[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nXJe9i70DE[/youtube]
I think you need to focus more on morals, values and politics and less on metaphysics. I think you need to express your dark serious sides.
I didn’t find the motivation to write a complete analysis of you after all, and it’s been several months since I’ve read a signifcant amount of your posts, so some of my observations about you may have been distorted over time. Perhaps it will come out through conversation, if one gets going.
I agree that you shouldn’t hold back your dark side. I suggest doing what Antithesis already did twice and make an alternative account. You don’t need to hide your new account’s identity, basically announce it in several posts or even your signature or title. It would still create a distance from your present account, where you basically reveal much about yourself that is far from dark.
If it’s in you, try taking Antithesis’ more ambiguous approach, where the reader might assume your somewhat isolated and antisocial offline.
I do focus on morality… a lot. Maybe it hasn’t come out more in my writing, but I do. Metaphysics is just my hobby.
Dammit, Stuart! 
I suppose, but my main problem with expressing my more sinister thoughts and views is that I don’t think of ideas as harmless powerless play things. Ideas affect people, they affect their mental health and what they do. To a certain degree, I take on the burden of responsibility of playing it cautious when I spout out thoughts and ideas.
Yes, from what your words tell me about you, I like you.
But then again, I realize there may be another side to you that I wouldn’t like. lol
Would that be possible, gib? I mean, do we see an entire picture of each other? Hell, we don’t even see an entire picture of ourselves.
Why? Anyway, don’t take that burden with me, you can always PM me.
But then, is that really helping him to grow, to spread his wings and fly? Hmmm? 
I’m only kidding. I get how you’re trying to help him.
Absolutely not. I’ve got no dirt on me. (kidding 
)
Wise words indeed.
Imagine I was in a conversation with someone who was mentally unstable, someone on the verge of suicide let’s say. Suppose we were arguing over the inherent value of human life. I say to him “There is no inherent value. All value is imposed from the outside and is therefore always relative. You could take your own life, and in the grand scheme of things, it wouldn’t matter at all.” Do you suppose it would be wise to say this to him while in his current mental state?
You seem like the responsible type, Stuart, so I wouldn’t worry too much with you.
Do I need help?
That’s almost funny. Do you think you would say that to someone if you didn’t at least partially believe it. And if you at least partially believed it then why not say it to him?
When speaking to one’s whose suicidal theirs always the chance that whatever word you may say will be what ‘does it’, but you’d be more likely to mention elephants and send him falling into a deep melancholy about good or bad times at the zoo, than you would be to send him downwards by telling him the world is without meaning. He already believes he’s without meaning, and misery likes company. So telling him the world lacks meaning has the effect of leveling him with a world he assumed was better than him.
Tell him the world does have meaning, even tell him he does, but without specifics - as if you say that to every depressed person you meet - and certainly you won’t be helping. But, it’s not that he wouldn’t have already heard that many times. Then while he would take such statements to mean everyone but him has meaning, it’s not like he wouldn’t have already believed that anyway.
You do suicidal people far more damage, on average, by ignoring them or the subjects of most interest to them; often the dark subjects, than you do by being careful.
But, I get the impression your more worried about legal liability than anything, in which case doubtlessly you are correct in being careful, especially since you go through little effort to hide you identity. Perhaps in an other forum, you should be as anonymous as possible, then you might feel better about jumping into the mix. But, that’s assuming you really want to. My goal in writing this is basically just t ask you to admit it’s about the legal liability and nothing more.
Because I’d want to be damn sure I know it’s true if it means he could end up taking his life. Compare this to the same scenario except with you in the suicidal guy’s place. Going on the assumption you’re no suicidal, I’d have no qualms about saying this to you–even if I only half believed it.
But this kind of misses the point; all I was trying to get across with that example was how expressing ideas can have affects on people.
Anything can happen, Stuart. When we’re dealing with mentally unstable people, the way they react to what you say to them can be unpredictable–this is true–but all I’m saying is that I tend to be more conscious than others (it seems) that my words will have affects on others, and this plays into the equation in my mind of whether or not I should just blurt out what I want to say, or perhaps how I should say it.
So you’re saying I should be careful rather than shut up. Well, certainly. That’s what I’m saying. If you take that quote of mine I gave in my hypothetical example, I don’t think I’d ever say that to someone I knew was suicidal, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t say anything at all. It’s the nature of the ideas I’m implanting in their heads that I’m cautious about. I’d like to think I can do my best to implant helpful ideas.
No can do, Stuart, because it’s not about liability. I hadn’t even thought of that. This really is just a part of my basic philosophy and outlook on life. I see ideas more as tools and as things that have affects–like any other real thing in the world–I see us as like computers plugged into a vast network, and the ideas we pass around (memes I guess you’d call them) are like data, most of which function like programs that we download onto each others’ brains. Better to spread properly functioning programs than viruses.
I think as philosophers, that is our highest responsibility.
On average it’s better for the suicidal person that you be careful rather than shut up, on average it’s even better that you don’t be careful and tell him exactly what you think.
Yes, now we’re getting somewhere. The idea that value is relative is not so much untrue as it is a irrelevant truism. We choose value and we are higher quality people if we can and do insist upon the value we choose rather than admit it’s relative. If we see someone of low value and tell them that everyone is of low value - which basically would be what you’re implying when you say value is relative - then we are helping them to live another day; at the expense of others, possibly even yourself. So I agree with you that I’d think twice before telling a suicidal person that, if I though they were of low value. Which is why I only speak to suicidal people who I assume have high value or at least the potential for it. But, to those high quality people I speak to, I don’t try to bring everyone down, dishonestly, to make them feel better, I tell the truth, which is that they are better that most. I don’t hide the self-interest there, it’s obvious that I wish to invest in people with low stock, if I foresee that it may go up, and its obvious that I enjoy telling sick people the truth.
I think it depends on the situation and the billions of variables involved.
What kind of truth do you tell sick people?
I will have to second that.
Due to popular demand, I refer you to my art: surrealsource.com.
As far as posting to ILP goes, I save that for the intellectual side of me.
Very Good.
What if someone were to philosophize like you draw and paint?
Conversely, what if someone were to draw and paint like you philosophize?
I think that’d be a worthwhile experiment.
I’ll give you that one.
Just what I said, if they’re of high quality, then I tell them they are so. If they’re of low quality and admittedly or obviously suicidal I ignore them, unless of course no one else comes forward, in which case I’ll take some initiative to help, for no other reason than to avoid, blame especially legal liability. But, then I don’t go to common forums so I don’t run into many low quality suicidal people. As for low quality people in general, I’ll tell them as much if it’s relevant within a conversation.
You may wonder what I think of your quality. Certainly you’re in the top 2%. You have more potential than anything, but I’m honestly hesitant to think you’ll fulfill most of it. Not to say you should think of that as a bad thing. I’m certain that you can obtain great monetary success if you focus on doing so and actually find such things important.
Yes, you’re right, that is what I implied. But this kind of seems like a tangent. I just brought up that scenario as a hypothetical example of how ideas can affect people. I don’t know if I’d actually argue that. And I don’t know if the hypothetical suicidal person would think like that–decypherings the volumes that my silence speaks; I think it’s more like what you agreed to above: that it depends on the situation and the billions of variables involved.
So I take it you would like to affect people in a positive way, just like I would, but you’re unwilling to lie to them, or at least hesitant.
Yeay! 
That’s true of most people, don’t you think?
What do You think of You? Or did you answer that already? 
Me?
My self-esteem is all over the map. Some days I’m up, other days I’m down. These days I’ve been down (but I’m on the upswing) (But that wasn’t the point of this thread).
I hate it when people ask me about my self-esteem; I never know how to answer it. It depends on my mood, on what’s going on in my life at the time, the context, and so many other things. I like to say: vulnerable. My self-esteem is vulnerable. It can be high, but I usually have to work at keeping it up there (unlike some people who seem to be able to keep their self-esteem on autopilot no matter what they encounter in life), but when the world and people around me weigh in on my self-esteem, it can easily come crashing down.
I’ve just been through a series of tough episodes but I’m coming out of it now.
← You see that guy in my avatar? I was inspired to use that as my avatar after watching Oz: The Great and Powerful with my daughter. I was watching that scene in which they’re traveling in bubbles towards some bubble city, and Oz points out that they’re going to crash into that big dome, and Glenda says not to worry, the good in heart will make it through, to which Oz yells “I’m gonna die!”… but of course, he makes it through, just barely.
I thought to myself, that’s me. The whole character is me. Questionable ethics, mediocre empathy for others, only so-so in the department of likability, but in the end, he makes the grade. He’s just good enough.
Yes, your right, that was an obvious truism. - I wasn’t clear.
Your question got me thinking about aspects of the concept of potential that I had taken for granted. I’ll try to clarify what I meant about your potential, but keep in mind that this is new philosophical territory for me.
Firstly, by potential I don’t mean the subjective expectations of others, but the objective ceiling on the limits of quality that one can obtain. For any given state that a person happens to be in; we could conceivably use difficult to obtain objective criteria to find what his potential is; that state would include their physiology, and mentality. So of course potentials change as a person changes, though we can always harken back to any given time from birth onwards when we wish to consider a person as having been first potentiated.
For one to reach their highest state of quality would take an environment which was both sufficiently challenging, but not to prohibiting either. This virtually never happens or rarely even comes close. In modern society which still contains a large percentage of people who would fit in well enough in past times that were more accommodating to potential, those with the lowest potential by far come closer to fulfilling it that those with higher potential - though of course this is always the rule when comparing those with high and low potential to at least some extent.
So basically all you need to take from this is the fact that nearly all those in modern days with high potential have an extremely small chance of fulfilling most of it. I find, from the small pieces of knowledge I have of you, that the environment you’re in is especially prohibited to you fulfilling your potential.
Something else to keep in mind is that while it seems you would approach a below average stance of one with your level of potential, it’s not likely you will fail to obtain virtually any of your potential. – It takes risk to gain, and those with high potential who want a chance at fulfilling most of it must take the risk of losing it all through an early death or its equivalent. I don’t see you doing that.