@Twist

In principal; yes. In practice; no.

I'm an honest hypocrite.

Sex is an entirely selfish act with no value (apart from reproduction) to anyone but the egos involved which serves to condition itself over time. If torn between banging my girlfriend and helping my neighbour out of a burning house, I should choose the latter. If it's a choice between an evening of self-satisfaction and terminating a fully-formed child in partial-birth abortion, clearly the former. I don't even have to get into metaphysics of ego-dynamics to illustrate how it is ultimately destructive. I can simply point out that it is a selfish desire that gets reinforced upon its fulfillment which has absolutely no productive value for anyone else and plenty of consequences. Both in the responsibility for the creative process and as one responsible for their own character.

Never-the-less I frequently engage in sexual satisfaction for primarily egotistical reasons with my girlfriend/common-law partner. Perhaps the only difference is I'm not telling myself its some divine act, I'm quite certain it is entirely selfish and therefor more akin to evil. I smoke too, and I wouldn't try to argue that smoking is productive, healthy or anything else simply because I desire it.

That's why when I call for my cat she doesn't come, she's in Australia.

@Jessss

I'm trying to work on that, maybe reducing the amount I communicate with others, or reducing the amount I care about truth and discernment in the highest abstract sense, but coming to such a reverence for truth was itself a long ardurous process of working within my self to overcome all of my personal aversions to it like; the time it takes, the energy it takes, the fact I'd rather read Calvin and Hobbes than De Corpore Politico by Thomas Hobbes, and that when I'm all done I won't be of much value to others but appear more as a nuisance. So, I understand, and I'm working towards keeping all of my learned opinions and thoughts locked up in isolation where they cannot possibly affect anyone else's heart-strings. I know the most of us are puppets, and I don't want to be master for better or worse, all I really want is honesty and truth, and there are all kinds of ways I've thought about it and the way that relates to others.. i.e. some of that existentialist angst brought on by self-consciousness.

Another popular thought experiment is if we could program a computer to mourn the loss of some of its data would that mean the computer is self-aware in the phenomenal sense?

Phenomenality is really the crux of the problem, virtually all behavior can be reproduced unconsciously. One rather telling fact is that by and large chimps and dolphins don't descend into abyssmal states of existentialist angst or suffer any imminent need to figure things out. They rarely commit suicide and have never composed any of the great works of Shakespeare. Though they show some rudimentary signs of a self-aware creature they show virtually no signs of a creature that is aware that it is self-aware which is characteristic of the endlessly self-reflective process we generally are. Such that we can reflect upon our reflecting upon and so on ad infinitum. The chimp or dolphin seem to be primarily concerned with self solely as it relates to others within their group. There is no record of chimps wandering off in solitude to contemplate their own existence and resolve the existentialist dilemmas borne out of this kind of reflective self-awareness. Thus it is reasonable to postulate that whatever self-awareness chimps and dolphins have, it's not what we are referring to when we say humans are the only self-conscious creature.

Whether or not humans or other animals are self-aware is a difficult question to answer that cannot easily be resolved by pointing to mourning elephants. It's just not that simple. Have you heard of the philosopher's zombie? How about sleep-walking? Or any other automatic behavior that resembles a consciously willed act but wherein the person's phenomenal (mental) self does not exist. To answer the question are and in what way are humans self-aware as distinct from other species we need to wrap our heads around a lot.

Egyptians worshipped the infinite God of which I routinely speak under many names including; Isis, Horus, Ra, Aten, Amun, Amun-Horus-Ra (amalgamated) and so forth. Such a society were it truly devoted to God would look quite unusual to modern eyes. It may even appear like, some insane thought, those "slaves" weren't actually volunteers. Simply because nobody in their "right mind" according to our sensibilities would do that to themselves.

People don't rob banks except to make themselves known. "Fear or revere me, but please think I'm special."

So the age old story goes. Jack the Ripper killed prostitutes (a.k.a. "dregs of society") and likely maintained that though the law prohibited him, he would be secretely revered like Batman or some other romanticized vigillante.

A few years back there was a man in the UK also killing prostitutes and the leity tossed around all manner of ideas about his motives, but criminologists the world over maintained that he was afflicted by the same intrinsic motives Jack the Ripper was. He wasn't "mad at the world" he was "making a name for himself". When the self fails to express itself in a manner that "fits in" in a traditional way, it may seek ulterior ways of elevating itself to worshipful status, and for many in the darkness of their own ignorance, the solutions are delusional. We cannot openly help these people come up with better solutions because by and large we are the ones who made them feel cast out to begin with, and secondly because we'd rather incarcerate them to protect ourselves against any possible sign of the potential of the prospect or any probability that we might be hurt. So we don't help them and are not mature enough to even try. Because we ourselves only haphazhardly made it to where we are at and cannot claim to understand it. There is a massive timber in our eye, and this is like a 10,000 year old seqouia. ; )

Mind you as the bodies pile up, it will have to eventually become evident that our techniques are not freeing us at all, but killing us.

Well this is interesting, though one might seem to be free, at least from external influences if one can physically overcome those influences. But then, only the extrinsic cause of bondage has been addressed and the implicit cause of bondage may very well be enslaving you from within. I guess one would have to ask themselves, with what readiness will I rise up to overcome extrinsic causes of bondage and to that degree do I do so because of intrinsic bondage (desires, habits, addictions, fear, etc..) or because of actual dispassionate justice?

I generally make the assumption that while Adolf Hitler was unique, as all people are, he was also very common psychologically. Hitler was no villain in the traditional sense of one unmotivated by anything but the desire to hurt others. Even Shakespeare's most machiavellian villain Iago who is generally thought to have no motives, clearly has motives when Iago is seen as Ego. If people were more attuned to recognizing this subtle but widely determining phenomena, perhaps other paths to resolving crises like this could actually be pursued. But as the world remains blind to our own nature we invariably conceive of fighting fighting with fighting as the only possible means to our "freedom".

There are people with conditions like this already that do not function very well. And anyway drugs don't fix problems, they just paper-over the problem so that, in the name of expediency, patients can get back to being grinded, uhh, the grind I mean.

But all drugs that fulfill some neurochemical role also fill a habituating and imbalancing role in one's natural neurochemistry. If your chemistry is off because you were sexually abused as a child and were never able to resolve it internally, we'll give you Selective Seratonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) to help calm you down. But don't stay on them or your dependence on them will dictate your moods thenceforth.

My mother used to be a psychoanalysts goldmine and she was constantly fed MAOIs and SSRIs and raked through psychoanalytic sessions. After 15 years she was still having the same problems but eventually she just let it all go, drugs, moods, anxieties and everything. To hear her talk about it now, one gets the impression she just needed to "grow up". That is, a lot of her problems were based in an infantile expectation of a romantic life (as portrayed in popular culture). Letting go of the delusion (some would call a dream) seems to have helped where the drugs were only a band-aid.

"Through very love of self himself he slew" - George Meredith, The Egoist

This is such an epic song. Apparently Merry Clayton had a miscarriage after recording the vocals on the original track.

Actually, I'm pretty sure this falls within the domain of gestalt psychology. Like the classic two-faces-kissing which doubles as a vase, or the famous Necker Cube. Not surprisingly gestalt artwork like this is a common complement to Idealism. Because it clearly illustrates the dependence of an object's identity on the attitude of the observer. I want to see "Chuck Norris" and so I do, instead of the disorderly arrangement of backwards characters it might appear to others to be. So perhaps if I wrote the AI so that it overlooked it's percepts and attempted to comport them to a desired view-point then I could achieve this "artificially".

I never tire of both consuming this kind of art and analyzing it's cognitive modus. Thanks

That's pretty cool. The Yoda pictures is most certainly the best. Not that I'm a judge of such things. This will probably be a big challenge for artificial intelligence. They spend so much time getting computers to recognize "O"s apart from "C"s and in order for the computer to understand this ambigram its going to have to "stretch its imagination" and conceive of the "C" as an "O". The layers of design complexity there are phenomenal.

I had a thought once, since the prefrontal cortex in my brain is responsible for all of my conscious decision making, and I couldn't be held responsible without it, I should have mine removed or just inject some kind of neutralizing solution so that I don't have to take responsibility for my desires and actions.

I don't think fitness is properly measured this way. The article correctly identifies that fitness is "inextricably linked to culture" but this is probably only a minor cause. A necessary but not a sufficient cause and it all depends on what you mean by fitness. The Body Mass Index that is traditionally used is well known to be a false representation of fitness. Fitness is inextricably linked to metabolics. Remember the oriental couple that were over 110 years old, lean and lived on french fries, or the "perfectly" healthy man who ate 25,000 Big Macs.

There are a number of metabolic variants that affect the way adipose tissue is stored in the body. For example; Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor Gamme (formerly Delta) converts stored adiposity into muscle tissue and in some people this process is accelerated making them fairly lean regardless of fat consumption, whereas in others it functions poorly and such people are generally obese according to the BMI and culture in general. Even if these people go on an all vegetable and fruit diet they will still be obese. Their problem is not what or how much they eat, but the way their PPAR-Gamma receptors respond to PPAR-Gamma. Diet, exercise, pump iron, they will still be fat and society at large will still ridicule them for being fat.

Now, we also know that genetics share a correlation with geography in many species. Members of a species in one region will have a specific variant which only barely bleeds over into the next region.