I wrote:
"The line 'What exists must be needed' is, call it, bogus. How many things do
you eat in a day that you desire but, in no interesting sense of the word,
"need"? We all of us have given things -- toys, photos, jewelry, tickets to the
ball game -- that are desired but not needed.
"I'd recommend that we also maintain a distinction between "necessary" and
"needed". Certain inexorable biochemical facts may mean that various events
necessarily left us with cancer or a heart condition, but it seems silly and
vacuous to say portentously, "If your cancer exists, it is needed."
To which Michael replied by first quoting me (but leaving out any mention of
my urging that we maintain a distinction not just between 'needed' and
'desired', but also between 'necessary' and 'needed'):
""The line 'What exists must be needed' is, call it, bogus. ... it seems
silly and vacuous to say portentously, "If your cancer exists, it was needed."
"Not if the needing is needed by the RNA/DNA of a cell that just has to grow
bountifully. Your rebuttal example cleverly shifts the needing from whatever
agent could generate a result (the tumorous growth) to the person ("you"). Not
playing by the rules, Cheerskep."
You get next to none of this right, Michael. The shifting here is being done
by those who are committing the error of anthropomorphism -- shifting human
feelings attitudes and belief onto inanimate, insensate objects.
My effort in this thread was to save from mystical obliterators some useful
distinctions in the notion behind our language (except in the purposely
figurative language of poetry, etc). William quotes Aristotle's faulty
achievement
but good effort to urge such a distinction, and William then puts his finger
right on it: "Aristotle said that desire is a condition of sensing and fantasy.
My own idea is that need and desire (I prefer desire as willful or concscious
desire and need as unconscious desire) are constructed subjectively and
thus filter or shape our sensing of experience."
Rolling rocks don't need to their sensing of experience shaped. I.e. rocks
never "need".
I claim it isn't just silly and vacuous to obliterate such distinctions as
William feels, it's harmful to clear thinking.
But you, Michael, are one of those guys who embrace the children's book
insight that the stone rolling down the mountain has (an unconscious) DESIRE to
get
down to the valley. You say what you call a "cause" NEEDS its result in order
to be fulfilled. ("To actualize its potential" perhaps? By God, I now think
William is right in sensing that a Jesuistic, Thomastic education can screw
some minds up forever.)
You write: "The result is "needed" by the cause, in the
sense that whatever the cause sets into motion or causation completes the
cause, i.e., it is "needed" in the sense that it is inevitable or inexorable,
given the cause."
This is quintessential "shifting", Michael, shell-game debate tactics. (It is
useful and reasonable to reserve the word 'cause' for an event. Static
objects almost never conform to our notion of a 'cause', so to keep our notions
consistent we should not label a bullet as the cause of death -- though it's a
sure thing lots of people will continue to do so.) That parenthetically said,
let's say Jake "causes" the rock to start rolling down the mountain to the
valley by pushing it. What, according to you, is the "completion" of that
cause?
The arrival of the rock in the valley? "It" (what? The push? The rock?)
"needs" what -- to reach the valley? Bad luck: The rock bumps into a bigger
rock
just fifty feet down the slope and it comes to a dead halt. But wait -- what
happened to the "inevitability", the "inexorability", of the "result"?
Do you feel an accumulating gas of absurdity here? It's not mine, Michael,
it's yours. And here's where the shell game comes in: You say, Oh, well, the
"completion" of the cause was not the arrival in the valley but the starting to
roll. Or the bumping into the bigger rock. Whaever happens is inevitable -- and
"needed". Oy.
Michael, don't fuss with words like 'cause', 'result', 'need', 'inevitable',
et al while you have primitive, not-thought-out and deeply "fuzzy" notions
behind them.
You say, "Ask the tumor, not the person with the tumor."
Kate is right: go ahead, ask the tumor what it "needs". A nice
anthropomorphic tumor will go on at length about its need to grow. And
depending on in which
country "Bobby's Puppy Talks With Tumors" is published, the tumors will speak
a different language! They'll explain why they NEED to grow until they kill
their host and thus kill themselves.
Kate also is right to ask, "Isn't consciousness part of this problem?" Yes,
much of the time. Because the word 'need' so often does connote an element of
desire, however unconscious, of at least "requirement to function".
"Johnny disrupts the class because he has a need to be noticed because at
home his parents ignore him." I, with William, claim 'need' should always be
saved for sensate creatures.
Granted, no word so common as 'need' comes with only one persistent
connotation. We say, "This crop will need three inches of rain this summer or
it will
fail." But I urge that 'need' there be replaced by the word 'require'. There's
no absolute right or wrong here. I claim that the notions of "desire", "need",
"necessitate", "require" and others all come to us (variously) with
associated notions that are different and arise from different notion. To say,
"Nah,
let's call them all 'needs'," obliterates distinctions that many minds have
usefully made. To say, "Your cancer exists, therefore it is needed," is
either
simple-mindedness or bogus obscurantism.
**************
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