Does sex just feel good or is it objectification of others?

Without a doubt, sex is a physical act, one acted upon every second of each day by a myriad of creatures. Being human, we feel this "necessity" to pare it down to some sort of Davidsonian act, an act that needs the subconscious motivations explained. But do we?

In its simplest form, two (or more) beings engage in coitus. The base desire is procreation. It is something that is encoded in all known dna from elephants to amoebas. We couple with another, and not necessarily with a differing sex, because our genetics tell us we need to do so. Even Spock had to (Star Trek bonus points).

Being advanced creatures with few peers, or so we think, should we be above base instincts? Should we deny the animal within? And if we do not, why do we not?

Kant had the idea that sex was a degradation of human nature, a "necessary evil" almost. We participated because it was our nature to do so. To follow that line, one that could avoid having sex would be a more enlightened being. Hence chastity amongst religious sectors. In a nutshell, we have sex because we can't avoid it.

Davidson would argue (and Haack as well) that our need for sexual coupling may have nothing to do at all with fulfilling sexual need, but emotional ones or even naricissistic ones. We have sex because it appeases something other than a base instinct, from boredom to dominance of another.

Person 'A' finds person 'B' attractive. A's hormones begin to work against him/her and compel one to approach B for the sole intent of coupling. B accepts because of the same hormone reaction. What follows afterwards is not part of the sexual experience. It is the act itself that matters, the one that is in question.

In its simplest form, sexual congress is the conjoining of at least 2 individuals/creatures for the sole purpose of attempting to procreate. Whether that happens or not is moot. It is the act itself that matters. And it is in that act that Davidsonian/Pessimistic arguments fall to the wayside. Procreation overrules all other base desires.

As example, one finds another attractive. A to B. A has a subconscious reaction that causes A to desire to procreate, subconscious or not. What follows has nothing to do with the act itself. A may rape B or go home an masturbate or even have sex with C while thinking of B. In the end, the desire to attempt to procreate is satisfied.

In the end, as long as the desire to procreate is satisfied objectification of others and such is an extension of that desire and one that can be parsed from it. It is a perversion or sexual diet that while dependent upon procreation, uses it only as its initial source motivation. We have initially have sex because we want to create children. What follows once the clothes are removed can be entirely different.

Davidsonian Primary Reason vs Kant's Moralism as applied to love

Donald Davidson's idea of a Primary Reason can be summed as a reason causes an action. The prototypical example is you want light so you turn a light on. And sure it can be pared down to multiple reasons, such as being afraid of the dark or staying in a place that you can't navigate in the dark. But even then, Occam-wise you turn the light on because you want light.

Kant believed that for a thing to be moral (action), one must not benefit from it because that destroys its value. Giving a beggar money then is not moral because one could benefit from it because one feels better about one's own condition. Basically altruism does not exist, as argued earlier (http://thewhyquestion.blogspot.com/2011/03/altruism-aka-lie-we-tell-ourselves.html).

Love is defined as having affection and personal attachment for something. We can love bacon (reason) so we cook and eat it as often as possible (action). But we benefit from it because it fulfills our need to satiate our need to eat the bacon.

So how does this apply to what is considered a love between two persons?

Let's assume that love between two humans follows the standard definition. Person 1 and 2 love each other because each provides affection and a feeling of personal attachment for the other. They can be considered "in love". Love then is the action.

From the Davidsonian standpoint, what are the reasons for love? If we desire affection and personal attachment, then love is a Davidsonian "thing". What we do gets us what we want. There is no Existential angst involved.

But as far as Kant's morality goes, if we desire love and affection, love is not moral because we benefit from it. Our reasons cause an action that gives us what we desire and is therefore immoral. We must love without expectation of any kind to satisfy Kant.

And that brings us back to Davidson. Can we love without any expectations?

There are no instances of love that do not invoke actions. We can not love for the sake of love because even then the action of love is caused by the action of loving. And because we benefit from this it is not Kantian moral.

The conclusion then is that love is both Davidsonian and Kantian. Love is not moral and benefits us. Love is never altruistic and always beneficial. Love is simply something that benefits us.

The importance of words

Quine, Wittgenstein, Rorty, and many others spent most of their careers arguing the semantics of words. What they truly missed is the actual importance of words. Amongst many of the Native American tribes conversations take hours, not because of the number of words spoken, but because of the rarity of them. They weigh the importance of every single word. They assign it importance.

In this age we send 140 characters at a time at each other and have begun to cease calling. We have shortened phrases to acronyms. We waste words. We write long blog entries about utter inanity. We look at pictures of cats with funny phrases that use acronyms.

But words have importance. We have forgotten this. Speeches that move us are filled with words that matter. Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King strung together words that changed a nation. Martin Luther strung together words that changed an entire religious sect.

But on social media we toss words around. We tell nobodies that we are looking at a car or eating somewhere they never will or try to seduce on a dating site.

We are losing the importance of words.

Think about the person you love and think about the last words you said to them or sent to them. Are those the words that you want them to remember should they be the last words you utter/send? Are those words worthy of that?

Sadly I am betting they are not. But mine are.

Altruism aka the lie we tell ourselves subconsciously

Altruism (coined by Comte) is defined as "the selfless concern for the welfare of others." A little more clearly, it means doing x for y and not expecting anything in return. But is that possible? Can one genuinely do for others without expectation of reciprocation?

The classic example is giving money to a homeless person. What are is the true motive? Do you do it because you feel sorry for the person and want to help them out? Or do you feel guilty? Or do you do it to make yourself feel better? Can you ever really know the real answer?

Hume's belief that people are altruistic because of love is void. And he did it himself. Hume believed that people love others and feel sympathy for them and are thus altruistic. If you are sympathetic to someone, your actions are not altruistic. What you do benefits both of you. It helps the person and it relieves your angst about their condition.

Kant, being Kant, further warps altruism. He believed that there are universal laws (hi religion) and because of them we are required to help anyone we can. He took the onus of self-serving want off the table and placed it upon the universe. But in doing so, he complicated matters. To summarize the position, we help others because there are universal rules that say we must help all those we can help. But in doing so we relieve our angst at not following universal law.

Davidson and Haack have applied complex mathematics to try to solve the problem of intent. And really that is what altruism boils down to. The basic argument is that a person helps a homeless person not to help that person and not to give themselves satisfaction but for a more complex reason, possibly that the person is ashamed that his family is rich and intolerant of the homeless. And still, we are relieving ourselves of angst.

In the end, altruism does not exist. No matter the angle we approach it from, we are relieving ourselves of angst whether we do it consciously or not. We demand something in return for our act of "selflessness". We do it because we need to because in the end we are narcissists at our very core.

Brain-state and causality

Let's start with a quote by Donald Davidson:

The notion of supervenience, as I have used it, is best thought of as a relation between a predicate and a set of predicates in a language: a predicate p is supervenient on a set of predicates S if for every pair of objects such that p is true of one and not of the other there is a predicate of S that is true of one and not of the other (Davidson, 1985, p. 242).

Previous theories had argued that claims concerning the identity of particular mental and physical events depended upon the discovery of lawlike relations between mental and physical properties. These theories thus held that empirical evidence supporting such laws was required for particular identity claims. According to Anomalous Monism, however, it is precisely because there can be no such strict laws that causally interacting mental events must be identical to some physical event. The token-identity thesis thus requires no empirical evidence and depends on there being no lawlike relations. It in effect justifies the token-identity of mental and physical events through arguing for the impossibility of type-identities between mental and physical properties or kinds (Davidson 1970, 209, 212-13; see Johnston 1985).

To draw his ideas out further, x=y IFF z (z causes x and implies y or z causes y and implies x) and z (x causes z and implies y or y causes z and implies x).

An explanation of an agent's action can be considered adequate only if it shows the action in question to be reasonable against the background of an agent's beliefs and desires. This latter
condition together with the truth condition, which states that the propositional attitudes a rationalization attributes to an agent must be true, form the necessary conditions for the justification model of explanation.

Davidson considers the above conditions necessary but not sufficient. The deficiency of the justification model is explained by drawing attention to the distinction between having a
reason for an action and having the reason why one performs an action. For a reason to be the reason why one performs an action the reason must cause the action.

For example, one has a reason to turn on the television, say, to watch one's favorite TV show. But this need not be the reason why one turns on the television. This is because the above reason did not cause one to turn on the television.

As Davidson puts it:

[S]omething essential has certainly been left out, for a person can have a reason for an action, and perform the action, and yet this reason not be the reason why he did it.

The reason for one to turn on the television could simply be because one is lonely and desires company. Thus, one reason (namely, to keep one company) was the cause of the action while the other reason (namely, to watch one's favorite show) wasn't.

Davidson continues:

Of course, we can include this idea too in justification; but then the notion of justification becomes as dark as the notion of reason until we can account for the force of that "because."
The mere possibility that a person acted on the basis of one reason rather than another presents an insurmountable obstacle. The anti-causalist has no way of accounting for the force of the "because" in the rationalization.

The only solution, according to Davidson, is to view the efficacious reasons (the ones that account for the correct rationalization) as causes of action. This leaves us, according to Davidson, with only one alternative to justificationalism, namely, the view that reason explanation is a species of causal explanation.

According to Anomalous Monism, however, it is precisely because there can be no such strict laws that causally interacting mental events must be identical to some physical event.

X=X but is not dependent on brain-state.