Marcus Aurelius was a nihilist

 http://www.anus.com/zine/articles/nihil/

But how to define a good life? If we look for absolutes, such as the best comfortable living, or the most power, or the most money or popularity, we find externally-defined things that do not reflect much of satisfaction, except of material want. It makes more sense to look to the ancients and to say that a good life is fulfillment of destiny, or of taking one's place in the inherent. Nihilism removes the sense of a good life as something that can be created outside of the individual, but also acknowledges the frailty of the individual: none of us will always see "truth" in the sense of what is accurate given the external world around us.

To say this is not to endorse a shallow "objectivism," such as that of Alissa Rosenbaum ("Ayn Rand"), for whom materialism became a philosophical object in the tradition in which she was raised, that of Judaism, which despite its dualistic faith-character sees nothing of supernatural or ideal value above material comfort: power, wealth, stature in community. These philosophies of "objectivism" become a parody of themselves, as they have replaced meaning in life with the means to life, bypassing the question of life in actuality. The objectivism of nihilism is closer to that of science or the ancient religious traditions of the Vedas: we are all enclosed in the same space, which operates according to consistent rules, and it acts predictably upon all of us, whether we perceive it or not.

Another way to say this is that when two people play catch, the ball is thrown and follows an objective course, regardless of whether the catcher has her hands in the right place to receive it. If the thrower misjudges her throw, the ball will land afar from the catcher, but the catcher can also compensate, having seen the ball move, and thus catch it. The motion through external reality is "objective," while the thoughts and perceptions of thrower and catcher are "subjective," and the two do not always come together; the game of catch is a fun way to calibrate one's internal sense of reality to reality the external, which operates much as a machine does, predictably according to its structure and the mechanisms therein.

Marcus Aurelius gives us part of the puzzle:

Surely it is an excellent plan, when you are seated before delicacies and choice foods, to impress upon your imagination that this is the dead body of a fish, that the dead body of a bird or pig; and again, that the Falernian wine is grape juice and that robe of purple a lamb's fleece dipped in shellfish's blood; and in matters of sex intercourse, that it is attrition of an entrail and a convulsive expulsion of mere mucus. Surely these are excellent imaginations, going to the heart of actual facts and penetrating them so as to see the kind of things they really are. You should adopt this practice all through your life, and where things make an impression which is very plausible, uncover their nakedness, see into their cheapness, strip off the profession on which they vaunt themselves.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, VI, 13

What is consciousness?

(Watch the video to 5 minutes in)

Consciousness is roughly synonymous with intelligence.

Consciousness is everything that happens in the universe, in every moment being influenced by other things, seen, heard, lit, ..and this goes on everywhere, because structures like neurons have a strictly real-physical-world structure of molecules/atoms, and so it has to be possible this function for influence is potentially applicable anywhere and everywhere in the universe, .. the things that happen in the human world also happen when we don't look, and equally when there are unobserved chain reactions in satellites reflecting light/data back to us from outer space and so on; all this is open for reacting-to; being vehicle for change and influence .. this is the detail and colossal "computing power" of the universe, of reality in its entirety, which allows us to exist, because we play always within its rules and allowances, never divorced or outside of, real physical limits, like the movement of our hands and eyes. They are not human constraints. What we call   individual consciousness or otherwise, general intelligence, is a subset(!) of the whole, wherein intelligence is what "enters" meaningful information and behaviour *for us*, as in the example of animal behavior: insects and strange animals, we seem to say, don't have faces but in contrast dolphins, hippos, cats, dogs, giraffes and elephants and some others do. And so for their behavior: ants are not anything humanoid but cats and dogs have arms and faces and emotions and body-image.    So the limiting scope of human perception itself has to be cast aside if we are to understand objective reality.

Also, aside from there being colossal amounts of physical space being acted on in each millisecond moment, there's some forces well above & beyond human models of comprehension like human meaning; there's the number of things that happen on this planet we don't even have names for, like how human behaviour converges-on and influences itself, ("global socio-cognitive dynamics" perhaps?..), and that invites a new problem of complexity of what natural-world and social systems we affect ourselves through. To begin putting these things into a bigger picture we have to look at the complexity of these systems, and arrange them by complexity, because that is how you account for what is "really" going on. You change the frame of reference, which is actually cognitively synonymous for me with "zooming in/out on/with a picture". And doing that, it includes visualizing images like the globe. Scale is fundamental; we don't care about ants and we have *defined* our own scale within the entire universe; both of scope of complexity and of physical space.

What happens each day? A staggering amount of things, according to a human. People talk, ride aeroplanes, fuck, shoot each other, ride bicycles, shout over video game Internet connections, read online blog posts written days ago and call it talking, read about events which later cause related behaviour in that individual, give birth, play music instruments too loud, eat, troll, come up with new scientific theories, come up with new political propaganda to scare poor people into hating each other, hit and scream at their children, sail a boat, design websites, crush insects, prostitute / sex trafficking, try on new shoes, spray aerosol and air freshener, kill animals, cook meat, read magazines, get addicted to things, climb mountains, ... the list goes on and on and on

Complexity is what we have to organize all of that. There's different, transient symbols/concepts one can use to represent the kinds of things that go on, to organize that hellish amount of information as points of interaction/influence.   I use "the individual", "the society", "human experience" and then the psychological, sociological and so on things are below that - these things are tiered, in a "tree structure". When one thing is more complex than the other, it is "dominating" it; driving and influencing it. Hence, for example; past experiences and value systems and perceptions of the environment drive human behavior; and; human dramas can only account for what we do on Earth, and not for anything much at all beyond the scope of that. Intelligence is simply a system containing subsystems, for example, society is a system containing individual human beings which are systems/machines containing their actions; their bodies; and; humans are systems comprising of ecosystems of cells; systems that are affected by other things from the environment ultimately forming behavioral inclinations in the human, thus, the human is a product of its environment and therefore less complex; driven, ultimately, on all accounts, by the environment.. which is driven by all of physical reality..

Consciousness, then, is the convergence of all systems[a.k.a. "things"][wherein they interact with one another], causing a self-influence; a self-reinforcement; a universally giant positive feedback loop. Occurring everywhere, everything onto everything, all at once. That's the only way it can be, because for example there's no upper limit on the number of human brains that can come into existence. Reality is just that complex. Consciousness is thus the physical reality itself; the cosmos; the universe; a physical system of forces at an atomic/quantum level. It can't exist or be defined only within human meaning, because that changes (in scope) all the time- things come into our scope of meaning all the time; stars and whatnot. Which are actually light perceived in our eyes as it's brought to our attentions, which are actually photon streams being perceived which is actually neural activity which is actually completely imaginary and merely collectively-reciprocated human perception in a sea of naked, insane, autonomous human bodies without any particular purpose or deservedness to be in any state whatsoever [[this notion is absurdism in philosophy]] which is actually molecules / atoms / quantum whatevers right down to only existing in a state of mathematical probability for the next state of what it is / where it will be, which of course changes when human minds observe them (so too would a robot have this effect). Reality is coherent because everything at all times is accounted for; human hair growth and human peripheral perception waste small amounts of energy all the time, for example; the brain doesn't turn them on and off because they have to be there all the time for it to work. As we know in computing.   And that's the only way it can be, for our experiences of these different emergences within this universe to always appear the same; continuous; replicated (above/including the concerns of chaos theory). It has to be emerging from the same-natured system every time.

To give a taste of the complexity involved in consciousness, note that the list of things affecting the human being as it grows up involves daily occurrences of heat, other environmental stuff like visible environment which influences mood (colors); and then there's social happiness, social status; the long list of things that society contributes to what we feel like throughout the day; and there's the daily cycle of bodily action that makes us feel tired/fatigued and whatnot; behavioural habits like staying up too late.. all scientific in nature.    And then acting on that again, the next day, is society again ("why do you stay up so late?"), so these are continual effectors, happening all the time,

And you also have the internal human experience, literally, as Deepak Chopra pointed out there 5min into that video; what we see/perceive/think is actually part of the whole of everything, and by doing so we create thought that does, (although many scientists don't agree??) change the quantum universe in totality. Yes, of course it does, of course it *has to*, because that's part of what needs to be resolved for things to take the next step; for the future to emerge as a product of the present state of it all. Thoughts change reality because they change us whom are actively drawing on past experiences as we function; as we grow and change through life. Thoughts just as experiences change us. They waste our time if nothing else, which is in itself, an *action* because it causes us to say "I wasted time" ...

Anyway, all of this stuff, complexity, is at least something you can separate from time. Time can be thought of as a linear process for this purpose. Where complexity "takes function", or "acts"; "is the universe itself". Physical reality is all the physical functioning of everything that functions, everywhere, at all times. And it created these thoughts I have now, because of a string of "events" in society and in outer space which influenced society the precise way that it did, and (events) in my own mind which "took" me here. Brains are an arbitrary structure with which to describe consciousness, or intelligence, or reality. They are constructs but they are not the total source of anything, they are points that information "travels" across. Vehicles. We are not our bodies but our local environment expressing itself; all of society acting on itself; all things influencing themselves indirectly through us and, equally, the other systems in nature and machinery. The perceived universe is a representation created inside an observing brain; the subjective "human perception" is a part of the objective, physical whole at all times.

But don't take my word for it; I'm a human that claims all life is centered around human concepts.



http://ruthlesstruthdotcom.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/one-song.html

The future is, in a very real way for us, a mass of probabilities.  The future has not yet made itself manifest as reality.  It exists as a sea of possibility, but it does exist.  The actual future, real, here, and now, as the possibilities of things that can be.

The possibility of you going to work next Monday, or calling in sick.  The probability of you reading a book tonight, or watching a film with your friends next Friday.  The probability of you scratching your head in the next 20 minutes, of a meteorite hitting the Earth, of a long-lost acquaintance getting back in touch, of a relationship continuing, or being broken, or a new one starting.

These things do exist as probabilities, always, right here.  They are all very real possibilities, although some are extremely unlikely.  But together, they form a kind of sea of probability that we directly, and in a very real way, experience as the future.

Tribe meets white man for first time

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyHYbsXt05k

(Tagged "aliens" because it demonstrates an alien experience.)

If we saw aliens, wouldn't it be like this at first?

We only know for example stories of individual beings reacting to one another, all autonomous and independently capable. What instead would emerge of/in another planet's species?

Scientist describes how crucial the environment is at infantile development stage

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5bi6x-4aNmM

Civilization

I try my best to listen to all the voices out there, to get a comprehensive sample. I do that because I want to make a realistic and accurate assessment, in so far as that is possible. It is very difficult. I'm limited by my own brain power, time, resources, health, energy. Gawd only knows what there is that never enters the public domain, stuff that the CIA, FSB, MI6, Chinese and other equivalents, know of, that we don't hear about.

I might be repeating myself,  but anyway, over on another site one person claimed that humans survived mass extinctions before.  This person is fully aware of global warming,  but denies that this can cause extinction.  It gets down to the hair splitting notion of that humans, as a species, won't all be wiped out on Tuesday, August 20th, 2013, or whatever,  so therefore the complete extinction of the human race is impossible.  While there is certainly doubt in one's own survival,  I suspect all of the NTE deniers secretly hope that if everyone is going to die,  they get to die last.

“If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.”  ― Albert Einstein

Guy had been talking about droughts in the videos I've been watching, which are what the entire world is contingent on not happening. Global warming is just so fundamental, and then you go to read a "debunking" piece like this;- The hard proof that finally shows global warming forecasts that are...

"It is obvious the world can live with these fluctuations in the level of atmospheric carbon.
There is a correlation between temperature and CO2, but some of my colleagues have put the cart before the horse."

It's more than about the next few decades; it's about the far-future, in a broader context than the next generation or two. Naturally. This is incredibly important stuff all the more because it is bigger than our lives. But the status quo is about living without broad consideration, naturally, because that's how the elites stay rich!   The element of human connotations to our entire global economy and its wealth distribution, is a fundamental in its destruction. Flexibility and investments..


Well, David Icke put it best:

I believe that the human race has developed a form of collective schizophrenia in which we are not only the slaves to this imposed thought behavior, but we are also the police force of it.

It's more crap from the machine that only knows how to pump out self-preserving, ego-stroking headlines. Nothing is allowed other than to toe the line; to wait for a story that pushes something to the surface, which is the only thing mainstream news will touch -

su·per·fi·cial 

/ˌso͞opərˈfiSHəl/
Adjective
Existing or occurring at or on the surface: "superficial damage".
Situated or occurring on the skin or immediately beneath it.

 -Because otherwise it immediately both infringes upon the crowd's right to stay ignorant, and alienates them because the thinking is too hard.  Politics is very similar because if you think about it they can never upset the rich. With everyday people you can't even begin to talk about something broad, something on the level of civilization, because they are actively being dumbed-down and emotionally abused, again I would draw the comparison to cattle. I imagine the cruel guy with the electric rod with the elephants going round in the circle, to be much like people venting frustration by spending their time sarcastically ripping into creationists or "conspiracy theorists".

There's so much to be said, about the terrible, horrifying, unstable world we've built. It would take up an entire book. I only really have an interest to keep psychoanalyzing like I do, maybe I'll write a book, just because. I doubt it would be useful, though, I mean how many people even read books these days? Which itself, in truth, also compounds any kind of decision, any meaning of life, because in this world with mostly stupid people, everyone's screwed. The establishment knows you can't just get people to stop polluting the world, our values are too delusional and dependent on the empire.. empire is having a problem because how it was designed to operate just to get by, is also causing international problems. Nobody seriously made the logical connection, it seems, that an industrial world that just keeps growing and growing adding more complex detail to itself along the way was eventually going to crash. People in the industrialized world now adopt a mindset that, because all our experience points to there being no problem with industrialized civilization, that it can never go wrong. But, a great quote for that-

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows us that faith proves nothing

―Friedrich Nietzsche

What's the situation we're in?

On the other hand,  I have nothing.  No solutions.  I would love to see a wild upswing in bulldozers attacking establishment buildings,  but that's no good either.

I have the arrived at the conclusion that all those people, Stern, Grantham, McKibben, are utterly useless

What's the situation we're in?   Nobody is asking, because nobody truly wants to know, in all its tragic, disturbing detail, above & beyond their own lives to such an extent that they ask every question, everywhere, and spend all their time on thinking about it. We live in a world of a work cycle, where 56 years into space age technology there are programmers punching in individual letters to create technology that is re-invented for the sake of being able to sit on the cash cow of your company's creation seemingly indefinitely by holding it up and saying; "WE did it FIRST."  One overarching theme comes to mind: short-sightedness.

Identity, psychology, the failing of most everyone today to ask questions like why do people in first world nations not enjoy life?; it all factors in. To understand this predicament, which is again what each individual person is actively discouraged and pushed away from by the capitalist model of what we are told all life and existence is, one would need to collect, gather, think about all of those things, about each thing in life and how human beings have been approaching life for the past 100+ years. There's no economic role for this.

That's how you begin to understand life, but from what I gather nobody has a very full understanding of all the processes (human thinking, cognition, and its conditioning is a very central and fundamental thing here), which means we are nowhere near any kind of solution to all of our problems. We[most of us] face near-term extinction by the *addition* of global warming to existing nuclear threats, still with a brainwashed thought process that science and government will save us from societal collapse. We are fascinatingly distant from how scientific our lives actually are- I was just watching Hell's Kitchen US and the contestants approached it like they were going to be the world master chef, like they had a chance, like it would all go well if they just survived the next TV cooking show round of not paying attention to how they think but rather, the emotional, social reality they're immersed in; the stress and the lazy, intellectually bland excuses and short-term appeals to Gordon Ramsay, whose subsequent frustration and anger the show is built around. I found myself thinking; "that's not how you get someone to learn, is it?"    And that is something profound: the status quo successfully instructs us approach our lives emotionally, knowing full well that a) all life is scientific in nature and b) if everyone does that, we are screwed.   And yet it continues!

Literally everyone is immersed in what they think life is, rather than what it would be best to do. Rationalizing, not rational. Disconnected. It reminds me of a story of a child genius that committed suicide because he was sickened with some things about life, like sex, it was alien to him. If you want a taste of how out of touch the world is just read this and take note of your own inner reaction to it. You don't want to accept it, because of how much you want to self-preserve your image of yourself.    Compare that scientific reality of how the universe manages to churn out brains that work so efficiently on the whole, eventually, to modern humanity's wargames and dramas of a similar dim nature, when looking at the bigger picture. Do we truly care? Does that question change if we add "about the planet"? Is it even possible to care? The answers are all there, only, nobody realizes it's in their best and [now] most direct interests to act. But the very meaning and notion of practical action has changed while time slipped by. We are a species that has rushed so fast to try to achieve greatness. Too fast, now, for us to act to save what we know. Police states are coming, extremism is coming; all of this is psychological, scientific reality, as it always has been.

And it also takes too long to reach a point where you can act;- individually, we are products of this society and the way of life that we know, and we will stupidly die for it, for some transient early stage of humanity. I can even feel how much this falls flat on "explaining life" to most people. The status quo teaches all sorts of logical-fallacy shit, like "you can all be richer than most people.. someday, maybe". We are all left to figure out these critical thinking (complex thinking) lessons of life on our own. Again, compare that image to the inane notion that fighting people from another country with an army of soldiers of your own, having psychologically broken them all in, is somehow contributing to the greatness of civilization. It even depends on people being stupid.

And I'm not going to throw in a sincere "I sometimes even wonder whether humanity is worth saving at all"; I'm far beyond that, and anything is worth saving if there's something or someone there to appreciate it. I just find it sad, sad and frustrating, that so many people in this civilization actually see life this way, actually believe logical fallacies like "enemy", as if there was, like saying man is inseparable from war, some pre-determined notion of what life is in a universe where we are actively defining and reshaping it for ourselves with the worldly events right down to the quantum individual level, of what we do, think, accept, believe, breathe. Even the air pressure in the room affects what a person becomes, even the shape of the room they're in and its relative location thus to their walking/travel route each day, changing the people they meet. But it's too profound for the modern mindset we commonly adopt. So much was and is just there, waiting to be explored, "conquered" (owning land and slaves isn't greatness), understood and even, improved. What a concept. Yes.    Everything was possible for humanity, from day 1. Although you could say a lot of the damage was done decades ago. The thinking, the psychology, it's central to everything we do, and the thing we are least is prepared for the new paradigm of life that is emerging. People build lives that don't radically change. The climate and biosphere are able to radically change.

Carl Sagan: The Pale Blue Dot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pfwY2TNehw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz6B-nGPc-c

The valley of the doomed

The teens roared and
The men crouched; sheep

Prized were the pretty-faces' genes
Faking dreams for a desolate society

Bland TV slots drowned out any
Human cries for discussion

News was falsified

People hardly listened and
People hardly thought but
Talked at each other

The people marched for change as
Cash controlled their governments

The innocent loved and
The wise plundered

News became entertainment

The heroes were lost and
The monsters got medals

The rich got richer and
The poor earned poverty

Money made problems

The intelligent nurtured weapons as
The weak screamed

The able were silent and
The exploited ignored

Religious teachings and the media were
Politically weaponized

Children skipped and jumped and
Adults herded

Man never had an enemy but
Endangered himself every day

Animals were bred for taste

Images schooled distracted minds while
Mouths sat open, starved dry, and
Truths begot murder

The deceitful climbed to safety and
The honest were subdued

Objects were chased and
People abandoned

Ideas and technology were sat-on for money

Fake human images, with TV lies, hid
The human cost of daily life;
The fake realities we lived

The human mind was made
Pitiful empire drone

On the backs of children and the afflicted,
Rich civilization ate the mother's hand that fed and
Revelled in the sweets exchanged for future and
Called itself great.

What is the matrix? What does it mean? (An interpretation)

Even if we ARE living in a real universe, the way we perceive, is by our nerves sending electrical signals to our brains, which our brains use to make an interpretation of reality. Replace the nerves with electrical cables giving electrical inputs, and the interpretation as our own personal digital simulation, and there really isn't any difference between the way our brains perceive reality and the Matrix, except that in the film, everyone is part of the same Matrix, while the way our brains perceive, we are each living in our own individual personal Matrices.

As I'm finding out increasingly, the matrix represents all the wildly inappropriate falsities, delusions and fantasies we have created as to who and what we are, in the context of society [media & distractive advertising; idol worship; modern living comforts far removed in appearance from the cost of their production] & modern industrialized life just as much as our perceptions of existence itself.

In particular I know that our physical world is the only thing that can be said to truly exist, in its entirety, in every moment that we pass through-- our brains, perceiving images 80ms behind & creating their own sense of colours and meanings of, what is really truly there, are fully immersed in, technically, a sensory dream or fake environment. What we feel and taste and touch is, ultimately, the brain connecting up existing maps of information to that of the input. And this dovetails with the systemic nature of the matrix; the programming symbols in the final 'vision' scene. Infact there's loads to be written about, particularly spiritually, what the 'vision' scene symbolizes;- the breaking down of what was previously perceived to be a meaningful reality; now, a system with individual people as the tiny cogs that shape its flow. But, more than that: the matrix highlights how we are so attached to our fake reality that we will all gladly individually die rather than face the truth; we have paralyzed ourselves to the truth of existence and, cowardly, despite our cliche hero videogame and movie plots we create for ourselves, we wish to remain ignorant of what existence is and to not have to confront it.

When it applies to all of us, we are overwhelmed and defeated. This global collective subconscious cultural feeling of looming danger is manifested in the zombie apocalypse fiction; in the reactions to the economic crisis; in the all-too-hasty responses to war propaganda. The matrix engulfs us whether we like to deny it and claim race or nation superiority or not; it is there nevertheless holding us and everything we are; and we would be foolish not to learn from history & the scientific nature of our reality, which lie well beyond and outside the realms of human meaning, in truth. Existence must be confronted, we must all (or at least those of us that would survive the increasingly likely crises all converging onto each other) swallow the red pill and with it the systems that we still do not recognize to threaten all of us most gravely and more than any other threat in history. We still do not understand what we are, and that alone with daily threats of extinction should be enough to horrify and humble us all. We are trading the entire future of human existence for the life we have today, and this is not even a conscious decision.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgBViHeiSKM

We should be aware that, for example, it is only 'visiting' people who suffer while the non-human system of the industrialized world trudges on, for the mere sake of tradition and boredom. We should be aware that greatness is not about how many people you can have working and pulling down trees for you, but how many people can live in peaceful and non-taxing living conditions for as long a time as possible, continuing to contribute and produce the kinds of objects and events a civilization can be proud of, and happy to continue fostering for the next 100 million years [a mere half-second if we scale the current universe's age to 1 minute] and beyond. It was never a matter of employee vs. employee; race vs. race; rich vs. poor; hardcore Christians vs. homosexuals or atheists; government vs. people ..it was human beings vs. the scientific nature of reality on the only planet we will ever have. Will we pull the plug on our minds? (safely)? There doesn't seem to be much time left, if any. The matrix holds almost every single human being alive in its grasp, most of all those in power.

(an email I sent) Subject: Extinction of the human species by 2060 - some links

(this is an email I sent to Charles Eisenstein, just putting it here because it's relevant and so I can link to it)


Paul Chefurka also has his own website, where he details some insights about overpopulation-
http://www.paulchefurka.ca/TF.html

-though there's other stuff too. In particular, at the bottom of the main page (there's more, but this is an except):

It's worth mentioning that there is also the possibility of a serious personal difficulty at this point. If someone cannot choose an outer path for whatever reasons, and is also resistant to the idea of inner growth or spirituality as a response the the crisis of an entire planet, then they are truly in a bind. There are few other doorways out of this depth of despair. If one remains stuck here for an extended period of time, life can begin to seem awfully bleak, and violence against either the world or oneself may begin begin to seem like a reasonable option. Keep a watchful eye on your own progress, and if you encounter someone else who may be in this state, please offer them a supportive ear.


Here is another one with some good presentation.
http://truth-out.org/news/item/14655-worse-drought-in-1000-years-could-begin-in-eight-years

This is all very alarming, and yet the media isn't covering it, and (as pointed out by one article I read today) this is, in fact, the biggest global threat by far.


---------------------

I'm convinced mass human dieoff is now a certainty, because I don't see there is a *PRACTICAL* way human behaviour can radically change over the course of just 3 years and not much more. That's about how much time I expect there actually is before radical, non-financially-motivated action is taken to seriously tackle the (at least partly) irreversible changes that have already occurred.

This process of being faced with the reality has kicked me into writing about all of what I know about life, I've just begun mourning and realizing this point mentioned around the "true meaning of the word apocalypse" -- the notion of revealing another more deeply rooted truth that was there all along. And, I have a lot to write about. For example, I'm using a concept of a "1-minute scale universe" to effectively convey the stupidity of our lack of critical thinking in the modern approach towards our very existence. I'm thinking and writing from an objective position with an overarching theory of existence.

I'm thinking distracting myself with this writing is a typical response to despair, but then again, what *is* the appropriate response? There is none. But anyway, now I am (creatively speaking) becoming concerned only with the problem, so this is good as far as writing is concerned.

For reasons expressed above, I'm thinking, now, I would only "give" my book to the elites and write it for "anyone that can take action" .. the alternative is that people would panic, no? I'm writing in as plain-English as possible. There are all these other concerns along with mass human dieoff such as properly maintaining nuclear sites. My mind is looking for a way out. But it's also become a way to criticize all of what we are doing (with the writing). I am theorizing about how you would intentionally create a "great" future if starting from scratch and building a society; getting prompted, which helps me further explain what is so wrong or problematic about how fragile modern human existence is.

I have (and have always had) a great sense of looming danger.. I recently had had it placed in the surveillance state but now I place it in climate change, I generally feel this every day, and I'm learning to live with it. I think I can write a guide on how to psychologically deal with anything. But, anyway, I'm interested to hear a response (the above was an email I sent to a few people- without response)

And I'm happy to talk about why I think the way I do. I also have a blog at: whatislife.ws (although my writing isn't concise or to a single clear point)

I also have a Twitter which is only about existence. https://twitter.com/Sorlaize

thoughts about life (advice)

(it's muddled.. it's more a brain dump than anything, but I like it)


I would LOVE life to be as simple as -be a nice person-; go be a soldier and kill space alien bugs that threaten to fly to our planet and try to eat us. I'd love it if life was that simple. But it's not. So I can't do that; I can't live with that kind of thinking. And you have to learn that, and get out of that mentality. That video gaming mentality where you wish you could stay in the game or the anime forever and have life be that simple forever. You have to grow out of it and change for the better. Because it's not going to get better. No-one's coming to save you. But better news;- life is incredibly complex and you can be a great human being. No-one's stopping you. That's what we truly mean when we say life is what you make it. Life grants you the power to do all of this. To become the kind of person that is concerned about our world and is moved to change it. To be intelligent, but/and also to feel. To be a science-minded person but also with a heart. A big, worldly heart. Life grants you all this and more. There are many beautiful things that life can be, if only you and everyone else picks yourself up when you get down, and actually talks to one another: you need to talk to each other, actually DISCUSS these issues like relationships and "that feel when no girlfriend". How to approach people; what love even is; how to make a better person of yourself. You, you the people are the change, and this is basically what Jesus was saying from the beginning. Screw the rules, rules are nothing. Be friendly and brotherly to the human beings around you; help them as you would your son/daughter eventually; discuss and sharpen your knowledge by teaching what you already know.


(inspired by this 4chan thread, after reading similar ones every so often)

http://www.eruptingmind.com/beating-the-reptilian-brain/

Understanding the triggers that you are exposed to, and their resulting effects, is therefore extremely important if you want to live a conscious life where you consciously choose what to do and how to feel.

just imagine for a moment-

Everything we have is in English.. every digital label on files and text in webpages.. every bar-code has our numbers.. every song has our garbled tones slammed in at places we prefer. But just imagine, that's only one language in an amazing endless possibility of all language or communication formats. We know humans can be born anywhere and they learn that particular language and speaking accent. so what else can we do? We are just touching the tip of the iceberg. We can have far more than words which are grunts of some contextual significance. What about light? What about interleaving sound and WiFi signals? computers, again, beat us in this age in their suitability to share information and help us in many different ways across the spectrum of existence.

Human sexuality is naturally promiscuous, primarily amorous

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/02/human-sexuality-is-naturally-promiscuous-primarily-amorous/

Ryan noted that the standard narrative of human sexuality is men have bargained for women’s sexual functions by being providers/hunters, and women have complied as a result of this benefaction and protection. But the problem with this narrative, he suggested, is the origin of human civilization doesn’t support this model. Before the advent of agriculture, we lived in hunter/gatherer societies which were fiercely egalitarian. Everything was shared.

Wouldn’t that include sexual relationships? Ryan says yes. Sexual exclusivity came later, after the advent of agriculture and more complex notions of property and exclusivity arose. But this development doesn’t change our nature. “Just because you have chosen to be a vegetarian,” he jokes, “doesn’t mean that bacon stops smelling good.” Just because we live in societies that generally organize around monogamous principles does not mean monogamy is the natural state of human sexuality. Like chimps and bonobos, it is natural for humans to have sexual desires for bonding.

The "standard narrative" can't say anything about core human psychology/behaviour, so this is why it falls apart. We've chosen to prioritize progressing society along a line whereby we abstain from experiments like "breeding humans in captivity" which could help us understand human behaviour better. Instead, we flusteredly claim we're better than that while each contributing to world poverty and the various other crises, and it takes us this long along that line running through history to come to these such conclusions. Who knows whether legalizing drugs would make society fall apart? The only way is to try it out. Openness is broadly a better policy than control.

Cloning real people

But then we have the nightmare of duplicity, if there is nothing innately special about anything or anyone then (as Lain alluded) could you replace everyone, indeed could you yourself be replaced?

Yes. Although this changes the meaning and paradigm of life altogether. In another thread somewhere the OP mentioned a planetary existence of clones of the same person.. there's issues like being able to tell who is who (but it would work because they'd have their own clothes.. or maybe not depending on adaptability..) and so on.

You would get PTSD or the like from killing/cloning and realizing what you've done. It's all well and good having the sci-fi dreams, but even with modern humanist / humanitarian realities we're struggling very much to deal with taking onboard a practical worldview. It's a problem of modern individual human existence.

Could you replace yourself? I mean what if there was a back-up and respawn system 

Sure, in isolation there's no problem there if the individual understands it. The film The Fly (90s remake) doesn't tackle this but I'm reminded of it; it's good; body horror.

so that if you died your insurance would cover the creation of your replacement, which with a body and mind identical to you own prior to your death it may well believe itself to be you, as you intended, indeed getting back to the Ship of Theseus if its memories are derived from your own then does it have legitimate claim to your identity?  

those items 1) "insurance" and 2) "claim to legal identity" aren't interesting to me, they're kind of arbitrary structures of our society. The clone would be you as much as the you from another time. Why can there be only one official version of the person? Why isn't it handled the same as celebrity lookalikes? because the cloned person is now their own person. Or maybe it's an infringement on human rights that the legal system in play decides what rules on that level apply across the board i.e. "all clones must not contact the original's family members, ever"

In all practicality though the use of clones would be corrupted by the same factors that corrupt in such a time that tech exists i.e. money corrupts today -> in a similarly money-based society, only rich people will clone / have cryo tech ?

If a beloved android of yours was destroyed wouldn't you want it returned to you, heck how about something more relatable, if the character Data from Star Trek was utterly destroyed except for a backup it left behind would you want him rebuilt from it so he continues to be a character in the show?

The same applies as with relationships vs. loss today. And Gantz has examples of this which I found interesting. Although it's a gory manga so it might not be your thing.