g. using words like ‘death’ to refer to its extinction), doesn’t obviously or frequently give rise to irrational decision-making until we start talking about things like cryonics, teleportation and cloning.
I apologise for the unclarity of my final sentence if you took me to be saying something stronger.
I think you might be under the illusion that desires are rational,
after all.