[ExI] Heroism without self-sacrifice

[Bryan Bishop]

On Thursday 06 March 2008, PJ Manney wrote:
> What I think Max is really asking (and even if it's a joke, tell me
> if you're not) is how do we reprogram the human brain to fight a

Autism/spectrum. These are the people that perform amazing feats of 
mental programming, some are able to construct mental firewalls so 
powerful that nothing can get through to them, while others are able to 
more constructively use these abilities.

> million years of evolutionary psychology, where sacrifice (altruism)
> was a successful strategy which was then reflected ...

Luckily, natural selection did not select too strongly for our own self 
interpretation of the mind, so we have some leeway here more or less.

> Most importantly, the hero should be reconceptualized through a
> redefinition of 'self' and of 'sacrifice', not by the removal of

The hero could be reconceptualized by redefining it as, say, yourself.

> either, or you will suffer from a story about which the audience
> couldn't give a tinker's damn, having neither an empathetic
> protagonist, nor stakes to worry about.  We don't need to rewrite the

We call an unempathetic protagonist a supervillian.

> myths from whole cloth.  If we did, they wouldn't work as well.  We
> merely need to rejig them to our purposes.

Yes, purpose is important in making the hero, but it is from within, it 
not necessarily a group 'we' that makes it. Actually, this might be 
suspect based off of Jef's response to my last post re: group coherency 
versus internal coherency.

- Bryan
________________________________________
Bryan Bishop
http://heybryan.org/