Dec 06, 2008 21:36
When science was first really being a standard at all, a French physiologist with a stupid French name argued strongly in support of materialism, meaning the only substance in the universe is entirely physical. It is an epistemological monism in a strong opposition to the rationalists of the time and still contrasting the inductive approach of the empiricists. He came up with the term 'The enlightened machine' to described how despite materialism, we are still amazingly complex and even divine beings, even if we are just a serious of mechanical reflexs (or so he thought).
If you know anything about basic existentialism, you can skip on. Science has to an extent proven materialism, or at least given evidence to the point of it can be called a fact. If there is a God, he has no non-physical power, which would make hm irrelevant. But anything can be measured in terms of things like chemistry or physics. Science and all that crap. But the issue is that consciousness still exists, I'd argue as extended existence thing with essence. This is all review.
People are enlightened machines. Autistic people do not have the ability to relate to the same kind of enlightenment. Man is a social animal, and a lot of our essentially derived are language-related. Meaning, language, communication, conceptualization, and still language. Social interaction is a fucking bizarre thing and you don't need to be autistic to experience how odd and awkward it is.
I think this may involve conditioning. What make someone naturally socially skilled?
That is actually not what we care about. How do you have empathy for a machine?
Thanks to some earlier existentialist arguments, everything is meaningless, but also equally meaningless. This leaves a scale of value outside of meaning. Enough philosophy.
Everyone can be thought of as a robot without a soul. They are mechanical. People are to thought of this way. Everyone exhibits behavior to show how they are. This is genetics: our amygdala picks up responses and reacts before the visual stimuli can even reach the consciousness. To understand people, you must severly limit your empathy, and focus on the behavior.
I swear, it's in the eyes. I've never noticed it before.
My misconceptions and misinterpretations of the stereotypes of others has left me distant and afraid all my life, probably since I had no social group until high school. To remember the racial stat, most variations between people exists inside groups than between groups. This number is as absurdly high as 82%+, and it applies to races, cliques, and socioeconomics. When you see someone, judging them through empaty on a stereotype creates a reaction reflex, so I put up a barrier. Then I come off as hostile. This is in no way exhausitive, but is actually kind of fun to watch.