The question is, of sentience. Sometimes it feels like my cat is sentient.I wonder, if perhaps other people are sentient.
sometimes, deep truths can be reached in right brain thinking. feminine thinking can also bring truths, but right brain is not feminine, it is actually less conforming.
It feels to me that sentience comes to those who have the “good life”. If they do not have the good life how could they be sentient? How could a wageslave be sentient at all?
The good life does not refer to money, but quality of character. A man living in the woods may have the good life, bathing and showering is not the good life but an uneeded frill.
It seems to me, that atheists suffer from blind faith in assuming others have consciousness.
Perhaps the more rational approach is to assume that they have a very low level of consciousness, but I suspect some do not have any consciousness at all.
Atheists also suffer from blind faith when they tell you death is the end of consciousness.
It seems to me, that sentience is a property of the brain, independent of intellect, and that retards may hold its property, as it seems to be related to communication of needs and the desire for revenge.
The ol’ problem of other minds. You seem to struggle with this question quite a bit. Most philosophers recognize the problem of other minds as a legitimate philosophical problem, but for you it seems personal. It keeps coming up. You really take the question seriously as a practical one for real life, not just a philosophical one.
Right brain thinking is more creative. It’s thought is more free flowing and guided more by emotion than by logic. I don’t know if that makes it less “feminin”.
Here, I drew a picture once of left brain and right brain–left brain thinking represented by computer circuitry, and right brain thinking represented by biological life–rule based and free flowing–both connected by consciousness:
Truths can be reached by either brain. The difference is just in the path they take to get at that truth.
Huh? I don’t get it. Sentience just means the ability to feel things (usually with the connotation of feeling pain and pleasure). How does being a wageslave remove your sentience?
Do you not shower and bath, Trixie?
I agree that the good life does not equate to money, and that it does equate to quality of character. ← But what does this term mean to you? To me, it means what becomes of a man when his life is enriched with as wide a variety of experiences as possible–good and bad, painful and pleasurable.
So do theists.
Given the problem of other minds, there is no way to prove it one way or another. Yet it does bring up a question, the onus of answering of which falls on your shoulders: what determines who has consciousness and who doesn’t, and to what degree.
What good is philosophy if it is not connected to real life?
Organicity is superior often to circuitry, circuitry uses a crippled approached to things whereas nature automatically rectifies and builds itself extravagantly and superiorly architecturally.
I dont agree that pain is neccessary for good living, and I think entities who have too much pain in their lives arent sentient at all. I think time is actually travelling backwards, and only if we have good destinies do we become sentient to experience our lives forwards.
Good for exercising the intellect? But who said anything about philosophy’s connection to real life?
I agree. Circuitry is a very recent invention in comparison to the eons that nature has had to evolve human intelligence. Computer circuitry is far from mimicking human intelligence. But it nevertheless is a good symbol for logic chopping, the symbolism I tried to get across in my drawing.
I wouldn’t say it’s necessary, it’s just that I’m not a hedonist. I think there are higher things that carry more import than mere pains and pleasures. If you were to ask me what my favorite thing in the world is, I’d say “infinite qualitative diversity” (I might also say “everythingness” but that’s equivalent). In other words, quality is higher than hedonism, and the wider the variety of quality in one’s life experiences, the better. This means one can have a rich and full life going through nothing but pleasurable experiences–so long as they are diverse in their qualities–but even that full life can be made even more rich and full if you add just one single painful experience.
Think of it like a painting. You can make a painting beautiful by adding a whole array of colors–everyone likes colors, right?–now you take that painting and add some shading. Shade requires the addition of a God awful color: black–everyone hates black, right?–but added in good taste and in the right proportions–for example, to add shading to your painting, which enhances it by adding a sense of depth–it becomes even more beautiful overall.
You’ll have to explain to me what you mean by “sentience”–as far I as know, sentience means the ability to feel things–and if a creature undergoes extreme pain, in no other condition would it feel more sentient.
You lost me here… what do good destinies, sentience, and the direction of time have to do with each other?
You did. “You really take the question seriously as a practical one for real life, not just a philosophical one.” - gib
Aesthetics and quality is a form of pleasure.
Further more, PTSD does not enrich the quality of the overall life and memories. You seem to be conflating masculinity for pain itself. Masculinity arises as a result of PTSD. The pain in of itself is not inherently good, only the effect that comes after it, masculine energy, and feminine masculine balance, is good.
So, if a man does not eat shit once or twice then he has not lived a full life?
Sentience, consciousness, a man in the machine kind of deal. You have no evidence that someone born into slavery is a sentient being. Sentient means a man in a machine kind of deal. Think about it, it would mean there is an actual person, a You in there living a shitty life. Do you actually think insects are sentient? The majority of the population, and insects, are probably pzombies.
Because only good creatures with good destinies become sentient, otherwise the timeline would become congested with shitty lives.
I wasn’t trying to say you were wasting your time with philosophy if you’re using it as an approach to some personal angst, I was just noticing that with you the question of other minds keeps coming up and it seems to be prompted by what appears to be a kind of angst over interpersonal connections. I’m saying it isn’t just arm chair philosophy for you. Am I right?
Not only can finding the personal roots of one’s obsession with certain philosophical questions or views be an effective healing process, but it makes for very juicy philosophy indeed. It precedes Freudian psychoanalytics. It goes back to Nietzsche. Have you ever read Nietzsche?
Aesthetics, yes. Quality, no. Pain is a certain quality of experience.
Aesthetics brings pleasure by the apprehension of beauty. But this is only analogous to what I’m saying (in fact, it’s kind of the inspiration for what I’m saying). Value, in this context, is determined by being itself. Existence is good. Nothingness is bad (or you could say neutral). The more things that exist, the better, especially if the variety of things that exist is diverse. Whether this turns out to be beautiful or not is beside the point, but think as far as human nature goes, human beings will see beauty in diversity most of the time.
Not by itself, no. But if it adds to the qualitative diversity of one’s life experiences, then it does.
Think of it this way: you have a story to tell, your life is interesting.
That’s right. Pain is not good. What it contributes to one’s life overall, however, may be good.
I’d say if you had two men, both of which ate cake all their lives, and the second man also ate shit on a couple occasions, then the second man has lived a richer life than the former.
Well, no one has (except maybe for the slave himself). Is this any less true for the master?
I think everything is sentient (depending on whether you think sentience applies only to sensation).
Are you suggesting there is an benevolent overseer guiding who has sentience and who doesn’t? That as an act of mercy, it removes sentience from those who are suffering too much?
Not removes, but simply does not inject sentience into those creatures.
You are the benevolent overseer and you choose what lives to inject Your sentience in, however the game is glitched and broken, things are not as originally intended, so there is some angst and hell involved.
This hell, does not increase quality of life, and if you measure quality of life by “how interesting stories we can tell to our kids” youre a feminine pain-worshipping idiot indeed. I bet you’d get ran over by a train to feel validated in some way.
This makes sense according to your post in the other thread. I didn’t know about the glitch, however. That might answer another one of my questions I asked in the other thread: is your life worth living? If the game is glitched, then maybe it isn’t but this was unexpected when you chose to live this life. Is that the way you see it?
Well… er, no, that would defeat the purpose. I don’t think one wants to throw one’s life away just to have intense experiences (even if painful ones).
And I ain’t no pain-worshipper… I’m a pain-appreciator (BIG difference! )
And I would think enduring excruciating amounts of pain would typically be seen as “masculine”.
Just to be clear about my take on all this, I am not preaching my own morality here. I’m predicting the morality of the gods. The gods would be beyond hedonism. Hedonism is for animals. For the gods, being is the highest good–including the being of pleasurable or painful experiences, and the more intense and the wider variety, the better. Nothingness is the only evil (and in fact, it isn’t really “evil” in the fully fledged “negative” sense to the gods; it’s more neutral, but it is the worst conceivable state of affairs).
As a human being, I know that I can’t aspire to live by this morality, not wholeheartedly. As a human being, I must embrace my own hedonistic nature and respect that of others. But this concept of the good in qualitative diversity is inspiring, and it can help with overcoming adversity, and it stretches me to try to live by it to a limited extent.
But let me ask you: you seem to believe that your consciousness can attain a god-like state (in the afterlife?) where it gets to choose an “avatar”, some life to experience living. What do you think you, in this god-like state of consciousness, would choose? Do you really think it would only seek out those lives that are maximally pleasurable? Maybe right now you can’t see why not–given that you are just an animal at the moment, addicted to hedonistic experiences–but as a god, freed of your animal nature, do you not think you might consider that it might be worth experiencing some degree of hardship in order to tell an amazing story? To the gods, living this life is like writing a story, or filling the roll of a character in some Shakespearean tragedy. To authors, actors, and play writes, just for the stories that move and inspire us to be told, it’s worth jumping into the roll and making it into as close a reality as we can. We all know it’s not forever, and at the end, we’ll come out of it and be able to appreciate the story we have written. The character himself who is in the thick of it won’t appreciate his own suffering and torment. In fact, he necessarily can’t. Can you imagine if Hamlet just breezed through all his angst and tormet thinking “meh–this is just a play; I’m just gonna chillax”? It would ruin the entire performance! But Hamlet is in angst, he does suffer torment, and the actor who plays him puts the character through this torment on purpose (so that there is a play). Are you absolutely sure that you, when you become the god-like consciousness that you predict in the afterlife, won’t think the same way to a certain degree?
YOu missed the point of the metaphor. Getting ran over by a train doesn’t equal death anyway.
Only in tribal communities, full of feminine males due to tribal gender homogeny. Typically these types of communities have religious, delusional minds.
That is a delusional sounding statement for several reasons. First of all, it sounds incredibly religious, second of all, its just nonsensical. How is nothingness evil? It doesn’t exist, and can’t be experienced. How can something that cannot be experienced be measured in terms of a evil or good value. It is the absence of a evil and good value, and therefore, is inherently unable to be evil.
The rest of it sounds like religious fanaticism, and how could I even begin to argue with something so deeply entrenched in your psyche?
As religous sounding as my views are, they are fairly reasonable. They serve a different function than your religious sounding hubris, they don’t tell people what is right and how to live their lives. YOu sound like someone who’s gone quite mad, and too mad to realise it.
In my model, the models are glitchy, and there is an “alert message” saying their is a bug in the system, but it cannot pinpoint the butterfly effect causal accuracy. The genius is all knowing, but not omnipotent, and cannot predict butterfly effect causal chains with 100 percent accuracy. So it is more or less a gamble, in my model. In my model, it is not possible to turn off consciousness, even though we would like to, and the reason Earth is selected is because it is a creative environment, with, as you said, a bit of challenge. However, a game becomes bad, if the challenges are too unforgiving, the cliffs are too narrow, and the AI is not condusive to enjoyment of the game. Thus, Earth realms are far from the ideal, hell, even Buddha knew this. You seem to come of as Caeser, who thinks he is a god because he drank too much lead. Your mentions about hedonism is a bit Magnus-sounding, but without the semblance of sanity Magnus provides along with it.
So yes, there is a certain merit to playing in the DOOM realms, which has a bit of strife and challenge, but not if the game is bugged, not if the game punishes you endlessly, not if theres not many game options or modes, not if theres bad aesthetics throughout the whole game. Noone would willingly want to be stuck in Call of Duty land. You make the comparison of Hamlet, well I think a more accurate comparison would be to Call of Duty or Big Rigs Over the Road, or ET.
You mean get run over by a train and survival? eeeuuugghhh
Really? You don’t think “toughing it out” sounds masculine?
This is why I said nothingness was more “neutral” than “evil”–but in this light, it does stand as the opposite of the good.
Yes, one could get very fanatical if one took this idea too seriously.
Somehow, I feel like taking this as a compliment.
I wasn’t trying to tell you how to live your life, I was trying to suggest what life you will choose to live once you become this god-like consciousness in the afterlife (or during this life?) You seem to be going on the assumption that just because you, as the human being you are now, would never choose a life of pain and suffering, you as the god-like consciousness you will become will also never choose a life of pain and suffering. The way you describe this state sounds like you’re open to the idea that you will reclaim certain memories once you become this god-like consciousness–for example: it was always you–and what I’m suggesting is that maybe one of these memories is an understanding of why its OK to temporarily experience a life of pain and suffering.
Ah, got it!
You mean our good friend Magnus Anderson?
Yeah, the video game theme. Got that about you.
Ok, so the game is glitched, there’s a bug in the system, and you feel like you’re stuck in DOOM (or is it not that severe?). I’m sorry this had to happen to you. It won’t last forever though, and you can always use ILP to vent.
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