Quote:
Originally Posted by The Batlord
Whether or not that's what you mean, it sounds like you're suggesting that genes and the cells that make up the organism really on different logic than the organism itself. Your consciousness is really just the emergent process of all of these smaller parts working together in order to better acquire resources. It's likely that the entire reason "you" even exist is to basically work as a slave in order sustain them, just as a cell does for it's organelles (not to mention vice versa). I imagine the logic that drives you to perform "altruistic" acts is governed by that basic directive.
I also imagine human societies works for the benefit of individual humans in much the same way and operate by the same rules that govern an individual human's relationship to the cells that make up his body (making a society or a species sort of like it's own singular organism). So if a human were to sacrifice himself "altruistically" for the benefit of the larger human species, it would be the same mechanism as a cell that dies when the body restricts blood flow during hypothermia. The cell isn't being altruistic, it's just operating in the way that evolution has deemed will maximize survival for the greater organism.
Alright, that's probably my contribution to the thread. You all am smarter than me and I'm just praying that that all made sense.
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It made perfect sense, and I pretty much agree with it, acknowledging the difference in semantics. Altruism is a useful word when asking "why is this cell/organism sacrificing itself for the greater good?". We may find that it doesn't match our idealistic vision of altruism, but the word kind of stuck around in the biology literature:
JSTOR: An Error Occurred Setting Your User Cookie
The Unit of Selection in Viscous Populations and the Evolution of Altruism
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Note also, that the evolutionary biology definition is:
"in evolutionary biology, an organism is said to behave altruistically when its behaviour benefits other organisms, at a cost to itself. The costs and benefits are measured in terms of reproductive fitness, or expected number of offspring. So by behaving altruistically, an organism reduces the number of offspring it is likely to produce itself, but boosts the number that other organisms are likely to produce."
Biological Altruism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
So here we have an example where it's explicitly not about passing your own genes on, but helping other members of your species pass their genes on (unless you consider long term effects of kin selection, I guess). Anyway, this is distinct from the way other biological papers i linked above define it... so even in the field of biology, different subfields define it differently.
The easiest way to get over such semantic ambiguity is to call each kind of altruism by a different label: idealistic altruism vs. evolutionary altruism, etc.