Deep Brain Poison: treatment for the viral ideas that ruin our lives

Great Debates
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*sorry in advance for using terms like: idea, concept, thought, meme, semiotics, etc… as interchangeable equals. I do not know/care enough to make those distinctions. Furthermore, sorry for trying to mash the concepts of virus (in our body) and virus (computer) together to form an equivalence with virus (in our brain as ideas and our actions on our thoughts). I guess a tl;dr version of the below would be something like: over time as we build up (and are built up in turn by our parents/society) our inner rules on how to think and act properly in our world, some of the rules are successful, others are failures, while others are neutral or immediately effective but with long term consequences (like junk food, or the easy way out). Any of those can in fact be a “memetic virus” that lessens us as a person and our society as a whole. For example, the word “deserve” and all of the pent up meaning and implications behind it leads to the hardening of our hearts towards the plights of others and severely lessens our empathy. In order to cure these mental infections and become closer to our idealized selves, we should scrutinize everything we believe in and use Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques to cleanse our minds of our old toxic thoughts/habits.

You know, I think that I have learned something. The point of writing a book, is a lot like the point of being a teacher. While making new points and forming new ideas is good and laudable; what really matters is repackaging and re-telling the old salient points/ideas in your own unique way to a new generation that has not yet (maybe?) experienced the ideas that made you grow as you have. What I am trying to say is that I used to dismiss people out of hand if they brought up, what I thought of as, old well-trodden ground. (like: what if we are all in a simulation, is a Chinese Room sentient, Sneeches with their Stars on their bellies as a social commentary on our “othering” desire, etc…) And I was wrong to do so. Now I try to be more like a teacher, going over the same points with different people, and trying to form what I “believe” into various facets so people that learn differently might see my point through those different lenses. Please be patient with my naiveté, I promise to interact more with this thread more than the zero I did for my others.

Space warfare in sci-fi can be many things, from lasers to missiles to asteroids to radiation to computer viruses. The last one piqued my interest after I read the short story Kumara by Seth Dickinson

This is a Promethean story, wherein a lone spaceship and her crew has stolen …something important… from an ancient machine god the size of planets. Chasing the human ship, the god’s revenants weaponize viral code. Needing more processing power to combat the viruses, the ship asks the last living crew member to choose which of the dead crew to delete from their simulated heaven, to truly die, (as their bodies and minds can be re-made back safely on earth otherwise) as the ship loves them all equally and she cannot bear to make the choice herself.

In a sentient ship so closely wedded and familiar with the human mind, what could a computer viral weapon be? Would it cross over from simply slowing down her processor and writing junk to her hard drive to express itself in her sentience? Would that viral form express as insanity or self destructive thoughts? Would it be an insidious, irrefutable, idea like solipsism that would make her not care about her mission/crew anymore? Could we, as mere meat and chemical potential, be infected by a purely mental-scape “viral idea?” What would that feel like? How would we know and combat it? Then I remembered something else that I had read a while ago, and a quote that was particularly powerful to me.
The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin

[Quote/]
“You don’t mean justice, you mean punishment. Do you think they’re the same thing?” “He means violence,” Rulag said. “And if there is violence, you will have caused it You and your Syndicate. And you will have deserved it.” A thin, small, middle-aged man beside Trepil began speaking, at first so softly, in a voice hoarsened by the dust cough, that few of them heard him. He was a visiting delegate from a Southwest miners’ syndicate, not expected to speak on this matter. “… what men deserve,” he was baying. “For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the Virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.” (P. 288)
[/Quote]

Ah… before this quote was remembered I was thinking of “viral memes” as much grander/complex things, like: people internalizing their belief in their own ugliness/worthlessness from repeated exposure to glamorized media images and trusted people telling them such; extreme otherization of taking your holy book as gospel and treating those not of your book as people deserving death/abuse; psychological issues such as anxiety or depression compounding when we dwell on all the negatives of the past and create excuses for why we cannot move forward. I never thought that such a deeply destructive, poisonous, thought could happen from our belief in just the words “deserve” and “earn.”

I do not know much about anything so I am eagerly awaiting your own ideas, but I myself cannot seem to get past the ideas of “deserving” and “earning.” So far all I have is: the idea of “earning” is inherently focused upon the singular (self/other) that implicitly sweeps away the roles that the many (other people, life forms, societies, nature’s externalities, etc) had in contributing to the “earned” event. Proper/idyllic living comes from a place of humility (realizing our relatively small, yet none the less, still important role in the Universe’s events) and respect (proper thanks and reverence for each individual, natural event, and whatnot that had a part in bringing the final event to fruition). Once we free our minds of the idea of earning, we would stop feeling lonely and greedy. Like how your life is different in the middle of loved ones and family sharing a meal vs sitting at a table in a cafeteria surrounded by strangers. Removing “earning” takes us from “I scored the touchdown” to “we did it team! Thanks fans, for being here today and supporting us! Good game other side, isn’t this fun? Lets keep playing!”

For “deserve” think about the animal kingdom and then expand it to our own lives. If a bird is hungry, does it “deserve” to eat? If the bird finds a worm and eats it, did the worm “deserve” to die suffocating in stomach acid, or did it “deserve” to live, with the bird “deserving” to be very hungry instead? Did the bird or the worm “deserve” the rain that happened to drive out the worm from the ground so the bird could see it and eat it? Are your answers some form of “eeh, nature will take its course anyway, “deserve” doesn’t factor in with dumb animals,” or something else that boils down to might makes right? How about with humans eating animals? Do they “deserve” to be eaten by us when we have the means to healthfully eat vegetarian style? We have morality, our might makes us right (right?) Or does our convenience trump our conscience? (sorry, convenience does trump my conscience. I still eat plenty of meat) “But you are still talking about animals in the equation, ‘deserve’ still does not really apply” I hear you respond. Ok, how about people “deserving” to eat. Full stop. Do we, you yourself, “deserve” to eat…ever? How about your family, relatives, friends, strangers, etc. ? Did you feel your heart soften and harden more and more as the levels of familiarity drifted farther from yourself? Such is the brain poison of “deserve,” it closes us away from the greater empathy and love that we should feel towards all things. Instead it makes our personal feelings of convenience override what should be our greater feelings of conscience.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-holt-gimenez/world-hunger_b_1463429.html We already grow enough food to feed 10 billion people, and have grown enough for the entire Earth’s population to never be hungry for the past 20+ years. It is our feelings towards those people (can also easily be internalized to mean I myself do not deserve good things) who do not “deserve” to have food (if only they worked harder, or cared enough to be active in their political structure, or did all the infrastructure work themselves, etc.), and our apathy in not helping out our fellow man which cause these crises. Now you may agree with the above parenthetical statements, but you have to realize that everyone is severely mentally ill. It is not even like you, a healthy person, understanding and helping out your sickly family. Everyone is filled with crippling disease and other mental illnesses, we all must lean on and support each other to the best of our ability. En masse, we will stumble towards a brighter future, but not if those sitting on the top of the heap get it into their heads that they are kings and “deserve” to stay on top soaking up the resources that are better spent on everyone evenly. To be free of “deserve” is to treat every person as they come up, to the best of our ability, without prejudice or judgment. And to feel an equivalent great compassion towards everything. It is like being an idyllic doctor.
So how do we actually become better people, instead of just blowing smoke up each other’s asses and returning to our same old vices once we tab out of the thread? We don’t. Even the alleged experience of perfect oneness with the universe that LSD or mushrooms give only lasts for a month at best before we are back to our old habits. The most we can hope for, as I see it, is for a single kernel of greater resolve or purpose to fall upon the scales that add up to our personality. Even though it took our entire lifetime of experiences to get to how we are today, we have forgotten much. Even though the revelation according to LSD is forgotten, a mellow kernel may remain remembered. Just as the mountain of daily self-loathing will too be pushed aside and forgotten for the things that actually make us feel good or excite our curiosity. To hasten the process, I feel that, we must first strengthen our mental immune system by consuming knowledge’s foundation (logic, philosophy, science, psychology, etc) followed by extra doses of therapeutic ways of thinking like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Then we can safely gorge on all forms of thought ( all different books, ideas, discussions, entertainments, etc.) once we are immunized from the tantalizingly easy to understand arguments that lead everyone astray. I feel that the big reason for our mental troubles is that the most poisonous ideas are the simplest to convey and “understand.” Like how a virus is the most simple form of life, but for real complex life to form (or for real useful ideas to be cultivated), like ourselves, it takes much more work and deeper understanding to reap the benefits from.

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Nature says the strong survive. Thus we and things like corn are still here and velociraptors are not.

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In short, I wholeheartedly support the concept “deserve.” This doesn’t in any way diminish my capacity for empathy; in fact it augments it.

4

Do what makes you happy and minimises harm to others - if that turns out to be popular or spectacular, or causes you to rise to glittering fame, then also enjoy your brief spell in the spotlight.

If it doesn’t turn out to be any of those things, who cares? - you’re still doing what makes you happy.

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A wall of text ending with a preposition; Up with this I will not put!

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The poison is subjectivism.

Similar theme (without the LSD). We’ve lost the concept of external objective morality.

It’s only about 15 min. of your time:

C.S. Lewis, The Poison of Subjectivism

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Wrong. Lewis equates objective morality with traditional morality, and equates that with Christian morality. He never asks “What about other traditions?” or “What was the validity of the founding of Christian morality, before it became a tradition?”

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Nope. I don’t have to “realize” that at all.

But schools out, man. Have a little fun!

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From the beginning of the OP:

This feeling may become a troubling when you effort to signal your communications to others.

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Actually, he does. Read The Abolition of Man. He gives all sorts of examples from other traditions, from Babylon to China to Egypt.

Regards,
Shodan

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Thank You QuickSilver, John Mace, and Czarcasm for being kind enough to teach me about how off-putting and poorly presented my screed was. I think I understand your greater points that you wanted to get across, let me see if I can articulate them.

Presentation is very important in every aspect of life. A person dressed poorly, yet qualified for a job, will have a harder time getting the job. A delicious meal that is mashed together in an ugly bowl stands a good chance of being left uneaten and unappreciated, just for the sight of it. It also works the other way. Nonsensical writings, if the words/sentences flow together well, can become best sellers (I’m looking at you Finnegans Wake) just as easily as a good ideas could never be appreciated if they lay within a dense dry prose that the reader just gave up on over boredom.

As such, when I misuse language such as John Mace had rightly brought up, I alienate my audience. I see now that with conversing, as in books, every little step needs to be taken to not assume anything. Even if the author knows/sees the greater picture unfolding around the characters, it has not been explicitly written down yet for the reader. What I was remembering when I wrote “you must realize we are all severely mentally ill” was something much more benign. Back in highschool I had a Spanish teacher who brought up the point that people who grew up speaking a gendered language, also subconsciously attributed that gendered thinking when describing the objects. For example, the Spanish word for key is feminine, and when they describe keys they say things like small, intricate, delicate, etc… all things attributed to the fairer sex. But when people from a language that has a masculine form for key describe one they use words like heavy, protecting, etc… As such I was impressed that even our forms of language lock away certain ways of surface level thinking about the world around us behind gendered (and other) doors. Is that not a brain problem? For the ancient Greeks to look at the sky and say its color was bronze instead of blue? To never paint with a realistic perspective until the renaissance, despite everyone seeing everything receding into the horizon line? Perspective: The Rise of Renaissance Perspective

Of course, I have no excuse for my gross misuse of language Czarcasm, and I will look into these words and really try to understand everyone’s true meaning. But here is one anyway; why do people argue over Bricker’s legal interpretations? He is, as far as I can tell, always correct if you use the lawyerly meanings of words/terms and do not read into the words any more meaning than that. Others then tend to use their own layman interpretations of the words and argue from there. But in a SCOTUS thread, really only strict lawyer words should apply. In this thread, I felt that all of those *'d terms were more or less interchangeable to the general reader (at least they were for me), but I realize now that if any real insight is to be gained, it is through the use of rigorous and scientific terminology to dig deeper and properly unpack the mind.

Thank you GulfTiger for this very interesting insight from C.S.Lewis. And thanks to you too Panache45 for your thoughts and for your response bringing me to this new link which talks about various world religions and their relative moralities Religion and Morality (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) .

Of course i will inevitably misinterpret C.S.Lewis, and probably your points as well Panache45. So please come and correct me.
quotes from GulfTiger’s link
2:32-3:10 “but when we turn to [use subjectivism on] practical reason, ruinous effects are found operating in full force. By practical reason, I mean our judgments on good and evil… until modern times, no thinker of the first rank has ever doubted that our judgments of value were rational judgments, or that what they discovered was objective. It was taken for granted that in temptation, passion was opposed. Not to some sentiment, but to reason.”

5:22-6:12 “procedure of the moral reformer, who after saying that good means what we are conditioned to like, goes on cheerfully to consider whether it might be better that we should be conditioned to like something else. What in heaven’s name does he mean by ‘better?’ He usually has at the back of his mind, the notion that if he throws over traditional judgment or value, he will find something else. Something more real or solid on which to base a new scheme of values. He will say, for example: we must abandon irrational taboos, and base our values on the good of the community. As if the maxim: ‘Thou Shalt Promote The Good Of The Community’ were anything more than a polysyllabic variant of 'do as you would be done by’ [Mat.7:127]. Which has itself no other basis than the old universal value judgment he claims to be rejecting.”

7:28-8:10 “This whole attempt to jettison traditional values as something subjective, and to substitute the new scheme of values for them, that is wrong. It is like trying to lift yourself by your own coat collar. Let us get two propositions written into our minds with indelible ink. 1. The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value, than of planting a new sun in the sky, or a new primary color in the spectrum. 2. Every attempt to do so consists in arbitrarily selecting one maxim of traditional morality, isolating it from the rest, and erecting it to an ‘una necessarium.’ [the sole criteria]”

Well thank you GulfTiger for completely crushing my ‘moral reformer’ way of thought.

But from these quotes, it seems to me that you are correct, Panache45, in saying C.S.Lewis equates objective morality with traditional morality. But, mistaken in that, Lewis says traditional morality is from the very beginning of our first tribe’s sense of religion/morality. See here how he says, “‘Thou Shalt Promote The Good Of The Community’ were anything more than a polysyllabic variant of 'do as you would be done by’ [Mat.7:127]. Which has itself no other basis than the old[er still] universal value judgment [the traditional that is older than Christianity] he claims to be rejecting.”
He is saying that before we ruined our morality (our knowledge of good and evil) by intermingling it with subjectivity, all religions/moralities/traditions were valid; as they all sprung forth from, and kept true to, the same proto-axioms that our first ape ancestors knew to be true and lived by.
To take a quote from the Stanford link I attributed to you Panache45, "The purpose of proceeding historically is to substantiate the claim that morality and religion have been inseparable until very recently, and that our moral vocabulary is still deeply infused with this history.”

The best place to build a house is on firm, level, ground. C.S.Lewis shows that all ways of valuing things or believing or acting are all variations on "The human mind … inventing a new value…[with] every attempt to do so consists in arbitrarily selecting one maxim of traditional morality, isolating it from the rest, and erecting it to an ‘una necessarium.’ [the sole criteria]” As such, the only way to properly act/think/behave is to do so with all traditional maxims/morality on a perfectly even foot, with none ever rising in importance or relevance above the others. For that way has your stable base turn to shifting sand. Now what would that even look like? To hold all moral actions/choices as perfectly equal in all contexts? I do not know. Someone help me visualize this please.

Mangetout, thank you for cutting through the BS of minutiae that I was spiraling towards. But, do you agree that some things that make you feel happy and that do not bother others could be something still worth changing, or at least moderating in order to stave off future ill effects? Say I am alone and retired and I love to eat junk food, or heavily drink, or do whatever that will leave my last years of life an agony. Would my life have a subjectively better outcome if I tried to find some inner/outer strength to help me improve my health? Or would the pain/hardship of such change outweigh the later quality of life benefits?

Ah, Panache45 I would love it if you could expand upon your thoughts for me. Is it something like: to better appreciate the good in life, bad experiences are necessary to give context and depth to life? Is empathy like a bucket full of water; in that, you only have so much to go around, so being able to dismiss or rationalize away the suffering of others as “karmic” saves it up for those that really deserve your support? Or am I just insane and am completely missing your point because you are speaking from a way of thought that is a mental blind-spot to me? (like a bronze sky, or a feminine key?)

Octopus, I think I see where you are going with this, could you do me a favor and watch GulfTiger’s link? Specifically, pause the video around 0:40-0:50 and read Nietzsche’s quote “What is good? Power itself. What is evil? All that is born of weakness.” Are you really advocating for ultimate strength and good being a cold dead universe full of black holes? I have a short story I would love for you to read that is about just that by Seth Dickinson Beneath Ceaseless Skies | Sekhmet Hunts the Dying Gnosis: A Computation by Seth Dickinson after reading this, do you still root for Sekhmet, or do you prefer Set?

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Your post is a little screed-like, but I have taken a similar view on “deserve” for some time now. In fact I think it has no real meaning at all, and attempts to put meaning on it cause people to invent false explanations that can manifest in very unpleasant ways.

I had wondered where I got this idea from and I see that it probably was from The Dispossessed. I should reread it.

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Fifteen minutes of CS Lewis talking? Do you know just how long that would be if you were tripping? Almost as long as it would be if you weren’t, which is several months. And no, “without the LSD” is never the right answer.

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I did not read very much of your two long posts. However, I loved your title, as it gives me a handle on a subject I have been contemplating writing about. Sidebar comment to follow:

The human (apparent) need and predilection for religion/mysticism (as distinct from a rational approach to the world outside ourselves) could be very aptly called a deep brain poison, and is one that I would gladly push a button* to eradicate if I could.

*Referring to another thread in another forum that I was reading a few minutes ago.

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I don’t have any thought on deserve, but I wanted to recommend A Fire on the Deep by Vernor Vinge. Archaeologists investigating a data base awaken something far better left untouched. A sort of computer virus threatens civilizations across the galaxy.

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Wait a minute, I think that I might have grasped something new (to me) by the tail. This is fun, please keep talking. Thank you for my growth.
Between the ideas in:
GulfTiger’s C.S.Lewis video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lgcd6jvsCFs&feature=youtu.be and my response to it,

This deeper book analysis about the phenomenology of language The Phenomenology of Language in David Abram’s ‘The Spell of the Sensuous’ | Blue Labyrinths

But mostly from this very long and in depth talk with the author, David Abram, about his ideas in his book The Spell of The Sensuous Dr. David Abram - The Spell of Literacy - Children of the Code

and our own Roderick Femm’s input "The human (apparent) need and predilection for religion/mysticism (as distinct from a rational approach to the world outside ourselves)”

Let me see if I can order my thoughts on this correctly, with sufficient synthesis on my part so I don’t just quote-bomb. tl;dr= before the written word, our ancestors read and understood their environment as well as we read and derive greater meaning from text. Their objective morality/religion, as C.S.Lewis would put it, was ultimately an ecological/biological fate that they learned and codified into stories. They had to form their morality/religion the way they did simply because that was how the biology/sociology of our Neanderthal ancestors conflicted and meshed with nature and ultimately carved out its own ecological niche. All of those “objective morals” were in fact objectively true for the time. You would die otherwise.

Our need for the mystic, to inject wonder and magic into our lives (by belief in religion, reading engrossing books, or watching entertainment, etc.), is a reflex from our animistic past (feeling/knowing that all things are alive and connected, us as part of the great cycle/web) which is entangled with (or maybe our reason for) our desire to learn and grow and understand our place in the universe. As we learned text, the constant need to read all of Nature for danger or opportunity turned into simply reading a farmer’s almanac. Our intimate connection to Nature was eroded, replaced with a new way of parsing the world; that of abstract symbols and greater abstractions of abstractions, all cooked up from and ending in human minds reflecting upon themselves. (This is where C.S.Lewis thinks everything went wrong) As we scienced our way through explaining Nature, now thought of as dead and passive, (as compared with an animistic viewpoint) and the God of the Gaps grew smaller, we became more disillusioned with the world, and more prone to entwine ourselves with anything that vaguely promised to be close to meeting that animistic urge that has been carved into our DNA over the millennium.
Maybe there is no such thing as “brain poison” or “bad choices,” only the following of our internal rules which served us well enough in the past, but in this new situation has failed to properly adapt or stay relevant. So C.S.Lewis’ claims that turning subjectivity towards our morality devolves into -is it good for you? That’s nice I guess- a shattering of God given eternal truths, and that any real idea we put forward is just an exalting of one or a few of the maxims of traditional morality over the others, is correct. But also missing a greater point. That is, everything changes. The maxims of traditional morality are not a flat shield that eternally protects people from evil. They are the ever changing teeth of a key and pins of a lock that everyone uses dynamically to gain access to others and lock away their own vulnerabilities.

Maybe subjective and objective are not opposites, but instead are the same thing seen under different strengths of magnification. The objective facts of living as hunter-gatherers on the African plains in 10,000BC, and the objective morality/religion that had been built up around those premises would be useless to the group to live by if they were transported to Russia 10,000BC to live. The old ways might work rarely on a person by person basis, but new “universal” truths need to be established for the new ecological niche they inhabit.
Blarg, it is too late now to keep writing. Maybe later I will add to this in another post, but for now have a quote-bomb. Sorry.

[QUOTE=]
Oral indigenous cultures separated by time and space, as well as philosophers separated in the same way, tend towards a similar conclusion: that the landscape is a sensuous field, and we are but one point of view or way of being which is in reciprocity, in expressive communication, with other points of view of ways of being
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bluelabyrinths

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Perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of this book is the discussion on the development of language. Abram takes us on a journey from pre-literacy (where stories and songs were employed as mnemonic devices to remember the accumulated knowledge of the tribe) to pictographic writing systems (e.g. Egyptian hieroglyphics) to the Hebrew ‘aleph-beth’ (as well as an interesting illustration of the Kabbalistic interpretation of words and letters) to the Greek alphabet (which Abrams argues was the first truly phonetic script – in which symbols represent sounds – to sever all ties with the sensuous world). It is this severing of ties, Abram believes, that has greatly contributed to the complete indifference with which we regard and treat the landscape and all that it contains. After all,language is inextricably linked to perception.
It is the author’s contention that the creation and spread of phonetic writing is a major source of our species’ felt distance from other beings and the planet. He argues that our senses were no longer involved in their more primal synaesthetic participation with the landscape, but were now converging towards written letters (purely symbolic representations of exclusively human-made sounds).
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bluelabyrinths

[QUOTE=]
Right. But, I’m wondering if just the very visceral, the very felt inner-sensory experience, audibly (with one’s mind’s ears) hearing this play of words inside our heads—what the Buddhists call roof-brain chatter. It’s not clear to me that that has been in existence very long. We do know that the experience of reading silently is much, much more recent than the experience of reading with the alphabet, which was for many, many centuries an experience of reading aloud. Or at least mumbling, often because there was no punctuation, and there were not even spaces between the words, so that you needed to sort of sound it out in order to discover what the words were that you were reading.
But, in the Middle Ages, once spaces are introduced into the text between words, and various new forms of punctuation, it’s much more possible to see and get the meaning without sounding it out. And so, a kind of inner, just reading-to-one’s-self, becomes possible. It’s evident to me that the experience of inner speech, of inner thinking, as we think inwardly all the time now and we experience it as being interior, does derive from that interiorization, or that moment when we begin to be able to read silently, because the experience of inner discourse, inner thought, is very kindred to the experience of reading silently.
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childrenofthecode

[QUOTE=]
So I see reading as a kind of animistic participation not that different from an indigenous Hopi woman stepping out of the pueblo and walking along the path and having her eyes grabbed by a small bush wherein a spider is weaving its web. And, as she focuses her eyes on that spider, she suddenly feels herself addressed, or spoken to by the spider. Or, a Lakota man strolling down a path and seeing a boulder and his eyes are captured and he focuses on a patch of lichen on that boulder and suddenly finds that the boulder is speaking to him. And, he enters into a conversation with the boulder. We do just the same thing, with our own scratches and scripts. We come down in the morning, open the newspaper, focus our eyes on these little bits of ink, and they start speaking to us. And, we enter into this rich, magical field of conversations happening at other times and other places. This is an intensely concentrated form of animism, but it is animism none-the-less. As outrageous as a talking stone, or a talking spider. We do it with our own scratches and scripts. Our ancestors did it with leaves, spider webs, tracks of animals, clouds, twigs, boulders. It’s as though we have focused down this animistic proclivity of our senses in order to practice it so intensely with our own scratches and scripts, that this new magic we’re engaged in has effectively eclipsed all the other forms of participation in which the human organism once engaged. So, the sun and the moon no longer speak to us. Trees no longer seem to speak directly to us. Boulders, certainly not. Gusts of wind. Uh, uh. But, the page does. Or the neon sign, with its lettering, does. Wherever we see letters of the alphabet, we feel ourselves being spoken to, addressed.
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childrenofthecode

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But multiple subjective traditions don’t add up to objectivity.

It’s amazing how you got that quantity of bullshit from my simple statement. I don’t know where to start.

18

[QUOTE=panache45]
But multiple subjective traditions don’t add up to objectivity.
[/QUOTE]

But many multiple subjective experiences that can form reproducible results equal objectivity, right? If I draw a triangle and add up the degrees inside to 180, and others all draw triangles and all of their’s add up to 180 degrees and no one can draw a triangle otherwise, is that not a basis for an objective mathematical fact that the definition of a triangle is that it has 3 interior angles which add up to 180 degrees? And yet after 2000 years of this objective mathematical proof, people discovered spherical geometry, whereby if you draw a triangle on a ball, its inner angles add up to more than 180 degrees, all the time (except when you draw small enough that the spherical surface acts like a flat sheet of paper again).

The objective fact of a triangle having its 3 inner angles add up to exactly 180 is still absolutely true… as long as we add the caveat that it only applies on a flat plane. The objective fact that triangles have inner angles adding up to more than 180 is absolutely true… again with the caveat that it only applies when drawing on spheres.

Objectivity is not some eternally True-in-every-event thing handed down by God. It is subjective to the specific realm it is being discussed in (subjectively relevant to either the flat or spherical realm it is drawn upon).

What are traditions but a codified group of “do and do nots” that have, over time, come to be proven useful to a tribe’s survival in their specific circumstances? They have learned many objective truths for carving out a living against Nature’s best efforts, and if they were not followed, they died. It doesn’t mean that a tribe that learned the objective truth (for that time) that pigs tended to be full of nasty parasites, and that we should not eat that animal if we want to stay healthy, should stay believing their old ways well into the future when pigs are very healthy and clean now thanks to the modern farm.

That objective fact slowly slid away into subjectivity (or perhaps everything should come with a footnote of *only True in this specific time and place and level of technology, etc.) as technology improved and agrarian communes turned into bustling cities and fewer people got sick from not following “traditions.”

I am saying that “subjective traditions” are directly analogous to “triangles on a paper.” Each “subjective tradition” that all groups of humans, and even the innate habits of other animals, have followed are subjective in the sense that their way of living was objectively true only for them. They lived their lives on a flat paper or another tribe on a sphere or yet other tribes lived on their own unique kinds of curved space. We do as well today. If you want something truly eternal, “objectivity that encompasses all subjective experiences for all of time” then all you -maybe- can say is “a triangle has 3 intersecting lines.” The end full stop. Or, “life will find a way to propagate.”

[QUOTE=panache45]
It’s amazing how you got that quantity of bullshit from my simple statement. I don’t know where to start.
[/QUOTE]

Sorry, I like to learn through analogies. I know that nothing can truly be perfectly analogous. If they were they would be the same thing, even in greater symmetry than synonyms. But please, teach me your way of thinking through any means that you find best. Please note that I 100% agree with the quote from The Dispossessed, it spoke to me as deeply as it did to our own Dr.Strangelove. I myself have nothing more in my head that I can offer you, if that quote did not change your mind. Tell me more about how “deserve” augments your empathy. Try breaking apart Ursula Le Guin’s idea for me. Show me where it falls apart. Please and Thank you.

19

What if it turns out that an un-examined life IS worth living, afterall?

Not everything has to mean something.

20

[QUOTE=QuickSilver]
What if it turns out that an un-examined life IS worth living, afterall? Not everything has to mean something.
[/QUOTE]

I think you are right. Every life form that is not completely automatic examines its quality of life from time to time and takes steps towards improving said quality of life. Sometimes the only improvement we can image is suicide. Take, for example, Flipper’s suicide:

[QUOTE=LoganHill]
he visited Kathy [Flipper], who by then was “retired” and living alone in a tank in Florida. She was noticeably anxious (something he now calls “captive-dolphin depression syndrome”). On the day that changed everything, she swam into his arms and ceased breathing, sinking to the bottom of the tank. O’Barry emphasizes that, unlike humans, dolphins are not “automatic breathers”; they can choose to stop. He’s convinced Kathy did just that, in essence committing suicide.
[/QUOTE]

Who else had a greater right to judge if her life was worth living, other than herself? Kathy [Flipper] saw a lifetime of solitude before her, and opted out. But she did so only after seeing her old trainer/buddy again… why wait so long? Did his re-emergence in her life trigger something? If he had never visited, would Kathy have continued to stay barely content with her life?

But what of humans who failed at suicide? Do they all stay true to their initial examination of their life’s worth, or do they regret their decision?

[QUOTE=]
It is estimated that 10-15 % of people who made a suicide attempt die by suicide. Recidivism rate of suicide increases even faster than the subject is close to the index suicide attempt. A one month recurrence rate is 5 %, 12-25 % at one year.
[/QUOTE]

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01176929

[QUOTE=Dr.DavidZigmond]

Suicide should be considered not in isolation, but against the background of behaviour which is harmful to the self. Suicide is thus the most acute and dramatic form of this and represents the ‘absolute’ in the suicidal spectrum. Other forms of self-destructive behaviour may presage later and more serious forms of suicide. Such patterns of behaviour indicate a kind of deficiency syndrome, where the person maladaptively learns that he can relate only by being hurt. The earlier this is countered the more hopeful the outcome, but some personalities seem so damaged and disordered that all help seems inadequate.

Sometimes suicide represents a rational decision taken from a position of mental health. This creates grave problems of ethics and management. However, some people are driven to suicide by a genuine mental illness where medical treatment is fortunately effective and mandatory. Correct diagnosis and referral of these people is a foremost priority.
[/QUOTE]

http://www.marco-learningsystems.com/pages/david-zigmond/suicide.htm
That does not sound too bad (in relation to what was supposed to be a final summation of all a persons physical/psychological worth vs one more second of living), a suicidal recidivism of only 25% after a year (i’m sure it goes up for several more years, though). Those are better odds than criminal recidivism, right? Dr. Zigmond points out that while some people can be mentally healthy and still choose suicide for practical reasons, most choose it as a result of mental illness or having learned maladaptive coping/life strategies.

I am in the camp that says: the only proof of someone having a life not worth living is that he successfully kills himself. If he fails and chooses not to, as soon as he is recovered enough to try again, his own actions of staving off death and preferring life are proof enough that his life is worth living. I agree that a completely unexamined life, such as that as an extreme amnesiac who can only live in the moment, is by definition worth living; because, no thoughts or actions to the contrary would ever enter that mind or be enacted.
But I do have to disagree with you here:

[QUOTE=QuickSilver]
Not everything has to mean something.
[/QUOTE]

I contend that everything means exactly as much as it does. Take for example the philosopher’s beard problem. Wherein we are asked, ‘what is a beard?’ We give a definition, and then the next question becomes: ‘is it still a beard if we remove one hair?’ And the questions and answers repeat as turtles all the way down. It is a way of asking for such unending specificity that the concept of beard itself starts to lose meaning. For example: if we agree that a beard is at least a symmetry three hairs, one on each cheek and one on the middle of the chin of at least an inch of length per hair; the next question would be ‘why can’t we agree that shaving off a micrometer of hair off the ends of the hairs would also still be a beard?’ And so on and so forth, we drown in minutiae until we are essentially forced out of exhaustion to admit “i’ll know it [a beard, a specific race, etc] when I see it.” and our opponent would crow about our lack of objectivity and our need to run home to the warm embrace of our subjective momma and such.

I can’t beat that line of questioning, but I at least can draw a line in the sand and confidently say that each atom added or subtracted from a beard adds or subtracts exactly that much. Every cell length closer or farther, denser or sparser, makes the beard exactly that cell length different. No more or less. If others want to add extra meaning to a thing beyond what it simply is (the sun rising and being worshiped as a god) it can also be taken away just as easily (we know the sun is just a miasma of incandescent plasma -thanks They Might Be Giants) but what base meaning a thing has is unchangeable as it simply and exactly is what it is.