Blackfish documentary on CNN - anyone else watch it?

[Taem]

…why do you think you care even remotely about your offspring, that you feel emotions whatsoever?

More importantly, why do I care about my parents? Why do I care about total strangers?

No, we've evolved emotions to help us "care" for our offspring so we could thrive through nurturing and propagation. That's all we are designed for, and it encompasses everything we do as a species and all our thoughts.

And, yet, thousands of children are starved, beaten, neglected, murdered, raped and sold into slavery all the damn time.

This is why there is no true altruism because everything we do, we do for survival of us, or even of our species in those two example you cited.

And still, Greenpeace activists put themselves between harpoons and whales.

I feel like I made a pretty good effort at explaining my points of view in my reply to FIT. It would be a great relief to me if you could take the time to gloss over that post before reading the rest of this one, so that we may understand one-another; if I do bring up topics I already covered in that post, I won’t be elaborating because the thoughts are already fleshed out in that post. Thank-you!

In regards to this topic, as I’ve stated in other posts, there are three known basic principles’ of all life forms created from RNA1: Gathering (usually food), Procreation, and Protectionism (of self, and offspring). Since evolving from these origins, we not only exemplify these principles in every aspect of our lives, but have grown to expand upon them, and even complicate them. A good analogy here of a lower life form would be how wolves forge a pack to protect one-another – just an evolved sense of protectionism. Our species has gradually learned to expand our emotions from these three principles to feel deep love, remorse, or even hate, all in an evolutional effort to not only survive, but surpass our last iteration, which I suppose is itself really just another form of variation/protectionism.

It’s true that most of us can “relate” to how others feel by placing ourselves in their shoes and when we see someone else or something else in danger or in a state of suffering, we often conflate these protectionism emotions we’ve evolved from protecting our young or ourselves into the urge to save others. My point here is that you cannot stop the origin of these emotions because they come from our evolved need to protect our offspring and ourselves meaning, while we always have freewill to make the “right” or “wrong” decision, we will always feel the urge to do deeds we perceive as right or moral not because of some god-driven need of morality, but because of the RNA in our system telling us it’s the right thing to do!

When we do what feels “right”, we are only following our gut instinct to follow the three basic principles I stated. This is why I make the claim that no matter how much we’ve evolved or continue to evolve, our basic emotions will always be based off these three things no matter how complex our brains have become or how well we’ve turned these three principles into a broad range of emotions in our minds. This is why any decision we make based off morality will always be predictably similar, thus no matter how much you want to believe your donation to the homeless was because you did the “right” thing, it does not change the fact that it only felt right to you because of our evolved survivalist nature regarding right and wrong, hence your actions were being influenced by selfishness all along.

True altruism can only come from the realization that any deed you do that makes you feel “good” is a selfish act to begin with; you are actually the beneficiary of the act because you’re the one who feels good by doing the act. If an act benefited others but made you feel “bad”, or you were disinterested, you would not commit to the act any longer because it would not be logical for you. A good analogy here would be giving a gift to a relative who never thanks you and perhaps even openly mocks you regarding your gifts; sure, you might continue giving a little longer in the hopes that things might turn around but once reality sunk in this relative was completely ungrateful, you would not continue to give them gifts thus proving your supposed act of kindness was nothing more than a selfish act of unfulfilled gluttony to begin with because unless your act made YOU feel good inside, you’d stop doing it. This analogy can be applied to all aspect of life.

So, to perpetuate an act of true altruism requires one to commit to actions that benefit others without any care of the end result for themselves or of their recipients… and that never happens. And the reason that never happens is because of the three principles I mentioned in my first paragraph, thus the influence of RNA on every aspect of our being, and the reality that even with freewill, we cannot escape our desires to follow our instincts. This is the reason there is no true altruism in this world!

"Life" can be considered to have emerged when RNA chains began to express the basic conditions necessary for natural selection to operate as conceived by Darwin: heritability, variation of type, and competition for limited resources.

1Links:
RNA World; shows how RNA can be made used as a building block for DNA and all life. Many studies have shown how RNA infused minerals behave in a manner similar to what we consider life:
What is RNA?; shows how RNA influences DNA as it’s messenger.
Spiegelman's Monster; shows an example of a Nobel Prize winner who created inorganic self-replicating RNA which exhibited the three signs of life:

Perhaps you think you "care" about things because this emotion comes from your god as written in the good book (i.e. all good things come from above)? If so, you are even more deluded with religious philosophy then I ever dreamed.

Perhaps you are exhibiting some bigoted, "holier than thou" attitudes that make me want to barf? How does this apply to your philosophical proposition?

Let me start by saying your intelligence on these boards is proven and much admired by many, and in all honestly here, has always been an inspiration to me over the years. When I was young, I always looked up to you, Pete, Occi, and Jester wondering if I’d ever measure up to the stature of posters such as yourselves, but with age comes wisdom. Regarding the comment of mine you quoted, I admit to unnecessary attacking you with that “delusional” comment and for that, I offer up a sincere apology. I didn’t have to write that to make a point, and I’m not sure why I did in that context, but it was unwarranted so I’m truly sorry I offended you.

So I suppose the better question is why do I come across as a religious bigot? On a personal level, I find it’s difficult to reason with deeply religious people. For example regarding evolution, you can show them empirical data, peer-reviewed and approved scientific journals, university studies, all proving the indisputable existence of the evolutionary process (including rather recently how the Russians breed wolves based on their temperament and got domesticated dogs and feral wolves from the mix, or how Hitler had soldiers breed the mastodon-type bull back into existence by breeding the most aggressive bulls), and the deeply-religious drumbeater will still explain how you are mistaken because “it is written…” I’ve shown the most cynical believer of their faith exactly how the bible came to be and how it was no more god influenced then a preschoolers krayola sketched notebook, but yet somehow even if they have the faintest sliver of “hope” in their brain they will surly find a way to block what was said and hear only what they want to hear.

In regards to altruism, I can show you what I believe in altruism, but since I was deeply Christian at one point in my life like yourself, I know you believe that all “good” comes from him above as it is written in the bible. To not believe this is to refute the philosophy of the bible and the very existence of the trinity itself (since God is incapable of seeing sin). I believe this is the main reason you have such difficulty accepting my point of view on this subject, which is also why I wrote that religious statement you quoted. I feel in conversations like these, it is your strong religious beliefs that hold you back from seeing what other people are actually saying. This is of course just my opinion.