Phi for All

This is wrong on a couple of levels. First, we didn't "come from monkeys". Apes and humans share a common ancestor that was neither. Primates split from other mammals around 60 million years ago, so before prosimians we looked a lot like squirrels. Talk about suffering! Second, being successful in your environment is one of the major survival drivers of evolution, and it doesn't care at all how much you did or didn't suffer. If you get to pass along your genes to offspring, it doesn't matter to evolution whether the road was tough or easy. It's not only the creatures who get the food that are successful. Sometimes it's just the ones that get the girl. It's clear you think the suffering of today's South Africans (well, not all of them) was brought upon them by some unnatural cause, but you haven't come right out and said that modern humanity is unnatural. Please, if you learn one thing here, it should be how to think critically about what you're saying. "Advanced" is another subjective term when applied to evolution. You think you're more advanced than, say, a krill? What if I toss you in the ocean, who's more advanced now? Who is the more advanced flyer, you or the mosquito? Evolution is all about adaptation to your environment. If humans have enough cooperation, tools, and resources, our high intelligence allows us to manipulate the environment. Without them, your intelligence alone won't let you be a more advanced dam builder than a beaver. So much of the problem understanding where you're coming from is because you use all these terms like good and evil, where your definition and mine may not match with anyone else's, and yet you're trying to pitch this as a "we should all think this way" sort of proposition. Your black and white perspective doesn't allow for all the rich nuances we see in reality. Poor people can be happy, we're not all programmed or automatically submissive, and we eat sometimes because we're hungry, and sometimes because we're bored, and sometimes because we don't want to waste it, and sometimes because we don't want someone else to eat it, and sometimes because we don't know when we'll eat next.

I mentioned neither "hasty" nor "nature". I don't like your broad use of the word nature, you use it interchangeably when you mean natural processes, and Earth's capabilities, and when you talk about nebulous essences that may or may not be conscious of us. I don't see what's "obvious" about the suffering of species leading up to humans. Don't all species "suffer" to some extent? Or are you saying humans suffer more than other species because we have high intelligence? Does high intelligence increase suffering ("they obviously weren't suffering as much")? When you talk about "Africans", are you talking about human Africans? Because you also talk about billions of years before humans evolved, so it's a bit unclear. Humans are no more "advanced" than any other species. That's not how evolution works. Other species aren't "advancing" towards becoming human. We just have high intelligence, but that alone isn't what gives us our adaptive capabilities and allow us some control over our environment. Suffering is yet another subjective assessment you're trying to generalize. Do you think everything is suffer-free in "nature"?

Nature considers things? Do you have any support for the idea of nature being capable of thought? I don't understand why you brought this up, it seems completely out of context. Why do you mention this? Again, I'm baffled. Within Africa, there are countless separate populations that are affected differently by changes in allele frequency. There is no single "African evolution", just as being African has absolutely no bearing on anything but geographical location. And I can't even begin to imagine how you're trying to tie another subjective concept like "suffering" to evolution or Africans in general. Baffling. And since no one else did, I have to wonder why you feel the need to defend this stance. This is another example of your preconceptions causing you to argue from a "canned response" position. You create strawmen to battle but ignore the real arguments, what people are ACTUALLY saying. I'd still like to know how you feel about bad things that create good things. Like a senseless death that galvanizes a community to make changes to prevent recurrence. If your definition of good requires that lesser goods be created, this senseless death seems to fill the bill.

This is another aggravating habit you've fallen into. Where did ANYONE even hint that "good is not real"? It's been said that good isn't an objective assessment, since it varies from person to person. It's like you have some canned responses you're bound and determined to drag out even if nobody is actually making an argument. Can you see this from our perspective? I was pointing out the dangers of changing definitions on people you're having a discussion with, and you respond as if I said, "Hey, good isn't real". I didn't, I can support that by re-reading what I wrote. You should try this. Would you like a short list of bad things that also create "lesser goods" (if I understand this made-up phrase correctly)? Lying is bad, right? But as children, it's an important step in our development psychologically, since it signals the start of planning ahead for the best results. Lying tells parents their child is thinking about the future and how to make it better. Breaking the law is bad, right? But if nobody broke the law, we'd never know that some laws are bad. My state no longer puts people in jail for A YEAR for smoking pot, but this would never have changed if so many people didn't break the law to show how silly it was. Having a fever is a bad thing, right? But raising your body temperature is the body's way of killing off infections, which contributes to overall health. Context is everything, and your redefined system seems to throw a big generalization blanket over the concept of good. I also don't understand why you mention "the judge of what's good is above them in the hierarchy (natural selection, planets to humans, etc)". This seems to imply that Earth is our judge on what is good. This assigns mental process capabilities to an inanimate object, which is every bit as supernatural as any deist position.

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In attempting to redefine commonly used terminology, you're effectively increasing the useless "noise" that the rest of us have to sift through to find the "signal" so we can understand what you're talking about. You put a bunch of words together like a tossed salad with no regard for how they sound to people who are used to mainstream terminology. This all takes more time than many people feel it's worth, but you then make things worse by trying to defend your actions using more broken terminology, and even go so far as to claim what other people say is "invalid". You're getting so much pushback because you insist on reworking the dictionary, you assume AND insist you're right, and don't explain what you mean in a way we can understand. This is plainly a case where what's in your mind isn't coming across correctly. "Because everything nature is to individuals within nature, I have defined as good; this is my starting point." You obviously know what this is supposed to mean, but I've tried several times and it makes no sense grammatically or scientifically. It's a HORRIBLE starting point if you can't explain it to others.

Wow, thanks. I appreciate your removing any and all restrictions on the way I reference this subject. I'll still try to stick to statements I can support.

Thinking this technically makes you a thinker, I guess.

Think of love as a forge that helps to form and develop your relationships. The goal is to find out how love can be more easily assimilated into your life, and how it can help you find someone who shares that love. If you don't keep it going, if you don't keep the fires stoked, you won't stand a chance of getting the right balance. As CaptainPanic mentioned, it hurts, and it's hard to see now why it's worth the pain. But it is.

After tranquil = lack of magic, the rest is word salad to me. It seems to say that being wrong carries more weight to it than just being wrong. It seems to say that you can breathe the air, expect a fair trial, and be protected from enslavement, but you don't get to be wrong about anything. I think this is something that made sense to you at one point but has possibly failed to scale to reality? Or you're using more non-mainstream definitions I don't understand? Because having the right to be wrong has led to some amazing discoveries. From penicillin to pacemakers to anesthesia, being wrong was the most beneficent thing that could have happened to those inventors and inventions. WD-40 is a great product and a great company, but their first 39 attempts were wrong. Wrong that ended up teaching them how to finally get it right. How can you discredit such a process? I think we have a right to be wrong, and it's helped us immensely. If you remove that right, a lot of great ideas will never happen.

What if I've determined that getting every last drop of oil from the planet will help the "prosperity of the human species"? Or that it's in our best interests to not have so many mouths to feed and enemies to fight, so I gather all those like-minded people around me so we can destroy the 25% of Earth's population that doesn't like us? Historically, every conqueror sees themselves as a good, strong person helping his/her people. It's too easy to justify the things we do and assign "goodness" to it. Importance is another subjective justification. I've heard this before. It sounds clever, rights vs wrong, wrong or right, the right to be wrong. Take away the mixed meanings though, and you'll find that being wrong is such a fantastically wonderful phenomenon that it warrants being given as a right. We're fallible creatures, our senses often deceive us, and we have an obnoxious habit of assuming that what's right for us is right for everybody else. If you don't recognize us as fallible humans who can build on error and make something right that was once wrong, you're undermining the scientific methodology that has been so successful in explaining our universe. Knowing we could be wrong allows us to think critically. Without it, how would we know we were ever right? In the same sentence, you've stated that: 1) You should never be wrong because you don't have that right, 2) You're sure of this (100%?), and 3) You've deem others to be guilty of being wrong, but not you. What about when you think someone is wrong but it turns out to be you? If you don't have that right, how are you ever going to learn that you were wrong? This seems like a pretty tortured way of getting to use a clever sound byte about the right to be wrong. edit to add: or is this just semantics, the way I've argued before that we may have reasons for misbehavior, but not excuses for misbehavior? Are you assigning an undefined significance to the word "right"?

Not to mention the epinephrine/norepinephrine cocktail that goes racing through the bloodstream to trigger 30 more hormones when faced with fight or flight. It's tougher to override our urges when they're enhanced by powerful chemicals that tell us to shun what we don't fully understand.

Maybe the problem is with the interpretation of "like-minded". It's one thing to have goals you've assessed as positive and helpful, and then to surround yourself with people who are striving for the same goals. As long as the goals are productive (by whose judgement?), this seems like a great way to enhance the process. It seems to be completely different when you just want to be around people who think the way you do. Is this one of those instances where what you think you want and what you need are different? An old friend used to tell me, "If you and I thought exactly alike, one of us would be unnecessary". I can see where it might be comforting to hear someone parroting the same things you say, but I don't think we grow as much intellectually if we're not mentally challenged on a regular basis.

I can think of issue-dependent circumstances involving the mind or the planet where surrounding yourself with like-minded people might not be good. In fact, I think many of our leaders surround themselves with too many like-minded people, and that may be why climate change gets ignored, or scientific research goes unfunded. I don't usually think of cults this way. Do you have any links to supportive evidence? I usually think of cult leaders as charismatic individuals who sway rather than force, which means their "flock" often comes to them for guidance. I wouldn't think they'd need to bother with those who aren't already predisposed to their mindset.

One one hand, it's encouraging to be around people who share your goals, who have a special insight into what motivates you. If you want to be successful, hanging around with successful people seems rational. On the other hand, surrounding yourself with like-minded people can lead to compound mentality (cults blindly following a leader due to limited outside interaction). It seems irrational not to have diverse input from lots of different personalities, and different experience and knowledge levels. It seems like this could be a definition problem. "Like-minded" can mean both those who share a specific interest, as well as those who are in general of the same disposition. It seems logical that I would learn physics more productively if I surrounded myself with physicists. But can I apply the same logic to my culture? If I'm a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, should I seek out like-minded people to surround myself with, or is my culture not a matter of mind? I think there is a danger inherent in surrounding yourself with those who's tastes and opinions are like your own. I appreciate exposure to different perspectives, and it's one of the ways I shape my own. It seems like it would be more difficult to find something better if you're convinced your group is best already. But I can't discount the effectiveness of being with people who share my views and can help me progress. What do YOU think?

Religion often fosters the concept of reaching out to help humanity, but it also fosters the concept of "parts of humanity are more special". This concept that some people are above others because of the choices they've made is very detrimental to "the lesson of love for mankind... we are alike" message you want to spread.

Or that they've been doing a fantastic job. LA smog was legendary thirty years ago. Here's an article from 1995 talking about how much better it got, and today California has some of the best emissions standards around. I'm so glad nobody listened to warnings that the clean air fanatics warnings were overblown.

They may be keeping you from making an objective assessment, since observably there are many people in society these drugs help. You're generalizing quite a bit based on limited experience. What does your doctor say about why they don't work for you?

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Since the existence of god(s) is questionable, and specifics about them are completely subjective, a more humanist approach seems rational. We know people exist, and they are much more predictable and consistent than god(s). I choose to invest my energy in knowing people instead of god(s).

Just like "screw". We're supposed to enjoy screwing but nobody wants to get screwed. "Screwing around" is wasting time. Screw is the word the censors can use instead of fuck, but it's rarely used as sex on TV ("Are you screwing him?") in favor of its standing as an unavoidable catastrophe ("He is so screwed!"). I'm still unsure why getting fucked or screwed became such a bad thing. "Fuck you" is one of those phrases that takes at least two people to recognize the insult or it's worthless. If I respond with, "Oh, thank you, that would be nice", it puts the phrase in a different perspective. Obviously, the guy using the pejorative doesn't want me to enjoy it, and maybe at one time the phrase included addenda that attempted to guarantee that ("Screw you with [insert something that would be painful to insert]!"). As it stands now though, the insulter and insultee both have to acknowledge that fucking is a bad thing, it's horrible to be screwed, you never want someone wishing you'd be fucked, and if they wish that upon you it should make you really really angry. We even have a shorthand version that's guaranteed to elicit aggressive response ("My middle finger extended signals that I want someone to abuse you sexually because of some lesser wrong you did to me"). * sigh * I don't get it. I don't use "retarded" to mean "stupid", why should I refer to a weak person as a "pussy", or call a jerk a "prick" or "dick"? And someone please explain why being a "cocksucker" is bad? I just think, if you ever want to be on the receiving end of oral sex, you probably shouldn't use such words disparagingly.

I try to avoid saying anything that would make a mother ban her child from using us as a resource for learning. Cussing is preferable to non sequitur in some instances Culturally, Americans have an aversion to excremental references. I know in Germany at least, the toilets have a ledge where your stools can be examined before you flush, and it's part of normal healthcare to check out your poop for abnormalities. I don't know who started it, but I'd like to reverse the trend to use body parts and functions as pejoratives. We use "shit" to describe mostly bad things (except on those rare occasions when you get the good shit). I really hate that our genitals and orifices are used to describe less than desirable people. And I wish everyone would stop using sex to insult! We have such a perverted outlook on sex in the US. How can we not, when it's so pervasive and used to describe both profound pleasure and vicious revenge? We simultaneously want and don't want to be fucked, and that's got to be creating some cognitive dissonance in the population. .

It's hard to take someone's ideas about evolution seriously when they talk about it as "Darwin's Theory". This is a well-used tactic by creationists to point to early work as flawed, and therefore suspect. As others mentioned, evolutionary theory has progressed incredibly since Darwin's time. It's one of the most heavily supported theories ever. If this person really wants to disprove evolution, have them tackle the current theory instead of going all the way back to Darwin. Judge the theory as it stands today, not a version that's 150 years out of date.

Each of your five objective points was refuted pretty successfully though. "Huge expense" is a subjective observation, to be fair. Don't forget that solar panel supply encourages demand-side efficiency as well. Smarter lighting, controls, and appliances increase the effectiveness of solar panels.

Great insight. And it made me remember the basis of the show. It's about friendships and their development.