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Replying to
That 1-minute incident made a pretty powerful impression on me and has stayed with me since. I can now tell when somebody is merely in a bad condition, versus kinda not there at all, having dissociated out of the situation entirely, letting their personal space unravel.
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It was also a very powerful early lesson (I think I was 14 maybe) in the limits on one person being able to help another person, who's been mentally destroyed to the extent of not being a person at all in any normal sense. They are beyond help because they don't exist in a way.
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I used to be a bit of a bleeding heart liberal kid before that incident, but I think that turned me very cautious about trying to help people. That sense that you can only help someone when they are "there" to be helped... you see it in weaker forms in less extreme situations.
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A bit of shorthand/heuristic for this is via Maslow's pyramid. In order for one person to help another at level n, the latter must *exist* at level n+1.
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You can't help with physiological needs if they're not "there" at safety. You can't help with safety if they're not there at "belonging". You can't help at "belonging" if they're not "there" at esteem. You cannot help with esteem if they're not "there" at self-actualization.
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And you cannot help anyone with self-actualization at all, except by accident, because there isn't a higher locus to "stand" at to pull them up. Integrity of the self is a bootstrapped thing. You can only help up to the level the person has already bootstrapped enough to exist.
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I should qualify this with -- *I* am limited in my ability to help others in this progressively constrained way. Others with more natural talent at helping may be able to help others who seem too far gone to me. I don't know.
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To bring this around to those of us living in the conceit of imagining we're "all there" ... to somebody who's bootstrapped to a level beyond what you have, you will appear "homeless" and "nobody at home" and beyond help.
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Incidentally, this isn't limited to humans. You can see animals on this spectrum too, from integrated self that is present at the maximum level that bodily design allows (insects, lizards, cats all have different scopes of self) to various stages of unravelled being.
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An animal that has fallen apart within its envelope of self is a piteous sight in exactly the same way. Even if it's only a bug that will instinctively eat its own severed leg.
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Replying to
"Consciousness-raising" (pilling in modern parlance) is the most cruel myth humans believe in. There's no such thing. There's only false consciousness raising.
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Wonder if there is a way to measure this. To me, it's the strongest sign of American collapse -- people who have crumpled and failed to maintain the integrity of the boundary of self we expect in their life station. People who are homeless-and-not-at-home at any level.
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Most societies expect all members to be "at home" at the belonging level of Maslow to count as human (esteem level requires in-app purchases). Anybody who falls below is problem to be solved. Anyone who is not being actively "solved" has been abandoned and left behind.
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The US is fairly unique in setting very high standards for acceptable "belonging" (at one point it was "home ownership") AND accepting a high rate of abandonment for those who fall. Poor countries tend to lower the threshold. Rich countries tend to lower the abandonment rate.
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Replying to
4E people talk about this in terms of 'embeddedness', but there's a whole descriptive language going back to von Uexkull's 'umwelt'. What's generally not appreciated is the extent to which different people need to build their environmental niche to be functional people.
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Replying to
While you might APPEAR that way, I’d bet that they’d have a compassion that we can’t even fathom I think most people completely underestimate how even superhuman AI might look at us. For example, we probably have more compassion for monkeys than monkeys have for their lessers