In most cases that has selfishness hidden inside it too. E.g. the offspring of parents will usually take precedence over the other kids; that’s purely a form of selfishness; they didn’t do anything criminal but they obviously gave preferential treatment “to their own”.
I.e. those things are mostly parental; it can also be societal; but we should never forget it’s always at the same time “but MY society is first”(nationalism is an extreme form but all families and groups do it in part) .
If they want to have family, yes
But I would prefer to read “should be allowed to adopt”, as I don’t see any benefits in forcing people who don’t want kids to adopt kids they don’t even share genetic background with.
That sounds like a recipe for abuse to me.
That’s a very unnecessarily conservative view. If you want them to contribute, they could do it in alternative ways (e.g. provide for their nephews (look up the Hijra of Asia).
Raising the next generation is the current generation’s obligation and duty. It is shameful how the current culture abandons this duty. I think there’s lots of different ways to do this. Maybe you don’t raise kids directly but you work as a teacher. Maybe you write a great book that is used as textbook in the high school classes of the future.
But if all one cares about is one’s own ephemeral “happiness,” without a care about leaving a legacy behind after their death, then shame on them. Period. The purpose of life is not happiness, it is the continuation of life by improving circumstances for those who come after us.
It’s hardly conservative, considering that in his home country, conservatives are fighting to forbid adoption by homosexual couples xD
But forcing people to do something is kinda conservative, so it’s somewhere in-between progressive conservatism and conservative liberalism (or whatever the official words for those are)
You talk as if choice is nondeterministic. People will do what the general environment created them to do.
Also in older societies a lot of poor or weak people never had kids but you only remember the survivors.
I don’t believe in forcing people to do anything. I DO believe in encouragement. Things like tax credits. I think that the traditional strategy of religious/social conservatives towards abortion is WAY too focused on the stick of criminalizing womens’ choices and not nearly focused enough on the carrot of actually giving women good reasons to choose not to terminate an unwanted pregnancy and choose adoption. I think adoption currently sucks and I don’t blame women for not wanting to do it.
Btw I’d rather not even discuss this, but I don’t like people saying that I’m in the politics of forcing people.
This paragraph is almost completely fine, but this one:
is completely short-sighted.
Who says the people you described don’t in various ways help others perform their “duties and obligations”, themselves unburdened with such serious affairs, they can advance other things important for our future.
You can probably think about specific examples of people you know and how they positively impact our future if you give it a try, but if you can’t, here are a few examples:
IMO, they all serve a purpose in the big picture of things. Whatever they do, whatever they left behind, they have served their purpose. You just gotta widen your horizon even more than you’re used to to find them.
I believe in Vedic religion and tradition they call this “Dharma”, and together with “Karma” and “Moksha”, it forms their own “holy trinity” of “life, death and rebirth”. Dharma means duty/obligation or in this context it’s “life”, Karma is…well, everyone knows, in this case it’s “rebirth”, and Moksha is liberation from duty, or in this context, “death”.
Surely you must appreciate the Vedic example, because India is now a global leader in population numbers, so they’re doing what you’re proposing better than anyone else.
TL;DR - you can literally do nothing your whole life and still serve a purpose for the greater good.
Much better. We have to be careful with how we phrase things nowadays. You said it yourself to me, more than once
Do people die without reproduction? Are sterile people dead, or not human?
Reproduction is optional in any life.
People used to have all kind of values that were also understood to be necessary for human survival and aren’t anymore.
That is not to say that reproduction is bad. It’s just not the focus of life, unless you make it the focus of YOUR life. Postulating people have a obrigation on the continuation of a species ends up smothering people that can’t or wont have children.
I don’t believe in an immortal soul. I don’t believe in an afterlife. I don’t believe in reincarnation.
I believe that consciousness is temporary. I believe that, in the instant of your death, nothing that you have thought or felt, no happiness or pleasure or pain that you’ve felt, will ever matter again. Utterly meaningless, zero value. There will no longer be a you to experience it.
I believe that the only way for consciousness to have any meaning at all is as a means to an end in the form of action, prior to death. As animals, we do not do things so that we can have brains; we have brains so that we can do things. The world inside your head is not the real world; the real world is the material world that will keep on existing after you’re dead and gone.
In short, I consider philosophical idealism to be childish, and I advocate philosophical materialism. And yes, seeing adults act in a childish way can upset me.
To add to my previous post…
“You are not special. You’re not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We’re all part of the same compost heap.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Some people view this quote as nihilistic or existentialist, as if their own specialness is so important, so central to their worldview, that without that specialness there can be no stable worldview, only some cosmic absurdity. That is a failure to truly embrace the message. Specialness is relative. For you not to be special, there must be things more special than you, outside you.
I do, and I can make you believe. In fact, I don’t believe in it, I know it. It’s science.
When you die, things related to you start having a bigger impact on people who consume those things. Those things can be material (land, house, any art - songs, books, pictures…), or immaterial aka spiritual (shared experiences you had with people who are still alive, your beliefs, values, knowledge…). Since you’re no longer here, and people have a hole they need to fill somehow, they start filling it with those things - they give them bigger value (or smaller value, if those things are mostly bad xD).
With time and their own experience, they will single out the most important of those things and leave them to their next generation, and so on and so on…so that in a way, you can say their soul was, indeed immortal.
That is, if you and I can agree that, for example, Aristotle’s soul is immortal. If we can’t, then, just forget this paragraph xD
Naturally, me neither.
Me neither. But I can make an analogy which could make it sort of make sense, but not in a literal way, but metaphorically.
Sharing the same genetic background as our oldest ancestors, we all share some similarities with people who have died a long time - be it personalities, propensities for disease or similar things which are mostly genetically shared. Now all it takes is a similar/comparable environment and similar existential pressures, and you can say with confidence bigger than 99% that a person is now alive who has died hundreds of years ago.
Again, not literally, but almost - if you read as much as I did, or as much as someone with your intellect and language skills probably did, you have to have noticed those similarities in author’s words, thoughts and beliefs. We can’t possibly be that different from our ancestors as much as our existential pressures and knowledge is similar.
The only thing that changes through history are what you call “ephemeral”, material things. What the whole science combined has learned in the last thousand years doesn’t even begin to approach what spirituality and religion had known since first human wrote a book, and I guarantee you this, having researched it for all decades.
It’ll take a lot of generations to prove some of them, but once we begin…I’m afraid to even speculate what comes next (not that I could, not knowing when that will happen and what the world will look like then).
It is.
Not quite. Connected to “soul immortality”. It does leave an imprint on people you leave behind. Your pains, pleasures and intense experiences are literally imprinted in your DNA and transferred to your offsprings by an epigenetic process called (surprise) “imprinting”. In science, those epigenetic changes are called “epigenetic marks”, and I believe it’s popularly known as “generational trauma”.
If you’re afraid of snakes or number 13, chances are, some of your ancestors had a close encounter with one of those (or both). No kidding. Well, half-kidding. I don’t really think that’s how specific phobias come to life, but it’s definitely how “performance anxiety” still survives the fact that we won’t die if we fail one test or embarrass ourselves during public speaking.
I will pretend I didn’t read this. It’s confusing to me, all those people talking philosophy, saying one of them is wrong and the other is right. Obviously, all of them are right to some extent, in some contexts and all of them are wrong in other contexts.
Actually, compost serves a purpose in the bigger picture. A creative, generational one - it helps plants grow, and then plants help for animals and other species to live.
So, from my perspective, it’s you and Chuck who don’t understand the big picture xD
Aristotle’s works have lasted long after his death. But what they are is not his soul, any more than a photograph of me is my body.
And I very much doubt that the record of his thoughts will truly last forever; at some point, perhaps many thousands of years into the future, they will be lost forever. Long-lived, certainly; immortal, not so much.
That said, I admire Aristotle precisely because his works have lasted long and sent echoes throughout history. He left a considerable legacy, one far greater than any he could have had by raising children. The greatest among humanity leave such legacies, but the greatest among us are not representative of us as a whole. There is only room for a small handful of Aristotles per generation, and it’s ridiculous to believe that all of us can be like that. The “normie” way of contributing to the future is by having a family.
I am pro-normal. I am also pro-weird. I don’t view these as contradictory; indeed, I view them as synergetic. Aristotle, and the other great weirdos of history like Einstein and Shakespeare, could not have been the delightful eccentrics that they were if not for the support of normal people. They were all made possible, brought into this world by a far less famous mother and a far less famous father, who raised them to be the people that they became. It is something like a symbiotic relationship. The normies make the eccentrics better, and the eccentrics make the normies better.
They NEED each other. The problem is in thinking that one can just abandon the other, and have everything be fine. I am, like pretty much everyone these days, against social conservatism that goes so far that it tries to eliminate eccentricity for the sake of being eccentric. But I’m also equally against social progressivism that goes so far that it tries to dismantle traditional family values. We can and should have both, with the majority doing the normal things. I understand that this means that there is some competition for who gets to be special and who doesn’t get to be, but I’m sorry, we just all can’t be rock stars. There is only so much “sacrificial genetic strategies” that a population can sustain, beyond which it becomes detrimental.
Weird isn’t bad. I like weird. But in most cases, what is weird should remain weird. In most cases, it’s weird for a reason.
If this happens, which I doubt, then it happens at conception. What you experience afterwards is irrelevant.
I have already stated that the purpose of consciousness is action, and reproduction is action.
do people actually want 30 minute matches?
I think they are fun every once in a while but seriously, the game is healthier if its’ generally ending turns 7-9.
galakrond priest meta was legitimately one of the most miserable times in HS history (no offense Schyla) because every match boiled down to massive stallfests
For the most part, yeah, but if you keep having intense experiences which are shared with your offspring(s), then your offsprings will transfer them, partly at conception, and partly afterwards, to their own offsprings.
I mean, sure, you can doubt this, but feel free to research about it, I’ve given you more than enough to begin. Saying to things I write so seriously “I doubt this” is not just rude to me, it’s also embarrassing for you, because I wouldn’t state it as a fact if it wasn’t, indeed, a fact.
When I’m not sure about something, I begin the sentence with “I believe” or “I think”, depending on the cognitive faculty which came to that conclusion.
Do you see “I believe” in front of that paragraph?
No, you don’t. You see this sentence, instead:
Which clearly point out it’s a fact.
And then you have this part:
Because I’m not sure if many people know about this and call it that way, but I have seen it called that way.
Can you “explain like I’m 5” this to me? The only people I’ve ever heard say that unironically IRL, are the ultra-conservatives I work with. If that’s where your personal politics are as well, then let’s stop discussing this between you and me right here so we can still be forum friends.
Elsewise, what exactly do you even mean by that phrase?
He is very likely a real person playing a character as a long troll, though.
Imagine putting dual lands and fetch lands in your deck. Also who tf runs 24 lands in the current meta? Some sort of 60 card yorion special deck? With all the fetches and lands that draw/scry/surveil its virtually impossible to miss as hard as you describe.