Where do concepts come from, and most importantly, how were they conceived? If there was an error in conception, then there are errors all the way down. ideas are the concepts by which we see and interpret the world. If the idea was improperly formed, then everything based off that idea is improperly formed by definition. Since everything derived from that idea, inherits it’s misunderstanding of the men or humans that conceptualized the idea from their misunderstanding of the the world. And since all concepts are derived from the world, through the process of detection, observation, and modification, if one was not seeing the world properly, one was not conceiving based on what is true, only on illusions of what is true.
Definition of the self:
your consciousness of your own identity
(used as a combining form) relating to–of or by or to or from or for–the self; “self-knowledge”; “self-proclaimed”; “self-induced”
a person considered as a unique individual; “one’s own self”
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
Selfishness:
concerned chiefly or only with yourself and your advantage to the exclusion of others; "Selfish men were… …
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
The self
When was it defined and by whom? We will never know… But this question is important because mankind has been ignorant of so many things, it was once thought things were made of fire. Then there was the theory of The Four Humours during the middle ages. Men are frequently thinking with ideas other men conceived and conceptualized from the world improperly and which have been passed down through the ages, so we must ask, were these concepts and ideas conceived properly when we compare it against a more clear understanding of reality? Are we arguing over the misinformed conceptualizations of ancient men who had no understanding of what they were conceiving?
So now we must ask, what is the self, in reality?. We must look to the human body for our answers. In looking at a human body and discovering how it functions. We know the self is the nervous system and brain that is attached to the body itself, one cannot disconnect the nervous system entirely from the body without severe damage, since the nervous system is critical in how a person is and how they feel and derive information from the world fundamentally. If key parts of the body is injured too gravely, the “Self” (nervous system) will die, that is, the key support systems will shut down and be damaged to such a degree that the brain/nervous system (person) is unsalvagable.
So we know at the very least, the self is made of many interconnected and interdependent parts. It is not a lone distinct object, it is an interconnected whole. A whole with pieces that are together or pieces that are further away. But these parts that make up the whole, and we consider it an object, a distinct person, something ‘separate’ from the rest. But in ultimate reality, they are not. We must eat and breath (a cycle of eating, a cycle of going to the bathroom), i.e. we are constantly taking in new things to replace old things, and those old things go back into the ground, to be taken up again, into the body. A circuit, or cycle. The cycle itself proves, that there is no such thing as ultimate separation from reality. That reality is a network of associations, that are either nearer or father apart, but in the absolute sense, not separate, similar to bubbles on a surface of the ocean.
The cells themselves still fundamentally all live together in a society, which we call a body (the collective individual) trillions of cells. All working and sustaining your body, muscles, and your mind without your awareness of it.
The idea that everything is selfish is incorrect when we look at nature.
APOPTOSIS, or programmed cell death is absolutely critical to the formation of human appendages and life itself, cancer is itself the elimination of all restraint (i.e. in political human terms, total unrestrained freedom, selfishness, non-interference)
For example, the differentiation of fingers and toes in a developing human embryo occurs because cells between the fingers apoptose; the result is that the digits are separate. Between 50 billion and 70 billion cells die each day due to apoptosis in the average human adult. For an average child between the ages of 8 and 14, approximately 20 billion to 30 billion cells die a day. In a year, this amounts to the proliferation and subsequent destruction of a mass of cells equal to an individual’s body weight.
Research on apoptosis has increased substantially since the early 1990s. In addition to its importance as a biological phenomenon, defective apoptotic processes have been implicated in an extensive variety of diseases. Excessive apoptosis causes hypotrophy, such as in ischemic damage, whereas an insufficient amount results in uncontrolled cell proliferation, such as cancer.
So when we look at how reality actually works, or ‘the self’ we see that the human concepts of selfishness and selflessness break down, since in the apoptosis example they are a matter of environmental necessity.
There is only actions, that occur depending on the environment in which they exist, sometimes it pays to be collective , other times it pays to be more ‘individua’, but the concepts themselves are incoherent when we look at nature, everything exists in a cycle, a recursive network of dependencies (air, food, water, cells shed back to the ground feed organisms, etc).
Consciousness is an interconnected network of cells
When we look at the body itself, there is both separateness and union, cells differentiate and interconnect and yet those individual cells are made of a network of interconnected parts again, and they all interact in countless ways.
Therefore the concept of selfish and selfless is incoherent, since they are matters of necessity, and geometry in nature.
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. The only moral imperative about sexual intercourse (among consenting adults) is that any children will if at all possible have at least two parents of opposite sex.