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I was talking more about the general capacity humans have to be happy. As in, not just me.

I agree that we don't live lives of such high quality that we're in danger of crossing into saccharine territory, but life gives you the opportunity to improve things for others and for yourself. And perhaps I am just an overly optimistic twit, but I do believe humanity is capable of treating itself of its self-destructive tendencies along with the other things that ail us that aren't so self-inflicted.

I said this earlier, but I would just make the simple argument that happiness only comes at the cost of something. No one is ever happy for free, so to speak. Everything is indirectly sadistic in quality. Down to the food you eat. You know how many sentient creatures perish painfully at our hand just to put food on your plate? The hours of boredom and abuse the seamstresses that make your clothes endure? Everything you do has suffering attached to it down the line. I'm not saying you're not allowed to enjoy any of this stuff--if you didn't, it would be a colossal waste of the suffering. I'm just saying that I don't really buy the happiness argument when the suffering demonstrably outweighs any happiness. Unless you're going to try to argue that your food and your clothes are somehow worth all that suffering. You'd be wrong.

Quote from: Not Comms Officer on April 20, 2015, 12:18:16 AM

That's a fucking retarded metaphor since the chance of you living an enjoyable life is far, far higher than the chance of winning a lottery. Say, 85-90% comparing to 0.000000001% chance.

Where's your evidence that 85% of people enjoy life?

And can you really trust people who say that they do?

I'm just making a guess clearly (but I guess you couldn't read that part), but there's no doubt that a far higher percentage than 0.000000001% of people are living enjoyable lives but that doesn't seem to be resonating well in your head.

You are yet again proving that you have no idea what you're talking about.

Quote from: Not Comms Officer on April 20, 2015, 12:24:43 AM

I'm just making a guess clearly (but I guess you couldn't read that part), but there's no doubt that a far higher percentage than 0.000000001% of people are living enjoyable lives but that doesn't seem to be resonating well in your head.

You are yet again proving that you have no idea what you're talking about.

How old are you? Less than 30, I'd guess.

Obviously (I'm 20). And you're even younger than me. So what the fuck do you know? LOL

Quote from: Not Comms Officer on April 20, 2015, 12:28:03 AM

Obviously (I'm 20). And you're even younger than me. So what the fuck do you know? LOL

I know that you've never had any sort of real suffering happen in your life. At all.

Give it 30-50 years. You'll get yours. And then you can tell me how great life is then.

I know I will. And I probably won't give enough shits to even answer you then. But then on the other hand, I have yet to meet somebody who is a lot older than me who says that life isn't worth living/imposing, so you'll be wrong again.

That's because they have addictions. Addictions to family, addictions to food, addictions to whatever. It doesn't justify the imposition. Nothing has any intrinsic value except for suffering.

I'm doubtful of that.

You seem to have an addiction for suffering since you can't help but to mention it in every second post of yours.

And #edge

"Nothing is real except for suffering". Do you have any idea how stupid you're sounding right now?

"Nothing is real except for suffering". Do you have any idea how stupid you're sounding right now?

Good thing that's not even close to what I said.

Quote from: Ushan on April 19, 2015, 11:56:21 PM

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I was talking more about the general capacity humans have to be happy. As in, not just me.

I agree that we don't live lives of such high quality that we're in danger of crossing into saccharine territory, but life gives you the opportunity to improve things for others and for yourself. And perhaps I am just an overly optimistic twit, but I do believe humanity is capable of treating itself of its self-destructive tendencies along with the other things that ail us that aren't so self-inflicted.

I said this earlier, but I would just make the simple argument that happiness only comes at the cost of something. No one is ever happy for free, so to speak. Everything is indirectly sadistic in quality. Down to the food you eat. You know how many sentient creatures perish painfully at our hand just to put food on your plate? The hours of boredom and abuse the seamstresses that make your clothes endure? Everything you do has suffering attached to it down the line. I'm not saying you're not allowed to enjoy any of this stuff--if you didn't, it would be a colossal waste of the suffering. I'm just saying that I don't really buy the happiness argument when the suffering demonstrably outweighs any happiness. Unless you're going to try to argue that your food and your clothes are somehow worth all that suffering. You'd be wrong.

My problem here is that the system that we live in, that allows for this massive imbalance in the scales is not necessarily one that can't be changed or replaced provided advancement in areas like robotics and biology. What if we where able to grow and harvest meat without it being attached to a conscious being? What if were able to make human labour unnecessary in the vast majority of production of goods and services? What economic incentive would there be to maintain an economic system based on money earned through production of goods and services if we were able to provide for ourselves with robotic labour?

Yes we could just choose to end the human race here and now, but wouldn't that make the struggles of our ancestors a huge waste of time, much like subjecting animals to shit conditions for the sake of mass-producing their meat so that I'll then buy and then throw in the trash, while deriving no pleasure from any of that?

The way I see it, we've gotten to a point in human history where scientific advancement has accelerated to orders of magnitude beyond what we were achieving a thousand years ago, and the less than helpful perspectives and traditions of the past are being questioned and abandoned, so we might as well keep going at it, until we get to a point where we've optimized the ratio of suffering to happiness in our society.

Quote from: Not Comms Officer on April 20, 2015, 12:48:50 AM

"Nothing has any intrinsic value except for suffering." It's pretty close, honestly. And you have yet to prove that your statement is even remotely true. And no, proof from that loser mentor of yours doesn't count cause he's a mentally retarded jackass.

Present me with one other thing that has intrinsic value other than feelings.

Cause suffering is the only feeling that exists.

Quote from: Not Comms Officer on April 20, 2015, 01:03:47 AM

Cause suffering is the only feeling that exists.

Good thing I never said that.

Present me with one thing that has intrinsic value other than feelings.

"Present me with one other thing that has intrinsic value other than feelings."

"Nothing has any intrinsic value except for suffering."

So the only feeling with "intrinsic value" is suffering according to you.

Probably going to regret stepping into this one. So I'll just drop off what I can say at hand.

Life, and generally existence itself, will never be peachy Verb. Nothing in our universe works that way. And nothing, likely ever will. Stars burn and die out. They expand, and explode. Total destruction of the system of planets orbiting around them. At one point, what drives our universe will cease. Arguably you could view that as rather negative. Destruction.

Suffering as we call it only exists beceause it's only one side. If there was no suffering, that would likely be the close definition of perfection, which as we know, cannot exist. Life doesn't work in one form. It has two opposing sides, always. Working order. And entropy. Our moral views, good and bad. And so on and so forth.

I'll use myself as an example.

I've not had a peachy life. Terrible childhood. And these days I can say I'm not cheery either.

However. That shitty experience as a kid, stuck with me. I looked at it, and I told myself that I never wanted to generate that particular feeling in anybody. That bad feeling, or feelings.

As such I try my best for everybody around me.

In which case you could say that from suffering, I flipped to the other side of the coin. Of course I'm not flawless. Nobody is. I get upset and I'm sure I've done things to upset people. But to a greatly, greatly reduced degree than if I decided as I grew older that I would emmulate my growing up experiences.

However, Verb, we come down to the reality of things. Suffering is a human construct. Derived from emotions and pain. I would argue, that much of what we construct as people, are illusions.

Aka, good and bad.

Too bad he's not gonna read that. :/

So the only feeling with "intrinsic value" is suffering according to you.

Suffering is the root of all meaning. Without it, life would be pointless. That's my argument. You can't present me with anything that would give life any value that isn't rooted in suffering.

I really don't give a shit, tbh

And I guess, since I'm talking to myself here, I'll make one last post here for tonight Verb. As I said. Put your sense of morality and emotion in the trash can for a second like you put dark souls there.

Without morality or emotional standpoint, because lets face it, human morality and emotions are unstable variables, looking at the very core of how the universe itself functions, you're left with creation and destruction. But both have no origin point. One does not overtake the other.

Take atoms. Clump atoms together, and a structure is created. However, over time, atoms in any structure are lost. As a result, that structure is destroyed.

But those atoms that are lost? They don't just dissappear. They're integrated into another structure. It's a continous cycle of loss and reformation.

Now, I'm arguing barebones constants without the addition of human variables. Which is, inherently what you argue over. Which, are in reality, illusions and constructs.

Take a child. Raise him to kill. Teach him that killing is good. His perception, as a living entity, will give him pleasure to inflict suffering. That perception of his, is his reality. And it is only viewed as inherently evil or bad by us, because of our sense of conformity, like we talked about a while back.

An opposing force and point of view to our own that we take comfort in.

Now we come to action, and reaction. This can be rather delayed. An example of this being, myself. I went through a good few years of shitty childhood before I ended up here. But through all of those actions I experienced from people, eventually, I reacted. I reacted in the opposite way that people acted towards me.

And even from that standpoint, it is still, creation and destruction.

Our entire reality functions on it. Think of an explosion. Arguably, on both scales, an explosion is destructive, and inherently negative to anything caught in it.

A volcano exploding.
A car bomb exploding.
A star exploding.

At the end of all three, something new is created. Ash fertilizes soil. A carb bomb incinerates the structure and people around it. Those atomic materials are dispersed and will, eventually reform into something else. A star, while taking out its system, will give rise to multiple stars which in turn create more systems.

You're viewing suffering, as a point. Like it's a start point. When really, there are no points. Destruction, and creation, simply, are.

If you remove one from the equation, the other will not function. Remove either side, and the other will not function.

And on that last note.

Materials were used to create the atomic bomb. Materials, were destroyed, and used, in order to create, the atomic bomb. Which was then dropped on hiroshima, and destroyed it. The suffering of those people, was real. But on a fundamental level, every single atom that was ripped apart by the bomb went back into something. New life. New structures. Elements.

I'm not trying to say that suffering is all sunshine and bunnies. Lets face it. Pain, is pain. But happy, is also happy.

Happiness is shorter than pain and yet still equal. Take a prisoner. Put him in prison, in solitary for a year. Pure misery. One long, agonizing year in solitary.

And then release him. The happiness upon release, the re-experiencing of things he took for granted and missed, while although short, is tremendously powerful. So powerful that one year of solitary, while not being forgotten or washed away, is immidiately put into the background by said prisoner's sheer happiness.

It's not one side because there isn't just one side. It's both. Without fail, it's always both, feeding off each other. In order to create something you have to destroy something first. And in order to destroy something, there has to be something to be destroyed in the first place.

The same concept can be applied to both happiness and misery.

And my ramble is done.

Oh look, he changed his stance. Nobody EVER DOES THAT!!!111!!11!
Are you saying that I should change my stance? Not gonna happen.

I wasn't going to post since midget is Le Ruse Master Supreme of Overlord Meta's Serious Board, but meh.

I don't give a shit tbh.  I'm for abortion, leaning more towards only using it to save a mother's life, in terms of rape, etc

Just because one guy out of millions and tens of millions changed his stance, everyone should follow suit?  Fuck that