Asserting truths isn't an end of itself. While asserting any truth you are delaying all others, so there's ample space for pathologies vectored by distracting truths.
I have found, when spouting information from my autistic data banks, that people like to label "opinion" on any information that does not please them for whatever reason. It's quite frustrating, really. I try to stick to the data I've learned in my studies over the years, and do update that information as it changes too! If I am offering an opinion, it's not in the form of relayed information, it's "well I think maybe that etc". Ego sucks.
ann kiszt that's right, at once the mystery's about how to let go of ego, oeuf corse. In which way, first of all, is ego wrong? The wrong of ego is all from the arbitrary scars from first experiences... that turn out to impose over the strategy, outdated tactics written in terms of what you recognized as self and what you didnn't when you first got surprised or hurt.
Boris Borcic I think saying "is ego wrong" is too simplistic. One needs a sense of self worth, but not at the expense of others. So pride, but not ego, if that makes sense? We really can't kill our egos, though. We learn to train and tame them, like a large dog, to work in our favour, as self confidence, instead of against us, as self promotion.
ann kiszt if self promotion works against us, something's faulty in the definition of self; I was proposing it's the ghost of the wrong headed parts of rough cut early judgments or diagnoses made in the normal course of early childhood.
Define "ego" ... I take it to mean, without prejudice,"the source of my drive, the seed/root of my motivation to live, to continue to exist as myself" (which includes/implies my moral sensibility). As such it is essential to being me. I don't take it to mean self aggrandizement at the expense of others.
ann kiszt David Chako this seems to be taking the path of assuming that I did introduce in the conversation both the concept of ego and the notion that something was wrong with it; not so, I was simply reacting to Ann's conclusion that "Ego sucks".
The thing is, any attempt to either appraise or criticize the ego will need to assume an accurate definition of self. My take is that ego refers to a first and typically premature definition of self formed during early development, and which tends to overly push the concept of "self" in the direction that makes sense in a context of social competition, via the equation of self to the representation of self by competitors.
Now, of course that's not all of the story; there's entanglement in particular with the biological gears that push males of so many species of animals to fight over females. Frustrating those gears altogether... isn't healthy for males. Castrating.
David Chako "the essential individuated drive" is something of a singular-plural oxymoron (it aims at calling uniformly what it describes as singular to each of us).
As far as I am concerned, I'd deny a single "individuated" drive, and OTOH I am most concerned with natural definitions of self that can be reached once its most primitive determiners are subdued (notably, by taking care to not confuse for non-self what the mirror of others reveals to us of human nature; body-mind questions also raise their head there).
Boris Borcic Certainly I agree that motivation adopted second hand is not efficient nor therefore morally appropriate. But I also find that psychological emergence is not a matter of imbibing the beliefs of others, rather it is a matter of discovering by and for oneself and then sticking as true as one is able to the course thereby inferred. And I don't understand how, without an ethical root that grows from inside, anyone can claim a properly calibrated moral compass.
David Chako I agree with your conclusion, but my understanding of a properly calibrated moral compass... involves (some variant of) Kant's imperative (not that I abide with Kant's own treatment)... involves the intuition of Kant's imperative, which has an anti-individuating component ("Be yourself! - I Kant" for the nutshell).
On "second hand motivation" -- of course; but I believe that beyond the... let's call it vulgar injection of motivation from competition... ...society also supplies language and worldview, that is, a background to our thought processes whose overlooking allows delusions of autonomy, or at least an over-evaluation thereof. A bit like what's also the case with our biological setup (genes).
hoo boy, didn't that blow into a huge philosophical discussion? I speak of ego in the buddhist sense more than the scientific sense. I thought it was pretty obvious that egotistical people are self promoting, and this makes them less welcome unless they're so powerful they can rely on sycophants for company and resources. Being unwelcome in human company handicaps one far more than the average human expects. I do know that the google notification window makes for a lousy place to get into a complicated discussion and so does my ill health, so I'll bow out and tell everyone you're all so right it blows my head, I can't believe how wrong I am. I just have to run away in defeat and shame from this otherwise elucidating conversation about the correct definition of ego.
ann kiszt Best wishes for your health. Please note nobody aimed to make you appear wrong nor boasted of such an "accomplishment". At least I didn't and I don't think David either.
Boris Borcic Understood, Boris, I did not feel personally attacked at all, just overwhelmed by the detail level brought to what I thought was a pretty simple idea. Thank you for your best wishes.
David Chako When I first encountered Kantian philosophy I had the same feeling. Then I took a closer look at the principle, realized it's unworkable in reality and only works in an isolated idealized environment. That's when I realized he really was an uptight control freak trying to tell everyone else how to behave and inhibiting himself out of all joy.
David Chako I don't know the word egoistic, never encountered it before today, so I cannot comment on what it means. however, I see people as having 3 personalities inside. One is the inner child, an emotional being, probably promoted primarily in the hippocampus. It's the part we have to parent, but lovingly. It's the part of ourselves that needs love and gives love, but also throws tantrums, fails to see the needs of others, and disregards things like health consequences. Like a child, it reaches for candy when fruit would be better, and whines if it has to stand in line too long. I think of that as the ego. Then there's the middle person, the one that is cogitating and using the word "I" and thinking of itself as a self. That's the part that argues and parents the ego. It's the part that understands consequences, accesses empathy and situational memory, and choose the salad for supper. Lastly, there's the spirit. This is the part that comes up when you have transcendant moments. Moments of being outside oneself, moments of ephiphany, or even the source of our instinct. I think it would be called the subconscious by those who think soul and spirit are technically unprovable and therefor unacceptable. When the central self, I guess it would relate to Freud's Id, I'm not sure, accesses the spirit self, much calm can be found, and much better self discipline. That is the part of us that reminds us of the bigger picture, the pettiness of most of our complaints, and bolsters the "parent" when arguing with our "child." Now how this relates to what old men of centuries past have had to say about the mind I can't say for sure. I tried to study them, but they angered me too often with theories I found so wrong and harmful I just couldn't choke them down. one after another, they sounded like Fools. Even sometimes I think The Buddha was a bit foolish but then I put him in historical context and can forgive. He didn't know about atoms, or dark matter, or even that women weren't weird animals, just people torn by hormone storms too often.
David Chako To me "Kant's Imperative" is a signpost because its formulation largely conveys an instinctive worry that I likely owe to sharing trajectory with a twin from nidation to middle school. I haven't otherwise studied Kant; I see him as having been outpaced by the non-euclidean revolution, a bit like the Principia Mathematica were outpaced by Gödel's limitation theorems. Yet the difference is that Kant's shame remained invisible to most of its audience that in turn makes even the best of Kant's wisdom unpalatable. Whatever, if I were God I'd lock Kant, his audience, and projective geometry duality in a room, until they make peace.
David Chako Fixing the purpose of things in abstraction of context, strikes me as theist. I mean, to me, purpose is a narrative ingredient and what purposes are or are deemed to be, deserves choosing depending on the tale. My prototype of purpose is a theorem statement in the context of its own proof.
Coincidentally I'm working on writing a post about the "backfire affect", where the truth often makes people double down on false statements.
ReplyDeleteI'll visit you for the science infusion.
ReplyDeleteCorina Marinescu, I've got PT today, so maybe I'll finish it for tomorrow. Happy New Year to you my friend.
ReplyDeleteHappy New Year Chad! & take it easy, your wrist looks a bit fragile.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to try to get the DICOMs for the latest x-ray, but yes, the osteotomy isn't great. Enough hijacking your post.
ReplyDeleteOr: don't assert "truth"; simply state your premises and assert that your conclusion follows as a necessary corollary (assuming it does :)
ReplyDeleteAsserting truths isn't an end of itself. While asserting any truth you are delaying all others, so there's ample space for pathologies vectored by distracting truths.
ReplyDeleteI have found, when spouting information from my autistic data banks, that people like to label "opinion" on any information that does not please them for whatever reason. It's quite frustrating, really. I try to stick to the data I've learned in my studies over the years, and do update that information as it changes too! If I am offering an opinion, it's not in the form of relayed information, it's "well I think maybe that etc".
ReplyDeleteEgo sucks.
ann kiszt that's right, at once the mystery's about how to let go of ego, oeuf corse. In which way, first of all, is ego wrong? The wrong of ego is all from the arbitrary scars from first experiences... that turn out to impose over the strategy, outdated tactics written in terms of what you recognized as self and what you didnn't when you first got surprised or hurt.
ReplyDelete(addition triggered by Jeffrey Mills)
Boris Borcic I think saying "is ego wrong" is too simplistic. One needs a sense of self worth, but not at the expense of others. So pride, but not ego, if that makes sense? We really can't kill our egos, though. We learn to train and tame them, like a large dog, to work in our favour, as self confidence, instead of against us, as self promotion.
ReplyDeleteann kiszt if self promotion works against us, something's faulty in the definition of self; I was proposing it's the ghost of the wrong headed parts of rough cut early judgments or diagnoses made in the normal course of early childhood.
ReplyDeleteDefine "ego" ... I take it to mean, without prejudice,"the source of my drive, the seed/root of my motivation to live, to continue to exist as myself" (which includes/implies my moral sensibility). As such it is essential to being me. I don't take it to mean self aggrandizement at the expense of others.
ReplyDeleteann kiszt David Chako this seems to be taking the path of assuming that I did introduce in the conversation both the concept of ego and the notion that something was wrong with it; not so, I was simply reacting to Ann's conclusion that "Ego sucks".
ReplyDeleteThe thing is, any attempt to either appraise or criticize the ego will need to assume an accurate definition of self. My take is that ego refers to a first and typically premature definition of self formed during early development, and which tends to overly push the concept of "self" in the direction that makes sense in a context of social competition, via the equation of self to the representation of self by competitors.
Now, of course that's not all of the story; there's entanglement in particular with the biological gears that push males of so many species of animals to fight over females. Frustrating those gears altogether... isn't healthy for males. Castrating.
Boris Borcic What do you call the essential indivuated drive? Personality is not the right term imho.
ReplyDeleteI want to be careful, because ego as epithet has a long and sordid history intent on curbing or even demeaning individuality and personal drive.
David Chako "the essential individuated drive" is something of a singular-plural oxymoron (it aims at calling uniformly what it describes as singular to each of us).
ReplyDeleteAs far as I am concerned, I'd deny a single "individuated" drive, and OTOH I am most concerned with natural definitions of self that can be reached once its most primitive determiners are subdued (notably, by taking care to not confuse for non-self what the mirror of others reveals to us of human nature; body-mind questions also raise their head there).
Boris Borcic Certainly I agree that motivation adopted second hand is not efficient nor therefore morally appropriate. But I also find that psychological emergence is not a matter of imbibing the beliefs of others, rather it is a matter of discovering by and for oneself and then sticking as true as one is able to the course thereby inferred. And I don't understand how, without an ethical root that grows from inside, anyone can claim a properly calibrated moral compass.
ReplyDeleteDavid Chako I agree with your conclusion, but my understanding of a properly calibrated moral compass... involves (some variant of) Kant's imperative (not that I abide with Kant's own treatment)... involves the intuition of Kant's imperative, which has an anti-individuating component ("Be yourself! - I Kant" for the nutshell).
ReplyDeleteOn "second hand motivation" -- of course; but I believe that beyond the... let's call it vulgar injection of motivation from competition... ...society also supplies language and worldview, that is, a background to our thought processes whose overlooking allows delusions of autonomy, or at least an over-evaluation thereof. A bit like what's also the case with our biological setup (genes).
hoo boy, didn't that blow into a huge philosophical discussion? I speak of ego in the buddhist sense more than the scientific sense. I thought it was pretty obvious that egotistical people are self promoting, and this makes them less welcome unless they're so powerful they can rely on sycophants for company and resources. Being unwelcome in human company handicaps one far more than the average human expects.
ReplyDeleteI do know that the google notification window makes for a lousy place to get into a complicated discussion and so does my ill health, so I'll bow out and tell everyone you're all so right it blows my head, I can't believe how wrong I am. I just have to run away in defeat and shame from this otherwise elucidating conversation about the correct definition of ego.
ann kiszt Best wishes for your health. Please note nobody aimed to make you appear wrong nor boasted of such an "accomplishment". At least I didn't and I don't think David either.
ReplyDeleteBoris Borcic Understood, Boris, I did not feel personally attacked at all, just overwhelmed by the detail level brought to what I thought was a pretty simple idea. Thank you for your best wishes.
ReplyDeleteann kiszt What is the difference between egoistic and egotistical, in your judgement?
ReplyDeleteBoris Borcic I can't abide Kant's induction. Happy to discuss at length, but doubt this is the correct forum for that discussion.
ReplyDeleteBoris Borcic But since you mention it, what do you suppose is the primary purpose of language?
ReplyDeleteDavid Chako When I first encountered Kantian philosophy I had the same feeling. Then I took a closer look at the principle, realized it's unworkable in reality and only works in an isolated idealized environment. That's when I realized he really was an uptight control freak trying to tell everyone else how to behave and inhibiting himself out of all joy.
ReplyDeleteDavid Chako I don't know the word egoistic, never encountered it before today, so I cannot comment on what it means. however, I see people as having 3 personalities inside. One is the inner child, an emotional being, probably promoted primarily in the hippocampus. It's the part we have to parent, but lovingly. It's the part of ourselves that needs love and gives love, but also throws tantrums, fails to see the needs of others, and disregards things like health consequences. Like a child, it reaches for candy when fruit would be better, and whines if it has to stand in line too long. I think of that as the ego. Then there's the middle person, the one that is cogitating and using the word "I" and thinking of itself as a self. That's the part that argues and parents the ego. It's the part that understands consequences, accesses empathy and situational memory, and choose the salad for supper. Lastly, there's the spirit. This is the part that comes up when you have transcendant moments. Moments of being outside oneself, moments of ephiphany, or even the source of our instinct. I think it would be called the subconscious by those who think soul and spirit are technically unprovable and therefor unacceptable. When the central self, I guess it would relate to Freud's Id, I'm not sure, accesses the spirit self, much calm can be found, and much better self discipline. That is the part of us that reminds us of the bigger picture, the pettiness of most of our complaints, and bolsters the "parent" when arguing with our "child."
ReplyDeleteNow how this relates to what old men of centuries past have had to say about the mind I can't say for sure. I tried to study them, but they angered me too often with theories I found so wrong and harmful I just couldn't choke them down. one after another, they sounded like Fools.
Even sometimes I think The Buddha was a bit foolish but then I put him in historical context and can forgive. He didn't know about atoms, or dark matter, or even that women weren't weird animals, just people torn by hormone storms too often.
David Chako To me "Kant's Imperative" is a signpost because its formulation largely conveys an instinctive worry that I likely owe to sharing trajectory with a twin from nidation to middle school. I haven't otherwise studied Kant; I see him as having been outpaced by the non-euclidean revolution, a bit like the Principia Mathematica were outpaced by Gödel's limitation theorems. Yet the difference is that Kant's shame remained invisible to most of its audience that in turn makes even the best of Kant's wisdom unpalatable. Whatever, if I were God I'd lock Kant, his audience, and projective geometry duality in a room, until they make peace.
ReplyDeleteDavid Chako Fixing the purpose of things in abstraction of context, strikes me as theist. I mean, to me, purpose is a narrative ingredient and what purposes are or are deemed to be, deserves choosing depending on the tale. My prototype of purpose is a theorem statement in the context of its own proof.
ReplyDelete