quote:

if a person is able to convince himself suicide is benificial for the body, and he says it with corret spelling and grammer, does that make him smart?

Yes.

Suicide does not imply stupidity.

Nor does a few grammar errors.

You have been here for too short of a period of time to judge Aguagon's natural wit and usual intellgent posts and threads. We are not calling Aguagon smart because he writes of suicide, but because we have read what he writes/says.

But you have now denounced Aguagon's intelligence twice. You have read this single post of his and consider him stupid. He is not stupid by any means.

Intelligence is logically and thoroughly explaining your ideas in correct spelling and grammar, with a mishap in the latter here and there.

Just because you don't agree with him, doesn't make him stupid. You calling him stupid automatically makes you fall into the same category.[/QUOTE]

if a person is able to convince himself suicide is benificial for the body, and he says it with corret spelling and grammer, does that make him smart?

I haven't taken the time to read your lengthy posts because, frankly, I don't really care.

But you have now denounced Aguagon's intelligence twice. You have read this single post of his and consider him stupid. He is not stupid by any means.

Intelligence is logically and thoroughly explaining your ideas in correct spelling and grammar, with a mishap in the latter here and there.

Just because you don't agree with him, doesn't make him stupid. You calling him stupid automatically makes you fall into the same category.

quote:

Originally posted by Jenos:
Ayn Rand is nothing more than a capitalist whöre.

i'm not arguing for capitalism, i'm not arguing for Ayn Rand, what i did was use the key points of a certian philosophy that is relevant and key to the thinking man.

why is it that people focus in on insignificant thing and than ignore the rest of what has been said? Thats like pointing out the car is red when there is so much more to it than the bloody color like how its a 1964 AC Cobra with a V-eight 4 speed manula engine capable of going 180 mph.

so the real questions is why is everybody ignoring the whole meat of what is said and instead comments on the last sentence or two that are less than editorial notes on the whole?

Ayn Rand is nothing more than a capitalist whöre.

What than, I beg for an answer, is smart?
Is denying that fact that people use free will every day to decide what to do with their lives, is that now considered intelligent?
That the power of reason - the natural ability that allows us the capacity of free will and separates us from the average chimpanzee or pet dog - has been rendered incompetent by deductions that deny the realities of existence is now considered bright?
Is denying the life we have due to the process of accepting the realities and truths of man’s existence in exchange for the death of rational thought by blindly believing that our thoughts and senses are mere whims of our environments and social interactions impossible of control, is that a stroke of genius?????
Reason and thinking are not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to shirk that responsibility. But you are not free to escape from your nature; from the fact that reason is the means of survival - so that for you, who are a human being, the question ‘to be or not to be’ is the question’ to think or not to think’
There are only two states one can be: existence of non-existence - and it pertains to a single class of beings: to living organisms which is what we are..
An animal is equipped for sustaining its life; its sense provide it with an automatic code of action, an automatic knowledge of what is good for it or evil. It has no power to extend its knowledge or to evade it. In conditions where its knowledge proves inadequate, it dies. But so long as it lives, it acts on knowledge, with automatic safety and no power of choice, it is unable to ignore its own good, unable to decide to choose the evil and act as its own destroyer.
Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of will of choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on what course of action it requires.
What about the argument that always comes up, that man is animal cause he posses the instinct of self-preservation?
For a lack of better words I’ll directly quote Ayn Rand.

“An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not posses. An ‘instinct’ is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. And even man’s desire to live is not automatic; your secret evil today is that that is the desire you do not hold. The fear of death is not a love of life. Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer - and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.”

A living entity that regarded its means of survival as evil, would not survive. A plant that struggled to mangle its roots, a bird that fought to break its wings would not remain for long in existence. But man regards his mode of survival; his capacity of reason and the capability of free will, as evil and has endured the torturous endurance of suicide of his existence due to this denial of the truth

Much of what I say here can be found in Ayn Rand’s Novel, Atlas Shrugged. Though I’m more of an existentialist type of guy, I believe there are some sound points to Objectivism which are key to this matter right here.
To deny these facts is to deny that one exists as a rational human being and further more to deny life.

quote:

Man, stupid people upset me....

Your essay was wonderful, I'll give you that.

But Aguagon is not stupid. Trust me on that one.

quote:

Man, stupid people upset me....

I hope this is your sig and not in response to Aguagon...he is one of the most unstupid people I know.

Aguagon, you scare me.

you have just spent several paragraphs nullifying the existence of man for what it truly is, proprosing that death is the only option concievable to man.

I refuse to submit.
I refuse to pretend that the institutionalized modes of conduct spawned from the savage minds of a death worshiping race should be thought of as the norm. I denounce the practice of forfeiting our natural sovereignty of man’s reason and free will in exchange for psychological slavery where the whims of the mystics rule all in their disillusionment. I shall no longer remain quiet, I shall rip forth the dirty rag of guilty silence from my mouth and scream in righteous outrage so loud that the whole world shall tremble to its very core. I shall do this because for too long now the world has been running a death race towards extinction of existence. For hundreds of thousands of years the world has been fooled into believing that man needs the conventional codes of conduct to function, to progress, to evolve into a being of much greater proportions and qualities than their previous predecessors.
What the victims of this practice fails to realize is that they have been actively participating in the eternal torturous execution of the greatest thing that exists: the thinking man.
It is by the thinking man and through their selfless self-actualization that there is progress and by allowing them the freedom to ask “Why?” that greater values are achieved. It is by allowing the reasoning man to live unhindered by any rules except the natural laws of survival that we have been able to stay alive as a race this long. Such men are why the world had been able to resurrect itself after the Dark Ages; an age of lawlessness and witch practice that was devoid of all intelligence. It is why the world is beginning to escape the irrational conditioned fears of the Cold War. It is how the world is beginning to escape the confines of our own internal prisons forged by the agglomeration of society and religion who are all ruled by the single mutilated concept of Good and Evil.
I say the world because the Thinking Man makes up the world and without them we wouldn’t exist let alone survive.
Now the strain of having to shoulder the burden of keeping alive the delusional suicidal masses has reached the climatic point in man’s history. It has come to be such a weight that it’ll snap the Thinking Man’s spine into oblivion and with them the rest of the human race. If something isn’t done soon, the world will find itself in a graveyard of its original glory; a mausoleum of the corpses and ghosts that once were man.
Man must be allowed to live.
The must be allowed to think without restrictions and censorship by mystics or politicians. They must be allowed to act without obstacles of the public’s consensus to hinder their progress. They must be allowed to enjoy life without having the world teach them that happiness is evil and despair is good. To do this people must not have to be subjected to the conditionings and conformity that is required of society and religion. Rather, they must be allowed to be themselves. To have free will, to accept responsibility over themselves, to govern themselves, and to think for themselves.
I do not believe in the abstraction of Good and Evil that has been commonly portrayed for the past millenniums. I do not believe that there are higher powers or a conflux of forces that ride behind us in every action and thought we do pressuring us to do their will. If a person is innately evil or good, they are incapable of free will to decide any other course of action than that preordained programming. It eliminates responsibility because than we are not in control of our own choices. It eliminates justice because than how can we persecute a person who didn’t consciously do what he did, but was done by a higher power we cannot perceive or comprehend? It eliminates identity because we form our identities through the choices and actions we make and if we are not in control of our own actions than we can’t have an individual self. The faith in such a belief is the leading cause for the death of man‘s existence.
What I do believe in is good or evil decisions. A good decisions is one that ensures the continued survival as a thinking man and promotes fertile production to stimulate growth whither it be of the mind or of material possessions. It encourages the acceptance of enjoyment in living life with harmony between all aspects of the body and spirit and never sacrificing one’s values or life in exchange for something of lesser value or the void of nothing. A good decision in the end means making choices with the knowledge of the realities of existence and acts accordingly to ensure the Thinking Man’s existence.
What are bad decisions is yours Aguagon. To promote the idea that everything is arbartrary is suggesting nothing is logical and nothing is done by free will is an abomination to man itself. Who created this computer? It took a clear, logical process to create this console to be used. It takes purpose to use a computer, it takes purpose to realize that there is purpose. A purpose to exist. A purpose to live. To say that life is random and can't be controlled by rational is to say that one can't live life succesffully, because that is what one needs to live.

The restriction you seek to escape is the law of identity. The freedom you seek is freedom from the fact that an A will remain an A, no matter what your tears and tantrums- that a river will not bring them milk, no matter what your hunger-that water will not run uphill, no matter what comforts you could gain if it did, and if you want to lift it to the roof of a skyscraper, you must do it by a process of thought and labor, in which the nature of an inch of pipe line counts, but your feelings do not-that your feelings are impotent to alter the course of a single speck of dust in space or the nature of any action they have committed.

Man, stupid people upset me....

quote:

See, Celtic, you actually couldn't jump off a plane naked while singing America the Beautiful, because you have no reason to and you can't do something (especially something dangerous and stupid) without a reason.

I mean if we want to. Some of our desires have no reason.

I feel my point is being missed. Our will is a slave to certain factors we simply can't control. See, Celtic, you actually couldn't jump off a plane naked while singing America the Beautiful, because you have no reason to and you can't do something (especially something dangerous and stupid) without a reason. Only when your desire to prove my bizarre theory wrong reached a point where it overrode basic logic and desire for comfort could you really "choose" to do it, at which point you'd just be validating the theory.

And clpo, as I did a horrible job of trying to address, free will and predestiny aren't the only two options.

There is a free will, to a point. For example, if I want to jump off a plane naked while singing America the Beautiful, I can do it in my head, but the possibilites of it actually ever happening are low.

So yeah, we've a certain percent of free will but society, law, etc, puts a stop to it.

Currently, I believe that our actions are determined by ourselves. I can't see how it could be any other way. For instance, if every single action of ours was pre-determined by some higher power, what happens when we purposely go against our predetermined actions? Was that determined? It frightens me to think that all my actions are controlled by someone other than me, so I prefer to think otherwise.

However, you make good points in your post Aguagon. You're probably right. I'm currently sitting here trying hard to avoid my homework, so my thoughts just aren't together on this.

And Worth, I think the same thing as your friend about infinite alternate realities. Ever heard of the multiverse theory? That our universe is but one in an infinity of others similar and dissimilar to ours? I believe that each unacted upon choice is acted upon in an infinity of ways in those other universes by alternate selves. Yes, it's an odd idea, being one I got from reading too much sci-fi. Okay, random train of thought over.

quote:

Originally posted by WorthWaitingFor:
So if there is no free will, where do bad decisions come from?

Well, bad decisions are unavoidable. The question is how they're perceived as bad. If only others perceive them as bad, even at the time they're being made, it doesn't weaken my theory. If the decision maker him/herself perceives them as bad, it will always be in retrospect. Nobody will actively choose to make a bad decision, if you define "bad" as illogical, unethical, and uncomfortable.

quote:

If there is no free will, how are decisions made when we have no past experience to base it on?

If there's really no past experience to base a decision on, I'd have to say that biological disposition alone would take the rap. Having said that, there's almost always past experience to base decisions on. Even in your example about a first boyfriend, you had past experiences to go on, even if those experiences were only anecdotes friends had told you, psychological principles you'd read in relationship books, or even how characters acted in a soap opera. Remember, experience need not be firsthand--in fact, for my theory to be reasonable, it would need to be secondhand a lot.

As for the fact that there are (at least seemingly) multiple conclusions to any given situation one can arrive at, the best defense I can put forth is the simple fact that we ultimately arrive at one conclusion (barring the existance of alternate realities), and I really believe there's a reason we arrive at that one conclusion. Our mind, quite speedily, races through all the options we can think of, putting each one through the filter (which, remember, it can't really control), and comes up with the one that it finds most logical, ethical and comfortable. From there, it becomes a simple yes/no matter until the conclusion gets carried out and becomes an action.

Well, it's less complicated when there's only two options, like with having blood drawn and not having blood drawn. There's not really a third option in that situation.

There's usually only two options in most situations (To do or not to do...), in which case the decision will more than likely be based on past experience.

But in a situation that is unlike any other you've ever been in, you have no past experience to base it on. This is a mushy, girly example but I think this is why most people never stay with their first love. I was in love with my first boyfriend but, having never been in a relationship before, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and I made decisions about what to do or say left and right that were bad decisions.

And I think humans are more prone to making bad decisions than they are good decisions. So my situation doesn't have to happen to everyone but it probably happens to the majority.

I never think there's only one conclusion I could have reached. I always think, "What if..." My friend, Adam, believes in infinite alternate realities and is getting me to start believing too (oh no, i'm being corrupted...). He says that every time we make a decision, whatever other options we had forms an alternate reality in which we chose the 2nd option or the 3rd option and life plays out as such in that other reality. You can see where the infinite part comes in.

So if there is no free will, where do bad decisions come from? If there is no free will, how are decisions made when we have no past experience to base it on?

quote:

Originally posted by WorthWaitingFor:
We still choose what to do...but the motions our minds go through to get to the two or three or four options is something we can't control. The free will comes in when we decide amongst the options.

And now you've got me thinking. I guess the question is whether or not the conclusion we reach is the only conclusion we can reach based on the unique infinite past and present external factors that are affecting/have affected us. There's a thinker.

I suppose I believe in free will because I refuse to admit that I'm not in complete control of my actions. This was an interesting post, Aguagon. You always make me think.

Well, I don't believe in free will as per the definition you have given it.

But here is how I have always seen free will: Non-Christians (particularly on this site) often argue with, "Well, how can you let a book control your life?" To me, the Bible isn't telling me what to do, it's guiding me. I might make a different decision if I see what God (or those who wrote in the name of God) wants me to do first.

We still choose what to do...but the motions our minds go through to get to the two or three or four options is something we can't control. The free will comes in when we decide amongst the options.

However, your post is gives weight to one of the reasons I think that there is not a sole religion but that all religions are really compressed into one. I don't believe that someone who is morally acceptable (doesn't kill or rape others, isn't an adulterer, etc.) and kind to others and tries to live a good life is going to go to Hell simply because he isn't Christian. I refuse to believe that. It doesn't make sense to me.

Okay, this was a sorta ramble but you always make me think, Aguagon.

It doesn't sound stupid to me. I'm not going to say flat-out that I no longer believe in free will, as I haven't done enough research on the subject to say so, but you've made very good points. It is true that once you start something you know you shouldn't, that you must finish it in order to get that nagging feeling out of the back of your head. It is impossible to just stop right then and there. You cannot distract yourself with a random train of thought. For example, if you're hacking into a government computer (not that I've done this) and know you shouldn't be, when you here an icecream truck go down the street you're not going to use that to distract yourself. Is that what you mean, Aguagon?

On the heaven and hell concept, what seems "unmoral" to one person seems perfectly fine to me. Some of my friends are extremely evangelical and if they knew I doubted God's existance, they would automatically think, 'You're going to hell' while I would think 'I'm a good person overall.'

And on the note of the suicide extremists, I really don't know. If I were an extreme believer in God I would say that they were not destined for heaven. As I am rather confused on these matters, I don't know what I would say. The fact that they were only doing what they thought was right would make me want to belive something different, but the knowledge that they killed others along with them