From: Ross A. Finlayson (raf@tiki-lounge.com)
Date: Fri Jan 07 2000 - 12:57:32 MST
If you've never felt pain you wouldn't know what pleasure is. Perhaps this is not
quite so, ie, there is a difference between pleasure and ambiguity, but it is along the
same lines as yin/yang, perhaps even Jungianism.
That is not the same thing as to not say noone deserves to have pain applied. It is
morally wrong to inflict pain. Thousands of Kurds die each year, mainfully assumedly
quite painfully, war is not moral.
Some choose physical or other pain as a side-effect of growth in return for
development.
Physical pain is largely the body's nervous alert system. It is largely its sensitivity
interrelating with the capacity and propensity of man's inhumanity to man and to
inflict physical pain that imbues it its psychological weight.
So, there can be classified physical con/contra emotional pain, they are quite
different.
Side note: political correctness is political correctness.
I appear to have drifted, the subject of this e-mail is about memetics thus memes.
Visually, the word "memes" looks like it could be pronounced "mee mees" when it is
pronounced "meems." The mass media is its own meme.
John Clark wrote:
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience@pobox.com> On January 03, 2000 Wrote:
>
> >Nobody *ever* "deserves" pain, not even Adolf Hitler. Now,
> >if *someone* has to be hurt, it might as well be Saddam Hussein; a
> >murderer is certainly "targetable" for life imprisonment if that makes
> >innocents safer. But pain itself is a moral negative, and nothing we or
> >anyone else can do will flip that sign to positive.
>
> That is wise, true, and very well said! In fact, if that is not a fundamental axiom
> of morality then I would have absolutely no use for morality. But it is and I do.
>
> John K Clark jonkc@att.net
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