--- Captain Cyborg <chris at susi.net> wrote: >
>
[btw, mate, your stuff about artificial intelligence is pretty damn embarrassing too. The idea that there could be a piece of software which simultaneously a) we wold regard as an intelligence equivalent to human and b) we could identify "bugs" and attempt to "hack" is likely to get you laughed off most serious philosophy lists.]
>
> There may be a benefit (if we were stranded on a
> desert isle) having another
> human for company and assistance that would make my
> chance of survival
> greater.
You seem to ignore the equally important fact that even if you believe in this crap, there is a significant evolutionary benefit to keeping gob shut about it to avoid being mistaken for a common-or-garden loony and treated as a public health problem.
> However this isn't the case. The only
> benefit I get out of
> keeping another human alive is the alieviation of
> some form of 'guilt' in
> my mind brought on by the indoctrinated into me
> during my formative years by
> a liberal school system and religious institutions.
>
"A liberal school system and religious institutions"? Have a glance at some of the societies in the world, now and through history, which have actually had to cope with the absence of water or similar unhospitable conditions as a fact of life, rather than a theoretical example. Off the top of my head, I count the Bedouin, the Australian aborigines and the Inuit.
All three of these cultures have strongly developed traditions of hospitality; of assisting travellers unknown to them, and of looking after each other. The idea that you can be a moral island and have nothing to do with your fellows is an entirely modern idea, and one which only someone living in the midst of a vast plenitude and superabundance of life-goods could have come up with (even though that self-same productive system refutes by its existence your idea of individual independence).
Ironically, this problem of "why should I, as an individual, not be an egoist?" was invented by the liberals, but given the violence done to the word "libertarian" in recent exchanges, I suppose it's a bit much to expect "liberal" to refer to Locke, Mill and Hume these days.
hey ho hum,
dd
, who, along with the "Oxford gene", seems to have inherited (probably from the other side of the family), this terrible compulsion to tell people to fuck off all the time.
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