"spinoza1111" <spinoza1111@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:e36f0084-d40d-4a45-9442-3bcc24d7e895@s13g2000prd.googlegroups.com...
On Mar 6, 1:32 am, Ron Garret <rNOSPA...@flownet.com> wrote:

In article <0JidnepcXNYxxVPanZ2dneKdnZydn...@bt.com>,
Richard Heathfield <r...@see.sig.invalid> wrote:

Ron Garret said:

In article <XfOdnW0X0NjfqVPanZ2dnUVZ8tPin...@bt.com>,
Richard Heathfield <r...@see.sig.invalid> wrote:

Ron Garret said:

So even Free Software is a
market exchange, and its authors are compensated. The only
difference
is that the compensation comes in a form other than cash because
the
authors of Free Software don't want cash, they want freedom. But
there is no altruism involved.

Similarly, mothers don't /really/ love their children. It's all to do
with DNA. And when people risk their lives diving into rivers to save
complete strangers, what they're really after is the Hero Badge.

Yeah, right.

You're not nearly as far off the mark as you are trying to be.

Oh, I can't agree with that! :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene

I read that book about 15 years ago (assuming that the wiki article does
indeed describe "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins - you can never
tell
with wiki).

There's an easy way to find out you know.

I thought it was nonsense then, and I think it's nonsense now.
(It was, in fact, that book that persuaded me, much to my astonishment,
that my stance on the whole Evolution vs Creation debate thing was
completely wrong.)

Ah, and here I was thinking I was engaging in a debate with a rational
person. Silly me.

But whether you agree with me or not on that issue, the denial of
altruism
is merely a consequence of inappropriate reductionism. Whether people
are
altruistic because "God made them that way" or because it's an emergent
species survival trait in a universe sans point, the fact remains that
people /do/ (on occasion) behave altruistically. To pretend otherwise is
just silly.

No. Just because they *appear* to act altruistically does not mean that
they actually do. Just as the fact that the sun *appears* to revolve
around the earth does not mean that it actually does.

Garret is right about creationism, wrong about altruism. Heathfield is
wrong about creationism and right about altruism.

Specifically, altruism means (cf. Kant) acts done for no hope of any
reward. We do these all the time, as well as acts for which the
financial reward is insufficient.

The Russian mathematician who refused the Fields Medal was acting
altruistically.

In writing my book "Build Your Own .Net Language and Compiler", I knew
that the royalties would not cover my costs, direct and opportunity.
Although to my surprise the royalties have started to roll in now that
the advance is paid, they will never cover the costs.

The fact is that people have a natural desire to act altruistically
even in the sex act, unless they are sadists.

In non-altruistic acts, someone is altruistic. For example, the
proletariat, in Marx, altruistically agrees to produce surplus value
by damping-down their requests for pay to a set-point which (as even
in the case of contemporary Americans, in the putatively and by some
measures the richest in the world) the proletariat doesn't have a pot
to piss in.

The corruption that ensues in fact makes many of us desire to do
altruistic acts such as write software simply to be able to breathe.

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