There is a secondary circadian clock which is regulated by digestion, so you probably don't want to eat too late. Limit your eating window to 8 hrs as a matter of habit.

Take a hot epsom salt bath before bed.

If we care too much about non-human suffering, then our right to sell and buy fried, grilled, roasted or sauteed animal might be taken away by moral agents.

Sarcasm Tags might be useful to indicate when we want to ridicule and point out irony without voice inflection.Sarcasm

Troll Or when we are a pro-inflammatory hypocrite, or an uninsightful disturber of serious discussion.Troll

Sarcasm--->Not only should we be punished for misreading but also for post redundancy due to skipping posts. I suppose it could be part of the PF's behavioral engineering program.<---Sarcasm

Catholics wouldn't be able to eat Jesus if he hadn't undergone the crucifixion (dismemberment).

The blood and flesh of Jesus were once that of Dionysus (wine representing the spirit of the that god). Maybe Jesus is far more Apollonian now, an formal image emptied of ritual ecstasies or awe with an oppressive cultural entailment, in the light of our hyper rational age.

I wonder if Nietzsche ever talked about the symbolism of Christianity as it relates to these two impulses.

More than one wife is traditional in some parts of the world. What cultural script should we follow?

Maybe it's about the existential functions of good art, given that Nietzsche was complaining about the decline of Greek tragedy with the rise of the Socratic impulse.

Nearly everything is unintelligible in a supreme sense, until we have to sit and listen to the mind give us a lesson on whatever it is it wants to explain.

None of us have the time, patience or audacity for such a feat.

Life is 70% ridiculous and 25% horrific and 5% everything else.

So any discussion about the meaning of the meaning of life is by default ridiculous.

I agree with BC's assessment. But also, meaning must predate language and culture, even if it just comes down to a rudimentary quality of experience adapted by instincts.

Is a carrot meaningful to an elephant?
Does a mouse find any pleasure in a cookie crumb?

Yes.

Witcher 3 for the gorgeous medieval landscape and soap opera.

Tested free trial of StarCraft II but looks like you have to pay for each of the race campaigns. Looks like fun (or at least distraction from existential woe).

More interested in learning how to build 3-D objects/designs for the future promise of 3D printing.
Design suites and software are prohibitively expensive, but need to do some more searching.

If we dumped out a collection of stuff onto a table, you'd be able to meaningfully sort through it on the basis of what might be useful to you at a present or future date.

We assess the value of things, people (et cetera).

If you were heavily depressed, to the point that you couldn't even look at the stuff I dumped out on to the table, then maybe there has been a significant loss in the capacity to find value in those things.

Depressed and anxious people are likely to say that "life has no meaning." Maybe there are perceived barriers to acquiring a meaningful state of being for many people.

I often think that if I only had tons of money, life would be more enjoyable, since the tedium and unpleasantness of work could be dispensed with in pursuit of other options (meaningful kinds of work).

You have to exist first before you put on parfum (essence).

"It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been committed for fear of not looking sufficiently progressive."

This highlights the well known psychological pressure of group conformity. "Cowardice" and what is "progressive" is partially defined by the group you're embedded in or trying to appeal to.

If you can't chug way too much beer through your anus, you're probably a "pussy" in some frat circle. What that might have to do with being progressive is up for debate. Status can "progress" in a group hierarchy.

"Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics."

The Red Elephants see great opportunity in blood sport (red is toward others, flushed alertness: fear).

The Blue Donkeys are burdened with a slave cart (blue is toward the self, blood has left the face: fear).

Every Donkephant is a Elekey, enrobed in a purple mantle of toward others toward the self.

Or... Go Cubs!

The flame of boredome and suffering renders it all into what might well be mystery.

Edit: It's backwards. Everything begins in politics and ends in mysticism.

My bed and my sleep have been monetized by titanic productivity.

The earth is actually a horde of Dragon's gold and you have to rent a space (a coin) to sleep on, all the while feeling anxiety of being eaten up in the process. Dragons don't eat gold, they eat people.

Just say no to Dragon gold, of which nearly everything is turned.

Make your clothes out of coins, be the gold that the Dragon values, and you'll be fine.

So Lambda is responsible for this mess.

Mostly women attend the meditation and prayer service at the building I upkeep.

There were a lot more women than men in the Holy Hell cult, if I recall.

Isn't football a religious/spiritual activity though?

Humans and their dumb intellectual classifications.

Suicide is a the ultimate pain reliever, better than heroin. And the good thing is that it doesn't even matter that you wont experience pleasure again - because this is a kind of suffering, and you are dead. The dead can't be deprived. — dukkha

This almost reads as a rationalization for murder.

The impulse to suicide stems from real suffering. It is a stop gap measure which could just as well accompany an existential resentment strong enough take the lives of other people.

Redeeming the world is different from personal redemption. I find that the latter is always prioritized and seen as a kind of prerequisite for the former. — Thorongil

I would say this could be emphasized more as a grounding context for understanding this topic, that ultimately the act of redeeming the world takes place form a first person point of view and is about the awareness of suffering in the world (one's own suffering) and what one needs to do in order to overcome it or come to terms with it psychologically.

The Crucifixon has been said to represent "a voluntary participation in the sorrows of the world" (Joseph Campbell). Instead of escaping the world, redemption is about the individual voluntary meeting his fears in an exercise of existential overcoming, true learning, that he may ascend to new being.

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?”

Alice (drunk off her ass)

Eugenics isn't about what "you" want, it's about what the authorities have decreed. — Bitter Crank

I think we can use the term to apply to designer babies in a Capitalist setting, even though as you say it is speculative sci-fi at the moment. The term is possibly too shadowed by its history and should maybe be abandoned to your definition.

You've seen the film, GATTACA, I'm sure, where citizens are discriminated against on the basis of whether they've undergone pre-birth genetic enhancement.

I should add that I want the child I deserve, I don't want to pick. — Agustino

But you would want to avoid severe genetic defects that might upend your family's future well being, right? So you don't really mean what you just said.

Is this a recommendation to "be here now"?

It isn't easy for those to reign in their irrational fears by which their perceptions are organized. A lot of the time the projected future, present and or past is unhelpfully false, or at least distorted in some sometimes useful sometimes harmful way. My fears about the future have me in an existential anxiety trap. Reworking the habits of perception is not easy by any means.

Stories of past, present, future bring order to chaos, unless they do the opposite, which they often do.

And I second what Unenlightened said, the eloquent bastard.

Whatever it is that makes a breeding pair attractive to each other probably has nothing to do with non-obvious but serious genetic flaws.

And eugenics is a social plan, not personal preferences. — Bitter Crank

We're not just talking about non-obvious genetic flaws with regard to eugenics, we're talking about the possibilities of shaping human features in a cosmetic or performative way out of personal preference. Though I know natural selection isn't a eugenics program of any sort, the same forces, cultural or instinctual, that help us pick our mates also help us to determine what we want our children to look and act like.

Why are so many South Koreans getting plastic surgery (and why do they have to attach a picture to their job resume)? I'm sure they would leap to any eugenics program that would make it easier on their children in such competitive atmosphere.

New Yorker: About Face

We already practice eugenics with regard to sexual preference and mate selection. The reason we desire some traits in our sexual partner has something to do with the likelihood that the traits in our offspring will be beneficial to them at some level, even if what we have selected for is average and quite common.

The body is either all apples, all oranges or mixed fruit basket.

It's full of impolite disinterest and poop.

Was a self-employed landscape maintenance guy who luckily fell into a job with a salary, rent and utilities covered by employer. My income is the effect of a private investment company and its privately funded non-profit foundation, so I'm basically working for a wealthy person.

I find work routine and dull but it does help me to keep physically and mentally together. I don't have much discipline or energy to use my off hours for personal growth and usually find myself consuming mindless entertainment. I struggle with insomnia which sours my mood a lot.

If I was wealthy enough I'd work on building an off grid tiny house community centered around a communal farm and a workshop for promoting open source DIY activities. Fuck the Capitalist pigs who don't know how to utilize land properly.

So now that you've given up your legal rights as a human being we are sending you to Foxconn, were you will work building Iphones until you collapse. You are already obsolete as a worker there and completely expendable. After you are dead your fat will be rendered down and sold to street food vendors and your desiccated ground remains will be sold off as fertilizer.

You have simply become the means to someone else's end (something the rest of us human beings have been historically trying to escape).

I was being facetious. I guess MU's argument is more subtle than that but I still don't really grasp it.

Everything is determined by the past. Life can't happen any other way than it does. There is no free will. Chance is a myth.

Case closed.

>:)

My only complaint is that you've not credited the source of your quote.

It really does feel good to scold you softly here.

The suspicion is that the TPF elites all already know the source and that the omission is to further exclude us lesser educated laypersons.

Viva la revolución

Moderator's Note
The source has since been added by myself, Sapientia.

I suspect that random mutation does not account for the speed of phenotypic changes in the given examples of selective breeding of plants and animals over just a few generations.

The traits already have been selected for (or are apparent) in a breeding pair of animals and are a part of the genetic diversity of the species. A very well practiced horse or dog breeder might have an idea what traits are possible or likely given pedigrees over a few generations.

The variation made possible from genetic diversity of a species (shuffling the gene pool by a lottery of chances) is vastly different from the variation made possible by random mutation. Maybe this highlights a problem with the given example of animal husbandry.

Why would you say that changes to an organism's environment are chance events? — MU

Even determined (or selected) events (ie. you deciding to brush your teeth this morning) are chance events in the sense that they are contingent (subject to chance) upon unknowns.

If your tooth brush falls in the toilet by accident and you don't have a back up, what is the "chance" (probability) you'll brush your teeth?

What is the chance (probability) I will die from a coconut falling on my head today?

We don't yet have Laplacian-Demon computers to tell us the grand unalterable choreographed nature of life.

It might be helpful to discuss what is meant by chance or randomness with regard to evolution, unless it is blatantly obvious of course.

I believe that the art of husbandry demonstrates to us that physical variations are most likely not the effect of chance. Domesticated plants and animals evolve in ways which are desirable to us, not in ways dictated by chance. If we had to wait for random mutations to produce the desirable changes which have resulted in the many varied domestic species, we would still be waiting. — Meta Under

You're discounting the vast numbers of individuals that are discarded in the process of selecting for an individual with desirable traits, over many generations. Gene modification by mindful selection does take a while as one is growing out plants and or animals which would not otherwise be selected for because of any number of possible chance variables.

In some sense you can pile on the unlikelihood of human husbandry in the universe as a chance event in selecting the Washington Navel clone.

I'm just offering up an unexplored, free floating, hazy intuition.

A state of total knowing seems contradictory, since there is too much information, too much mutually exclusive conditions that could exist at any time. It seems as useful as its opposite state, a condition of total ignorance.

Ignorance informs or contextualizes knowing (or what can be known) in some way.

For instance if I know how the events of my life will unfold perfectly in the future how would that change me in the present (would I be a fatalist or determinist of some sort)? There could still be the option of ignorance as a value, ie. those who do not wish to know something choose not to know it.

Zen conjures a setting of Japanese austerity, essentially a kind of brutal boot camp for the initiate.

Drill instructors always are characterized as assholes but that is part of the tradition.

Maybe the superior is getting a taste of his own medicine in a humorous way (if Zen makes everything easy, everything is already resolved).

What is an example of a useful metaphysical fiction?

Borges poetic illustration of this thought experiment is endlessly fascinating and enigmatic.

The library has all possible configurations of letters which code information but it's all relative to ciphers or interpretive agents.

When presented with a book or cipher you would always say that it is finite relative to your function or its function but that goes without saying. Actual infinity is just as incomprehensible as super humongous giant universal size sets of whatever.

There is too much to count some in some finite set but there is always more to count in another finite set, and there is always more to count in another finite set, et cetera.. ad finitum.

Who is counting? Who is measuring? Surely these agents are infinite? .....

:s