Messages

Hire a good electrician.

-MillsJROSS

Agree

No, you replied to a message board thread on the internet, adding nothing of value besides an brief glimpse in the mind of the MAD HATTER

Helm: Being alive is a poor incentive to stay alive since it ceases when your life is over. It is however an argument against suicide.

Without wanting to derail this gem of a thread, what I ment was a pretty low-brow concept: we're instinctually hardwired to desire to remain alive. There is no need for arguments on why staying alive is a good idea, be you a man with convictions or not, we just really really want to.

So I'm not buying the 'I am an agnostic and therefore I don't have God to focus on and remain alive'. There's been people that believe in absolutely nothing, have done the most atrocious things you can imagine, and they sleep like babies and think life's the greatest thing ever. 

I love the canabalism argument because it makes people seem so clever.

Spell the word.

Yeah, in retrospect, totally japanese, but back when I was 9 in the arcades, extremely endearing.

Dodonpachi at the top of the list
E.S.P. Rade
Armalyte (c64)
Cyvern
Battle Bakraid
A.P. Batrider
Raiden Fighters 2
Super R-type (SNES)
Cabal
Robotron


amongst others

Sometimes. Seriously, the cannibalism line of thinking is faulty either way.

Choosing a particular idea about what is "good to do" is not inherently illogical. What little I know of Peter Singer's utilitarianism suggests to me that it is logical and consistent. Like other ethical systems, it just isn't necessarily right about what is "good and bad".

Choosing a particular idea about what is "good to do" is as logical as choosing the next idea. All equally invented, fabricated. Inventing Right and Wrong by JL Mackie might be a good read on this one. This is what I said. Was I not clear? I have not read any of Peter Singer's stuff, but I am prepared to accept that his ethical conclusions all follow his premises, and that he makes no major logical blunders or contradictions. This wasn't what I was talking about.


EDIT: which is, I guess it's good to spell this out in this thread: it's easier to prove almost everybody in this thread, including bspeers to be logically inconsistent with his own statements than it is to prove anyone WRONG (read: bad) on moral grounds. What people are then likely to do is just that, punch holes in each other's credibility, because none here are master arguers that pay particular attention to their logical errors. Lots od personal discrediting, lots of Ad Hominems. It's fun discussion, but nobody should take the moral highground.

last two posts by mills are great.

2ma2: even existentialists with strong epistemological issues with the concept of knowledge, that claim to know nothing, still have reasons to remain alive, and they seem to have their fun too. Being alive is good enough incentive for staying alive, it seems.

Ad hominem. Yes you shouldn't even be in this one unless you're prepared to invest in it and not sweep everything you don't agree with off the table as being angry and illogical.

I agree ethical consistency is a good goal to strive for. But the foundations of the various ethical schools themselves, be them utilitarian or some more absolute systems, are not logical or consistent with anything else as they're axiomatic and based on someone's arbiterate idea about what is 'good to do'. So let's not get too carried away with 'nnngh! your arguments are illogical!'

If you're looking for startling new discoveries in an internet discussion about free will, well...

First of all, try to coherently explain what you're trying to say to me, as

between an unfathomable ruleset and one where there are no rules

This seems to differentiate between a ruleset that is unfath... let's say near-impossible to comprehent by human intellect, and a ruleset, which contains... no rules. Surely you don't mean that, do you? I'll take that as if you ment how do I differentiate between a near impossibly complicated ruleset, and the complete absense of a ruleset, to which I reply: The presence of a ruleset is a hypothesis based on epyrical founding. On the very barest of levels: not by saying why things happen, but by observing that they indeed do. The premise of causality is of course a theory, but a very safe and axiomatic one. Our understanding of the ruleset might be flawed, and we might endlessly try to better it, and it can be argued it will never completely cover the workings of what the ruleset governs (this is known as the process of scientific progress) but there is little epistemological discrepency in saying there is one. It is a direct byproduct of "things happen". The other option, is complete and total solipsism, and that's no fun, is it?

You're assuming that everything that can happen has a rule. That is true metaphysics: that there exists things that are not controlled by some set of rules, but by a will, be it human, divine or something else.

Please seperate what I said, and what you're saying from the above quote as it is not clear to me. You did not clearly state how there exists something not controlled by rules, but by will. I didn't say that. You didn't say that. Why is it being said?

@SSH

To attribute freewill to the quantum dice roll is even more depressing than to support the notion of a strict determinist world for most people. Even in this configuration that you seem to suggest trumps determinism, through the various 'random' universes and appropriate rule-sets governing them, the one we're in, operates on the level on which we experience it, under said set of it's own rules. Whether this set of rules initially is dependent on dice-rolls, or in fact whether the reliability of these rules at any future notice is uncertain, doesn't interest me as much as the certainty that right now, up to here, it has been and continues to be dependent. Do you understand? Chaos Theory doesn't mean Chaos period. A completely unfathomable (to humans) ruleset doesn't make the end result of the process any less deterministic.

Metaphysical/Material dualism is a concept I am not inclined to take seriously. The machines are the machines and everything interfaces with everything else in ever-complex connections that are beyond us fully. The mystical bent to these processes is not mandatory to agree that they [the processes] exist. Even if after death, some sort of spectral form, remnants of memories from the human electric system for example, lingers for a time, this isn't more metaphysical than as much as the one interpreting chooses it to be.

Gods (/spirits/whatever) are a demand. They are not necessary.

Finally, because you're being silly: my assumptions are inherently justified as such; they are not testable hypotheses and need no scientific backing to operate as they were intended: as grounds for conversation. Please carry on with the bad humor.

You have no sense of humor.

Please, do explain it fully.

There is no such thing as free will. We are biological mechanisms. Everything a mechanism does is the result of the influences and initial charges and directives it has. The 'self' is sitting in the passenger's seat, looking at his own cogs, looking outside, looking at his own cogs, looking outside. We influence ourselves in ways that are exactly compensated for. There is no etherial spirit outside and above ourselves dictating the actions of the body according to it's divine ethical choices, made before time.

exhibitionist [...] her furry friends

I'm covered. Proceed as you see fit. Sorry to take the conversation towards this subject.

Oh heh, she was the one who asked me to do that.

Do you mean she asked you to draw a furry version of her, or did she ask you to show revealing photographs of her to internet forums? One doesn't... necessarily follow the other.

I liked Terminator 2

>dance