There is evidence to suggest that for every person raised in a 1st world economy, 5-8+ people could be raised without malnutrition or neglect in a 3rd world economy. — XanderTheGrey

Should we really place any moral value on individual human life? Personally I can see no value. — XanderTheGrey

Hello. I see a contradiction between these two statements. If humans have no "moral" (I think you mean ontological) value, then your argument in the first quote has no effect. 1 x 0 = 8 x 0 = 0.

the less people, the more resources available. — XanderTheGrey

The more resources for who? Individuals who have no value?

I say this a lot; you can't have soft nihilism. If individuals have no value, then resources for those valueless individuals also have no value.

What’s that saying - ‘a shiver looking for a spine to run up’.

I take the church of Euthanasias stance on suicide; the less people, the more resources available. However I also extend this concept to mass homicide within 1st world economic zones such as the United States, Europe, Metropolitan Asia, ect. — XanderTheGrey

Xander - this is a really disturbing post. It sounds like you are really serious about this. Is it something you have plans to put into practice? I've only said this to one other person on this forum - if I knew how to contact them, I would tell someone in your life what you have said. Have you told anyone else?

Please be kind to the people around you and to yourself.

I agree with you on an emotional level, but we need to be able to make arguments against this kind of nihilism. These kinds of arguments should be welcome at the table. If these arguments aren't given a hearing then they continue to fester and grow.

Personally I can see no value. — XanderTheGrey

Every human at some point values someones life.

Hello. I see a contradiction between these two statements. If humans have no "moral" (I think you mean ontological) value, then your argument in the first quote has no effect. 1 x 0 = 8 x 0 = 0.

The more resources for who? Individuals who have no value?

I say this a lot; you can't have soft nihilism. If individuals have no value, then resources for those valueless individuals also have no value.

Every human at some point values someones life.

You all make a good point. I forgot to add perhaps; that even if I had no values, it would make sense for me to expetiment with adhereing to diffetent "patterns" as it were, rathet than devoting myself to the behavior of a loose unit.

The point I'm trying to make here is that the greatest precived common values of the greatest precived majority of mankind: seen convoluted and construed in many areas, including this one; suicide, and homocide.

The Earth is rather isolated in outer-space. Those of us in the 1st world suffer from a terrible delusion that our everyday lifestyle choices are not responsible for the vast amount of suffering on the otherside of the globe; that its "someone else's fualt" that there are "bad guys" to blame. Meanwhile a group of people were locked in a room together with enough resources to last each one 90+ years, it would be considered wrong if a smaller group claimed the majority of the resources as their own. Would it be wrong to those few people so that more of the others could survive?

When it comes to superiority, I think the average person from a 3rd world lifestyle has more potential than one from the 1st world. They are generally healthier, more physically fit, ect. Regarless of any possible malnourishment.

Privacy is a virtue, I'd rather my family not know about my deeper veiws on things.

But to answer your qeustion and clear my name I'll tell you the same thing I said to the docs; "I have many plans, many thoughts, desires, and urges, but I have no intent".

Value, as you are defining it, accounts for a single perspective; that of yourself. Given that most of the secular society has been taught that everything happens by chance, and there is no superior being, then it is not surprising to find the lack of purpose in many people's lives. If, however, the premise of the none existing god fails, then all of the secular society also fails. Purpose is not found in yourself, but rather in something greater; hence the populace cannot find purpose due to lack of finding a greater cause.

Value, as you are defining it, accounts for a single perspective; that of yourself. Given that most of the secular society has been taught that everything happens by chance, and there is no superior being, then it is not surprising to find the lack of purpose in many people's lives. If, however, the premise of the none existing god fails, then all of the secular society also fails. Purpose is not found in yourself, but rather in something greater; hence the populace cannot find purpose due to lack of finding

I'll need to do some reading and become more familiar with "secular" philosophy, I feel I could be more familiar with the word.

But yes, you could say I find propose in something greater than myself, which is simply desire. It adds up doesn't it? We will all risk our health and our lives for something we desire, even give them up willingly. "Desire" is greater than ourselves it seems.

My desire is to not adhere to concepts that are so saturated in hypocrisy and convolution. I recognize that hypocrisy and convolution cannot be avoided completely, but the topic of suicide and homicide are utterly saturated with it.

I don't know if we should put moral value on individual human lives, but I think most of us do put it there naturally; for one, our own lives are bound to others, as we don't survive alone after birth, so already some people are more valuable for our survival, while others are a danger to it. This is obvious, of course, and one might say that this only concerns a very small circle of people for each person. But the survival, and health, of people around us gets its value at least from this, and for them to function as well as possible, their circle of valuable people determines in part how useful they can be to you. So objective value of people I think could be found through this road.

Or if you wan't to go still further: isn't it anyhow the case that the people at the shit-end of, say, capitalist exploitation (say, in another country) have no effect on your or your close circles lives, so they have no value, and we shouldn't care about them. Well. No. Obviously the non-shit-end only is at it is thanks to exploitation, so it's dependent on it. This seems another type of way to give value to people, as parts of a system, but in this case the usefulness is upholding an institution very much bound to your survival in the present state, e.g. the economy.

Now, if you say that this is not moral value, I'll just add that survival is better when the survivor is happy, so the circle of people, and the machine-people under capitalism are still connected to your happiness, of which the first is so directly, the other indirectly. (Also, an unstable system won't survive forever, so happiness of the machine-people is also of consequence.)

The point is, people are (I think naturally) put into order of value to your happiness, and everyone has their own ordering. There are people that have value to you and that you don't know about, since they have a possible effect on the lives of people you know. Since we're not omniscient, you never know, and I think an assumption of moral value is more natural than that of no value, especially since the limits between enemies and non-enemies are no longer very clearly cut in many instances. In people insofar as they are not related to others I don't think there is moral value, and too much of it is placed on some people (e.g. by condemning all instances of capital punishment).

As the world progresses into more of a unity and your present way of existing is bound to more and more people, I think assumed value of them is more reasonable than no value. Whether this has meaning as far as the universe goes hardly makes a difference... This got too long. If someone reads it, sorry.

My desire is to not adhere to concepts that are so saturated in hypocrisy and convolution. — XanderTheGrey

Yes, I agree. It takes most humans a while to find truth in its purest form, uncorrupted by others.

I agree with you on an emotional level, but we need to be able to make arguments against this kind of nihilism. These kinds of arguments should be welcome at the table. If these arguments aren't given a hearing then they continue to fester and grow. — Noble Dust

In a serious and convincing voice, Xander has proposed mass murder as a political tool. I don't think he means 10 people, I think means millions. Otherwise his political goals would not be met. How is this different from the Nazis under Hitler, the Soviets under Stalin, The Chinese under Mao, or the Khymer Rouge under Pol Pot? From my point of view, the difference is that he means to apply it to me and my children. I guess I don't mind this being discussed here, but its sickening to have all the usual pseudo-philosophical suspects act as if the idea is not monstrous.

In a serious and convincing voice, Xander has proposed mass murder as a political tool. I don't think he means 10 people, I think means millions. Otherwise his political goals would not be met. How is this different from the Nazis under Hitler, the Soviets under Stalin, The Chinese under Mao, or the Khymer Rouge under Pol Pot? From my point of view, the difference is that he means to apply it to me and my children. I guess I don't mind this being discussed here, but its sickening to have all the usual pseudo-philosophical suspects act as if the idea is not monstrous. — T Clark

I mean "either or" actually; 10 people here, 20 people there, and perhaps even a holocaust, yes. To me its a higher level of sanity to consider such things. No doubt however; war is an incredible waste of resources, I have to wonder what the footprint of ISISs human sluaghter houses are. Likely its far smaller than Hitlers holocaust. I wish I was educated in applied mathematics. It's probbably most similar to Saloth Sars ideals, but very different. I think the most I would ever seek to do is help create an online movement that encourages mass murder, and murder-suicide, and addresses its true effects on the rest of the population.

I forgot to add perhaps; that even if I had no values, it would make sense for me to expetiment with adhereing to diffetent "patterns" as it were, rathet than devoting myself to the behavior of a loose unit. — XanderTheGrey

How would that make sense?

The point I'm trying to make here is that the greatest precived common values of the greatest precived majority of mankind: seen convoluted and construed in many areas, including this one; suicide, and homocide. — XanderTheGrey

Too many typos; not sure what you mean.

Those of us in the 1st world suffer from a terrible delusion that our everyday lifestyle choices are not responsible for the vast amount of suffering on the otherside of the globe; — XanderTheGrey

Maybe make an argument about this? Instead of stating it as obviously true.

Meanwhile a group of people were locked in a room together with enough resources to last each one 90+ years, it would be considered wrong if a smaller group claimed the majority of the resources as their own. Would it be wrong to those few people so that more of the others could survive? — XanderTheGrey

I think this is really the meat of your argument, right? Distribution of resources is a difficult moral dilemma when faced with real inequality that threatens lives. The issue here, within your specific argument, is again the same logical problem I brought up before when I asked "The more resources for who? Individuals who have no value?" Your argument begins with the emotional assumption that all individuals deserve proper resources. That emotional argument assumes individuals have value. You're beginning form a non-nihilistic perspective without realizing it, and erroneously arriving at a nihilistic conclusion because the inequality is so great when viewed emotionally. But you only think you're a nihilist because of your erroneous conclusions, because you haven't acknowledged the unconscious non-nihilistic assumptions you're making in order to begin to make your argument.

Given his response to you, I think you might be right.

war is an incredible waste of resources, — XanderTheGrey

Resources for who? Your statement suggests that resources are valuable, but you admit that you think individuals are not valuable. What makes resources valuable, given that people are not?

I think the most I would ever seek to do is help create an online movement that encourages mass murder, and murder-suicide, and addresses its true effects on the rest of the population. — XanderTheGrey

Why? What predicates the value of mass murder? "We need less people on the earth" in order to achieve what exactly?

According to utilitarianism there seem to be two ethical arguments for committing murder:

1) The "Utility Monster" argument: Perhaps it is the case that the pleasure and happiness a murderer experiences by killing somebody outweighs the future pleasure and happiness lost by his victim and the grief caused for the victim's family and friends.

2) The "Benevolent World Exploder" argument : Perhaps the most compassionate action to minimise future human suffering is to commit genocide and wipe out the human race.

The problem of course is how to define and estimate the net-utility of a person's continued existence as a whole - a utility value which should take into account how the individual feels about his own life, and the expected net-utility of that person's potential offspring and their offspring etc.

Is it even meaningful to talk about utility in the absolute way these arguments demand?

For while we can estimate *the relative* utility of an individual's actions by observing the average choices they make when repeatedly presenting to them the same set of choices with their associated consequences, there isn't any means by which to evaluate whether or not being dead is a "good choice", since this state cannot be re-entered and re-evaluated.

My conclusion is that murder and suicide, in being non-repeatable events cannot be assigned a utility value on behalf of individual victims. Utility can only compare states of satisfaction of the living, who on average appear very much opposed to the consequences they experience with respect to murder and suicide.

Hello. I see a contradiction between these two statements. If humans have no "moral" (I think you mean ontological) value, then your argument in the first quote has no effect. 1 x 0 = 8 x 0 = 0. — Samuel Lacrampe

The more resources for who? Individuals who have no value?

I say this a lot; you can't have soft nihilism. If individuals have no value, then resources for those valueless individuals also have no value. — Noble Dust

Resources for who? Your statement suggests that resources are valuable, but you admit that you think individuals are not valuable. What makes resources valuable, given that people are not? — Noble Dust

I think something people do not understand is that I'm not claiming to put 0 value on everything and anything. When I speak of random individual human lives having no value, possibly even negative value; its essentially for the same reason any other comidity would seise to have, or even negate its value.

Lets qoute Jacque Fresco on "gold" for example.

"If it rained gold, people today would be putting it in their closets and cellars and hoarding it. But if it rained gold for months and months, they would be shoveling it out of their house."

-Jacque Fresco

Every human at some point values someones life. — Hand In Hand

So as you see above, ofcourse I place value on human life, but all values we place on things are conditional, and subject to adjustment, and change.

I forgot to add perhaps; that even if I had no values, it would make sense for me to experiment with adhereing to different "patterns" as it were, rather than devoting myself to the behavior of a loose unit.
— XanderTheGrey

How would that make sense? — Noble Dust

Why make an effort to behave differently everyday? Even if I had no values, behaving differently everday would not achive any good results would it? For example; prescribing value to my life one day, and declaring it worthless the next. That wouldn't get me very far, I would still need to behave in certian patterns to achive anything; and I value achivement. So you see: I'm not valueless anyway, just as I never claimed to be; to my knowladge atleast, I put value on things according to a certin set of perimeters.

The point I'm trying to make here is that the greatest precived common values of the greatest precived majority of mankind: seem convoluted and construed in many areas, including this one; suicide, and homocide.
— XanderTheGrey

Too many typos; not sure what you mean. — Noble Dust

Seem*

Abstinence and rejection of and from suicide and homicide, both on small and massive scales; is a "common value" in our culture. Why? I'll work on gathering information that acts as evidence to support my theroy; but I'm saying that there is evidence to suggest that it's a convolution to have this value.

Human lives have become of negative value with the current misallocation of resources, there is an artificial scarcity of resources due to the dynamics of "supply and demand" within our money based economy. When supply is too high, the commodity becomes worthless even to the point of pestilence(negative value).

We plow over fields of food if a particular crop is becoming abundant to the point of lowering the market value. We burn diamonds when we find caches so great that they would cause a drop in their value. The same kinds of things are done with dog breeds, cattle, dear, bear, ground hogs, wild boar, ect.; why not humans? Perhaps we do, and perhaps that is called: genocide.

I applaud you on your candor. This is not a subject that most people feel comfortable talking about as raw as you did.

I think that human life, like any other form in the universe, is neither worthless nor priceless.

All these so called laws and moral and ethical codes we have contrived are simply guidelines and not absolute truths. How can they be absolute truths when they were artificially created ? They are required in society for structure, but the problem arises when people mistake them for absolute truths and are shocked when "criminals" violate them :)

That said, I don't condone homicide, but I don't consider killers "evil" either ... I consider them unconscious ... i.e. unaware (on a deeper level than the superficiality of the mind) of what they're doing. I laugh every time the news immediately labels a mass murderer "evil". What they're doing, of course, is what is easiest to do - label someone without any investigation or understanding whatsoever. "He killed 10 people, and he is therefore evil. Case closed." This is because of laziness ... no one wants to know the deeper truth behind what actually happened. Also, the action is mistaken for the person performing the action. An evil act is mistaken for an evil person.

There is a beautiful saying in the Bible (I think). "Forgive them for they know not what they do." What this means, according to Eckhart Tolle, is that no person in his/her right mind would hurt another. (and I use "mind" in a deeper sense, not just meaning the brain). Don't judge someone based on their actions. The action is not the essence of the person.

Not everyone who kills is evil, and not everyone who goes to church and never harms a fly is innocent, either. So, I think homicide is bad, but there are evils that are orders of magnitude worse than homicide. They look harmless or even noble on the surface, but are far worse than homicide. When you subject another person to suffering (mental, emotional, physical) and force them to live their entire life with that suffering, that, to me, is far worse than putting that person out of his/her misery.

I'm not against suicide; I think that life is overrated, as I mentioned earlier. Whether or not it is the right choice for someone is entirely dependent on the individual. The only pain one can measure is his/her own, so one has no business judging another person's choice to commit suicide.

That said, I don't condone homicide, but I don't consider killers "evil" either ... I consider them unconscious ... i.e. unaware (on a deeper level than the superficiality of the mind) of what they're doing. I laugh everytime there is a mass shooting and the news immediately labels the killer "evil". What they're doing, of course, is what is easiest to do - label someone without any investigation or understanding whatsoever. "He killed 10 people, and he is therefore evil. Case closed." This is because of laziness ... no one wants to know the deeper truth behind what actually happened. Also, the action is mistaken for the person performing the action. An evil act is mistaken for an evil person. — Aurora

One of my favorite songs, although I'll only listen to it on Mondays:

One of my favorite songs, although I'll only listen to it on Mondays — T Clark

LOL. I'm assuming that the song is, in some form, a response to what I said ? If it is, do elaborate, because it flew over my head :D

LOL. I'm assuming that the song is, in some form, a response to what I said ? If it is, do elaborate, — Aurora

I laugh everytime there is a mass shooting and the news immediately labels the killer "evil". What they're doing, of course, is what is easiest to do - label someone without any investigation or understanding whatsoever. — Aurora

They can see no reasons
'Cause there are no reasons
What reason do you need

It's a clever song, but I don't really see it as funny. As a matter of fact, I find it moving. Sometimes, maybe most times, people do things for no reason at all. Recognizing the emptiness inside people is an act of empathy, compassion, although the Boomtown Rats may not see it that way. I'd like to think they do.

Hmm ...

I think that people are puppets of/to their conditioning. It's almost like they're robots/machines on autopilot ... executing their instructions without any questioning. You're an engineer (as am I) ... you can appreciate that.

I think that people are puppets of/to their conditioning. It's almost like they're robots/machines on autopilot ... executing their instructions without any questioning. You're an engineer (as am I) ... you can appreciate that. — Aurora

You reminded me of my father there for a second. He was an engineer too. We had a lot in common, but the way we saw people was really different. He had a somewhat mechanistic vision of how people work that seems similar to yours. He loved Myers-Briggs type testing and other sorts of metrics. That doesn't mean he didn't treat people with kindness and friendship. I, on the other hand, have a very intuitive, impressionistic understanding of people.

How does your understanding of the mechanistic lives of people jibe with your dismay about their inauthenticity? Is that where the inauthenticity comes from?

How does your understanding of the mechanistic lives of people jibe with your dismay about their inauthenticity? Is that where the inauthenticity comes from? — T Clark

Good question.

Being mechanistic ... inauthenticity ... it's all directly related, in my view.

A lot of my understanding of human behavior comes from direct observation and experience (not unproven theory), but I have also been influenced greatly by the spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle whose teachings really speak to me and reinforce that what I have observed is true.

The true essence of a person is consciousness, prior to its contamination by societal/cultural conditioning. So, newborn babies are closest to that true essence; they have not yet been conditioned with concepts, language, and other artificial constructs that most people blindly adhere to and mistake for absolute truths.

So, the "mechanistic" behavior of humans, that derives from their conditioning is also 100% the cause of their inauthenticity. In fact, the inauthenticity is the conditioning ... that part of a human being that is not part of his/her true essence. Eckhart describes this conditioning as a mask obscuring the true essence.

If you recall my grocery store example in my thread about inauthenticity, we have been conditioned, like robots, to reply to the question, "How are you?" with the response "I'm good. How are you ?". This is what makes it inauthentic. It comes from a superficial place within us ... that mask or layer of conditioning that hides our true essence.

Hope I made some sense.

Relax. Xander doesn't have the means. The several nuclear powers, however, do have the means and periodically threaten to use those means, which would accomplish Xander's goals at least handily. More likely, abundantly.

If you recall my grocery store example in my thread about inauthenticity, we have been conditioned, like robots, to reply to the question, "How are you?" with the response "I'm good. How are you ?". This is what makes it inauthentic. It comes from a superficial place within us ... that mask or layer of conditioning that hides our true essence. — Aurora

I don't know if you remember my response to your story - what you called inauthentic behavior, I called ritual language which signals a sense of community.

The true essence of a person is consciousness, prior to its contamination by societal/cultural conditioning. So, newborn babies are closest to that true essence; they have not yet been conditioned with concepts, language, and other artificial constructs that most people blindly adhere to and mistake for absolute truths. — Aurora

@apokrisis has some interesting things to say about this over on the thread about the experience of awareness - . I don't know if you saw it.

If I may paraphrase, all those "authentic" things you are talking about are culturally mediated too.