Always Dance

lawl
well im gonna go for a bit be back soon

No, i was just making a joke about even the strongest teenager with super powers are vexed by goverment laws

public school, peh who needs it, in our econmy

even the powerful are subjected to it

Luckey man you are. i dealt with bullys, stupid grading systems, delinquents, both student and teachers alike ect ect ect

WOAH! what are you now? 17?

what? you've never been to highschool? but how? how are you in colage then?
confused

that explains it. i was bout to say, man what highschoo you go to

Are you in colage?

awesome
pff class is where the learning should be, i pay as much attention as possible in class and finals are just like the mid terms, just wit more questions

machine/dragons/wariors fusion
humm well there is always time, just search for it

yep, but only with one friend irl, mostly i duel on a place called dueling network
I would recomend duel network, but lots of people are bad at the game now, or use cheap kill decks

http://www.kh-vids.net/showthread.p...nized-Deadpools-Society-(Or-D.O.O.D.S)/page38 he plays yugioh like me, and he is a deadpool like me

wrote a fan fic, killed a fello duelist and deadpool, ect ect ect

Aww ^^ thanks!
XD and Hello! How are you?

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Well, for one, I want to have an affect on other's lives. And...I just can't imagine being the only one who exists. How often is it said that happiness is worthless if you have no one to share it with?
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Pretty often, and that is actually very close to one of the most emotional lines that have ever been written. But it doesn't defy practicalism to entertain the idea that someone isn't physically real—you still share happiness with someone, the experience and feelings are the same. You do not stand to gain by refusing to share happiness in a dream. In fact you stand to lose the chance at further happiness

Watch Into the Wild for more info about that line, or just for a great movie in general. My favorite movie, actually.

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The world would not exist without anyone to observe it. I want the world to go on after I die because I want to have had an affect on the world.
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But if you won't be there to observe these effects then they become meaningless.

Also the chances of you having an effect on the world are low even if all of this real. Furthermore, if it isn't real, then consider this: if you are the world and the world is you, then if change yourself and purge all that is negative within yourself to become a better person, you change the world. Sound familiar?

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Although I understand what you have said, I do not believe accepting practicalism will allow me to understand more things.
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It's not about 'understanding' more things, because reality becomes meaningless when you can't measure whether something is real or not. This is a scenario I gave last night to someone about pragmatism.

Note: you must concede that something's reality cannot be proven by a subjective observer, and that you cannot use one object that you cannot prove exists to prove another object's existence, so asking your potentially non-existent friend if it is real is contradictory. You have already acknowledged this.

Because you cannot prove a concept's reality, what you actually do every time you accept something as real is that and that alone: you accept it as real. This is a meaningless thing to do because that doesn't actually change how useful it is, but it does change your prejudices.

For instance:

Realist: "Do these hammer and nails really exist?"
Pragmatist: "Can you use them to build things?"
Realist: "Yes."
Pragmatist: "Then why does it matter if they exist?"

Your concern over their reality would become a prejudice that limited your ability to make use of the tools in front of you.

As a side note, I have been using the word practicalism and that is inaccurate. I meant pragmatism this whole time. I apologize for the bad usage.

how are you?

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By disagreeing with it. The argument is not about my ideas of people (Which are the same in real life and in dreams, yes), but the manner in which they exist. Or, as you'd like to put it, the manner in which I perceive them to exist. I perceive you to exist independently of me, because you can interact with people other than me who also exist.

However, a spirit following me that only I can see obviously exists dependently of me and will die with me. If I knew this, I would not eventually start to think it was real. Look at my inner monologue, I interact with it the same way I interact with real people and with dreams, I even have a mental visual representation of it, but I understand that it does not exist. It is completely dependent of me, nobody can interact with it except for me, and when I die, it will not be able to exist. You would still exist if I were to die right now.
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Why does that concept matter to you? Why does it matter if others can see me? Furthermore, what if those others are just like me? What do you gain by caring whether they are real or not?

You cannot know that I will exist if you die, so why do you believe that? On what basis are you able to believe that the world will still exist without someone to observe it? Furthermore, what is better about believing this that than not believing it? Why do you want to believe that the world will go on even if you die?

I have a quote that applies to this.

"The ultimate criterion for the goodness of a concept is not whether two people are brought into agreement but whether the scientist who uses the concept can operate successfully upon his material - all by himself if need be."

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Look, I don't believe it is impossible for Hogwarts to exist. For all I know, it could. But I believe that it does not. That belief could change. I think the only difference between me and you is that you simply consider it unlikely for Hogwarts to exist and stop there, whereas I, after weighing the likelihood, concluded that it does not exist. Is that correct?
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No, it is not correct. You have weighed the likelihood once before or been taught that it does not exist, and you choose to believe that for all later instances unless the evidence for it suddenly is more convincing than what you previously decided. Let's say that you have two vials. One of them is filled up to a certain point with information that says Hogwarts does not exist. Because it is the first vial you come across, you focus on it and practically ignore the other. The other has a little bit of proof in it, and it is not more proof than is in the first vial. The second vial begins to fill over time, and you continue to ignore it. It fills, and fills, and fills. Finally, when the level of proof in the second vial is greater than the first do you even consider focusing on the second vial. And even then you are skeptical, because the first vial is more familiar to you.

I, on the other hand, watch both constantly, constantly keep a watch on the proof of the second vial as well as the first, and when asked, I will assess the likelihood anew. You are staring intently at the first vial and when asked will not even look away from it; "It's not as full as this one so it isn't important."

I weigh the likelihoods constantly and I refuse to accept any vial as 'good enough' at any point in time while there are other options. You decide far ahead of time what is good enough and ignore everything else until a new vial presents itself. If you do change to the second vial, you will do the same thing, only now you will be focusing on it. It is your attitude towards all vials that bothers me, not each vial itself.

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Again it's not a matter of simply dismissing the idea of ghosts, it's a matter of weighing the possibility and likelihood, and coming to a conclusion.
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See what I said above. You assess based on predefined likelihoods. To be blunt, your measurements and methods of measurement are outdated and you have refused to move on because you "already proved they didn't exist" once upon a time.

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I do acknowledge both of those things.
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And yet you willingly choose to limit your ability to realize things. Why?

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I'm pretty happy with my Virtual Box.
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Exactly. This is called being closed-minded. You have just explicitly stated that you are perfectly happy with not thinking outside of the box.

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God dammit, you're right again...
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So you can't prove that you have a physical body or a brain—you just have a theory of a brain that makes a lot of sense based on what you see in others, that you assume are real.

You can gain a lot by letting go of this narrow-minded assumption. I will explain how below.

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And again...However, my argument is that you exist independently of me (At least, I think you do), a dream character does not.
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But that argument is invalid, because no matter how well you think you know someone, you still only know the idea of them that you have built up in your head. You would have the exact same experience in a dream—if you were in a dream long enough, you would 'get to know' the characters there, and eventually you would drop these pretenses and start to wonder if they actually were outside of your mind. The more time you spent on them, the more complete they would become, just like with 'real' people that you meet. You could say that they changed, or you could say that you hadn't learned enough about them yet. It works in both the 'real' and dream worlds. You might say that you wouldn't, but you would if you were around them enough to fill in all of the blanks.

If they are both ideas, then how do you differentiate 'purely' an idea from 'an idea of something that actually exists'? I do not see any difference other than 'the amount of time I spend with them'. If you had a spirit following you around that only you could see (think Hikaru no Go), you would eventually stop assuming that you were hallucinating it after a while and start believing that it was 'real'. How do you explain or rationalize that?

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I don't see how I stand to gain anything by entertaining the idea that Hogwarts is real.
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Are you serious?

What if it is real? Wouldn't that be awesome?

Predictable response: "But it isn't."

There are hundreds of ways to gain from dropping this ridiculous pretense. Two them are that you would gain the freedom to consider anything that you cannot prove false. You would gain more capacity for thought and would probably learn something else by considering the idea. Maybe the person who saw it merely saw a castle that looked like it. Maybe magic exists and there is a school for it but it is not Hogwarts. But your first reaction is to decide that it doesn't fit with your boot programs and disregard it straight off. The second of the two reasons is that you are killing your own enjoyment of the world. You are refusing to think of what could be and would rather assume that nothing exists but what you have been told or have personally proven exists. I guess we know why they call you a conservative—you are extremely closed to adding new things onto your view of the world.

A good example of why you might gain from broadening your worldview is by accepting that maybe someone isn't lying when they tell you a ghost story. If the ghost is real, then you gain several things—a knowledge of it, a heightened chance of noticing them when they are around, a better chance of accepting that they are there and that you are not dreaming, and the capacity to analyze it scientifically. You lose all of these when you assume that science rejects the very idea of them. "That's not possible" is the line said by those who die first in ghost stories, remember?

If fear isn't a good motivator, then let's say that someone tells you about a place where a beautiful Faery lives that seduces men. If you had an appetite for such things, then you would do well to at least consider the likelihood of its truth and going to see what they saw for yourself.

Instead of this constant assessment of likelihoods, you choose to preset binary options of 'true' and 'false', which severely limits your ability to experience new things or explore new possibilities. You are an old man sitting on his butt, refusing to believe that anything is true that he hasn't seen, and you are probably younger than me.

I would definitely say that you have tons to gain by acknowledging that you know next to nothing and that your entire view of the world could be flipped upside down by a single realization. Why don't you believe that?

This is your argument in a nutshell: "I don't see how I stand to gain from anything by booting up another operating system like Linux."

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Dammit, I already replied to this. I guess it didn't go through. :/
Retyping...
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Sorry about your luck. I hate it when that happens.

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The subjective experience that I go through is the same, but objectively the experiences are different because you can measure which parts of the brain are active.
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And when you take those measurements, you do so subjectively. Using an eye and using a microscope are functionally the same action and they are both subjective experiences. Using an X-Ray is akin to having different filters for vision; for example, some animals can see heat. If you could 'see' someone else's brain with whatever-ray filtered eyes, it would be the same as viewing it with your naked eyes—this is subjective. To make this simpler for you, since you value others' existence, let's say that you and one other person are the only people in the world. You want to prove that you are not hallucinating them, but you cannot measure your own brain. You have them measure your brain for you, and you accept that you are not hallucinating because they are outside of your mind.

But wait! You used what could have been a hallucination to prove that it was not a hallucination. You have already assumed that they are outside of your mind. This is akin to asking your imaginary friend if he is real and accepting his answer.

Substitute a machine that would do the measuring in for the person, and you have the same problem. It is logically impossible to measure one's own consciousness.

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Sure, by what my existence revolves around still needs other people to exist. If they didn't, I couldn't have my incomplete perception of them.
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No, it does not. Think about it—you just conceded that what your existence revolves around is not the actual people, but your ideas of those people.

You have also stated that people in dreams are 'merely' ideas of people.

Why do you need the people to be there to have the ideas of them? When your friends move away, go into a coma or die, never to be seen again, your idea is all that you have—but I assume you would still keep any promises you made to your idea of them because your idea of them lives on, and you still feel accountable to them even though they are no longer present. This is an obvious double-standard based on an arbitrary property called 'real'.

Why shouldn't you respect the 'imaginary' idea of a person just as much as a 'real' one when you have already admitted that what you truly respect is your idea of the 'real' one rather than their actual self? It doesn't make sense to differentiate if they are both your ideas of people.

You might argue that a fictional character can't come out of a book and or your dreams and do things to you, but neither can most of the people on this site. Those fictional characters and dreams have the same kind of interaction with you that we on this site do, that through text and ideas only. The only thing I can do to you is ridicule you and dislike you, and any fictional or dream person can do those things too. So why should the fictional characters be any less respectable? Why should you feel more accountable to me than a dream character? And don't use "because they will be gone the next day". I could be gone and never speak with you again the next day, too. There is no guarantee that they will not, so that excuse is invalid. For now, assume that this character can appear in any dream. Why should you feel more accountable to me than to them for what you do to them?

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I can still do all that without letting go of my perception of reality, it's called suspension of disbelief. Look at my Harry Potter video. Obviously reality did not matter to me when I made it.
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Yes but that does not change your firmware. You discuss Harry Potter in order to entertain the idea, but if we were to talk about whether Hogwarts were real or not, you would suddenly drop the act. This is like emulating an operating system inside of Windows using Virtual Box; you are still using Windows, and the frame of the box is a Windows window frame. Your mind is not so free as you seem to think if that is the case. You should be able to entertain and actually take stock in the idea that Hogwartz could exist unless you have personally explored the earth and not found it anywhere. Instead you would choose to disregard it as ridiculous.

I do believe you have something to gain here.

Your username is awesome! I wish I could rename myself "Grandpa" with the usertitle "Delisous tea, or eadly poision." (sorry I'm a horrible speller, it dont help if I'm using my phone too...) ... Oh and hello nice to meet c'ha.