Is Weakness Necessary?
In natural predator-prey relationships if a predator is so strong a hunter it proliferates and the prey population declines, their group gets equally wiped out. Would you say in this sense that weakness is necessary for survival, and thereby there is some good in weak people just in lieu of the fact that they are weak relative to their potential?
Comments (83)
In nature, the predator is also prey, and the prey predator. And if nature sneezes they're all dead.
This effect leads to cyclical population growth and decline in prey and predator, as illustrated here:
I'm in North America where foreign invasion, whether its birds, trees, vines, viruses, or humans, can radically alter the biosphere because the invaders come from areas where they had to be really aggressive and hardy to survive.
Why are North American species such pushovers?
Because that's how equilibrium left them. As you say, prior to the development of a new equilibrium, we see devastation. Japanese grass takes over forest floors and provides no food for birds. The birds move on and now all sorts of seeds have no way to travel to new fertile ground.
But a new equilibrium will come, maybe to one day be upset by new aggressive invaders.
Diversity is necessary for survival. Weakness is not a biological fact, it's merely a human judgement.
"Weakness" and "strength" are too heavily loaded with moral connotations to be very helpful in describing ecological relationships.
What is necessary for survival is a more-or-less sustainable balance between predator/prey animals and plant communities. As @Frank noted, a sustainable balance can be disrupted and various species adapt or become extinct.
Example: The glaciated regions of North America were scraped down to the rocks, then layered over with 'drift'. Over 10-15,000 years, plant and animal communities repopulated the glaciated areas. When Europeans de- and re- populated North America, they brought with them a variety of 'exotic' species which were native to Europe. One of those was the large earth worm, longer and bigger than the earthworms that were native to North America. The exotic earthworms eventually reached the northern forests, where they commenced rapidly chewing up leaf litter at a much higher rate than the native worms did. This is a relatively recent development and it is changing the ecology of the forests. How this will play out in the future is unknown.
It doesn't make sense to oppose one worm as 'weak' and the other as 'strong'. They are both strong--but one is larger than the other and they eat more.
By weakness I mean the common usage, making the wrong decisions, failing at things, self-destructive behaviour, depression, anxiety, being a nerd, a loser, a freak, and so forth - even disposition towards actions such as being overly generous, trusting, or gullible. If you were perfectly athletic, charming, and happy, you'd reproduce more just the same as a predator would prey more. However, that might not necessarily be 'strong' in the sense of the strength of your species, and as an individual act couldn't it also be considered weakness?
It's obviously not wholly weak to be strong, these terms have meaning though about these sorts of 'weak' people maybe they command some amount of respect just for their courage and strength in having weaknesses?
But the predator is dependent on its prey although it is stronger.
Your insight is a traditional Chinese view.
[quote= Lao Tzu]
That which shrinks
Must first expand.
That which fails
Must first be strong.
That which is cast down
Must first be raised.
Before receiving
There must be giving.
This is called perception of the nature of things.
Soft and weak overcome hard and strong.[/quote]
If so, then the misdirection is yours. Starting out with "In natural predator-prey relationships if a predator is so strong a hunter it proliferates and the prey population declines..." is a pretty strong indication of what a reader would think you were getting at. Let me take a minute to vent:
The OP goes in one direction, then after a few entries, the original poster announces "Oh, well that isn't what I meant." Hey, it's the job of a thread creator to get it right from the beginning. (You are one of a number of people who do this,)
In your response, you said "you'd reproduce more just the same as a predator would prey more". Kudos, if you want to talk about human existential questions, morality, and the like, then leave the biological alone (because they misdirect the reader).
You seem to be reaching for a paradox about weakness and strength -- and they are sometimes in paradoxical relationships. The Taoist talks about how a "weak" willow bends in the wind and is not damaged, while the "strong" oak resists the wind and is broken. So, which one is strong and which one is weak? Paradox.
Oh, look: Unenlightened just quoted Lao Tzu--stealing my thunder right out from under me!
See also Aesop.
So your main point is to say that the weakness of an animal is of an altogether different kind from the weakness of a human being, is that what you mean? In terms of the weaknesses that predators exploit versus the weaknesses that other human beings exploit are incomparably different?
But what is the main difference you are referring to, isn't weakness itself known as a kind of tendency to be exploited in some manner? Even in the comedic sense, where we say "I have a weakness for steamed salmon," don't we mean that we allow our natural fondness for the salmon overcome our rational thinking? A physically weak person is someone who, relative to others, would be subject to being overcome by force of another, and hence exploited physically.
But we are just deflecting the meaning onto another set of determinations of what we mean by 'exploitation,' and we can go on ad infinitum in this sort of circular peeling away of the layers of language, probably winding back up where we began. This is why I was trying to avoid the analogy, because it is often subject to this fault, but I meant it as it was said.
Considering your clarification...
Quoting kudos
strength and weakness are not as clearly differentiable among we humans. Is being a computer nerd a strength or a weakness? The handsome, healthy, hot athlete may get to mate more often, but if what is needed at the time is insight into printed circuitry and code, how useful will the hunk be? Fun to fuck but after that... pffft.
There have been a number of discussions here about the evolutionary value of depression. What good is it? Not sure myself, but some people think that "depression" has value to the group because anxious depressed people are sensitive to potentially dangerous situations that the hale and hearty are not. Personally, I haven't found depression to be an advantage, though it might lead to insights that a mentally robust person wouldn't arrive at. And not all insights are equally useful or healthy. Sometimes it is better to not look behind the curtain.
Loners, Freaks, losers, nerds, et al living outside convention as they do a good share of the time, can bring fresh perspectives to the community. Some of our great inventors, authors, artists, musicians, etc. were loners, losers, freaks, nerds, and worse--if you can imagine anything worse. (Most of the greats were more or less socially successful, but not all of them were.)
So, among human society, weakness and strength are not as obvious as they are among animals. Sometimes strength comes from being an alienated, dysfunctional outsider. An outsider will probably have better vision to see society as only an outsider can.
Take Thorsten Veblen, a late 19th century, early 20th century economist and sociologist. Some of his outsider traits enabled him to see the purpose of large, carefully tended lawns: They are conspicuous consumption -- proof that one has a lot of money to maintain a perfectly useless field of grass on which no sheep or cow will ever graze. It is difficult to get such insights into society from the perspective of a socially successful person. To the wealthy-enough homeowner, the large lawn is inherently justifiable, and worth all the work that goes into it.
A weed patch in front of the house, on the other hand, is proof of one's failure in society. Success = nice grass; failure = weeds. I have weeds in my lawn. I agree with Veblen: large chemically dosed lawns are bullshit and ought to be stamped out. Screw the middle class lawn mower.
We're both in agreement that there is no truly absolute quality of weakness we can point to. If Mr. Veblen failed miserably in his attempts to monetize lawn-care analysis, and he were still a social outcast, we could say he probably has a weakness: a type of epithet for incongruity between his desires and his reality, mostly as a result of a tendency towards being overcome. By the same approximation, we project that the animal desires it's own survival and it's failure to live is a result it's weakness.
I see your view as ends justifying the means. If someone is successful, they are strong, if they fail they're weak. In this judgement I feel like we are losing a core quality of weakness: the tendency. That is, their vulnerability. The sense that their weakness is a result of free will, choosing a course that will tend towards their downfall. If we as species and not as individuals did always make the right choice, don't you agree that it would kill us?
I don't see why it would, but there is zero likelihood of our species always making the right choice -- or even always choosing the lesser of two evils.
"If the ends do not justify the means, what in God's name does?" some famous person said.
Successful people usually have SOMETHING going for them -- quite often a highly successful parent or grandparent. The various children of John D. Rockefeller Sr., Abigail, John III, Nelson, Laurance, Winthrop, and David had their success handed to them on heavy silver platters. I'm not suggesting that any of the children were morons, but it does help having one of the richest men on earth as a parent.
There are people who choose, or accept, their weakness, their vulnerability. Some of them tread the paths leading to holiness -- Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. There are people who accept their low status, for any number of reasons (too complicated a topic for here and now). Some of these people strike one as saintlike, or maybe as freakishly weird, depending. Or maybe ready to be taken to the home for the very very confused.
Quoting kudos
The absolute most weak person is a bit hard to imagine having much of a role of any kind in society.
I'm a bit lost as to what you are aiming for.
Right, and being a die-hard believer in Darwinism as you alluded to earlier, don't you think that there is a reason why our species like others is designed like that -- a reason that has a firm basis in natural or sexual selection? Why would a female mammal specially choose a mate that is weak? So our attention would then understandably turn to the selection of the natural category.
As @Olivier5 pointed out, strong hunters do not proliferate at the expense of their prey in nature, rather, there is a dynamic balance between the two groups that ebbs and flows. Where strength does become important is on a Darwinian stage of eliminating weaker rivals that would otherwise claim the same territory in the food chain. I am thinking of foxes, coyotes, and wolves that cannot survive in the same terrain and territory together. But this competition among peers is just as intense and at times just as deadly in human affairs, especially at the international level of the hierarchy.
If we were to formalize this relationship by setting up a dichotomy of strong/weak predator/prey, we would need to look at something that takes the dynamical aspects of either experiential or real-world relationships into account. Which is why I attempted a Heraclitean peer-to-peer and another one-to-many parent-to-children model for your first phrase. I think these relationships would stay static for a time but not forever, not as would be expected for any dialectic originating with Plato.
It isn't a contradiction to claim that both are somewhat true. Mostly, predators and prey don't obey linear increasing/decreasing rules, but in many cases if they over-hunt to the point where there are no prey left - such as in the case where interaction rates are too high - they experience a larger reducing force, sometimes to the point of extinction; you don't tend to observe this as often because over time the probability of it reduces. The equilibrium seen in Olivier's graph is one example of a time that it doesn't occur, but not really a proof of why.
I have lots of weaknesses: old, arthritic, going blind, gay, overly opinionated, depressed, and so on. I'm not very strong now, though at my best I was a pretty good long-distance cyclist -- not fast but persistent. I swam, jogged, did calisthenics, etc. I've accepted the cards I've been dealt and am more or less, pretty happy. Though, the ice on which I am standing isn't all that thick.
BTW, I like your banana and hammer image.
What is it about Darwin that you find disturbing?
Some, not all. There is a tendency to forget that the biggest, fiercest dinosaurs went extinct, that the interdependence of every ecosystem includes top and bottom, and puts the top in the most fragile position, survival-wise. And that even biologists and philosophers were once mewling brats needing feeding and changing and nurturing by others. It's largely an ideological thing, I think.
Well maybe, maybe not, and how the hell would we know?
Then too, "depression" as it is tossed about these days can mean all sorts of things.
Steven Pinker proposes that we are less violent today than we were in the stone ages, not because we have evolved into a peaceable species, but because we developed centralized control -- the city state first, then later the larger state, which enforced more cooperative peaceable behavior. Take away centralized control, and maybe we would revert to a more violent norm.
Did evolution play a role in the development of the city state around 5 to 7,000 years ago? Seem like a very late development to pin on Darwin. Grain probably had more to do with it than anything else.
Dogs and humans formed a pretty strong connection around 20,000 years ago. Was that evolution or selective breeding (which is, in a way, fast evolution)? Russian biologists have shown that silver fox (a generally unfriendly species with nice fur) can be bred into a docile dog like animal without its nice fur and wild behavior in the space of a human lifetime (so, 30 to 50 generations of yearly breeding fox). Whether humans or dogs initiated domestication is hard to say. Based on the manipulative abilities of dogs I have known, they probably instigated their domestication. They saw in us a very good deal, available to them at the cost of friendly tail wagging, eye contact, a little snuggling, and the like.
I am not directly attributing depression and anxiety to evolutionary causes without evidence - that would be very lazy reasoning. I am attempting to form an analog between human weaknesses and animal weaknesses. If you don't believe humans can be overcome by failure and weakness in the same way as animals, then we are really going into evolution-denying territory; by claiming that humans have complete discontinuity with the entire animal kingdom.
It's probably safe to say that humans fail to survive in ways very much like other animals. Inattentive animals end up getting run over by automobiles, for instance, whether they be squirrels or people. Disease is a great leveler across the plant and animal kingdoms. So is predation. Humans may be a top predator now, but we have not always been at the top, and when it comes to the competition between pathogens and animals, our superiority (with antibiotics) is a flash in the pan. An unarmed person has no particular advantage in a confrontation with a polar bear or a grizzly. If we can't run fast enough and hide, we stand a good chance of being eaten.
Even oddities like homosexuality show up across species, appearing in mammals and birds, and of course, humans. Male pairs of ducks, for instance, have been observed stealing eggs from other nests in order to have eggs to hatch. Surviving members of geese couples (gay and straight) seem to mourn the loss of their mate. No reason why they wouldn't -- the avian limbic system isn't all that different than ours.
1) Actions that counter animal's individual interest
2) Success in such as way as its interests or needs could be better satisfied
3) Individual interest that counters possibility for survival, or sexual selection
Since it doesn't get us anywhere to view only from the animals perspective, we can instead talk as in, the animal is chosen or selected to be weak in the same vein as it chooses to be so; this contradiction is left in-absolute in the form of present discussion. From this point of view, we could say the animal may do a service to the others and to the entire ecosystem through it's physical weakness.
One example of this would be bears which discover garbage. A smorgasbord of stuff is suddenly available, most of which isn't healthy for bears as a steady diet, and displaces their normal diet of stuff like berries, fish, grubs, meat, and so on. Bears seem to be sated the same way that people who eat too much garbage feel sated. Fed and feeling full, but deriving too little essential nutrition along with the calories. The bears are likely to become sick. Plus, the garbage-dump bears become a nuisance (they are too dangerous to have around) so can lead to their deaths by shotgun.
Quoting kudos
I can't think of an example that fits this. What did you have in mind.
Quoting kudos
Sometimes "odd couples" form, often involving at least one domesticated animal, but not always. Like a goose and a dog, or a horse and a goat. Aside from companionship and ending up on YouTube, there is no advantage to the animals in the odd couple. They are never going to mate.
Celibate religious are an example of principle 3. It may help an individual's survival (monasteries are usually safe places), but one definitely won't reproduce, if one is faithful to one's vows.
As an individual the failure could be weaknesses in one instance are strength in another. Or the qualities could very well rest in behaviour with the highest probability of success.
To make an analogy with the human being, a businessman with an excellent business idea and strategy could fail nonetheless; That the act was chosen to be imparts some of the weakness and not only the result or the causa finalis of the act. Similarly, we could compare human actions with the animal who does not choose it's own death, but acts it out; in the process allowing another species to survive by balancing the population numbers.
Among humans, one sometimes meets people who seem to have nothing much going for them (homely, not very smart, not physically gifted, etc.) but who are persistent and manage to keep body and soul together for a long time and die of old age in their own bed. How can that be? As The Preacher in Ecclesiastes put it, "The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but time and chance happen to all."
I am here today, writing to you, because on a number of occasions accidents were less damaging than they VERY EASILY could have been; I didn't get AIDS, but I certainly could have, and so on. It wasn't because of caution, immense prudence, or foresight that I am still here. It was LUCK, True enough, most of the time I lived a conventional life; I went to work, did my job, saved my pennies, ate a healthy diet, exercised, didn't do drugs, or smoke and drink too much for too long a period. But I was also a risk taker, and if you take enough risks, eventually one will get nailed. I backed off risk enough to survive.
The squirrels that get run over are not examples of unfitness. They are victims of bad luck. Their species didn't evolve to have an understanding of moving vehicles, so whether they are squashed or not is a matter of luck. Some animals are more adaptable. When one bikes down a street where there are lots of pigeons, the birds don't fly away as one approaches. They hop a few inches to get out of the way. Squirrels aren't equipped to do that. On the other hand, squirrels recover 90% of the walnuts they bury. Pigeons aren't equipped to remember where several hundred walnuts are.
What animal is that?
Quoting kudos
It is just you. If you lived where there are a lot of bears, and one of them was running your way with you on the menu, you'd be happy to have a shotgun handy. What would you use -- a sling shot? A BB gun? You'd fulfill the bear's desire for [I]"Kudos al Fresco"[/i]
I suppose we're getting into an area where I've seemed to find the philosophy of Nietzsche difficult to accept. Does our weakness make our existence a crude reality, or is it fundamental to our animal nature that we be submissive, fail at things, imperfect in different ways; Is that a core component of who we are or our real nature?
I thought it's a rock-paper-scissors arrangement we have in the natural world, like we have in the military: archers beat pikemen, pikemen beat cavalry, and cavalry beat archers. :chin:
Good or not, chance is a factor in life. It just IS. What is bad is ignoring the part that chance events play (positive. indifferent, and negative). Unless one thinks that there is a string of implacable deterministic causation from the Big Bang down to this paragraph, then chance is a given.
Quoting kudos
Weakness, submissiveness, failure, imperfections... fundamental to our animal nature? Not in my book!
We 'compounded beings' are an amalgam of strengths, flaws, failures, successes, wisdom, stupidity, and so on. Put crudely, we are primates with an overly developed frontal cortex (intellect) driven by a limbic system which evolved to assist survival in the jungle. Our emotions are vital, but they are volatile, and powerful. We prize our intellect, but without our wild emotions, what would we ever accomplish? Nothing.
Our "core, or real nature", is contradictory. On the one hand, we can reason; apply logic; develop deep insights; construct models of the world. On the other hand, opposite the deep thinker, we can fall stupidly in love, fly into a rage, commit arson, rape, and bloody murder, and then again, suddenly be as gentle as a kitten.
A core piece of human reality is that we are barely masters of our own houses (our minds).
So, we go through our lives, sometimes lasting more than a century, as a bundle of contradictory desires, wishes, fears, and hopes. That's kind of who we are. Some people, or maybe beneficiaries of chance, go through life at peace with their different parts. Or maybe the clamped a heavy cover on all that and just ignore it. Some people have a stormy relationship with their parts. They aren't at peace with it all, but that doesn't mean they are miserable. Some people like southern California weather -- nice all the time -- and some people like to have the occasional tornado, violent thunderstorm, blizzard, or the perfect autumn day.
Does that help any?
It sounds like you are both making a similar point if I'm not misreading it. That to a certain extent chance is a phenomena that occurs external to an individual, and separate from weakness. What does 'chance' itself really mean? Are you talking about events of which we have no control or simple discontinuities in our free will? It seems evident to me that both 'free will' and 'chance' are not words for things in themselves, but a sort of human technology. It is a process of quantification of internal and external causes into a black-box mechanism to be controlled, something that in the 17th century turned into probability. Take any example no matter how extreme, if I knew enough of the details I could argue equally well for either being of pure causation in a simple desire-to-end-result causation. It would be a little unbelievable to say free will should ever be truly discontinuous.
But it seems worth mentioning here because if we take the viewpoint that the failed animal has no free will in choosing to die, we are subject to saying "it was strength that overcame weakness." Weakness then is just an empty negation with no choice-value but to be avoided - this makes some sense for the individual interest, but terms of higher philosophy wouldn't it be something of a scapegoat?
Quoting kudos
This reminds me of a comment I made in another thread about how even in a completely deterministic set up, the way things proceed/occur may be misconstrued as chance/probability.
You mentioned this: Quoting kudos
However, the external is, in a deterministic setting, completely, for lack of a better word, preordained. There are two things to consider here, things out of our control - the external you're talking about - and chance. Methinks, in my humble opinion, you're conflating things out of our control with chance.
To illustrate, take our solar system and put it in the context of chemistry and physics. Chemistry is life, chemistry is deterministic. An asteroid the size of Texas is physics, physics is deterministic. The event consisting of the Texas-sized asteroid hitting our beloved planet is completely determined by the interaction of mass, energy, and force. In other words, an extinction event asteroid impact is not a chance event at all but, here lies the rub, we, chemistry, life, make the mistake of believing it is.
:chin:
This seems off topic to me but you opened this new line of inquiry.
"Strong" and "weak" are relative terms. It seems like an error to use it as a definite, fixed feature.
In that sense? No. I cannot recall- nor would I like to- a time where humans preyed on each other regularly for direct sustenance- in terms of literally eating one another. As far as conquering land and peoples for resources or servitude, yes but even that doesn't mesh with the reasoning in your OP. Animals don't enslave other animals, they eat them- or at the greatest congruence to humans, chase them out of former territory.
Humanity however is a bit different. When most people think of the word 'weak' they think of lacking physical strength. Seldom does mental ability come to mind. And sure, living as cave peoples someone bigger than yourself makes you for all intents and purposes- weak. As in your power and potential over theirs is far lesser. At least in comparison. But- if you were to say utilize something as simple as a lever and wield something as simple as a slingshot for example, that advantage in strength and size the other person has over you is negated. Or at least, the two are drawn much closer together. Sure, greater physical strength and size will always translate to greater power in terms of analog devices and tools but it becomes less of an inherent necessity.
If you're from one group who is being invaded by a much larger group, with few numbers left on your own- and you manage to study natural elements and determine which are poisonous- you can use stealth to say "spike" the enemy camps water supply and become victorious by the next morning. Just one of many examples.
Say you're in a primitive jungle and you come across someone much larger than you. If you can either get them to chase after you or perhaps chastise them if they don't at first, you could lure them to say a pitfall trap with sharpened spikes. Or just in general take someone much stronger than you. If that person is vulnerable to name-calling, insults, and other forms of mental sabotage and you happen not to be, well, you have the upper hand in most things save for a direct conflict of course. And even so, anger or rage especially can lead to mistakes and oversight.
To answer the question, assuming we're using weakness and strength properly and not completely focused on the physical... generally probably not but I'm sure there are some exceptions. I'm trying to think of a more eloquent way to phrase it other than "don't be like that guy" in terms of motivation to become the strongest you can be, especially if you witness reasons or events where it would've come in handy. Besides, many people and I would hope most train physical strength because they know it's smarter than to not and perhaps even to do good things, but those who don't and do so just for vanity or rather to try and address a deep-rooted personal insecurity or inferiority complex... would probably feel better about themselves after coming across someone less gifted or otherwise "weaker". I suppose there's that.
Not at all. Did I say that? I must've implied it. My mistake. We all have our triggers. Though I believe I pretty much if not explicitly said it's smarter to train physical strength (be strong) than to not (be).
Quoting kudos
Naturally as a self-proclaimed philosopher I believe mental fortitude can topple brute strength on occasion. Call me a pen mightier than the sword kind of guy if you must. Both are needed really. I suppose seeing as physical strength or power is something largely out of one's control those who rely heavily on something that's a "given" or otherwise easily obtained or done as the entirety of their essence or who they are not only miss out on the more refined things in life but can sometimes dull or handicap the lives of others. Curse of empathy, what can I say.
Quoting kudos
Well, sure. It's not the object or essence it's what it's used for or why you seek it.
Quoting kudos
Again, it's the intent behind the motive. To quote someone I'm not sure whether or not I admire, leaders are dealers in hope. Peace through strength is a mighty fine slogan and philosophy. Now, how this peace and strength is obtained and maintained I think is the question.
It seems I didn't express myself well enough. Let me give it another shot. @kudos thinks, if I understood him, that things out of our control are chance occurrences. This, to my reckoning, isn't correct. Things out of our control could very well be completely determined in every sense of that word.
To drive home the point, imagine particles of gas in a container and consider the "life" of one single particle, call it X. The motion of all particles (including X) in the container are fully determined according to science. For X, the things out of our (X's) control are the motions of other particles but notice that that isn't a matter of chance. Au contraire the motions of the particles are out and out determined. In short we can't equate things out of our control with chance.
Chance events seem like they are part of the knowable universe. We don't know when they will occur, just that they do. And when they do, chance events will be entirely consistent with the behavior of physical objects.
Lots of people have guns, bullets, and hands to hold, point, and fire off bullets on any number of trajectories. The behavior of the bullet is entirely determined, but which trajectory the bullet will follow depends on events which are not lawful (determined)--all the factors connected with the firing of the gun.
So, if a bullet's trajectory from a gun located a considerable distance away should by chance pass through the container of gas particles, the shattering of the glass and the dispersal of the particles, will all be perfectly 'lawful'. But there is no law that states no bullet will be launched on a container-smashing-gas-particle-scattering trajectory.
That's my view. If you don't agree, that's fine; there's a chance that you won't.
There's a chance that you won't because, by chance, a highly charged particle may have passed through your brain and disrupted the critical processes of one neuron which was pivotal in determining the way you think about chance.
Given the number of highly charged particles in the universe, it's amazing we are able to think at all.
Not to contradict you but name one event in a bullet's trajectory that isn't determined.
To be frank, the matter isn't as clear to me as I would've liked. What exactly does chance mean to (you and me and @kudos)?
As far as I'm concerned, since we're talking determinism here, chance is uncertainty in outcomes, a situation brought about by the lack of an observable pattern or if there's a pattern, it's probabilistic with a value between 0% (impossible) and 100% (certain). In other words, if things out of our control were chance, they should be patternless which isn't so. Hence, my reluctance to the claim that [I]things out of our control[/i] = chance.
BitterCrank, wear :mask: and stay safe. :smile:
Once the bullet leaves the gun, its trajectory is determined. But the moment the fool waving the gun around pulls the trigger is determined by chance. Not patternless?
Quoting TheMadFool
I do, you too.
That's begging the question, no? How do you know "the fool" waving the gun around isn't determined?
Quoting Bitter Crank
Good to know.
I'm not exactly sure where this syllogism came from, but I don't remember writing anything about it. I wrote this:
The idea of chance as something occurring external to an individual is also generally conventional and is loosely based on the definition of chance via google:
Note the subjectivity present in the definition ? 'obvious design'. Obvious design is dependent on how it is observed. The word obvious here makes this impression of the meaning most strongly. I should also like to mention that the structure of saying something is true about chance, that it occurs external to an individual, doesn't make the reverse true or mean that both are the same thing or completely separate.
This definition seems to be taking the activity of chance to be the same thing as chance in itself; the quantitative, describing, analytical activity of chance. Your elimination of the subject in "brought about by the lack of an observable pattern," gives this impression, because it negates the subject that is doing the observing and their freedom to choose in applying their methods of understanding. This leads you to the conclusion that everything must be determined because you must determine it. Imagine if we took the activity of philosophy to be the same as philosophy in itself. We would be at risk of limiting ourselves to what our present concept of philosophy allows us to know. Here you are exhibiting the reverse by eliminating what chance allows us to know and treating what it means as obsolete.
Chance allows us to know weakness, because through the negative activity of denying the institutional methods of quantification, reduction, efficiency, we lose their sense of perspective when forming judgements based on those methods. For instance, positing that strong animals survive and the weak ones die might lead one to believe that to be strong were what we should all strive for, where this is not a scientific truth but a regular judgement. If everyone were to follow it then strength would cease to exist.
Quoting Bitter Crank
It seems he's making the point that the weak are needed for the strong to exercise their strength.
Ie. that the weak are an opportunity for the strong to show their strength.
As in, there can be no knight in shiny armor without there also being a damsel in distress. But does that mean one should choose to be a damsel in distress?
To engage in that kind of strategic mathematics _deliberately_ would require an accurate picture of the entire populations involved.
Because at any given point, any given individual does not have the whole picture of the situation. Indeed, sometimes sacrificing oneself can be beneficial for the species as a whole, or beneficial for the other species; but other times, it is not. But at the ground level, it is impossible to know which is which.
A military general can, for example, assess that by sacrificing 15,000 men in some particular battle situation, he can surely save the other 50,000. But that's because as a general, he has the necessary data, the big picture. The soldiers don't.
If, however, something cannot be achieved deliberately, then it is impossible to talk about it meaningfully, rendering the issue moot.
The human mind is so much more interesting when viewed from this perspective of a 'collective will.' I think this question is one more for the Existentialists. Like the Sisyphus myth, both the strong and the weak push their boulders up the hill; both commanding equal respect for taking on the many contradictions of life. From a social point of view I think it makes sense not to go to far with this point of view that perfection of our survival is the absolute good in itself.
Then what is an absolute good in itself, as far as human life goes?
Ahh.. Philosophy for lazy people. My favorite kind.
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Because kudos is mixing an assumed personality with wild instinct of animals. Incorrect application.
Quoting kudos
Still inappropriate as a means to compare the natural instinct of prey and predators with personalities of people. Categorically incorrect.
Please try again.
Interesting you would say this. In what ways are they different to you? Are you saying there is something clearly different between a human driving force causing violence to another human for gain, and a predatory animal causing violence to another similar mammal in the animal kingdom? Does the human not in some part have their own benefit and survival in view when they do this similar to they way an animal does?
It's not that, it's this...
Neutrality; or; weaknesses of all calibre are necessary for opposite strengths to exist.
I have not read the rest of this thread, so what I am about to say may have already been said. But I don't think weakness is necessary. Contrary, as was once said (I forgot who): "Just as the leg of the deer is chiseled by the tooth of the wolf, so too, the tooth of the wolf is chiseled by the leg of the deer." It is not weakness, but resistance that has the predator and prey building each other into who they are.
As to weakness, it might be said that in the survival of the fittest, that which is consumed must have also have been fit. Otherwise, that which consumed it would not be the fittest, or as fit as it could have been. So the cow does us no favors by being a fat, stupid, lazy, bawling, fly-covered, shit-smeared, stinking creature that drinks putrid water, breaths the flatulence of the neighbor doing the same, eating rotten corn silage, standing on 3 feet of it's own shit, and then laying down to be killed without a fight. But it is not the cow's fault. We do this to ourselves. And look at us. Are we fit, simply because we survive? I think not. Besides, it's only been 10k years. The jury is still out.
So weak people are not good in their weakness. If anything, they are good in that they may contain a gene that helps us survive a pandemic, climate change, or some other shift in the existing paradigm. They might also serve as a weight to be lifted upon the shoulders of the strong, making them even stronger. The problem is, too many of the self-identified "strong" refuse the lift. They are greedy, selfish, and searching for reasons to disparage and marginalize the weak. We haven't always been this way. Maybe we are getting soft.
So yes, in many circumstances what is ‘weak’ for x can be ‘strong’ for y.
There's no doubt it should make sense to want to be stronger. But what about the strongest? Or even stronger than that? As an idea it can easily transform into a fetish, or a masochistic pride that doesn't speak for the full breadth of our real interests.
We are physically weaker, but we not only utilize our differently-evolved brain and tongue to make up for our lack of tooth and claw, fur and hair, but we over-compensate due to our feelings of insecurity. This causes us to marginalize and devalue our fellow travelers, beyond what is simply necessary to consume them. We also tell ourselves lies/myths about our superiority/specialness in the scheme of things.
But, as others have pointed out, weak and strong are not only ranked, but they are relative and situational.
I haven't even made that jump yet, because I'm still in the natural world, predator/pray assessment from the OP.
Quoting kudos
I don't know what that means. Is it a metaphor? Guessing, I'd say we don't miss the mark. We domesticate the prey. We don't shoot the arrow any more; we use a retractable bolt to the brain. We do not give them any chance, and that is how we have survived (so far).
I'm sure there are times in your life where you've asked yourself "why didn't I just do x and everything would have gone fine." and so forth. Well if you were perfect everything would go fine, and one only need think shortly over the consequences of that over a broad group to see how that could end in an overall failure. This all reminds me of the Radiohead lyric Just:
Can't get the stink off
He's been hanging 'round for days
Comes like a comet
Suckered you, but not your friends
One day he'll get to you
And teach you how to be a holy cow
You do it to yourself, you do
And that's what really hurts
Is you do it to yourself, just you
You and no one else
Don't get my sympathy
Hanging out the fifteenth floor
You've changed the locks three times
He still comes reeling through the door
One day I'll get to you
And teach you how to get to purest hell
You do it to yourself, you do
And that's what really hurts
To your point though, it's not so much about weakness or strength in the traditional physical sense. If a volcano erupts and a pack of 1,000 pound grizzly bears share an adjacent forest with a flock of birds that weigh a tenth of a ounce, who would you wager will be the survivor and who bites the dust? See, didn't think of that now did you.
In a way of apples and oranges.
You lost me. :smirk:
Do explain why.
If we hold the Theory of Evolution, why taboo Social Darwinism?
What are "our real interests"?
Quoting kudos
You mean as in, letting others live?
Quoting baker
There is a fundamental instinct that humans have regardless of their social personalities. "Weakness" is a relative social term, which may or may not play a role in an instinct that would kick in a given situation.
Please re-read the below quote again, and see how the switch from animal instinct to "weak relative to their potential" happens. Is there not a fallacious argument here?
Quoting kudos
This is hard to agree with, because we're talking about more than just human social weakness. You're right that weakness is a relative term. In fact, to say something is 'weak' is almost considered the equivalent of saying 'everything but this thing is strong.' I do agree that in humans there is much more abstraction and division of opinion about what constitutes weakness and what strength. But it's the general idea of strength and weakness that we maintain and not the exact sameness of it to any specific materialistic analogy that I'm interested in. Within that idea it is bound to it that not all can have a strength, because if they did it would not be a differentiable quality.
The worst thing that could happen would be for this to come off as another unbearable 1:1 correspondence between the limitless explanations of evolution theory and the thinking and behaviour of human beings, which in terms of meaning doesn't seem to us to have such deterministic causes. The point of the predator-prey analogy was to appeal to intuition and not only reasoning, where we take there to be animals that are weak for reasons outside themselves and for reasons within themselves. When a rabbit decides, "I'll just come out into the open this one time to have a nibble since its so quiet," where the fox lays waiting, that to me is a weakness of judgement not unlike the human who buys into a pyramid scheme thinking "maybe this time I'll get away with this." They are both similar to the human failing of idealism; many of us consider that failing to be a weakness.
It is surprising that you would cut everything off at the level of social weakness and call that something else when there are animals that exhibit strong and weak social traits. Chimpanzees being the closest to humans. Where do you draw the un-crossable line between human weaknesses and animal ones still remains a mystery. Surely it would be unbelievable to say humans and animals are the same thing, but it would be equally unbelievable to say we share nothing in common with the animals when there are some obvious similarities, depending on your religious beliefs.
What instinct?
This isn't an argument. It's two sentences, the latter of which is a question. A syllogism yet needs to be derived from this, and doing so requires some discussion to clarify the premises (as I've been asking all along ...).
It seems the problem at hand is of a more general nature (and has nothing to do with animals, or comparing humans and animals). Namely, it's that it is hard to meaningfully, comprehensively define "weak" and "strong", while at the same time, both these terms play important, even vital roles in how we understand the world and ourselves.
So here is the run-down of the ongoing whittling of the term 'weakness' that we have put this together so far. This is not so much a definition of weakness as it is an ongoing delineation of it that is probably never going to be finished.
1) We have posited an individual and their separate external circumstances and judged them to be less effective or ineffective at reaching an end using a certain means; this can be because of lack of ability, good sense, or by simple circumstances outside of their control (ie: lion hunts gazelle, squirrel is run over by truck, etc.).
2) We have reached a certain end using a means, and in so doing have compared this end and means to others who have attained or are in the the process of attaining some end using a means, one or both of which we see as lesser. This can be because of the ineffectiveness of the end in achieving other ends or by a perceived discrepancy between the will of the individual and the end itself; the in itself and for itself of the end (ie: he's always eating, but because of this he is fat and unhappy).
3) A relationship of exploitation is revealed whereby in the judgement of the ends and means the observer takes as implicit a certain desired deficit for some purpose that can be for themselves, not, for someone else, or all (ie: this group is lower than us because they are weak). In this case the weak person has the weakness enforced on them in an external or internal way, so that it wouldn't exist without being made into an image or idea.
4) The determination of the weak is turned in on itself, and viewed as such it displaces the weakness that was previously thought primarily of content into one primarily of form (ie: it is weak to believe that only to be strong should be desired, etc). The weakness is found to be in the belief that the weakness is somewhere 'out there' where it is observed and we can see it as if we were neutral observers.
These are the aspects of the weakness idea as we have outlined them, but not it's true definition. All four taken in isolation seem to fail to tell the whole story. For instance, (1) and (2) both suffer from the limitation that they use the language of images as if they were concrete realities. (3) tells us something, but it seems somehow absorbed into itself. (4) is the closest approximation to what this thread has been revolving around.
The question I have for you at this point is, "does (4) deserve to be part of our notion of weakness, or should it be cast out as unnecessary?" What is good about (4) in relation to the other three we have here? Just another reminder that these four don't constitute and exhaustive list, only what we've managed to cobble together here.
I have to admit I have to read most of your posts more than once, because I can't follow your train of thought.
The topic of weakness is something I myself am keenly interested in. I wouldn't frame it in the way you do, though, but in terms of looking into the idea of might makes right, like I did in several of my threads.
I think the salient point of weakness are its moral implications, including actions based on them. If a being is weak, does this mean that it is not unjust to destroy it (simply on account that it is weak)? If a being is weak, is it possible to wrong it, to commit an injustice in regard to it, or is any act against such a being justified?
Taken as moral law, this would lead to some pretty dark types of behaviour: executions, prejudice, anything would be fair game because the weak deserve their punishment according to (3). In an objective way, things would be lost though they may not seem that way to the subjects themselves. But it is unfair to have one group who doesn’t care being at an advantage because they care and another being at a disadvantage because they do care. This is where it goes into the existential question of, “When is a moral life worth living?”
If someone knows themselves and chooses freely to be immoral, then they simply get the circumstance they choose. Morality wasn’t made to enslave people, but rather to be a way of life that was considered by antique thinkers to be the most reasonable way to live. But reasonable could mean other things too. I think we just tend to have certain presets because of our historical development that way, and it’s perfectly rational to want to defend them.