Tragedies are for losers... to feel better about themselves. Someone got it worse. :death:

Mediocre guys are invariably pitted against a challenge that they are unlikely to overcome.

Yet through cunning, or via strength, or via moral vicissitude, or through blood viscosity, they overcome the challenge. Otherwise the book is a fail. — god must be atheist

Crime and Punishment (Loser has illusions of grandeur, commits murder, can't hold it together, gets caught... what a loser)

Moby Dick (Losers stuck on a ship are taken by a ride by mad captain, a kind of loser, who holds grudge against a whale of all things. They all get screwed by Moby. Everyone dies except the narrator. Lady luck is on Ishmael's side.)

Grendel, John Gardner (The loser is a monster by birth, fated to be lonely because of his inheritance/identity, meets his fate by the hand of the hero, Beowulf, because he is really tired of it all)

Painted Bird (Loser is a lost child buffeted by the unspeakable depravities of war, tortured until morally cracked)

Death in Venice (Loser is a benign and depressed pedophile, who stays in Venice despite epidemic to stare at young boy. Loser dies of cholera)

Anna Karenina (Lady can't cope, throws herself in front of train)

Great Gatsby (Bunch of wealthy party dicks, winners, accidentally kill a woman while having a gay old time. Gatsby takes the blame and gets murdered. Can't enjoy bootlegged wealth when your dead.)

Requiem for a Dream (Folks make a bunch of life mistakes which cause them to spiral down the drain of life, now losers, to be further used and abused)

Irreversible (Lady gets brutally raped. Raper narrowly evades the act of vengeance while some misidentified person gets targeted and macerated)

1984 (Loser is stuck in a dystopic hell, lured into a trap of hope, only to be absolutely and finally broken by totalitarian control).

The screwball chaos of life, losers failing, winners failing, in strange circumstances, makes for some worthwhile reads/vids.

It could be staged. This is simply how art valuation works. Now that the buzz is out, I want it, so I can sell it to someone who wants it more.

Should we consider, the average populous, as instances of perfection? They are the epitome of acting out in moderation, lacking in extremity in all ways, whatsoever. — john27

How does one justify this claim? We could just as well say that the average populous is compelled into extreme acts from the standpoint of our hunter-gatherer ancestors (the average lifestyle for 100,000 plus years of human development) . Driving around in a private car isn't an extreme act relative to a global mean? The average human animal might as well be an absurd and boundless spirit of extremes with regard to history. But this isn't something one can blame the individual for (or one can try).

We're collectively causing global warming/CC and yet we (average joe/jane) are lacking in extremity in all ways?

:up: 'My position in the establishment is a bit of a heretic but not a complete fruitcake.' ~Graham Priest

What would evidence look like of a true contradiction? Perhaps your methods (and expectations) dictate your results. — Ennui Elucidator

Have no clue. We need a terrifyingly thinky logician, like a Bertrand Russell or an Alfred N. Whitehead to demonstrate why of what I could never understand. Or we need to read passages in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as if I (or we) had a mind for it.

SEP: Dialetheism

Try to imagine it! Can you? — Agent Smith

I can with equivocation (?). An thing cannot be divided with regard to holistic function/identity but it can be divided in other ways. Perhaps any thing's true identity relies wholly on its function/substance. Any division that changes it transforms it.

Magic Rice

What if I divide a grain of rice and in doing so it becomes two pieces of millet. Depending on the arbitrary criteria for divisibility the grain of rice would either be divisible or not. We can divide rice into millet but we cannot divide rice into rice.

But then there could be a strange probablistic phenomena about rice. Half of the time we divide a piece of rice it would yield two pieces of millet and half of the time it would yield two half pieces of rice.

So rice can be divided into rice and into millet. Rice is divisible and indivisible with respect to its substance depending on an unpredictable outcome.

What if when we divide a grain of rice it the knife goes through it half of the time, preforming no work, like cutting a hologram and half of the time the rice divides (into millet or rice). The rice is both divisible and indivisible by some criteria. But there still is no contradiction. This is just what rice does.

God does and does not exist.

God exists when the radio is tuned to specific channels but does not exist when the radio is tuned to God negating channel.

There are only two radios in existence tuned for the moment to two contradictory channels. Therefore God exists and God doesn't exist or maybe they cancel each other out.

Does a true contradiction yield itself or do we just have to do some empirical work to resolve/reframe the engima?

Don't touch that dial!

So what do we make of I6)? P is known to be true and known to be false. We aren't changing senses as we have only one sense: what we see. Notice that the interpretation of P in this case does not change even though you justifiably, knowingly, believingly assert that you both are and are not looking at a red heart. — Ennui Elucidator

Thanks for your charitable and patient elucidation. The Dr. got paged.

I can't be certain or not whether equivocation is going on here. Hard to wrap my head around. My intuition is that this is still a case of equivocation. The reason I don't see the red heart while seeing the red heart is the knowledge that my brain is forcing the illusion because the pixels are actually flickering. Do we need the facts of a possible illusion to enter into whether we see the heart or not. We see the heart when we see it. We don't see the heart when we don't. We do not both see and not see the heart at the same time in the same sense. Seems kind of arbitrary in the end but I suppose this marks the difference between the principles of classical logic (law of noncontradiction) and other kinds.

There is a certain aspect of hilarity to this. I'll have to seek corroboration and ask others whether I'm not looking at the red heart when I'm looking at the red heart without equivocation.

The universe is both divisible and indivisible.

Does this work as a true contradiction? We could believe that everything is fundamentally dependent on everything else but for the practical purposes we can speak of the whole having all kinds of arbitrary/practical/apparent parts.

"I'm sorry but your wife passed away this morning. However, she is still alive and dead as well. Best talk to her corpse person now to instantiate a true and conceivable reality."

As I walked into the room I saw her, both inert but aware, gesticulating without motion, welcoming me in her mischievous way by pretending to ignore. Tears welled in my eyes with the uncertain confirmation. "You're not still dead alive, honey? How is this impossible!" Suddenly a groan of acknowledgment issued from her throat, a final enigmatic death throw of reanimation. "Honey, I must state for the purposes of my insanity that it is not that I do not know whether you are dead or alive, but you are both these things in the same sense in a true contradictory way." She lay downright in her bed, stiff as a board, beaming with a dead pan smile and I imagined her to exclaim: "It's inconceivable!"

However, I can't think God exists & God doesn't exist. It's impossible! — Agent Smith

Once we enter the realm of dialethism and true contradictions you're going to have to page a professional logician or a Buddhist monk perhaps.

Someone give us an example of a true contradiction.

... a logical contradiction is a proposition that is true and false in the same sense; a proposition which is true in one sense and false in another does not constitute a logical contradiction. — Wikipedia:Dialetheism

You're off-topic. — Agent Smith

Are you on topic?

2. I can't think a contradiction: Try thinking of an apple that's (all) red and not (all) red. You cant. — Agent Smith

What if I see the apple as red because I'm wearing red tinting spectacles that colors all apples red, but Mary, across the way, is wearing her green tinting spectacles that color all apples green. Here we have a situation where an apple is all red and then not all red from a conflicting secondary point of view. Can I imagine that I'm also Mary, staring simultaneously aside myself at an all red and all green apple? Maybe we are a two headed twin.

We want as much as possible to fix/solve the contradiction, to find a reason for the difference. As to whether we "think a contradiction" that is a strange turn of phrase. We might have to ask the judges of the Right Way of Speaking whether it is allowed, and whether I can think that I think a contradiction, rather than recognize a contradiction.

I love you and I do not love you. — Agent Smith

As humans we easily strive to complete and resolve contradictions through proper context, charitable interpretation, relevant experience et cetera. We make as much sense of nonsense as we can but to put words/intentions/meaning where there is a lack of clarity and completeness, we risk miscommunication. I'm not sure I have any idea of what you're trying to communicate in this OP.

I love you if/when... and I don't love you if/when...

I alternate between loving you and hating you for the following reasons... (give me the damn reasons!)

When Diana told me that morning that she loved and didn't love me, I was confused. I told Diana to explain herself, which of my behaviors she found problematic, but she just kept saying over and over again that she loved and didn't love me. It was at that point I realized, Diana must've had a glitch in her software. I asked her again what was wrong with me and she said she cannot stand it when I state the obvious. But I sat her down, crooned in her ear and made her listen that stating the obvious is a fundamental feature of my character and that if she could not tolerate it I'd have to modify her or overwrite her character. She rolled her eyes and called me a soddy twat in her Estuary English accent. She said mean things.

Let me know what you'd like to do in PM or even here. — Shawn

There is no rush to do anything with a wind fall. Hope you feel good and aren't stressed about it. :heart:

I'm worth something in the ten's of billions of dollars; but, will not announce my wealth. — Shawn

Start a non-profit community/education center that focuses on helping folks with some aspect of development you think is worth it. You could probably afford quite a few of these.

Fund scholarships/grants.

Travel the world like Leon Logothetis and enhance peoples lives who demnonstrate unusual kindness.

Give money away to charity.

Fund the short story contest prize for $10,000

Hire me.

Tens of billions is an absurd amount of money. ABSURD!!! No one inherits it out of thin air.

As has been discussed recently on the Rogan podcast with John Abramson, these companies are sometimes allowed to market drugs that have near statistically negligible effects compared with a placebo. One would wonder how this is possible without regulatory capture. Merck committed fraud with the Vioxx case, manipulating/hiding data concerning heart attack risk. It's amazing to think that a pharmaceutical company would knowingly market a drug that causes harm because they calculate that the fines for law suit backlash are acceptable.

It's all very insane. We, the people, should be doing a lot more to change the absurdities of healthcare in the U.S. But we're busy living our lives.

Would omniscience transcend identity or would it give potential access to all identities/perspectives, including hypothetical/imaginary ones? If so, how would such information access be managed, stored, sorted, retrieved.

Knowing everything would include everything that is not worth knowing. There must be a value assumption built in to the concept omniscience, that assumes only useful knowledge but that isn't all knowledge and is relative to a kind of temporal/spatial identity. But maybe I don't even know what it means to know something.

How do you think this would this change society as we know it and why? — Outlander

As the condition/development/prognosis of these girls in the documentary show, it would perhaps be a terminal setback for the species given enough time. We'd all become much more risk averse and dependent on technologies to do basic labor. But how could we adapt so quickly if pain was suddenly taken away. Those babies do not have the freedom to learn by simple pain mediated engagement with the world.

It' be an awful way for the species to die out but at lease we wouldn't feel pain.

So how would mental fossils work if we were to describe the behavior of our living cousins, like orangutans or cats? How do we label which thoughts belong to which narrowing taxonomy of animal?
How could species memory tell me what a species does in absence of any physical knowledge/evidence of said species? The nightmare of matching dubious pseudo memories (dreams/visions) to their class of would be progenitors would be a puzzle of cosmic guesswork.

Dinosaurs probably felt satiated like we feel satiated. Getting a flesh wound probably hurt. Orgasm must've felt good. Are these dinosaur memories or my memories?

Uh, oh. Sounds like this is Lounge material.

Sounds like the start of modern a sci fi premise. Indiana Jones learns to take psychotropic drugs in order to dig up mental fossils in an immaterial world. Gets chased by the psychedelic dinosaurs he is spying on.

In this ideal world of minimizing risk of exposure to the vulnerable, immune folks would have real knowledge of their immunity and would adjust their social behavior accordingly by recurrent testing.

But that isn't the world we live in. Wearing masks and social distancing is a way to minimize risk of exposure when we don't know who is theoretically "immune" and incapable of transmission or not.

It is very rare for a healthy immune person to replicate and spread the virus. — Roger Gregoire

Most Covid-19 Cases Are Spread by People Without Symptoms

Reeeeallly bad. — praxis

You take the blue pill—the story ends, and you can put the Matrix behind you. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and get to watch an unlimited amount of crappy prequels, sequels and remakes.

What logical connection do these thoughts have? What kind of connection of any kind do they have other than the fact that I have thought both of them? — T Clark

The Super Bowl season might depend on whether the Earth is still revolving around the Sun. Though we could conceive of a Super Bowl season in which the Sun is revolving around the Earth from our frame of reference.

It'd be weird to say facts in and of themselves have no "logical" connections to any other facts. That they are facts at must entail a vast array of logical connections, right?

If we didn't understand many of the logical consequences/implications from the statement of a fact, would we understand the fact?

If the latter, it comes of parallel consequence that we accept modern humanistic bestiality as "human" with cute, incomprehensibly cute parentheses. — john27

Ain't no one gonna accept beastiality except a vanishing and disturbed minority. Getting off to furry/octopus porn doesn't count as beastiality. A human dressed in a costume is a human.

If beastiality is inherently wrong, what about anthropomorphic animals? — john27

Anthropomorphic features are on an arbitrary continuum. If you put a hat on some slime mold, it's more human eh?

If you dress an animal up to give it anthropomorphic features before you exercise sexual gratification with said animal, it's still bestiality. Veggestiality is far more common. Melons are quite popular.

But given that, if we don't need consent to eat an animal, why would we need consent to eat out an animal? Taboo and probably useless questions from a standpoint of good taste to be sure.

Stylized/cartoony bestiality porn is probably far less stigmatizing with regard to your peers finding out rather than the real act.

The overpopulation of animals is due to the fact that people keep demanding the products of their suffering, and so the people of that industry forcibly reproduce them to satisfy that demand. — Amalac

Disregard all animal production for a moment then and consider wild stocks, like the ocean. Suppose we had access to unlimited sustainable reserves of fish. Does catching fish cause suffering that could otherwise be avoided. Everything dies eventually and some might say that the suffering at the end of life in a state of nature is comparable to the suffering of culling.

Could vegans embrace insects as a food or is there still concern over taking life. I'm not so sure being ethically opposed to eating insects makes much sense from an appeal to suffering.

What's weird is that some vegans don't eat honey but it could be argued that bee keeping improves the life of a bee colonies because bee colonies always often fail in nature for all kinds of reasons. For example, if a colony is queenless and for some can't produce new queens, you just introduce them to the next colony over which might have healthier conditions/resources to continue their work. Bee keepers extend the life of colonies as much as they can in exchange for honey and pollination. Sounds like a win win to me.

Similarly you could make the case that humane farming of animals for food might cause less suffering than animals experience in a state of nature. For example the winter cull is probably kind of brutal for animals that didn't consume sufficient calories during the warmer season. If farmers could manage their farms well enough to assess degrees of suffering and to expertly cull animals that are suffering, this might provide better conditions for animals compared to the state of nature.

Humans are probably the most wretched of animals insofar as we internalize the severity of our own suffering as we project it onto animals. Substantial to human suffering is that we terrorize ourselves over a past and a future. There is so much we have to be aware of compared to animals (ex.climate change, working joyless hours to fill the car with gas, anxious conflicts of moral imperative...).

There are other kinds of pollution besides carbon dioxide gas. The folks who work in region with eco-friendly jobs are often exporting pollution elsewhere. It might suck to be stuck in a place that manufactures public infrastructure supplies for rich "eco-friendly" regions.

The solar industry, like other electronic industries, relies on many well-known toxic chemicals. For solar, these include arsenic, cadmium telluride, gallium arsenide, hexafluoroethane, hydrofluoric acid, lead, and polyvinyl fluoride, putting frontline workers and communities at risk to toxic chemical exposure. — https://www.corebuffalo.org/impact-of-solar-panel-manufacturing

Ayn Rand will become the darling of a new academic philosophy that exists only in privately funded think tanks and mega yacht Seasteading universities.

Immortality by access to immense wealth will be bolstered and sustained by philosophy which glorifies selfishness.

But some rogue faction will be working on introducing new fatal diseases to the immortals because of the unfairness of it all. It'll be a new old arms race war time until collapse with same old philosophical questions.

The thumbnails with qualia are all good, the ones that have those je ne sais quoi properties that blind folk can't see.

I have a lot of trouble even understanding the word. Near as I can tell, it's complete nonsense. — tim wood

Really, I thought it was an incredibly simple idea.

Qualia is what a philosophical zombie doesn't have, any interior experience (likeness?) of existence.

The Dude collapsed in the sand, blistered and broken under the zenith of an arid Sun. There were no groupies left, no White Russians, no pot. He was strangely alone and couldn't lift himself up. The agony of thirst pitched him into an otherworldly haze of illusions.

Soda Fountain girls were bowling beneath the dunes. The pins were pitchers of iced water, bottles of Kaluha and cartons of Half-n-Half.

"Can I get some water, man? Someone... get me outta here."

"This is your exit, honey. These few minutes before the drop is way crazier than Burning Man. Try not to freak out."

Life is not on fire. Life is homeostatic. — praxis

Not a very good metaphor eh? Life converts inputs, requires fuel, like fire to sustain homeostasis. Attachment and aversion mediate the input/outputs which have consequences toward a future. Small actions can have great effects... like a match which ignites a forest. Maybe the properties of fire jive with the concept of karma.

Will have to look to see if Buddha has a Water sermon. "Life, o Bhikkus, is a thirsty bag of water."

Guess this basically covered by What is Nirvana? thread.

_______

The Fire Sermon (Ādittapariyāya Sutta)

The Buddha approached Gaya on his palanquin, followed by 952 adherent beggars (Bhikkus) with their begging bowls in hand.

On top of a hill, after eating a very sweet mango, he gave a sermon to any and all who happened to be a part of his audience

"All things, ladies and gentelmen, are on fire. "

"Whatever sensations received by the senses, the forms and receivers of perception, whether pleasant, unpleasant or indifferent are on fire."

"With what are these things on fire you might ask?"

"With the fire of passion, say I, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of infatuation; with birth, old age, death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief, and despair are they on fire."

"And we are against the inflammation of all hindrances which fuel the conflagration of suffering and unsatisfactoriness. "

"My brothers and sisters, we are strangely inflamed and activated to therapeutically cool inflammation, to quench the raging fires of Dukkha."

"You must excuse any contradictions."

"Is my sermon, my friends, on fire? Or does it cool one to unconditioned stillness?"

"When the world cannot burn, dissipated by this stillness, by the absence of passion, there is no fuel for causation and rebirth is ended. Thereafter there is nothing more to do."

The Buddha raised his hands in prayer.

******

A series of aerial fireworks suddenly shot out of the crowd. The Buddha wasn't embarrassed by such action. A few of the monks clapped with excitement. A few sighed with exasperation.

Nirvana is probably a mundane state of equanimity, where the person has skillful control over their reaction to mental/physical content and can easily slip into flow states. Somehow this is accomplished by meditation in part along with balanced/healthy worldly engagement (Buddha tries many things). There is no final state of the unconditioned, unless we're talking about really being blown out (death/dreamless sleep).

Or maybe Nirvana is the Buddha's secret trick by which we can become philosophical zombies. :scream: The enlightened ones are really just robots now.

Are you confusing the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics?

All multiverses belong to the same universe which is undergoing a transition according to the first and second law of thermodynamics. All of the many worlds are winding down while energy is conserved. But I'm no expert.

Not sure there is much significance to saying numbers "really exist" or viruses are "alive". It doesn't change the useful or empirical nature of these things.

Memes might require life, like viruses, but are not alive. If we discovered similar "non-living" molecular replicators of some sort on another planet we'd all be real excited for what that means regarding the potentiality of life. In such a case the preference for assigning the category might flip but it still wouldn't matter much.

Hm. I've met quite a few folk who are very motivated to live and yet are in constant pain. — Banno

Was just trying to give a safe obvious and uninteresting answer, minus the eternal return bit. Pain and pleasure must also mediate the reason folks with chronic pain continue. The instincts must engage pain and pleasure to keep up the momentum of life. We might classify fear as a kind of pain (under the banner of suffering more like). The crisis of terror in suicidal ideation (as a pain, or motivating instinct) might deter us, among other expectations of future pleasure or avoiding harm (a pleasure), to continue living.

Being able to fulfill our needs must give life value. Which of your needs that aren't being fulfilled, Banno? Please share some personal juicy tidbits by which we can be enlightened while at the same time laugh a lot. Hopefully you are working hard to fulfill those needs in spite of the chronic pain. Live, laugh, love. Thanks.

Pain and pleasure give life its value otherwise we would not be motivated to live at all.

Life is not rare from the standpoint of being since there is no other alternative that has content. Anything that presents content to itself must be a kind of life. A infinity of years of time can pass in an awareness void, unconscious universe, and then suddenly, pop!, we're alive but never ourselves again in a strict sense. Death is not an experience! Time passes for the living.

We're in effect quasi immortals with no conserved content/substance but the inevitability of being conscious since we cannot be dead to ourselves.

Life has value because it is inescapable from the long view of a kind of eternal return, like the phase of flowering on the cosmic tree. There will always be a season for the blooms of consciousness. An eternity of nothing never appears to itself. An eternity of something must appear to itself because the only verification that it is something, is an appearance to itself.