Peace and War

Congratulations.

I figured you'd get it (if you hadn't, I would've complained, lol)
You deserve it... and could you please take a screenshot of teh pr0n se-shot-

WELCOME TO THE FOLD PAW :D

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Usually wrong. Not my type of thoughts, it was your own thoughts earlier about choosing to be born, something I wouldn't have thought of if it wasn't in some metaphysical theme. Too abstract for the more tangible idea of choice, but then again you probably wouldn't see it like that.
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Oh, I see. That wasn't me putting words in your mouth that time. That was me extrapolating choice to its origin. Whether a subjective consciousness was created by an event before it or happened randomly, it is subjective and as such could not created itself. I do have a habit of assuming another's arguments and thought processes before they say them, but that is not what happened in this case.

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When you were in a conversation just with me, that would likely make comments made by you more directed to me. But I was actually highlighting the fact that you can make people feel negative about you, and you clearly said you thought of such a thing. So why say it all? Then again you've already told me such things before I suppose. All I hear is 'I don't care' when you talk about other people or talk to them.

But Makaze... I have to admit I am sorry if I 'hurt' you in some way, if I disappointed you, I did not mean so. Truly I have never been against you, actually for the majority of time I've been defending you against others who would simply class you as some troll, but when you returned from being banned, your attitude seemed more bitter at things, and it seemed you took it to heart and blamed everyone. This was likely when your image of me was changed, I'm actually incredibly flattered you offered me any esteem in the scheme of things.
Heh, it was when you wanted me to pick whether I was with or against, I just couldn't believe you would see people as that. Duality.

But as I have said before I am not here to show off my most excellent of skills to you, this is my place of peace and your place of war, metaphorically of course. I am here to relax, part take in the company of others, talk, laugh and enjoy myself in a usually calming place.
I have enough drama in real life to really wish for anymore. Work is full of political bull and drama with colleagues always making things mad. I come here to meet people who are diverse and up for a nice time. This is one of the reasons we have butted heads more, I wish you to not shake the apple cart just for the purpose of the fun you get from it.

I have never seen you as an 'enemy' Makaze, you are a part of this community, and without you it might be that more people would be willing to bring up issues that wouldn't be analysed by you to an nth degree, but he'll, still wouldnt feel great if you left. We need someone to kill the mood round here! :p
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Thanks, that cheered me up a bit... While it is true that I am impartial, I also value certain people and would be bothered if they rejected me. You were someone that was hanging on a precipice and you tipping really depressed me because to me you were kind of a bridge between the people who understood me and those who just disregarded me. Like I said, it was symbolic and made me feel like I had failed in a much larger sense than just with pleasing you. I did hold you in a high regard... And I am not sure why you seemed to think that I didn't care about you or had it out for you or something.

I don't mind it being calming at all, but to me calm is also "free of white noise". I would rather have silence than static, an absence of light than an overabundance. I tend to be an elitist because I consider a serious discussion less annoying than inanity. I can put up with some inanity here and there but I still condemn it as clutter. It is when the traffic of awesome stuff that makes me laugh or moves me slows down but the inanity doesn't slow down at all that I get frustrated and overly serious. Some people might call a disorganized mess of banal chitchat calm, but it is too chaotic for me to feel calm around it. A bit OCD about the quality of posts, even in Spam.

Compulsive need to correct everyone, too. Can't let a discussion go without a point raised on one side, so I'll interject almost every time. Hate to see people do a bad job even if their side is a losing one... Bad habit, but I'm not sure how to raise quality without being a mod and literally censoring things I dislike (read: being a tyrant) if not by being serious all of the time.

I do need to calm down more often. If not because it is more enjoyable, then because getting riled up is not the most effective method. I need to take my own advice, because no matter how right you are, being adamant is going to scare people away because they give no shits about what you care about.

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then you go on to presume much about my thoughts like you know what I'm going to say, and counter it before I have even started on the subject, or wouldn't have even brought it up.
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Am I usually wrong about your thoughts, or is it just worded in a way that you would not have used? No one likes to be predicted, but I don't remember being wrong. You just say "When did I say that?" instead of offering what you really mean... Usually.

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You imply me of lying and say that I am not well known of by you? This is what makes you so hard to understand you, when I see your posts it's as if I am being looked down upon. I can presume you likely didn't mean this, but it's how I felt from it.
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I did not mean it like that, but I suspected you would take it personally. You take quite a few things I say as if they apply to you specifically. Please assume that I am being impersonal unless it becomes extremely obvious that I am addressing you as an individual.

If someone says something, I usually hold them to it and assume they mean it... Unless I know them well enough to detect satire or a lie. Which is why I find it hard to take jokes. The other day in Skype, I took you seriously because my expectations for you had been shattered and you lashed out at me, so I was not sure what to expect. I feel forced to take your measure anew based on what you say after you have rejected me and shattered my image of you. As a result I took what you said as if you meant it. That is an example of what I meant.

I debated using 'discussed' but it seemed obvious that you did not truly care for the discussion or my points in retrospect so I decided against it.

I was fuzzy on the reasoning behind it and saw reasoning to the contrary. Compulsively correcting others is one of my most predictable traits. I guess I take people at their words far too often unless I know them well enough to see through a lie.

And yet we have not come to any sort of conclusion about the original point.

I hold that you can define abuse of a human the same way that you can define abuse of an animal and vice versa because they are the same. I got the impression that you did not hold this. That is why we argued.

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I said humans have choice. I didn't say they have a choice in everything. That's a generalisation that you perceived, and the source argument would be 'Is there ever a choice?' not 'this would mean nothing is a choice' which is an answer to source argument. You can't question with an answer like that, especially since you altered what my thoughts are to what you perceived I was thinking. You never bothered to ask me.
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You said that humans have choice. In order to counter this, I presented the argument that the choices of all subjective entities are predetermined. I did not say that humans do not have a choice in everything, that is a miswording. I said that they do not have a choice in anything. That is quite different.

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I'm completely sceptical. I could just sound sarcastic but I'd rather just say so. I doubt we are the most efficient creature, a number of insects indeed have greater efficiency then humans.

Termites are the main thought, they have roles for everyone, they do so, they work till they die, they die for their work, they create their own nests and live in a hive functionality.

I would doubt even more you to the most efficient. I find it to be arrogance, to think you are the most efficient. Humans are limited and to different from one another, it is not something to pin the whole species down in one fell idea. Too many specifics.
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Efficiency must be relative to a goal. While termites may be more efficient at running through the course of an uninterrupted cycle of continued and mutually beneficial existence, they are not very efficient at working with circumstances or obstacles that would impede their structure. For instance, other species can easily kill a nest of termites. They are not efficient at strategic defense. I say that humans are the most efficient animals because they are capable of solving more problems more efficiently than any other species. While termites may have more efficient social structures, the quantity of problems that humans can solve efficiently makes the termites insignificant via comparison.

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What? So trying to disprove God's existence presupposes that existence is part of God?
Shake people's convictions? Too comfortable? You mean cause conflict and chaos. Devil wind, you remind me of Fuma Kotaro, an entity to create conflict for the creation of more conflict. The role of life itself is able to shake people plenty, it is their moments of respite that keep them level as things move beneath them.
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Not quite. Trying to disprove the existence of a thing presupposes that certainty can be found. It cannot.

I mean to cause them to come to conclusions in the present and be ever shifting. I dislike it when people grow stagnant, especially myself. It is better to always be thinking than to be sure of what is and will be correct. The "will be" part especially.

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So you believe in destiny and fate then? That we have no control over what we do and are deluding ourselves.
And if we know that if something we don't find pleasure in its taste but is healthy for us, if this is a preference of your own health over pleasure, then pleasure is not the the only choice you have, it is between health and pleasure. Your choice comes from many factors, it is usually not one defining characteristics that will dictate everything you do, and it may not even be something you've experienced before, but a development of your own self and state.
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I do not believe in destiny in fate, but I also cannot get past the idea that the me who is saying this right now is not the same as the me who sent the last message to you, and that the me who sent the last message to you has influenced the me speaking right now. Go back to before I was born, and even if I theoretically created myself, the me that created me is not the same as I am right now because I am not aware of the choice and I personally did not make it. If I cloned myself, would my clone have chosen to be himself? And so on.

"I" am here, speaking, right now. What I say, is that me? Why am I saying this? What led me to saying this? All I have is my memory, and my built-in reactions. Was I the one who formed them? How do I know if I formed them? I do not remember forming them. If I do not remember forming them, then who did? Did anyone?

That is an argument of complexity. We do not have a choice between health and pleasure. We have impulses that cause us to pursue health, and impulses that cause us to pursue pleasure. Whichever impulse wins out, we end up "choosing" that one over the other. Think of choice as a program running some numbers. It is not an instant conclusion and may loop back in places but still makes perfect sense. That should help you get the idea.

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Humans can not choose nature, parents certainly have no control over their childs nature, only the nurture. It is not how the laws of the universe work. But do you even believe the laws of physics, nature, and so on? You are a devil's advocate to the point of contradiction to being human in my mind.
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I do not believe, but I make use of those laws. They are means to ends.

Humans cannot choose their nature regardless of physical aspects. Because they have a beginning and are fundamentally temporal (or rather, if they are), it is impossible for them to create themselves, or know themselves fully. See my questions in the second paragraph of the response above.

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I've written plenty of essays to explain my overall points. Do not insult me in such a way that I can not read it, take the occasional criticism will you? My god, it's like pulling teeth for you to say you're in the wrong, in general.
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Sorry again, I must not have expressed myself well. If you failed to understand, that implicitly offers that I was not explaining well enough as well.

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Wait, when the **** did I bring up choosing to be born? You stated it and I asked how it's relevant, and you're saying I brought it up? Are you thinking of something different?
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You brought up the idea that humans have a choice. This would imply that humans more than chose to be born, but chose the spectrum of desires and tendencies that they were born with. I went to the source while you were more general, but you did bring it up.

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So there is no knowledge if we can know nothing? This discussion isn't happening then? You seem to be saying that we can't know how an animal would be created, so then science has no grounds in how any animal is created? Or do you mean its origin as a life form?
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... No? I am saying that you can take any argument regarding a human and apply it to an animal and vice versa. If you argue that humans are superior because of some lack of complexity in animals, then I take the argument that complexity does not imply superiority or fundamental difference. If you argue that humans are superior because they have choice, then I argue that animals also have choice. Humans are merely the most efficient animal. That is what I am doing.

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I get the feeling that you would try to disprove the entire existence of things because it all needs to be observed using our senses, which are not reliable in telling what is 'true'.
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I would not try to disprove its existence because that would presuppose certainty exists. Rather, I would play the devil's advocate of that card on someone who felt certain in their reality. If one gets too comfortable with their model of the world, I am wont to remind them just how shaky it is. And have done so many a time.

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Yang does having limits mean having less choice? Because it's limited. Isn't that the definition of limit is that it lessens what is there?
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... No? Choice and options are not the inclusive. My point is that if a human does not get to pick the options available to them, then their choice is essentially meaningless. Even if a person had as many choices as their mind could conceive of, they would not have picked out that range of choices, and would be forced to admit that choices outside of their imagination may be possible. And yet their imagination is limited to the one set. Even if you theoretically had every possible option available to you, you did not choose what pleases you, so your end choice is a result of preferences that you did not initiate. Something that tastes bad to you tastes bad to you regardless of what you want, and this will affect whether or not you eat it.

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Humans don't have a choice in what they create in themselves or in their descendants, especially not on a planet sized level. If you're going into designing humans to have the least 'limits' you're on the verge of eugenics, which is ultra elitist crap.
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I am not for designing humans and a support for third party intervention does not follow from what I have said. If you were created by your parents then you still did not choose your own nature, your parents did. Eugenics or not, your nature is out of your hands.

Sorry about the multiple directions. It probably appears that way to you because you do not see the overall point but instead see an individual argument.

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I may not be able to choose what I am born as, but why does that dictate anything? I have no control over the universe, over my birth. Why bother discussing that which I or you know nothing about? If we don't know it, try to investigate and find nothing, I can come to no answer to my questions and won't be able to get there if I have nothing to refer to, perceive, think of... its like thinking about nothing.
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We are discussing it because you decided to take a side on it and I saw fault in that. If we should not bother discussing it, then you should not bother with taking a side on it either.

I will get straight to the point, then. If you cannot know whether or not you created yourself, then you cannot know that an animal did not create itself as well. If sentience is complexity alone, then it becomes meaningless as does choice. If it is irrelevant to complexity and is instead based on the idea that humans choose their own desires, then animals could choose just as easily. If we chose our limits as humans and are quite limited already, then why should having more limits (being a less intelligent animal) denote less choice in the matter? By that logic, why didn't humans choose the fewest limits possible?

Whether causality is valid (MGS2) or humans have a choice (no evident or logical basis), there is no way to tell the difference between a human's choice and a dog's choice.

No matter how you slice it, a human is the same as an animal.

It was not sleeping? I dislike it when a question of mine goes unanswered.

You cannot break every decision down to good and evil because they are arbitrary values placed on things after they have been analyzed. Similar to the price of an item. Am I able to break everything down to its objective price? I have heard of no logical or philosophical basis for the appreciation of good and evil.

I used evolution and survival as examples of in-born inclinations, not as the sole basis for all of impulses. Whatever the overriding pattern in question is, the individual that is affected by it did not create its own inclinations. If you concede that, then it is not a matter of selfish or selfless. I am arguing that the self does not exist as an individual and that choice is meaningless because the chain of perceptions and experiences that led you to make that choice were not of your own design. You did not cause yourself to be born, or even if you did, you cannot prove that you designed what you created.

This applies in a world without genes as well. If you consider a human to be simply a consciousness, then a human does not get to choose its own inclinations or how it perceives things. A human does not get to choose how many senses it is born with. It does not get to choose what colors it will see when it looks at an object. It will not get to choose whether or not certain patterns of those colors will please it or displease it. It does not get to choose the environment it is born into; it will not get to choose the objects around it. Because it will not get to choose the color is sees, how much it likes this color or the object that it looks at, there is no room left for choice. It will see an object it did not choose, see it as a color it did not choose, and have a reaction to this color that it did not choose.

You can claim that a thing is good or evil, and that is arbitrary. Depending on the premise (what each side considers the dividing line), I could argue against you turn for turn. If you were to die, your conception of good and evil would no longer be held in the world, and nothing would have the prices that you set on them. A thing is the same regardless of the price you set on it, notice, so the price is an arbitrary value. A price is the level of "goodness" or value you put on the subject. Spiritual value or material value, both are placed on objects after assessment and are not based in inductive or deductive observations taken from them.

The argument that a subjective experience does not allow for choice has never been countered successfully. It is axiomatic, while the idea of a divide between good and evil is not a concept that all people develop without being taught. Everyone will arrive at the conclusion that choice is meaningless if they think about it long enough. Yet it is incredibly rare to find two people (who were not taught what morality was) to come to the same conclusion about what good and evil are.

You have not tried to counter my position. Instead you have tried to compare it to a subjective spectrum. Please do not misdirect. Is there a room for choice when perception, preference, and experience are all outside of a subjective entity's control?

I have known of dogs that have at least risked their lives for others, so yes, they had an impulse to die for others.

The example of the Guru assumes that "well-being" relates to survival or avoiding pain alone. Suffering and harm are subjective concepts. If the Guru valued an idea over his life, then what drove him to do so? Everything that I can think of can be summarized as an impulse that was the result of a tree that he did not initiate.

What is this other drive and how is it different from an impulse?

If you condition a dog well enough, it will die for you as well. Is there a fundamental difference between a person developing a wish (impulse?) to die for others and a dog doing so?

okay, thanks for recording and editing you rock man(i was gonna edit but thanks!)! BTW: make a censored version with cuts and edits, a safe version for the official podcast, and an uncensored version with no cuts, for us to post later in the production zone, thanks man, it was awesome doing this with you, thanks for your patience, and my sexy accent gets all the naked ladies.

could not find you. seriously.

and i did not get a skype invitation.ill try adding you.

you dont have to if you dont want to, its just my PC is very laggy, but Dr_Wigglz has experience with this, I think it might be best if he does it.

YESH! okay i talked to everyone and the all accept, we can do this, btw: last time i tried it kinda dint work on my PC so could you maybe, try to use a Skype recorder for us?

for 2 of our members, the time i last said was not very good, can we start a few hours later than what i had planned, like 3-4 hours?

:/D=:*LAST TIME CHANGE! I SWEAR!*

send me the email.

But on another note: how is your day?

Now is 6:54 pm in Brasilian time, were going to record 2-4 pm my time, you do the math, tomorrow 2-4 pm my time, add me on skype if you havent. im also posting this all of the other 3 member's Prof Page