An Empathic Lens and a Connected Universe

[Brant Gaede]

Rand claimed she had no faith, only convictions... Isn't it faith that we place in ourselves when we decide to face uncertain challenges?

Why?

--Brant

[Dglgmut]

We have to believe that our effort is not in vain. If we do not know for certain, does that not mean we act on faith?

I'll use chess as an analogy, again. When you make a move that doesn't force a particular reaction, you are using faith as your guide. If you don't know exactly what will result from the moves you make, you are only trying to make things easier on your future self, rather than determine anything in the present. You are saying, "If I move here, I trust I will be able to deal with anything my opponent does afterward."

[Dglgmut]

The answer is to stop the approach of judging before understanding and pull back the covers to set truth and understanding first. It is to deal with the problem where it really exists and where we do legitimately have control: in the damaged parts of our own self.

I don't like the word "judging". What do we mean by it, "evaluating"? People say, "Don't be so critical." Like critical thinking?

Of course I agree with your main point in this quote, but seriously, I don't think judging is the right word. First of all, "judging" always means negative, in the context you used. So is it judging, or is it something else? I think it is a defense mechanism that has nothing to do with thinking, but rather the obstruction of legitimate thought.

This is part of becoming programmed by others. And that's the real issue that anyone has to deal with... being programmed.

Not caring what other people think means ignoring their programming.

Edit: Rand emphasized justice a lot... Justice is a corollary of non-contradiction. A person is a person. What's right is what is best for us, but why is it good for us to be fair? Is that not more utilitarian than personal?

You could argue about economic theories being based in utility or morality, but if morality means what is best for you, then anything else is utilitarian. No? Morality is not about what's good for man, but what is good for a man.

Empathy is good as long as it is just, and justice is good as long as it is moral. So... is justice necessarily good? I believe it probably is but I don't know how to prove it.

Is being fair good for me, and why?

[Brant Gaede]

We have to believe that our effort is not in vain. If we do not know for certain, does that not mean we act on faith?

I'll use chess as an analogy, again. When you make a move that doesn't force a particular reaction, you are using faith as your guide. If you don't know exactly what will result from the moves you make, you are only trying to make things easier on your future self, rather than determine anything in the present. You are saying, "If I move here, I trust I will be able to deal with anything my opponent does afterward."

Calculated risk taking has nothing to do with faith--as a leap of faith. Life is a series of calculated risks or risk-reward. You calculate with your thinking brain. It's not faith, it's reason.

--Brant

[Dglgmut]

I understand that, but if you knew for sure that you would fail, would you try?

Faith, hope, whatever you want to call it... you have to have it.

[Paul Mawdsley]

Paul, I wasn't talking about "caring about people", but caring about what people think. You can care about someone without caring what they think; parenting takes a lot of this, no? And often, caring what other people think (of us), does not entail caring about them.

Calvin, sorry my jumping off point was unclear. When I was talking about "caring about people," I was simple giving context to my perspective on caring about what others think. From my perspective I don't agree that the reason I care what other people think is because I "believe they can judge whether [i am] living correctly or not." Quite frankly, I don't care what someone thinks or judges about me when they haven't taken the time to see and understand me. Their thoughts and judgements are not of me but are of some fictional character they have in the stories in their heads.

I honed this perspective while in a relationship with a woman who started to go through cycles of seeing me through projections of relationships in her past. The irony was that the safer I made her feel, the more she started reliving past traumas by projecting ghosts of relationships past onto me. She would cycle from giving me the deepest sense of visibility in my life, in some moments, to feeling like she was seeing someone else completely in others. As crazy making as it was, it was an amazing learning experience. I learned the importance of having a broad base of friendships feeding back to me a strong sense of how I am perceived and the importance of having a strong inner sense of who I am. I am now very certain about when someone's view or judgement of me is off base. Her crazy didn't become my crazy...almost, but not quite.

Paul

[Paul Mawdsley]

The answer is to stop the approach of judging before understanding and pull back the covers to set truth and understanding first. It is to deal with the problem where it really exists and where we do legitimately have control: in the damaged parts of our own self.

I don't like the word "judging". What do we mean by it, "evaluating"? People say, "Don't be so critical." Like critical thinking?

My point was about judging before understanding. I see judging as the black and white evaluations we make about right or wrong, true or false and good or bad. These are all rational judgments. Beneath these are emotional judgments based on: for me or against me. When we tie our sense of self to maintaining our inside story with ourselves being elevated, our emotional judgments are in a position to subvert our rational judgments. Our need for a story that can fill the void of our damaged self-esteem sets the emotional judgment of "for me or against me" to weed out information that doesn't fit our story. This puts our emotional needs ahead of what is true, what is right and what is good. It puts emotional judgment before understanding.

[anthony]

Sorry I will need to read over these replies again. But right now a couple things:

Tony, of course it is best for us is we are able to grasp reality with our own mind. And what I'm getting to, I think, is that we all want what's best for ourselves, and selfishness is not what needs to be advocated. I'll give an example below.

Paul, I wasn't talking about "caring about people", but caring about what people think. You can care about someone without caring what they think; parenting takes a lot of this, no? And often, caring what other people think (of us), does not entail caring about them.

You care, means you care about someone - which means you care what they think - which means you care what they think about you. What's the confusion? See it hierarchically, and everyone outside one's chosen ambit - unknown people - does not feature in one caring for, or second-guessing their judgment of one, or owing anything to (except for one's general good-will to them.)

"Selfishness is not what needs to be advocated" has me puzzled. Don't you think the most selfish action in life

is one's advance towards grasping reality with one's own mind? You've blithely eliminated one section of bedrock which rational egoism rests upon. Ouch!

[Brant Gaede]

I understand that, but if you knew for sure that you would fail, would you try?

Faith, hope, whatever you want to call it... you have to have it.

And just what are we talking about? It's time to concretize this. Also, failure comes in a variety of flavors depending on the variability of situations. Have you reduced this to existence in a concentration camp? Faith and hope, of course, aren't the same things. You hope the light at the end of the tunnel isn't a train coming toward you. If you have faith you might pray.

Your request for absolutism seemingly as an excuse for not acting is off-putting.

--Brant

God helps those who help themselves

the baby learning to walk keeps failing--keeps falling down

[Dglgmut]

But Brant, hope and faith are the same when it comes to action. "Never lose faith/hope." They're interchangeable here. You wouldn't go into the tunnel unless you had hope/faith that it wasn't a train.

If someone asked you to make a bet with a 99% chance of you winning, isn't it your faith in the odds that makes you bet? Say you bet $100 and by chance you lost, even with great odds, can we now say that it was faith that made you bet?

When we make choices we have to ignore certain possible outcomes, because we can't undo a choice. Call it calculated risk, that doesn't take away the reality of the inevitable uncertainty in life. We have to act without knowing the exact result of our actions, and so it's where we place our faith that is important.

Believing in God is a calculated risk; that's how a lot of people sell it, too. "But what if you're wrong?" What if? They're calculations are bad, yes, but there's no eliminating the risk part. The safest bet is to learn how to look after and think for ourselves, but a lot of people don't believe that.

Trial and error is how we learn new things, how do we learn to trust ourselves? By succeeding?

[Dglgmut]

"Selfishness is not what needs to be advocated" has me puzzled. Don't you think the most selfish action in life

is one's advance towards grasping reality with one's own mind?

My reply to this was:

Surely people have selfish reasons for being interested in what a priest can tell them. They want to be guided, for their own sake. The problem is not self-interest, but faith in oneself.

If that is not enough then I ask, what if someone disagrees that "one's advance towards grasping reality with one's own mind" is the most selfish? What if they think that's impossible, and therefore a waste of time? Now what advice do you have for them?

[anthony]

I'd say - if the parish priest were his best bet for knowledge about himself and his life - "How can you

stand not knowing for yourself?" If he disputed that knowledge is a highly selfish value, I'd say he denies

that his observation, induction and subsequent concepts are what he needs to understand rational

egoism, which is a concept which he won't understand because he denies that concepts are attainable

or important enough, and ego-driven -- and round and round the tautology goes...

[Dglgmut]

Tony, I'm not talking about knowledge, as a value. The example I gave was a person who distrusts himself, and therefore accepts a second-hand code of morality.

It's not that he can bear not knowing himself, but that he thinks his best odds are with what everyone else is doing.

How do you convince him that he's capable of forming his own moral code?

My argument is that you can't. There is no proof, only faith. You either believe in yourself or you don't.

[Brant Gaede]

But Brant, hope and faith are the same when it comes to action. "Never lose faith/hope." They're interchangeable here. You wouldn't go into the tunnel unless you had hope/faith that it wasn't a train.

If someone asked you to make a bet with a 99% chance of you winning, isn't it your faith in the odds that makes you bet? Say you bet $100 and by chance you lost, even with great odds, can we now say that it was faith that made you bet?

When we make choices we have to ignore certain possible outcomes, because we can't undo a choice. Call it calculated risk, that doesn't take away the reality of the inevitable uncertainty in life. We have to act without knowing the exact result of our actions, and so it's where we place our faith that is important.

Believing in God is a calculated risk; that's how a lot of people sell it, too. "But what if you're wrong?" What if? They're calculations are bad, yes, but there's no eliminating the risk part. The safest bet is to learn how to look after and think for ourselves, but a lot of people don't believe that.

Trial and error is how we learn new things, how do we learn to trust ourselves? By succeeding?

A 99% chance of winning is a good bet if you can afford to lose. No faith required. A series of 99% bets is a 100% chance of winning overall. That's how it's done in Vegas with much worse odds for the House. Believing in God is no more a calculated risk than believing you might be swooped up by a UFO and eaten by aliens unless you take precautions. "Calculated" and "faith" don't go together. If you believe in God it's faith or bull shit.

--Brant

[Paul Mawdsley]

I'm definitely siding with Tony and Brant on this set of exchanges.

When someone holds a seemingly untenable position, and a position that doesn't fit well with what I have heard from them in the past, without showing signs of reflecting, questioning and evaluating their position in the presence of peer opposition, I start to question the motives for their position. Right now, Calvin, I am questioning your motives in these exchanges. Are you motivated by an inner search for the truth or are you motivated to engage others and draw attention to yourself to raise your sense of self-importance? My gut is telling me to back out of this exchange because it is becoming an energy sucker. Calvin, you seem to have lost the drive to put the work in yourself to seek the truth. This is starting to feel like someone projecting helplessness to get others to do all the work for them and make them feel important. Please prove me wrong.

Paul

[Dglgmut]

I'm just exploring as usual. Whenever I have an idea I take it as far as I can before thinking about something else.

I don't think I'm far off from the truth though. Think of intuition. That is completely faith based. It's making a decision without really knowing why.

There is such a thing as self-doubt, and there is such a thing as trusting yourself when you don't know for sure.

This has a lot to do with social interactions, because other people's views may seem to conflict with our intuition. So what do you do?

Am I projecting helplessness? I don't know that I was leaning one way or another. I would say Rand and her heroes had faith in themselves. They didn't know what the future would hold, but they trusted they would be able to deal with it.

I'm trying to lay out the debate between the two ends of the spectrum. Is it self-interest vs altruism? Or is it faith in oneself vs faith in others (for ones own self-interest)?

[Xray]

I'm trying to lay out the debate between the two ends of the spectrum. Is it self-interest vs altruism?

Can you think of one single action performed by humans where self-interest doesn't factor in?

[Dglgmut]

In The Virtue of Selfishness is an essay called Isn't Everyone Selfish by Nathaniel Branden that addresses your question.

I think you are right, that all action is rooted in self-interest. But an explanation is needed. I'm exploring the possibility of faith playing a role in how we decide what is in our self-interest.

[Brant Gaede]

In The Virtue of Selfishness is an essay called Isn't Everyone Selfish by Nathaniel Branden that addresses your question.

I think you are right, that all action is rooted in self-interest. But an explanation is needed. I'm exploring the possibility of faith playing a role in how we decide what is in our self-interest.

Okay, then it is up to you to first define the word so everybody isn't talking by everyone else.

--Brant

[Dglgmut]

Fair enough. Faith is a belief in something without proof.

The premise that we must act for a reason is more important than that definition, though. If there is not a definite reason to act, because of the natural uncertainty of life, we must believe we are acting for a cause that we may, in effect, not be.

Yes, when we take risks we know that there is a chance that we may fail. Do we think about it? Not while acting. I don't think we can possibly act deliberately, while simultaneously considering the possibility of an undesirable outcome.

When you make a bet that is an almost certain win, you are still taking a risk. You may, in effect, be hurting yourself, but you mentally evade that possibility so that you may place the bet.

To take a risk, we must believe we are doing the right thing. Is this premise true?

[anthony]

I'm just exploring as usual. Whenever I have an idea I take it as far as I can before thinking about something else.

I don't think I'm far off from the truth though. Think of intuition. That is completely faith based. It's making a decision without really knowing why.

There is such a thing as self-doubt, and there is such a thing as trusting yourself when you don't know for sure.

This has a lot to do with social interactions, because other people's views may seem to conflict with our intuition. So what do you do?

Am I projecting helplessness? I don't know that I was leaning one way or another. I would say Rand and her heroes had faith in themselves. They didn't know what the future would hold, but they trusted they would be able to deal with it.

I'm trying to lay out the debate between the two ends of the spectrum. Is it self-interest vs altruism? Or is it faith in oneself vs faith in others (for ones own self-interest)?

I think what you're getting at is really the debate between Faith (intrinsicism) and skepticism. They both hold omniscience in common - one fakes having it, the other is pissed off at not having it (so basically says knowledge is not possible to one.)

O'ism says neither is right, and that certainty of knowledge is always contextual.

You act on what you know, right now. You act to the full extent of your honesty - one might say - very seldom on an absolute truth. Then you easily 'forgive yourself' for possible subsequent mistakes.

As long as you rule out the fallacy of omniscience , and are aware that knowledge is contextual - you CAN act, and are not frozen from self-doubt.

There's where the rational selfishness comes from, that you don't need faith, or others' opinions.

Fair enough, Calvin - perhaps you know Arthur C. Clarke's 3rd Law : "The only way of discovering the limits

of the possible, is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."

When I read it, it rang a bell for me...

(But man, you have to know how to not go out too far, and how to come back to reality again!)

[Dglgmut]

Sorry guys, I'll drop it. I was wrong.

If it makes you feel any better I wasted way more of my time than yours.

[Brant Gaede]

Fair enough. Faith is a belief in something without proof.

I think I see the problem. Reason can result in a proof, but a proof is a highly specialized and structured bunch of evidence reasoned out in certain ways. Faith is a claimed way to knowledge sans reason or a belief in something sans reason. You almost got there.

--Brant

[Brant Gaede]

Sorry guys, I'll drop it. I was wrong.

If it makes you feel any better I wasted way more of my time than yours.

? I didn't waste my time. If you were wrong, why were you wrong--and about what?

--Brant

[Dglgmut]

First of all, the premise that we have to believe we are acting for a definite purpose is false. We can act without even knowing why, and there are degrees in between. Buying a lottery ticket, people don't expect to win, but there is a part of them that isn't really conscious, and that part acts based on emotion (specifically the feeling that they are special, for some reason).

Secondly, I don't think faith is the issue between collectivist and individualist philosophies. Self-doubt is definitely important, because it's what leads people to blindly trust the majority. However, it's not faith in oneself that is needed to correct that, it's just honesty.