Originally Posted by
Dianeva
It depends on how you look at it.
Inside our minds are concepts of individual people, who we correlate to people who really exist in the outside world. We believe we have at least some (probably skewed) version of them in our minds. We feel empathy for those concepts of people and might feel sorry for them because, for example, they're starving and we know that if we were starving we would feel pain. We know that these other beings that exist and are like us are feeling pain, and imagining that pain makes us feel it too, in a sense, due to the way our brains our wired, brought on by evolution. When those people are no longer starving, we feel better because we know they're not feeling pain anymore.
Those are pretty much the facts, and it's up to you to decide what altrusim should specifically mean to you and to determine whether or not what's going on in your brain is selfish. One way of looking at it is that there can't be any altrusim. Even if you feel bad due to someone else's pain, it's still your pain that you're trying to prevent (even though it was initiated by the knowledge of someone else's pain), and so it's selfish. If that evolutionary link in your brain that causes you to identify with the other person, to feel bad when they feel bad, goes away, you would no longer give a shit about what pain or happiness the other person is experiencing.
But, as long as we're humans and limited to our brains (and I'm not implying that there could be anything different) we can't ever hope to get better than that, and so the word 'altruism' would have no meaning. It reminds me of the free-will problem. It might be true that all of our actions are determined, but that should be irrelevant in determining if we have free will because that isn't what we mean by free will. Similarly, it might be true in a strict sense that no one can really care about anyone else directly, but perhaps that shouldn't be how we determine whether we're altruistic or not. We still have those concepts of other people in our minds, and feel like we can relate to them, and feel sad when they do and feel happy when they do. Some people feel these things more than others, and for different people than others. So on a more human level, I think this is what we should mean by altrusim.
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