Testing my netiquette skills, everything goes
Admit it, you just got access to GPT-3 and testing it on us, aren’t you?
Your Turing test has failed, boom!
I had to google what GPT-3 is and then I had to google what a Turing test is. After 15 minutes of intense wikepedia scrolling I only understood that I’m just dumb and machine learning isn’t for me
Your friends and lovers are just your pets.
People don’t choose partners (lovers/friends) as independent individuals with their own character and flaws. Rather, people simply prioritize their own pleasurable feelings reacted towards specific objects, like when you adore a cat or a dog.
To put it in another way, you simply looking for pleasurable extension of yourself in other people rather than seeking complex individuals who might not conform to your worldview
This is an interesting observation of the reality but let us explore it a little deeper. While I agree that if you see yourself into another person you tend to bond with them and have deeper relationships, I don’t come to your same conclusion. Of course a narcissistic person can see their friend/lover as just an extension of themself (and there are a lot of narcissistic people around nowadays), but if I see myself in you I also see my insecurities and my mistakes and this is the very base to positive dynamics such as empathy and compassion.
The crux of this opinion is that you can’t befriend/love another person unless you find something to relate to, something close to you personally rather their own personality. Even your mistakes / insecurities and the things you don’t like in them are all about YOU, not them.
To put it differently, you (or any non narcissist) simply cannot love someone on their own, without any personal connection to your own self.
In that sense, empathy is a way to feel good about your own ability to manipulate your personal experience in the way how other people must be feeling. You cannot know how other people feel; you’ve never experienced feelings of other people directly; your knowledge about feeling of others is just a lexical speculation; hence your empathy is just a way to feel good while acting on this speculation.
In my opinion, constructive discussion for this opinion would be analysis (is it true?, why / why not?) — B+ in that regard, and if true, examination where this opinion leads us to. To make matters easier, here’s the rest of it.
The fundamental root of this opinion is that human connection, in fact, doesn’t exist: we do not love nor hate each other. Instead, we like or dislike the feelings we get from interacting with objects we call other people.
In that sense, empathy is a way to feel good about your own ability to manipulate your personal experience in the way how other people must be feeling.
This assumes you’re operating under the assumption that you have a mental model for the other person. This is not necessary, you can be open to others feeling and thinking in very different ways than you are, and using an imperfect medium (speech) to best understand it.
Not knowing with 100% accuracy that your experience matches does not invalidate the common framework that myself and another human are operating on. You can say with reasonable certainty that a computer performing a calculation is doing so very similarly to another computer. The same is true of humans because we share similar ‘hardware’.
To simplify this down to ‘we cannot ever feel empathy, only sympathy’ can be a useful exercise to frame how little we truly do know, but to make the jump to ‘therefore everything must be framed through your own eyes’ is ignoring the shared biology we have. There are behaviors that we know humans will spontaneously show, and there have been countless discussions where ideas have some level of universality to them. To ignore these is an oversimplification and shows the error of this level of inference.
As a short aside, the model you are working with ‘you simply looking for pleasurable extension of yourself in other people’ is just proof of that error of inference. You yourself already stated that you cannot exist in the mind of others, thus it is plausible (and likely) that someone else exists which does not conform to the same model that you have proposed. Compersion is a good example of a kind of behavior which does not fit your statement.
Ok, I give up, you’ve won, good job :)
You said that way better than I did, thank you Sensei
The matter is hard to tackle without splitting the focus in multiple branches, so I’ll try my best to keep it coherent. Correct me if I misunderstood, but what your trying to say is that our love and affection for other people is not real since all we can experience, as human beings, are our own perceptions. But ins’t that true for everything? If I bite an apple isn’t what I’m experiencing in reality the electrical messages my brain translates in what we call taste? So I cannot like apples because in reality I’m just able to enjoy electrical signals?
You’ve got it, good job! Now we can invert that notion and say that if every experience is illusion and nothing is real, then all illusions we get are as real as we can get.
We may accept the fact that our vision is capable to recognize only limited range of light wavelength. Nevertheless, we may enjoy the colours in our day-to-day life, without sacrificing the knowledge that we see only fraction of what is possible.
If so then I do believe that the intrinsic qualities of a person mediates the reaction you have to the stimulus. In poor words “I know that having a relationship with you is in reality me just feeling me, but what really love means it is how you, in your unique way, are making me feel me” The fact that there is a translation in between doesn’t necessarely mean that there is an original message and that message isn’t true, does it?
“I know that having a relationship with you is in reality me just feeling me, but what really love means it is how you, in your unique way, are making me feel me"
this also happens to be a very good title for a love song
If so then I do believe that the intrinsic qualities of a person mediates the reaction you have to the stimulus.
Intrinsic qualities cannot communicate with you, only you can observe them; you can observe intrinsic qualities only in the way you know how. In other words, you dictate (even if unintentionally) how you see the person. “How you see” is largely predetermined by your own way of perception.
This way, you’re not able to observe the person on its merit (as if you were them) even if you wanted to. Basically, to observe the person if you were them is possible only if you become them — give up your conscious/unconscious self.
Imagine you see a lizard, you don’t know what it feels while passing you; It can bite you and you will feel it. You might reasonably see it as aggression. At no point you can get into its skin and understand what this bite actually meant. Even if you could talk with the lizard and it would try to explain itself, chances are you wouldn’t be able to give up your human perspective on the matter.
The fact that there is a translation in between doesn’t necessarely mean that there is an original message and that message isn’t true, does it?
Translation here means that there’s communication happening with outside world, while in this opinion piece, it’s so muddied up by unreliable narrator “self” that it’s basically just ever expanding confirmation bias
Yeah I understand the connection. The only thing that doesn’t resonate with me is that this opinion takes for granted the fact that any form of communication between human beings is faulty on every level. While it might be right that there are some things that cannot be talked about, abstract concepts as love, fear, faith and such, I think it’s a little forced IMHO to presume that NOTHING, EVER can get through the Veil.
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MODS
Being a mammal myself is hard for me to understand the dinosaurs everyday experience, what it means being generalized and called names like “prehisyoric” or “cold blooded” or even “extinct” in some cases. They for sure deserve their shot in this moment more than ever. Evolution is never about single species, it’s about the ecosystem as a whole: dinosaurs can never evolve if we don’t let us evolve with them.
Okay. OKAY. I guess we’re meant to post our fringe-ass opinions, the ones that are most likely to make people angry, thus testing your ability to remain polite?
Here goes:
I, as a human being who cares about engaging in politics, am not in any obligation to have an opinion about China, or Russia, or Ukraine, or any of those other countries. They are far, far away. There are big serious problems right here, in my country, that take priority. And besides, it’s hard enough to know truth from propaganda for things that are close, imagine for things that are far away.And even if I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, who the ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ are in these distant foreign conflicts, I do not have the power to do anything about it.
If I were to don my tinfoil hat for a paragraph or two, I feel like the constant bringing up of this or that foreign country whenever one attempts to discuss the politics of their own country is a deliberate trick to muddy the waters. I could be talking about stopping the privatisation of public services in Brazil and people on Reddit would be going “But what about <totally unrelated human rights violation in the other side of the globe>”
And even if I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, who the ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ are in these distant foreign conflicts, I do not have the power to do anything about it.
the most immediate contention most people would have that comes to mind is whether or not this assertion is accurate, particularly if you live in the united states or another country in which the country’s foreign policy is (more or less) determined by democratic elections. you can quibble with however small or large the influence actually is, but i think most people would agree that even as an individual you have some ability to influence the foreign policy of such countries (we didn’t start the war on terror or eventually leave afghanistan in a vacuum, after all) and therefore you do actually have the power to do something, it would simply be a matter of mobilizing to achieve it.
Yeah I guess what they call “whataboutism” is a mask many people wear and turns every converation into a sterile chicken fight. But instead of this thing being created and orchestrated by evil forces, I think it has more to do with people not being educated to have constructive conversations on the internet (the thing I’m trying to be here is supposed to be a sort of training to contrast that): a lot of people when they have nothing to say about a given topic feel the need to assert some kind of verbal dominance and whataboutism is one of the most used mechanism. As a wise person said, for me it’s easier to believe that people carry ignorance rather than malice.
Solid opinion.
