Doomroar 2015-01-01 15:12:55

Ok now to the scenario #2

In this version we can measure happiness, and prescribe models of happiness to other people, this one is easy, since happiness is no longer an abstract thing, we can just tell someone how to carry with their life, then give them a scan of their brain in which we show them that they have attained true happiness, whatever that may be (because i will assume that such a system can guarantee a person's self-fulfillment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-fulfillment i had an interesting conversation with Nietz about Self-actualization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-actualization last year, and by that i mean 2013, and i believe we came to the conclusion that it is there were happiness resides, whether we were right or not remains to be proven), thus in this scenario there are solid ideas of what is true happiness and how it can be achieved, people then only need to do one things to be happy, and is to try to replicate the common preconception of what a happy life is, this scenario has a bonus however, and is that happiness not only is a solid objective concept, but it can also be measured and demonstrated.

All right lets go back to real people and the Fisherman, we live in a world that is a mixture of the 2 scenarios, people already have an idea of what a happy life is supposed to be, that idea is a cultural construct that is spread by tradition and it depends highly of ideological factors, that vary from social environment, to political ideals, to moral norms, religious beliefs, and personal taste as well as ambitions, in resume is a world filled with incompatibilities, practically anything goes because despite there being general ideals of what a happy life is, in the end it all bowls down to the person itself, in short you can't tell another person what will and what will not make them happy, or if money can buy them happiness or not, or if that happiness is real or not (you would be like the tourist that tries to tell the fisherman how to live his life, in essence you would be a fool).

This is a good point to write a TL:DR can money and the material world give people true happiness? yes, but that is not for everybody because true happiness will remain subjective unless the day arrives in which we can accurately measure and demonstrate what true happiness is like.

Ok so that's one part done.

Now, do i know what i want at this point in life? yes at this point in life, the question of "is that what you really want?" is something that a psychoanalyst should explore, for i don't know my uncconscious mind (which provides another problem and is that some psychologist argue that there is no unconscious mind as Freud would have think of it, but that will be for another time, you can read the article on wikipedia, the Controversy part http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscious_mind#Controversy and then there's Jung view on the unconscious, among other scholars, anyway), however i do (and this is a justified belief, see links on the previous comment) have a general idea of what i want, and even of the things that i want and can never be, but like i said before "trick is that what we want changes with time", so what i want now may not be what i want after, to explain why this, i would need another 4 comments in which i explain the myth of identity, all just to come to the obvious notion that people change overtime, anyway to save time i will use this method, lets assume that people never change, i guess shit would be completed more often XD, ok jokes aside lets assume that people never change and what happens is that they just don't know what they "truly" want, however that leaves us with what they don't want, so they can know what they want by discarding unappealing options, in my case i already know of plenty of things i don't want to spend my life doing/being, and these range from Civil engineer to fisherman, how do i know i don't want to be a fisherman? my granddad on my dad's side has a coastal farm on the northern parts of Choco (the peaceful side), and his life is practically a copy-paste version of The Fisherman Story, i have no doubt that he is happy with his life, but other than an occasional vacation (that comes as expensive mostly on transportation) i have no interest on experimenting his lifestyle. However i don't think that you need to experience something first hand in order to know that you don't want such a life.

I guess this covers pretty much the theme, yeah i do think that it could explore more indeed all the notions, but i do believe it manages to explain why a simple life wont satisfy everybody, however i do agree with the notion that most people do want to have a simple life but use the wrong means in order to achieve it, but not all people are most people.

Doomroar 2015-01-01 18:13:28

Well i like to think that i explain everything that i said, but the links are there mostly to have a back up source, and to have something explained in a more detailed way that saves me time, it will cost time to the reader of course XD.

Indeed it is a world in which people have to try things first to know what they like. Yeah the modern parading of priorities (at least in the developed work) is to satiate a creative/intellectual/economic output and then having a family comes second even third, or just doesn't comes XD, but yeah these priorities change with time.

Oh but the power of the brain is quite limited, otherwise we wont have any need to train and practice mental task in order to remember or learn things, that's one example out of many, there's plenty of info on mental illusions and the limitations of the brain, however even with all that Sonja tells us that a mental disposition can overtake a genetic preposition, personally i like to believe on the validity of her study.

Talking about euphoria https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jz_VhUof5Js an euphoric life would be impossible because being alive also subjects us to sad times, however it can be argued that a life filled with various moments of euphoria is a life that is closer to "true" happiness (using the Plutchik-wheel as reference, the one about grades of feelings).

I see so you wont be in for the experience machine? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_machine btw the machine could be programmed so in your simulation you would have to go through hardship in order to attain bliss.
Btw2 the experience machine/the matrix/brains in a vat, are all famous skepticism arguments, that in essence say that we have no means to know if the world we experience is a simulation.

And could this article change your views on transhumansim? http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-titles/religion/11103/transhumanism-and-the-search-for-digital-immortality/?tw=kr personally i am all for it, talking with Dr S3C about the biological definition of life, and if viruses should count as alive or not, my position is that in which life as rare as it is, is not really all that specials and in a way a part of our "self" is already dying constantly so being digitized or mechanized wont prove a problem for me, the why to this would require another long message tho...

Yeah there's no way to know, you could search forever and there's no guarantee that what you find is true happiness, however if you don't search there's even less chances that you will find content, maybe what people should search for is satisfaction, to know that at least they tried and searched for it, and in the road they found some things, maybe is not true happiness but it is something, that correlates with Erickson's stages of psychosocial development http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erikson's_stages_of_psychosocial_development , since the last stage is reflection you can see if what you did with your life is fulfilling or not, but then again that depends of the person.

Yeah those are some sad examples, that can sadly be find in both history and our current times, like people that try to become superheroes then die of cancer, or parents using their kids to have a second go at life... but they are just a couple out of many cases, i never said that true happiness is impossible (it may or it may not be), i just said that attaining happiness is not something that is granted, or that it can be achieved using the same mediums and circumstances, after all for now if someone says that it is happy the only thing we can do is to believe them.

Yeah the fast move to prove a point is by arriving to the same conclusion by using the opposing premise, i don't really like it but it works XD.

It sounds ideal because just as you said, both the Fisherman and the tourist have the same ideas of what a happy life should look like.

Yeah " if you think you know what you want, you should give it a shot" that's pretty much it.

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On the unappealing side of the options, when you only have those kind of options at hand and nothing better, in those cases what occurs is more of a forced option towards the lesser of various evils, but being life weird as it is, it could be a possibility that one of those unappealing options ends offering happiness, as for that happiness being greater that the one offered by appealing options, that sounds unlikely, but who knows? maybe he joins the army, is brainwashed becomes a hardcore patriotic and each times he shoots someone in the name of the flag it experiences euphoria followed by ecstasy, even if it derives from the suffering of others, regardless of those others being good or bad, i guess that also count as happiness, in this case he would be a happy soldier that does a service to his country, if what his country (and the soldier) does is right and wrong that is another theme.

Doomroar 2015-01-23 09:57:40

Pff having kids is no longer a necessity for survival it can even seem as a detriment for it, which is ironic if i have ever seen irony.

The hell are you saying? we are constantly using all of our brain all the time, even when we sleep, which organ do you think is keeping all your functions actually working? that bullshit of the 10% of the brain is the biggest myth there ever was. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_percent_of_brain_myth

If there is life after dead, then since you are already dead... then maybe you will be in eternal bliss, i imagine something like a very long orgasm... that actually never ends, that's some weird shit.

But what if... what we perceive is not real!? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW7Op86ox9g

Haha the manga is way better.
We are constantly changing, and part of what makes us is constantly dying already, what scares people is that transhumanism shows them a sudden change, but would you stop being you if half your brain was a computer? what about a quarter? a tenth? a fraction of a fraction? the whole thing? what makes us, be us?

My humble opinion is that "we" actually don't exist, we are just an amalgam of cells, a multicellular body, and once it comes together in order to sustain itself it creates the illusion of a self that can't be pinpointed but is actually spread all over the many parts that form it, and it so just happens these parts are constantly changing, but they do follow a pattern, this pattern is our genetic map and our memories, for memories i mean a shared experience that all these parts that form "us" have.
So as i see it in transhumanism "you" actually do die, what remains is just a clone of yourself that shares your memories and which body composition has some similarities to the original but is actually more resilient, however that is kinda what happens to us on a daily basis, i have thought about it:
What if... what if you could take every cell in your body that is about to die, separate it and conserve it for 5 years, and yo do that with every single one, until by the end of it you actually manage to conserve a copy of yourself that is actually made of yourself, that body is not even your clone, it is actually your body which cells are in an descending order 5 years older than your current one, what if then you awaken it? is that you? yes it is! but it is not at the same time, because from the moment they separated from the main body you started having different experiences.
But then... what if... what if you could share perspectives? what if you could share experiences? be connected? "you" would effectively be in 2 different parts at the same time! and if that connection suddenly breaks then what makes "you" is just reduced to a perspective, and you know what's the beauty of all this? there are at least 2 humans that area already living under similar circumstances http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1331769/Doctors-stunned-conjoined-twins-share-brain-thoughts.html these conjoined twins actually share brain, and can see through each other eyes, as well as experience each other thoughts.
I guess that in resume what i want to say is, we would keep living but only after we have died once, however we are constantly dying already, and being alive isn't all that special, of course since i don't think that there is anything more, it gets even more interesting when the definition of what we consider to be alive is such a thing devoid of anything special, but if we think that there is actually a soul it gets even simpler, the only thing that happens is a change of recipient, same software different hardware, but i don't believe in the soul.
As for being human, i actually don't like humans, i find the concept of humanity overrated and actually unimportant, just a mere excuse to put ourselves above everything else in the world, following the essence of self-preservation it is a great strategy, but once we look beyond that it is not really important at all, biologically we are just animals that are smarter that the rest, philosophically we are just entities capable of thought along with some logical ordeals, and i don't believe in spirituality, so for me to stop being human is not a problem, actually i don't even think that being human is a defining fact of what makes us "us", and that is also compatible with some religious traditions, a ghost is not really a human, and if someone is reincarnated as another animal they stop being human, but they keep being themselves they just have another form (what if that fish you eat last week was one of your ancestors? dun dun dun! XD, i guess that's fine they helped to keep you alive after all).

You can look into the soul of people!? my man you have paranormal abilities!

Following the categorical imperative finding happiness by being a mas-murderer (even if is legitimized by the power of the state) would be wrong, this actually makes me wonder if there are cases in which killing someone is right even after following the categorical imperative? mmmh my imagination fails me.

Doomroar 2015-01-31 09:35:02

I was not talking about overpopulation, having 3+ kids makes life harder in our modern times in comparison with having 3+ kids back in the day, not only that would increase the survival rate of some of the offsprings (since the child mortality rate was so high, having various kids was ideal) but they also could be used as labor force, for example if they live in a farm.

Sure unlimited potential of human progress, if we see it as an overtime graphic in which we summarize the accomplishments of humanity in general and not as what an individual can accomplish on his lifetime.

An eternity of being fucked silly doesn't sounds that appealing XD.

Nietzlawe uses it constantly in our conversations so i just go there and copy-paste it.
Yeah we should make the best out of whatever we are being handed, even if it is fake, it is real to us.

But we are nothing important, yet fear of admitting this has constantly lead us to invent a bunch of nonsense in order to make us special.

Talking about personality, what if one day you suffer amnesia, and then your personality, tastes and memories suffer a complete change? would you say that "you" died and that body now belongs to someone else? what if then every 3 days the first personality takes hold of the body, would that mean that we have 2 persons sharing a body? but then which one is you? if the answer is both, doesn't this means that you are just a bunch of meat and whatever behavior that body takes will instantly become "you"?

In my first example, yes, it is 2 entities that have 2 brains, and they are separate from each other, they are autonomous, and biologically they are identical, however since they are in 2 separate spatial positions, their brains would slowly began to wire themselves differently, indeed in that spam of 5 years the original body may have experienced a lot of things that the other one doesn't has access to, so at that point all we see is asexual reproduction, you cloned yourself.

So my solution to that would be to link their consciousness, and that is where example 2 enters, in this case the 2 entities would start having their brains wired according to each other and began to share memories, experiences and perspectives, if they are constantly linked they would effectively by at 2 places at the same time, since they are biologically the same, their brains are wired in the same way, and they share the same experiences, memories, etc, what we have is one mind, with 2 brains, meaning just one will, think of it as having an extra arm, but it is a whole body.

Yeah, so like i was saying their consciousness are linked, so the trials and experiences that lead entity #1 to overcome his phobia are instantly transmitted to entity #2, and the things that happen to #2 are also being transmitted to #1, so if #1 manages to overcome his phobia the same would happen to #2, think of it this way, now instead of having 2 eyes that allow you to see left and right, now you have 4, and instead of having 2 hands now you have 4, and you can control each set, you may ask then which brain is sending which orders? it wont really matter because they have one mind, in the case of the twins they have shown to have 2 minds meaning that they don't share the part of the brain that makes decisions, however they share the part of the brain that perceives, i guess that's how they know which thoughts is of their sister and which one is their own. If the link that these 2 bodies share is broken, they wont die, but they would become independent from each other, now disconnected they are 2 different entities, meaning that the first one died (the being who had 2 bodies but one mind), and now it has 2 sons (who share memories past experiences and taste), think of it like cutting a planar worm in half, it wont die, and each half would regenerate the missing parts effectively becoming 2 entities, that were just one once upon a time, the 2 worms share memories, and are the same age, they are the same genetically, but they are different from each other and independent from each other.

Yeah, i personally don't believe in a soul, precisely because to this day we haven't find any mean to answer those questions, if it exist, but the spiritual people that talked on that interview are comparing it to software... anyway the soul is more of a cultural invention, for some only humans have soul, for others all living things, etc. But unless we get to know what is the soul, if it even exists at all it is best to not mention it.

That's fear talking, the same fear that leads to geocentrism, the same fear that leads to racism, the same fear that leads to the denial of evolution and our status as animals that share the same struggle to keep living as the rest of inhabitants in the planet, it may be a longing to be special, an strategy to justify why we deserve things more than others, and then take those things for ourselves, and as long as we don't admit that it is just an excuse it works just fine.

Doomroar 2015-01-31 10:00:08

Seeking a purpose is another excuse to make ourselves special and differentiate us from others, in the end there is no inherent purpose to life, let alone humans, things just exist.

Talking with Dr S3C about the definition of life (discussion that was left unfinished because apparently he fell off from the face of the earth and is currently orbiting the planet...) what constitutes life is not really all that special, it is just protein that just happens to organize itself in organelles and then self-replicate, so i was arguing that viruses should be considered alive, because they too can replicate by invading other organism, but S3C told me that it wont happen unless they could be autonomous, so the definition of life doesn't even lies with how complex an organism is, Viruses are just mere protein that sometimes is coated inside a protective membrane (and actually the membrane that protects fetuses as they develop in the womb is actually thanks to virus DNA that stuck with the rest of our DNA, indeed a big part of our DNA is just virus DNA that has integrated with ourselves, so we are chimeras made out of other organism), so in the end my conclusion is that life is overrated, seeing that a thing can escape the definition just because it lacks a couple of functions, i was not able to tell him that, i was about to send the conversation towards AI, mechanical life, and other beings that are not carbon based, but then he had to become an astronaut...

Doomroar 2015-01-31 17:10:17

Forgot to address the topic of revenge, yeah, at one point the cycle of revenge ends either because everyone involved in the chain dies, or because someone down the chain recognizes that the initial person (who they are supposed to avenge) or some involved in the chain messed up.

Doomroar 2015-05-21 19:03:02

I could go on a wall of text explaining why your diet, and your muscle memory (which i do think is not what you think it is, but whatever) are not what define your personality, and from there your ego, also known as self, but meh, is not worth it man, you already interiorised that stuff.

About the mysterious 21 grams that are said to be lost at death, since the research was plagued by bogus data and overall malpractice it is not considered good evidence for the existence of a soul http://www.snopes.com/religion/soulweight.asp , the researcher himself admitted that more research was needed, and hypothetically speaking, just for the sake of talking, even if 21 grams could be evidenced as something that is consistently lost at death i can see various religious doctrines not attributing that number to the soul, by principle a metaphysical thing having "weight" doesn't makes sense anyway.

Fear as a defense mechanism, being on denial of how unimportant and not especial we are in the face of the universe.

Nah i think a year passed already, that conversation is as good as dead.

Move on, would be the closer, but is more of a thing of recognizing that is not really your right to claim revenge since your associate was in the wrong from the beginning, oriental societies would call it faulty vengeance, since the honor that is supposed to be avenged never existed from the start, thus you can't reclaim or save something that you never had anyway.

Doomroar 2015-05-22 07:54:11

Yes they would be able to performs each other task with ease if they have each other bodies, however that's about it, no personality definition whatsoever it is attributed to how accustomed are your muscles to a certain pattern of movement.

The problem with the soul, and its biggest characteristic, which is also what allows it to survive as a concept even to our days, is that it is above our physical world, and thus saying that now has weight incurs in a contradiction, but sure you can keep looking for it, you will have to find something better than how heavy it is tho.

RIP in pepperonis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTavdHfEvDc&feature=youtu.be&t=19s

Doomroar 2015-05-22 21:01:17

Not everyone gets enough endorphin from working out that they will feel it rewarding, which is a pity because the world would have way less obesity on it, anyway back to the thing, if they both experience the same thing it doesn't matters if one is lying on a bed hooked to a machine and the other is actually working out at a gym, as far as mental stimuli goes, however the body of the one at the gym will be having the added benefit of being exercised but that'r really besides the point, you can make them both feel sore and tired, similarly you can take a guy in a dessert and make it feel like it is going to die from cold, if the person really goes and takes measures against it, it will in turn kill itself by dehydration and overheat, without even feeling hot.

Well the 21 grams have only been recorded there on that study, by that guy, and he chunked them to the soul, so since no one else has been able to get some results on the theme, their status remains linked to the supposed findings of that guy, so if you talk about those 21 grams you are talking about his research, until someone makes another.

Yep that's life on the red line... i mean on the internet.

Doomroar 2015-05-23 21:25:38

The shock and pain of suffering a heart attack would be experienced by the other guy, his autonomic nervous system will go into action, but since it is actually exercised it will survive the shock, nothing else will happen because the other guy died so it stops sending signals, and the connection ends.
The guy who never exercised, never exercised, so he died.

You normally do that for successful experiments to see if the success was indeed due to good practice and not some errors, this case is not one of those, so you will be spending time, effort and resources on something that is held as a faulty experiment that not even the guy who did it first was able to replicate and carry out with consistency as he was doing the measuring, i. e, you would be making your own experiment not a replication.

Doomroar 2015-05-24 18:24:19

You can do it if you have access to a clinical institute/retirement house, the only problem would be to justify permission to carry out an experiment of weighing out near death patients to see if you can measure their souls as they leave their bodies, not only from the patients but also from the heads of the places, you would also have to explain just why you think that such a thing will work to begin with, and bringing out a failed experiment from years ago is not enough, you have to propose a rational argument to explain why the soul would have a weigh, so in resume, you will have to explain your vitalist views in 2015, even if you get the patients i don't think the head of the place will play along, the proposition "a soul has weigh" will only appeal to a limited kind of people, not even of orthodox religiosity, because for them the soul is a thing that transcends planes, so it should no weigh anything.

Doomroar 2015-05-26 18:40:47

"not only from the patients but also..."
Yeah that would be a good way to scientifically proof the existence of a soul, but before that you have to explain to people, just why is that you think that the soul has weight to begin with.

Doomroar 2015-05-28 01:40:30

The puns.

The implications are these, that mystical thing, has mass (or atleast momentum), and is affected by gravity, despite not being a conventional physical substance.

But before this you have to make it explicit why there should be a link between an "embodiment" of all attained knowledge and life experience and some attribute of mass, that in one hand, in the other is finding people that accept the reduction of the definition of soul to the embodiment of knowledge and life experience, i have only heard that one from the ancient Greeks, that bastard Plato and his crazy world of ideas, but for him the soul was something so pure that it was inconceivable for it to have weight, from that point on we get dualism and some half-assed attempts at explaining behavior trough vitalism, pretty much people chunking things they don't know to the soul.

Doomroar 2015-05-28 04:42:33

But just what in the world is etheral water?

Well if you actually get the volunteers, and good equipment to precisely weigh people i don't see the problem with it, it actually sound like an interesting experiment to do, the foundation behind it sounds crazy as hell, and it all points out toward nothing at all actually happening, but you could justify it with some psychology side research on why people actually allowed you to go with it, but then again that would be from two entirely different fields of research.

I wont recommend Plato for anything, anything, he only has value if you follow the process with the historic development of philosophy from ancient, then to medieval, then modern, them contemporary. People actually say that Aristotle was wrong about most of the things he said, now imagine his master, Plato is even worse than Aristotle.

Doomroar 2015-05-28 06:37:49

Sounds like you are making stuff up, like the soul, or the flying spaghetti monster.

Now convince people of investing on that.

Curiosity is a good thing, in which case you will have to start from his master Socrates, Socrates probably never existed and Plato made him up, so by "reading" Socrates you will be reading Plato, the highlights are in the Apology, the Banquet (Symposium), and Phaedo, all of them quite tedious i really don't like them at all, the most decent on of his is The Republic and that's more politics and ethics, and to understand the context you will need the previous ones, from Plato then it follows Aristotle, which is an improvement.

Doomroar 2015-05-28 16:46:07

You have to read David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature.
What's nothing to eyes is left to the realm of speculation, like gambling.

Highly doubt it, he already has his hands full with the Power Wall, and the plants to make them in a big scale, plus his investments on space development, to now ask funding in a project without any basis other than faith is a waste of money.

Socrates's Apology, written by Plato about how Socrates got himself killed defending his principles, and thus became a martyr, it is highly possible that Socrates never existed and Plato just made him up as a literary device to write his books and develop his philosophy.

Doomroar 2015-05-29 20:47:19

That quote doesn't applies to a lot of things, epistemology included, and while creativity is important it has to be backed on something "visible" for lack of a better word, i guess demonstrable could be used.

Except that he is not basing his entrepreneurship on baseless grounding, which is the main issue here.

Read it up.

Doomroar 2015-05-30 21:13:58

Making a metaphor, imagining that the universe is a planet-like globe floating around in an endless void full of universes, can be visualized (well not really since as humans we can't really visualize the infinite, so imagining the universe as a planetoid is already counterproductive), however you are not backing yourself on anything visible, you are just making wild speculation, the example is unrelated to what i am saying, remember we are not talking here about artistic creativity here, but creativity in order to explain the phenomena of the world, that's the main issue here, remember that this all started because there's not a basis to why the soul should be affected by gravity, this in order to get permission and funding to run an experiment of weighing people as they die in search of evidence of the existence of a soul.

Since color is just a refraction on light wave lengths and we already know the tendencies of each side of the wavelength imagining a new color would only require for us to stretch the wavelength to the desired side, yes i do think that color theory got quite boring after we learn about light mechanics, but that's just how color works.

Doesn't seems to be, there you go now you have a catchy title for a book.

Doomroar 2015-05-31 17:12:24

Exactly, so what i am saying is that before someone makes an experiment trying to find if the souls exist and on top of it has weigh they first have to find a "chair" for their thesis.

So you are saying that there are colors outside light wavelengths? that doesn't makes sense at all... on the other hand you could be talking about the limited range we can see of the quite wide light spectrum, in which case it is not a problem because we already know the light tendencies of the wavelength.

In that case the Wikipedia article already covers that topic.

Doomroar 2015-06-02 01:49:29

That's nice and all, but if you want some one to try and run that experiment, they can't do it in "free fall mode".

Well that's what Lovecraft does all the time, he tries to illustrate things that are impossible to illustrate, so he just says that what his characters are seeing is impossible to describe, and that's pretty much how he rolls.
However that makes no sense when it comes to color or better said chromaticity, because what is known as color is directly limited by photo-receptors and what light can do, as a result he never really tries to define what color the known things on his stories are, not even on his text "The Colour Out of Space" which so just happen to have color as a main plot device.

Sure.