I wouldn't want to live devoid of emotions, but then again I wouldn't "want" much at all without them. I think they're neither a blessing nor a curse.
I’m leaving for a music festival tomorrow and won’t be back for a week or so so this will probably be my last reply here. I will not deny this, but even if I’m being dragged along for the ride, the prospect of not knowing where I’ll end up or what role I’ll play is good enough for me. Besides, whether your conscious self is influenced by other people or by “dream alter egos” doesn’t matter; in the end you are experiencing the same. Why bother thinking something else than everyone else then? I could ask similar questions several times throughout this reply: why call yourself a god if being a god isn’t better than being a human? I can’t escape the suspicion, or rather the suspicion has grown on me, that this little gimmick of yours is just a way to set you apart from everybody else for the sake of it. I’m already quite sure that you’re terrified of being normal, so you mosey along with whatever outrageous idea throws you a rope and pulls you away from that normality. The obvious truth though, is that you are no more interesting than anybody else regardless of whether you call yourself a god or a human. The “puny god” line from Avengers comes to mind. The only way I can think of that you can call yourself a god is by claiming that you are a creative force. Still, you have no more conscious power over us than we claim to have over others. Even if you are the only one who thinks, the decisions you make don’t always play out the way you’ll want them to, even though we are supposed to be created by you. Even if you kicked everything in motion, you have no reason to believe that you have any judgmental or intervening power on your fabrications any more than said fabrications have on themselves. What good then is thinking altogether? How does it make you a god and how is it better than what we claim to be doing? Answer this before claiming that there is any logic in you. So did I. Not practicing what you preach is part of what I meant by That too is a part of self-contradiction. But if your intuition really does make logical conclusions, then similarities between your own achievements and limitations and those of others should ring a bell. There is no concrete proof, nor is it necessary. I think the gist of it all is your unwillingness to set yourself on the same level as your peers. You somehow prefer to think that you are different from everyone else, and I still can’t fathom why this is desirable at all. We find the world more interesting because our time is limited. We’ll receive the emergence of democracy in a nation as being good news, but if you’ve seen that nation going back and forth between a democracy and a dictatorship for 10 times or so, it won’t even pique your interest. Being immortal waters down the beauty and interest of things that mortals experience. Therefore it harms your capacity to enjoy them. But if you keep on betting on lower odds in light of those successive wins, those past experiences are not to be used as a reference. You’ve implied that even a complete and utter loss of cards won’t keep you from betting. How else would you explain your reasoning of “Maybe I’ll invent a way to create energy”? Sounds like you have a gambling problem, which is odd considering you abstain from addiction because it hurts your capacity to enjoy. Yet you try to justify your intuition with logic. See above. I can only wonder what that reason might be. Hurting you was never my intention, though I wouldn’t have cared if it were a byproduct of it. That would be so if your environment was also constant. You seem to be under the misconception that knowing your personality is the same as knowing how your entire life will play out (on top of that, no one can say with a straight face that they know themselves completely). That being said, solidifying your personality does not necessarily mean that you will never make adjustments to it again (and indeed in most cases it doesn’t). But you will do so without ignoring what you thought, felt and knew previously. You could argue that changing your opinion or personality on the fly is in practice much more efficient, but I have no intention of believing that continuous self-deception won’t wear on you eventually. Switching back to believing you can die when the time comes is all well and good, but don’t tell me you won’t wonder whether you haven’t made some very foolish decisions in the meantime. Having lost all zest and interest in the universe around you does not make you free from desires (in fact, waiting to win reveals that you’re not completely apathetic). It’s true that you have nothing to lose in waiting for a miraculous way by which they can be fulfilled, but waiting in the meantime can be a frustrating affair that can make betting all the more unappealing. No more than you have reason to believe that you can’t run out of it. I assume not believing that is preferable to you, but that will bring us back to what we have said before. Learning about yourself is only valuable when you can compare it to something similar. The traits you possess are part of a range of different traits, or at least have an antonym. By distancing yourself from the people you interact with, you have made such comparisons impossible. Therefore, the desire to learn more about yourself cannot be fulfilled. Studying ants will not give me valuable information about myself. I could observe that ants are eusocial creatures and that I’m not, but I will only come to that conclusion because a human once taught me what eusociality means. I need other humans to compare and to assess whether I am strong or weak, happy or sad, authoritarian or anarchistic, greedy or generous. You can find it interesting to study something that isn’t you, but to be able to draw actual conclusions on your own nature, you need parallels and comparisons with equivalent beings. Then it makes no difference whether it is true or false because it lacks noticeable consequences. Any theory that has consequences that cannot be addressed to anything else can be supported if not proven. There is no fallacy in ignoring something that doesn’t matter. Even if it is a practical choice, the alternative of taking it into account isn't better. Except you admitted that death or non-existence is not a loss. You value yourself but can’t feel bad about losing it.
This is just a matter of semantics all the same. Whether you call it a dream or the physical reality, it remains the only thing you’ve ever felt, and claiming that that isn’t so will put you on the same level as people who claim to have been possessed by the devil in my eyes. I see my sense of reality backed by a majority of people who feel the same way. I realize that this is meaningless to you, but see below. That conclusion is by no means unavoidable. It wouldn’t even be reached if you didn’t give more weight to the few differences you observe between yourself and other humans, rather than the plethora of similarities. Feeling that the world is a dream, surviving death against incredible odds... This isn’t even a unique claim among people, so how on earth could it have more validity than the observations that you eat, walk, screw and urinate the same way as the humans around you? Your intuition is definitely not based on logic, which makes it all the stranger that you try to apply logic in this debate and in several others all the same. That being said, you don’t deny that you foll you are delusional but that said delusions are in fact more useful than believing in logic. I’ll address this below. Also, you have not been given evidence that others think but later on in that same reply you said This once again seems to demonstrate that you don't actually acknowledge what you preach, and I'm still not convinced of the efficiency of thinking A and saying B. Why are you asking this whilst quoting the answer? If you have no imagination for anything but the immediate future, then you are a horrible hedonist. I’m well aware that mixing several spirits together is a good way to make you the happiest man on the planet for a short while, but I know that I’ll be anything but the next morning and even the next few hours. Planning ahead usually maximizes pleasure more so than looking only at the next few minutes does. Gambling, by definition does not guarantee a favorable outcome. It is absurd to try and avoid stress due to time constraints whilst creating stress due to hoping for a favorable outcome all the same. Thinking “I will win” won’t cut it if you openly admit that you’re gambling. Words alone aren't enough to condition the mind if they are do not correspond with the thoughts behind them. You can delude yourself, but you’re not immune to self-contradiction and the awareness of those contradictions. I find it preposterous that you erect a concrete wall between truth and efficiency even though the latter is based on the former. A metal hammer will break a rock better than a rubber hammer will due to the physical laws governing the materials. Antibiotics will do a better job at combating bacteria than a skittle will due to biological truths. These truths are often perceived by imperfect means and therefore not objective, but they are what makes us invent more efficient tools. Facts that don’t have an immediate practical use can still be (and are being) investigated, although their certainty cannot be verified. Observing the behavior of pest species, for example, will not exterminate the pest, nor is it a perfect study because it is based on a sample. Nevertheless, it is a far better strategy to assess what they are fleeing from then to just intuitively throw a few extra predators in there and hope that it will sort itself out. In a sense you are right: efficiency is the parameter that decides solutions. To claim that one value is superior to the other is absurd though. It is far better to establish educated axioms and base efficient tools on them than letting your gut feeling pick an option and hoping it will work out. You seek to understand yourself, but you have (a) Made this impossible because your opinions change to whatever’s convenient at that precise moment making your personality effectively amorphous (b) Made this redundant by admitting you are a one-track minded hedonist, which is as boring and as easily untangled as the average Joe’s psyche (c) Made this both impossible and redundant by denying the existence and the relevance of truths, which must include truths (and thus understanding) of oneself. (Yeah, I’ve been aware that I’ve did my share in making this another Makaze-centered thread but at least it has given me the chance to say that you have nothing to gain from thinking “I am Makaze and I’m speshul”.) One of your strongest desires is therefore irrelevant. I can only guess what the others might be, which I won’t, but I can imagine that some if not most of them involve other people. This is why singling yourself out isn’t a sensible choice. By believing in the nonsense you’ve been spewing these past few replies you made your interactions with others questionable and your comparisons to them moot. You have greatly limited the desires you can have, let alone the ones you can actually achieve. Getting back to: The grand question would be: why would you WANT to live in a universe where the only reference is you, eternally no less? You’d be a lousy gambler if you put your chips on that though. If you have come to a point where you have lost all interest, your “new dream” would have to comprise of entirely new experiences, unthinkable even to your current self. Gamblers may bet on the unlikely, but never on the inconceivable. When it comes down to that, it’s a good time to fold. This alone doesn’t refute my point. I may have misunderstood you but read on… The reason I’m already replying instead of playing Lost Odyssey (a game with immortality as a major theme no less) is because I thought of that flaw and wanted to edit my post before you’d point it out, because I knew you were going to. You may have noticed that in my previous post I may have said “energy available to you”. I’m well aware of the laws of conservation of energy, and I knew that you’d argue that you wouldn’t run out. However, even bringing up something along the lines of “I’ll just believe that I can use/convert any type of energy trololololol” doesn’t excuse you. Wasting energy again becomes a key point here (yes, it still haunts you even though you thought could brush it off). Next stop on the train of thought… If you have no reason you believe you can run out of usable energy, you in fact believe that you have a limitless supply of it (because any finite number that can be subtracted can be subtracted to zero). Why then do you feel strained when you use up more than you should? Even if I have misunderstood you, my observation of you believing in “wasting” energy is correct. It cannot be unpleasant to lose something that you have an infinite supply of. You want to do things with as little effort as possible, but with an infinite amount of time and usable energy at your disposal, this should not even affect you. Furthermore, it puts your entire idea of efficiency being a high and mighty parameter on thin ice since efficiency is not applicable to you. I admit that I didn’t see this coming. I had expected you to take your chances and spew some bogus about being a spiritual consciousness not requiring energy. It is good that you at least admit that every process requires it. It makes telling you you’re not immortal that much easier. So that’s that then. The resolution to this discussion lies here somewhere. The way I see it, it comes down to one of three scenarios: (a) You admit that you are not immortal, since you can run out of energy and you said that this equals death. I guess that would make me succeed in what I’ve been trying to tell you all along. (b) You admit that being immortal is not preferable because you will run out of energy leaving you with nothing to do, but this means going against what you said in the above quote. (c) You insist that you will not run out of energy, but as I pointed out, this goes against another thing you stated and puts your entire “I <3 efficiency” philosophy in mortal danger. All usable energy would be depleted though, and according to the same law of conservation of energy that you have tried to use against me, energy doesn’t appear out of thin air. Whatever would convert it into a usable form is beyond your grasp as well as mine and like I said: gamblers never bet on the inconceivable. Being on the same wavelength with other people gives me an understanding of them, and them of me. It’s not too hard to see how this decreases stress, but anyway.... You said yourself that your greatest desire is to understand yourself as an individual. You’re on your own for that. I have like-minded people that can help me with this because I put myself on the same footing as them and accept that they can understand me. Their judgment is limited, sure, but so is yours (it’s funny that you can’t deny that it isn’t due to what you said before). You have to entangle yourself entirely on your own, which is both more stressing and less efficient. Your goal is clear enough but you picked the worst approach for the job. Sucks to be you. Funny how I don’t feel stressed at all then. You did notice that I answered “no” in the poll, right? You could argue that given infinite time, any likelihood becomes infinitely large. Just to rob you of that argument beforehand, let me remind you of cause and effect, and if something doesn't happen right away, it won't happen if the circumstances stay exactly the same. Perhaps anything could be possible given infinite time, but not with zero tries. Also, rule of three: there is nothing logical nor preferable to betting on a scenario that you cannot imagine except a favorable outcome in the end. It's no longer gambling without at least mechanism with which your astronomically low odd may occur. Losing yourself along with everything you value makes it a better scenario in itself. You will experience negativity whenever you lose something you value, else you wouldn’t value it. However, with your consciousness destroyed, you obviously have nothing left to feel negativity with. You treat death as defeat, but that's incorrect. Death (or permanent loss of consciousness if you will) is equivalent to a zero sum. Being conscious without anything you value to interact with is a negative result.
It is quite well-defined from a biological standpoint, which hopefully still takes priority over any philosophical ponderings. If "being the philosophical type" means turning your head away from the cold hard facts in favour of abstract and dreamy ideas with no or questionable evidence, then I am indeed not the philosophical type. I look at the scientific basis and go from there, which I admit gets exceedingly difficult the more my scientific knowledge expands. Nevertheless, understand and applying mechanisms is essential and without it, philosophy is indeed pointless. You can't explain how a watch works without understanding the composition of the gears inside. If someone claims not to be human I expect that person to know (read: be convinced and having reason to be) what sets them apart from the human species. Escaping the dance of death once does not suffice. Which, again, is a good way to impede any kind of progress in any conceivable area. For someone valuing usefulness, you seem fond of holding ideas that are anything but. Of course, you could always make the argument that you'd rather think about yourself rather than an anonymous crowd of humans, but I can't help but wonder where you'll get your satisfacton from if you exclude everyone but yourself. No matter how you look at it, satisfaction is the key factor to living a fulfilled life, and there is no scenario to lead such a life without others coming into play in some way. Not quite, even if he repeats the phrase every day. I have a hard time believing that you can't see the difference between "I will never die" and a repeated "I won't die today". He who says the latter doesn't extrapolate his life span indefinitely, only to the end of the day. That being said, both can be dead wrong and end up dying that very day. Whether believing they won't will actually help them I'll leave in the middle, but I do know that senescence is a powerful force of nature. Read: I delude myself. I agree with what Patman said before me, but see below for an elaboration on why I think your ideas are shite even if you could choose to believe in usefulness rather than truth. Except efficiency is observed with the same methods as truth, so if truth cannot be discerned, then efficiency becomes equally unknowable. Long term usefulness may not be apparent even if though it may overshadow short term usefulness eventually. Contrariwise, even if something seems immediately useful to you, you have no way of "discerning" whether it may not be more useful to believe something else in the long run. Given this, the tool you wield does not matter since both are equally useful/useless. Which brings me back to my central point: your philosophy contradicts assumptions, truths and hypotheses thought out by people that have struck me as more intelligent than you have been (which, at this very moment, isn't the hardest thing to do but I digress) and its usefulness is questionable. Believing you can't die might make you last longer in a world filled with knowledge and behavior that you deem pointless. Where is the efficiency in being singled out? Quod erad demonstrandum: you lose on all fronts. Funniest thing I read this month. Hooooooooooooold it! I'm going to be hopping on a train of thought here... It's a debating technique I'm not used to, but here goes... Part 1: You believe avoiding death requires energy. Thus, you believe that actions require energy (since it absurd to assume that only avoiding death requires energy). You believe you can waste energy. Thus, you believe the amount of usable energy available to you is limited (since you can't waste something that isn't). You believe you will live indefinitely. Thus, you believe that you will live to see the day that all the energy available to you is used up. Thus, you believe your actions to be limited (since actions require energy). Conclusion: Even if you assume that staying alive doesn't cost a single Joule in itself, you will be left there staying alive taking no actions. Eternally. Mathematics have taught us that: Infinity - finite number = Infinity So the finite time that you have energy availble falls into nothing compared to the infinity you'll spend without any. On to part two... I think I've already got you pretty much cornered by using conventional logic, but since conventional logic isn't your cup of tea I'm going out of my way to cut off the "enlightenment doesn't cost me anything" option as well. Part 2: You believe you can waste energy. Thus, you believe that you can spend it usefully as well (because if you don't want to waste it, it means you'd rather use it for something else). Thus, at least some things you consider useful require energy. You value things that are useful to you (see this entire debate). Thus, you value at least some things that require energy. You insist in living by the most useful option. Thus, all the things you value require energy (because if they wouldn't, it would only be useful to value that which requires no energy and nothing else). You will spend an infinite time with no energy (see part one). Conclusion: You will spend an infinite amount of time without the things you value. How is believing this useful again? Also see above. I do not believe avoiding death is a waste, so that argument is void. The latter will be resolved on your death bed, when you may or may not come to regret overestimating the time you had to do the things you've always wanted to do. Tryng to fool yourself into thinking your time won't come will get so much harder when you live long enough for your health to deteriorate (because stayin healthy DOES cost energy, so time not wasted avoiding death is instead spent/wasted living healthy longer). Of course, you could always believe in eternal youth, but then you should ask yourself the question why you'd suddenly stop aging if you already have aged in the past. You're only making things harder for yourself. I, on the other hand, am synchronized to a set of rules that both make sense to me and fulfill me. I am being far more efficient than you are.
Lately I tend to avoid the Debate Corner, or indeed any Discussion thread since they all wind up being debates anyway. They're not half as fun as they used to be. I belittle my opponent's views because I know from experience that they will think longer and harder about the criticism I just gave them. I make use of analogies from everyday life to get that point across. Ideally, I will make my opponent wonder why (s)he didn't think of that in the first place. Another personal favourite strategy of mine is "reversal time", when I try to use my opponent's own logic against him/her. Often opponents of mine have tried to stray off-topic to conceal fatal flaws in their ideology, and I fell for it frequently but I'm beginning to wisen up on that. I assume I've shut my opponent up when they stop replying, because I know debate-loving members of KHV are too proud to back down if they have even a sliver of an argument left (myself included, mind you). My main goal is to challenge my own logic, and if possible, to force a shift in my opponent's opinion, even if it is but a slight one.
Saw this coming somehow. Having your own definitions for generally well-defined concepts is a good way to make your own posts pointless, to say nothing of the ones you read and reply to. As I've said in my previous post, no two circumstances are ever the same. The same goes for individuals. Nevertheless, we extrapolate and intrapolate in all branches of scientific research and well beyond it. The development of medication relies on population samples rather than a complete picture, and yet it has not prevented us from developing effective medicine. Of course, extrapolation based on a single observation is asinine, and there is not a single statistician with half a brain cell that would do so. I have only given up on living indefinitely. I may aim low in having finite ambition; I prefer it to desiring something that is bottomless but, after giving it a minimum of thought, unfeasible. What you gain by believing something doesn't signify if you genuinely believe in it. I believe a lot of things I rather wouldn't, but I won't turn a blind eye to them just because it'd be convenient. When you use that as an argument (repeatedly, no less), you don't sound very convinced.
Exactly. And yeah, I had forgotten to quote him.
I'm not going to package it in a politically correct form and just say it like this: not believing you can die is dumb and/or pretentious. There are no records of an immortal human as of yet, so believing that you'd be the first would be roughly equal to me being convinced that I'll attend Hogwarts next year. Every piece of evidence is an extrapolation in some way since no two circumstances are the same. If a snake belongs to a poisonous species, it is safe to assume that you will be poisoned too if it were to bite you, even though you have never been poisoned before or if you have never seen that particular snake kill someone. You are a human. You have seen or heard of people dying. Logical outcome: you'll die some day as well. Tough shit if it stops you from striving to live; it doesn't stop me. Accepting finity is a far more adequate response than stubbornly denying it. It doesn't even matter whether it "increases your efficiency" (although the way you handle the concept of evidence is as inefficient as they come). You don't believe in something because you want to believe in it; you believe in something because you think it makes sense. If pretending to think you can't die does the trick in lowering your stress levels, fine, but the outcome is not an argument in and of itself. See also the "I'll believe in God so I can go to heaven" non-logic.
I don't fear it. There are things I want to have done before dying, but when I'm dead I won't be around to regret them. That being said, I think I'd hate being old and helpless and regretting the things I'll never get to do.
Bypass Unit --- Nanosphere Courier
Map of the bank. Walking through walls (including ceilings) of any thickness whenever I want to. Not the best nor the most creative option, but I think it would do.
Worst Zoology teacher ever, handing out empty textbooks and shit.
Lately I feel that the need for best friends has packed its bags and vacated my mind completely. The closest thing I need in my life right now are mates and buddies. My best friend is my ex-girlfriend and we met at uni. I only see her about once a week in real life now; we have the majority of our conversations on MSN. We argue occasionally, with some of those arguments inflicting lasting damage and others not so. My second best friend has outgrown me, which left me with an ambiguous feeling. We met at a tennis camp when we were kids. We used to argue a lot, to varying degrees of intensity. They didn't mean a thing the day afterwards, or so we often thought.
A debate in a "What languages do you speak?" thread... Are there no depths you people won't sink to? I'm fluent in Dutch and English, and rusty in French and German (the latter more so than the former). I don't think I could still have a decent conversation in the latter languages, but I guess I could understand most written texts if the vocabulary used wouldn't be too eloquent.
Never seen such a picture-perfect example of self-contradiction in a single sentence. Bless you. Semantics aside, if you are not okay with treating your pet badly either, why even drag "objectivity'" in the debate? How is it still relevant? Technically (hey, if you can make such blatant use of the term, so can I) you do. Not everyone may agree that being of the same species is a necessary requirement to start a romantic relationship. Your opinion is just as biased as any other. Only in your mind, perhaps due to your conscience or whatever, do you think it's wrong. To you, the nature of the species matters. To others, consent matters. The former justification isn't any better than the latter, and it is foolish to think that it is. This comes dangerously close to saying that "everything that isn't a no is a yes", which is the epitomy of Insane Troll Logic if I ever heard it. Children can't consent either. That doesn't make consent unnecessary. Whether animals aren't hurt by sex I'll leave somewhere in the middle. This too is a subjective matter (of which I'm trying to tell that no debate on bestiality can do without), although I don't think farm animals would enjoy you interfering with their reproduction, and I don't think shoving your wiener into a house pet half your size will be a very pleasurable experience for it either. Perhaps this won't be necessary, but I'm warning you right now that the moment you consider physical arousal as a factor, you're basically giving me a "you-win-this-debate" free card.
So you must be perfectly okay with owners neglecting, mistreating and/or killing their pets? Furthermore... How is this in any way, shape or form objective? Or indeed, why isn't that logic "mumbo jumbo" for that matter? While I'm not keen on giving animals anthropomorphic properties, treating them as dead weight is equally incorrect. A distinction should be made between human, animals and inanimate objects. So yeah, suddenly objectivity doesn't matter and consensuality may. Funny how that goes, isn't it?
Then I see nothing wrong with it. Incest with mutual consent is okay in my opinion. It shouldn't be illegal nor frowned upon.
A quote that some of the more eloquent members here should keep in mind: "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." - Albert Einstein
Fixed that for you. We might as well fit it into a billboard in front of the Spam Zone.
I wasn't offended (though I can't help but wonder why you feel sorry if you thought you did nothing wrong). I'm sorry for singling you out. It's true that I don't recall you ever saying this before. I guess I just heard it one too many times, from different people. Just keep in mind that when you say that independence is attractive, you imply that dependence is less so. So technically you are saying that your side is better. Usually that wouldn't matter to me, but I don't know if whether they need a significant other or not is something people can choose. That's why it bothered me. Calling you out for flaunting wasn't exactly appropriate though, and I apologize for that.
