Are you responsible for your physical vehicle's limitations?

[Bro Dave]

We are each limited and gifted. We did not create, request or define who we are and the physical and personality traits we have to work with. Is it therefore reasonable we all be held accountable for our accomplishments we may achieve or attocities we may commit?

Bro Dave

[ENIGMA]

In this case its both about physique (improve the body, and be able to prevent disease´s such as Polio, DM, cancer and so forth) and mental ability (improve brain capacity, and prevent people with mental disease´s such as cp, depression, (and personally i would include wrong-thinkers such as religious people and ignorants, but thats personal).. So it has its obvious positive sides, I really see nothing bad about it.

If you want to see any of those things improve to any significant degree during this century, then genetic engineering and possibly robotic augmentation are probably your best bets on the individual level. Eugenics would simply be too crude and slow to have an appreciable positive impact to outweigh the concerns of those negatively affected.

[ST88]

While some people are undoubtedly more able than others, where is the benefit of having everything come easily. More often than not the most naturally gifted individuals lack motivation as they tend to rest on their laurels. In all endeavours it is the one who works hardest and shows most improvement who attains the highest prize.

This is not entirely true. There are those who do not have to work very hard in order to attain good prizes and there are those who have to work as hard as they can just to tread water. Like the song says, "It ain't me, I ain't no millionaire's son."

Well that assumes you don't regard growth or self improvement as the highest prize.

By the same token, it is not impossible for a person born into fortunate circumstance to attain this kind of self-improvement, and it is also not impossible for someone who is not as talented to wallow in mediocrity. I don't think blanket statements are possible.

"Self-improvement" as a concept is tricky. How does one improve oneself, and how do you know when it happens? Happiness as a goal, for example, doesn't pass the serial killer test.

[Curious]

While By the same token, it is not impossible for a person born into fortunate circumstance to attain this kind of self-improvement, and it is also not impossible for someone who is not as talented to wallow in mediocrity. I don't think blanket statements are possible.

Of course I agree that you are correct. I did not mean to suggest that only the talented could be slothful but it is true that, no matter what the level of ability, the majority do just enough to get by. If simply getting by entails greater effort then it should follow that this will result in the greatest benefit or improvement.

"Self-improvement" as a concept is tricky. How does one improve oneself, and how do you know when it happens? Happiness as a goal, for example, doesn't pass the serial killer test.

I think that the measure of a man has less to do with his own opinion than to the opinion of others.

[ST88]

"Self-improvement" as a concept is tricky. How does one improve oneself, and how do you know when it happens? Happiness as a goal, for example, doesn't pass the serial killer test.

I think that the measure of a man has less to do with his own opinion than to the opinion of others.

Not to be contentious, but this would seem to render the whole idea of a "good person" into a popularity contest. What is "good" is not only in the eye of the beholder, but also in the very concept of what "good" is. It strikes me as the same fallacious ideas that are in the concept of 360-degree management, where your advancement in a company is determined by what your cohorts and supervisors think of you, instead of by your work product.

[Curious]

Not to be contentious, but this would seem to render the whole idea of a "good person" into a popularity contest. What is "good" is not only in the eye of the beholder, but also in the very concept of what "good" is.

If a man's goodness is measured against the concept of goodness then whose concept is it measured against? His own single perception of himself or the combined perception of many?

[ST88]

Not to be contentious, but this would seem to render the whole idea of a "good person" into a popularity contest. What is "good" is not only in the eye of the beholder, but also in the very concept of what "good" is.

If a man's goodness is measured against the concept of goodness then whose concept is it measured against? His own single perception of himself or the combined perception of many?

I'm not saying I have an answer to this question. In fact, what I'm saying is that there isn't really an answer to this question. Both the self-reporting and the ratings from peers have their problems. If you wish to gauge the limitations on your physical vehicle, for example, you need only look at other vehicles for what yours can't do. But there are many things that the so-called "normal" vehicle can't do, such as see the color ultraviolet or fly.

If you subscribe to the theory of evolution, you will see that each one of the vehicle's characteristics was somehow selected for (and, I guess more accurately, not selected against), and has therefore become a part of the species, and ostensibly a part of the collective knowledge of the species (e.g., a person born without eyes will still have a brain with a visual cortex).

But when you talk about "improvement" of your vehicle, what are you talking about? In my world, good is relative. Some people are proud of their accomplishments in business, despite having lied, cheated, and stolen to get to where they are. Others admire them for that. One need only look at Donald Trump as an example. These are not intrinsic properties to the vehicle, they are learned behaviors. The wonder of it all is the wide range of behaviors and behavior patterns that are possible within the human species. Depending on the context, even the community standards of "good" vary with the situation and the behavior. Even when behaviors are identical, we can make a distinction between the good and the not so good. As an example, there are war heroes who have killed hundreds and there are murderers on death row who have killed one. The context changes even when the behavior is the same, and even when the intent is the same.

Getting back to your question... what was your question? Oh, right.

There are times when one person has an intent or a nature that we might call "good" but is nevetheless called "bad" by the community. History is littered with examples, and there are many reasons why the person is not accepted.

[Bro Dave]

In an attempt to refocus on the original question, is there a duality? That is, do we have a vehicle and are we then the driver? If so, then the vehicle is “issued”, and you are left to use deal with its limitations as you attempt to traverse your life. But that life is to a large extent defined by your transportation, is it not?

Bro Dave

[Curious]

Sorry Bro Dave we did go a bit tangential on you didn't we? Back to the original question, while I don't necessarily agree that we are responsible for the limitations of the vehicle, we must take some responsibility for it's upkeep. If you believe in the karmic influence from one life to the next then it could be argued that the limitations of the physical body are the result of your past actions (oh no not algae again!). You seem to be suggesting from your duality hypothesis (although I may be incorrect in this assumption) that the vehicle is dependent upon the class of licence that the driver holds. If this is the case then is it your suggestion that we pass from one suit of flesh(or ultimately spirit) to the next only after the lessons of that particular garment have been learned.

[ENIGMA]

In an attempt to refocus on the original question, is there a duality? That is, do we have a vehicle and are we then the driver? If so, then the vehicle is “issued”, and you are left to use deal with its limitations as you attempt to traverse your life. But that life is to a large extent defined by your transportation, is it not?

Bro Dave

I am rather skeptical of a dualistic hypothesis since it would lead to a number of rather odd and unresolved implications when looking at the current experimental results from studying various types of brain damage and seeing the effects on patients.

One such class of studies that comes to mind involves the resulting behavior when the corpus callosum, the connecting brain tissue between the left and right brain hemispheres is severed either by accident or on purpose (It's a last resort to limit the severity of seizures). What happens is, namely, any sensory input that gets sent to the right hemisphere (left side of body) never gets sent to the left hemisphere and vice versa.

A few resulting effects of this condition are:

1) A patient puts their left hand behind a screen, is handed an object, feels the objects shape, and can later identify it with that hand afterwards, but is effectively clueless when trying to identify it using their right hand afterwards. Only if the patient either says the name of the object or writes the name of the object (depending on which one the right hemisphere does, I forget which is which) so that their right side of their body is told what the object is, can they find the object behind the screen with their right hand.

2) A patient is shown a picture of Hitler only in one side of his vision, they become visibly angry/disgusted and when you ask them why, they say (if you showed the picture to the side that doesn't control speech) something which is a plausible reason to get angry ("I was thinking about something that I really should have done but didn't do." or the like), yet when pressed they don't acknowledge (presumably because that side of the brain doesn't know) that they were angry because of seeing a picture of Hitler. The general idea of all of this being that the other side of the brain controls many emotional responses and that the only reason that the speech side of the brain even knows that the person is angry is because of the responses, and when asked comes up with a plausible explanation to try to rationalize the anger.


When examined in the context of dualism (namely the vehicle and driver metaphor) we get the odd result that when the vehicle (brain) is broken and seperated into two sections, each with sufficient redundancies to drive more or less independently of the other, the driver (soul/spirit/conciousness/what have you) is in one of the following scenarios.

1) The driver is duplicated, so that with two sections there are now two drivers, but they cannot keep in regular contact with each other.

2) The driver is in control of one section and either someone else or no one happens to be in control the other section.

3) The driver is no longer in either section, and each is either being driven by someone else or no one at all.

This leads to a few rather odd questions, namely:

If the drivers duplicate when the vehicle does, then wouldn't the driver be just as affected by whatever else happens to the vehicle (namely if the vehicle dies, so does the driver) ?

If the driver is not in control of a section, who/what is controlling the section, if anybody?

If a section can independently function without a driver then what distinction is there between a section with a driver and a section without a driver?

etc..

[Curious]

If the driver is not in control of a section, who/what is controlling the section, if anybody?

If a section can independently function without a driver then what distinction is there between a section with a driver and a section without a driver?

etc..

If one was to agree with this notion of duality couldn't this then be attributed to a limitation of the vehicle? I suppose frontal lobe damage might be a better example which would , by changing the personality of the person, appear to not only change the vehicle in some way but also to replace the driver.