RE: virus: Altruism, Empathy, the Superorganism, and the Prisoner's Dillema

D. H. Rosdeitcher (76473.3041@compuserve.com)
18 Apr 97 12:17:28 EDT

Over the past couple of months, I had some disagreements with people who were
Non-Objectivists. But, I have redefined my enemy to be a non-contextual thinking
mentality that is demonstrated by the following:
There seem to be 2 kinds of Buddhists: One kind understands that there exists
an inescapable duality between words and their context, but choose to break up
that duality in order to give credence to a nonsensical ideology like Buddhism.
The other kind of Buddhist appears to not understand the duality that particular
words can have different meanings depending to their context. Here are 2
examples of both types of Buddhists in action:

Robin wrote:
konsler@ascat.harvard.edu wrote:
>>Obviously we are
>>altruistic...in the sense that we can engage in trade, that we can delay
>>gratification, that we are willing to "invest" effort today on the
>>assumption that there will be return with interest at a later date.

Robin wrote:
>Sorry, that's not altruism.

>http://humanities.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/WEBSTER.sh?WORD=altruism

>Regard for others, both natural and moral; devotion to the interests of
>others; brotherly kindness; -- opposed to egoism or selfishness.

By saying, "that's not altruism", Robin implies that he understood what Reed
meant by the term 'altruism'. But, he takes the word back out of context in
order to present the impression that the word has intrinsic meaning apart from
its context. This is how Buddhism survives as an ideology--through people being
stuck in a non-contextual thinking mode as exemplified by James, the other kind
of Buddhist, who wrote:
> "Not only is greed self-defeating in
>the long run, altruism makes better neighbors and ultimately greater
>personal fulfillment."?
...as if concepts such as greed and altruism have meanings apart from context.
--David Rosdeitcher