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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (272611)	1/11/2010 10:17:43 AM
From: Lou Weed	1 Recommendation Respond to of 281500

<<And if we accept the concept of a conscience, then we are tacitly accepting the existence of a soul, or spiritual aspect, to our existence.>> Conscience I know exists. Soul in the ethereal sense I'm not so sure of but one thing I do know for sure.....James Brown had soul.

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (272611)	1/11/2010 12:49:41 PM
From: Maurice Winn	2 Recommendations Respond to of 281500

Hawk, I have noticed over the decades that many people talk a good line about do-goodering but somehow, one way or another, it's me who seems to have the time or inclination to stop and help the person or animal in trouble. It's not that my friends or anyone see. It's not that I personally benefit. I even try to tell myself "No good deed goes unpunished" which is sort of true in many ways. Also, giving people things tends to encourage them to be neglectful of taking more care in their activities and keeping their lives in proportion to their abilities. But I'm aware that with the best will in the world, even amazing supreme beings such as myself can make blunders, mistakes and without neglect find ourselves needing help, due to outright bad luck. So I tend to the forgiving side. It's not that there's a spiritual soul side, other than accepting that there's more to consciousness than my own. The benefit to me comes from the probabilistic idea that if I do that low cost thing, it provides a high value benefit to the other people which creates a total net benefit to everyone which, because other people also do that [like minded people] there is a probabilistic benefit to me too. It's us against the four forces of the apocalypse. We are the anti-entropy movement. It's a bit like a shepherd will untangle an animal from a problem - later the sheep will provide benefits. 6 billion plus 1 people are better for me than 6 billion minus 1. Look at the rising economic value of people everywhere [other than in Mugabe's disaster, Venezuela and the like] to see the economic advantage to me of more people. Made in China keeps me supplied with loads of cheap things. Nature and women are winnowing the gene pool, looking for the diamonds in the rough, so there are lots of genes needed to be winnowed. In 1000 years, of those 6 billion, there might be only 100 million with descendants - which isn't many so every one helps. But even more than that and even more importantly, it's about identity formation. Having been a salesman, and also an engineer and scientist interested in causal effects, I would wonder why it is that people buy things and why would they buy my things in particular. A salesman's job is to sell things, so figuring out how to increase sales is a good idea. Much of what we buy is not simply calories for our stomach, lubrication for our car, spectrum for our cyberspace. But even for those prosaic products, why buy where they do? They buying and selling process is about identity formation [leaving aside the sheer mechanics of calories, lubrication, bit-carrying]. There are two essential ingredients for successful sellers - empathy and ego-drive. Without both of them, people will not succeed. Of course other things help, such as knowing technical specifications and stuff, but those are the two biggies which drive the process. I got the words from a Harvard Study a couple of decades ago on what makes successful selling. Since it agreed with me, I put it in with my own theories. People buy because the seller satisfies their identity formation needs. The seller makes them feel the way they want to feel about themselves, helping them with their identity formation. But it's not a one way street. The seller also joins in the identity formation process like a hall of mirrors in which two parallel mirrors reflect the seller and buyer back at each other. That's where the empathy comes in. The two can form an identity creating relationship for mutual creation. Each on their own is nothing going nowhere. Like a tree falling in a forest making no sound. Like the sound of one hand clapping. Like a solo handshake - the motion is the same but there's a certain something missing. Like a photon's wave function without a consciousness to drop it into reality. Selling is a law of nature. So is helping somebody broken down on the side of the road in a snow storm. In the alpha male biological world before Jesus type brotherhood of man mutual identity formation, life was dog eat dog genetic competition with the Devil take the hindmost and beat anyone and take whatever was available. It's pretty obvious that the Roman Empire, founded and operating on the dog eat dog alpha male principles, would NOT take kindly to a universality mutual benefit ideology where there's little need for top-down rulers, megalomaniacs, kleptocracy and murder. The point of the cross is to remind us of the fundamental principle of Jesus = the individual and identity formation across all of us in open-sourced peer to peer processing, versus the totalitarian alpha male overlords operating on atavistic dog eat dog principles of power. We secularist anti-entropists are more able to understand those processes. There's no hereafter other than that which our descendants will experience and whatever it's all leading too, which is something = we don't know where we're going, but we're on our way, a bit like explorers of the world setting out in small ships to go around what was obviously a ball of water floating around in space. We're in it together. Many hands make light work. We will tame those four forces of the apocalypse and bend them to our will. Mqurice PS: As you can see here, there's quite a bit of taming to be done. umbra.nascom.nasa.gov