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I'm slowly turning into obbe
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2016-09-09 at 7:23 AM UTCOh no, not you Lanny! The last of the last, the rock upon which the oceans of BS crashed, the unbowed, the unbroken. Hear that sound? It's my soul crying out in anguish!
It's good to have an open mind, especially after being subjected to years to attacks (ie. hearing pascal's wager for the like 50th time...). I, too, know that hunger of spirituality, but I honestly can't cross the barrier. There's something sweet in accepting the truth, the minimal truth, and leaving everything in a constant state of painful uncertainty.
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2016-09-09 at 1:10 PM UTC
Oh no, not you Lanny! The last of the last, the rock upon which the oceans of BS crashed, the unbowed, the unbroken. Hear that sound? It's my soul crying out in anguish!
It's good to have an open mind, especially after being subjected to years to attacks (ie. hearing pascal's wager for the like 50th time…). I, too, know that hunger of spirituality, but I honestly can't cross the barrier. There's something sweet in accepting the truth, the minimal truth, and leaving everything in a constant state of painful uncertainty.
Well isn't that kind of what having an open mind means? It doesn't mean accepting crazy pseudo spiritual nonsense for no reason. Having an open mind is more like staying afloat in the sea. You have to relax to float. If you stiffen up and try to cling to your ideas about the nature of life, yourself and this universe, whether those ideas are spiritual based or science based, you will sink. But if you have an open mind, if you can relax and float on the surface, the truth will come to you whatever it turns out to be. -
2016-09-09 at 2:45 PM UTCThis thread gave me cancer. Why are you discussing this nonsense constantly? All you guys do is repeating words of other, way smarter people without the insight required to form or understand those thoughts.
Pseudointellectual bunch of cocksuckers. You are nothing but quiet echos of meaningless words. What's the fucking point? How do you gain pleasure from this? Are you considering this waste of time a learning experience?
Why are you guys doing this? -
2016-09-09 at 3:20 PM UTC
Stop liking what i don't like.
Ok bro.
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2016-09-09 at 3:21 PM UTCI think it's somewhat human nature:
Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, "Why, why, why?"
Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.
You see, artists have a vocation to express their perceptions of hyperspacial realities from every point of view that man can reach, at every different time that man can live in, to provide us with handles on universal truths. All the myths and all the religions present us with different pictures of the same hyperspacial entity, and that entity is ourselves. Artists, scientists, and mystics who glimpse spirits dimly through the Veils of Maja limn a projection of the eternal entities into the human dimensions of literature, theatre, music, dance, architecture, engineering, philosophy, mathematics, justice, politics, morality --- in a word, culture. Like pictorial art, all cultural artifacts compress hyperspacial structures into fewer dimensions so that ideas are represented in more or less tangible forms. The form is the specialized language of its poet and the meaning of the form is the essence of the myth.
"Why are you guys doing this?"
All those posing unanswerable questions, or declaring that their questions can't be answered are not in the business of creating science, nor do they have any intention of informing the public; their real purpose is obscuring knowledge and confusing you in order that they may gain and hold their advantage over you. Rhetorical questions take many forms, and none are so beguiling as the scientific poser. Rhetoric manipulates automatic psychological reflexes so as to make the audience believe that the authority who cannot answer his own questions knows something that his audience doesn't know. -
2016-09-09 at 3:50 PM UTCAnyway...
So you're saying she would be wrong? What if she argued that personhood is a philosophical problem and not simply a matter of definition or isn't species dependent? What is wrong about that?
Yes i am saying she would be wrong. And saying: "Oh no, but you see, it's a philosophical question". Is a slippery slope, because we could just as easily extend this to everything. Before long we'd call everything something else than what it actually is.She can consider this cat to be a person and that doesn't fundamentally change anything about the properties of the cat, so why shouldn't she consider it to be a person?
I can consider you a dumbass and you could consider me an idiot but that doesn't fundamentally impact our individual intelligence. And if calling X, Y doesn't change anything about X then what is the point? We should just call things by their names.Would you consider that simulation to be a person?
I would but i wouldn't consider it being me.If I were to remove your hands those hands would not be a continuation of your consciousness as you experience it, so would you still consider them to be "your hands"? How much of yourself can be removed/replaced before you're no longer you? In another thread you claimed what makes you who you are is your "essence". If I precisely simulated your essence using a machine yet you continued to deny that the simulation is you, then is there something else that makes you who you are? If so, what is it?
You can remove anything you like, my consciousness would be the essence of my being i'd say. And if you remove my consciousness i stop existing. As far as i am aware at least
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2016-09-09 at 3:52 PM UTCExistence is perception, and perception is thought, therefore, existence is thought. Scary, innit?
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2016-09-09 at 4:01 PM UTCIf you aren't publishing you are wasting your time. Period.
You guys ride really high horses but all you do is shitpost on a forum that will be gone in a couple of years. None of your ideas or thoughts have any merit unless they have an audience that can review and spread your ideals/thoughts.
What you guys do is just a hobby. A hobby that will lead to nothing. Your ideas are lost.
I told Malice to publish his shit for that exact reason because some of it is actually original content and worth being thought about. You guys are just wasting time because it gives you some sense of importence and a feeling of intelligence to spew those big words and incoherent thoughts over the internet like mental diarriah(?).
What's the point? -
2016-09-09 at 4:33 PM UTC
I think it's somewhat human nature:
I truly hope for you that you are trying to troll me. What the fuck is this? LOL.
Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, "Why, why, why?"
Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.
You see, artists have a vocation to express their perceptions of hyperspacial realities from every point of view that man can reach, at every different time that man can live in, to provide us with handles on universal truths. All the myths and all the religions present us with different pictures of the same hyperspacial entity, and that entity is ourselves. Artists, scientists, and mystics who glimpse spirits dimly through the Veils of Maja limn a projection of the eternal entities into the human dimensions of literature, theatre, music, dance, architecture, engineering, philosophy, mathematics, justice, politics, morality — in a word, culture. Like pictorial art, all cultural artifacts compress hyperspacial structures into fewer dimensions so that ideas are represented in more or less tangible forms. The form is the specialized language of its poet and the meaning of the form is the essence of the myth.
"Why are you guys doing this?"
All those posing unanswerable questions, or declaring that their questions can't be answered are not in the business of creating science, nor do they have any intention of informing the public; their real purpose is obscuring knowledge and confusing you in order that they may gain and hold their advantage over you. Rhetorical questions take many forms, and none are so beguiling as the scientific poser. Rhetoric manipulates automatic psychological reflexes so as to make the audience believe that the authority who cannot answer his own questions knows something that his audience doesn't know. -
2016-09-09 at 4:54 PM UTC
Yes i am saying she would be wrong. And saying: "Oh no, but you see, it's a philosophical question". Is a slippery slope, because we could just as easily extend this to everything. Before long we'd call everything something else than what it actually is.
Ok, but consider this:There's nothing in the "definition of cat" (itself biologically somewhat ambiguous) that you'll find in a biology textbook that precludes a cat from being a person. Not that I think cats are people, but I'm not sure why personhood would even be a prerequisite for inclusion in a family anyway or why non-personhood would mean you have total inalienable property rights over a thing.
It might be a good idea to show some sort of reason as to why you believe she would be wrong. What makes a person a person? Is it possible for non-persons to become persons and vice versa? It wasn't very long ago that some of your fellow human beings were actually considered to not be persons. Now they are. And sometimes things like large corporations are considered to be persons. So why shouldn't a girl consider her cat to be a person?I can consider you a dumbass and you could consider me an idiot but that doesn't fundamentally impact our individual intelligence. And if calling X, Y doesn't change anything about X then what is the point? We should just call things by their names.
Calling a cat a person or a member of the family is an expression of the way the speaker experiences and interacts with that cat. It represents a difference in the way the speaker perceives and thus interacts with the person in comparison to non-persons. Isn't that sort of obvious? We do call things by their names as we experience them - some people experience their pet cat as a member of their family, or as a sort of cat-person.I would but i wouldn't consider it being me.
Ok but consider this:What does it mean to be a "continuation of your consciousness"? Presumably a sufficiently complex simulation could execute all your same mental activities in the same sequence as you today, we could even imagine it doing this in parallel in advance of the physical "you". I actually agree that such a simulation would be a different thing, have a different although isomorphic consciousness, but I'll argue that precludes physicalism. If subjective experience is reducible to physical states (the physicalist premise) then identical physical systems should have identical consciousness properties. Like if we say acceleration is reducible to mass and net force of a system then two physical systems with same net force and mass must experience the same acceleration, and yet you seem to admit here that two systems with the same physical properties (a perfect clone or a perfect simulation and yourself) would have different consciousness. So something has to be wrong, maybe the idea that you wouldn't share an internal experience with a clone or simulation is the mistake but that seems even more out there than the idea that consciousness is nonphysical.
From what I can tell you feel such a simulation would not be you because you would not be sharing the exact same subjective experience, or something like that, right? Like, the simulation and you could share the same memories, react the same way to events and questions, have the same thought patterns, but if you were sitting on the opposite side of the room as your simulation you would each be having a slightly different experience than the other. And of course, if we turned off the simulation, "you" would still exist.
Let's imagine a slightly different scenario. Lets say you had contracted some sort of rapid, degenerative brain disease and if we did not act quickly we would lose you forever. Imagine we have advanced technology, so advanced we could record all of your information, all your memories and neural connections and your entire "essence" essentially, and we could use nano technology to replace your dying brain tissue with an artificial substitute that could precisely simulate your "essence". Imagine we have the technology to do this quickly, painlessly and you are able to remain conscious for the entire procedure. You would almost feel like a fog has been lifted from your mind. Would you still consider yourself to be the same person afterward? Would you still be "you", even though you have an artificial brain running a simulation of your old organic brain patterns?You can remove anything you like, my consciousness would be the essence of my being i'd say. And if you remove my consciousness i stop existing. As far as i am aware at least
How would you define consciousness?
When you have an operation and become temporarily unconscious, do you temporarily stop existing? -
2016-09-09 at 4:55 PM UTC
What you guys do is just a hobby. A hobby that will lead to nothing. Your ideas are lost.
It's a hobby that has led to insights that have improved my life. I consider that a win.
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2016-09-09 at 5 PM UTC
It's a hobby that has led to insights that have improved my life. I consider that a win.
There you go. Question answered. That's a fair reason to do something, I guess. -
2016-09-09 at 5:16 PM UTC
Something I've thought of is dropping something to the ground and asking "What meaning does this have?" in response to what may be my most hated question, "What is the meaning of life?"
Very zen.
