God is an intentional being though and not a mere force of nature, yes? Catholics are saying something along the lines of “if you don’t come inside, God is going to come by and make you suffer because God doesn’t like being people outside at this particular time”. In this case “being outside at a particular time” is “suicide”. If one goes to the afterlife and finds an intentional being ordaining suffering for doing an action, is that not a punishment by that intentional being for that action?
However, it still remains that someone that does do so would not be in a middling neutral way, contra to your previous statement, and would differentiate them from a rock in some manner, even if only for one moment.
In this case, by way of analogy, you are voting for the guy openly saying he will kill everyone while showing his means to do so and just simply believing that this is not actually the case. Then he does so. Many parts of the mind aside from just intent cooperate to realize the goal of that intent in the world.
Those aren’t the only options.
God is not a “force of nature”, depending on what you are calling “nature”.
God is intentional in the sense that God doesn’t change direction and cannot be changed.
But God is NOT intentional in the sense of ignoring a situation unless someone does something naughty and then deciding to go punish that particular person.
God is The Rule that never changes and applies to all situations at all times (much like the weather in the analogy).
The Church is merely informing people of the consequences of The Rule that always applies to all things at all times (“omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent”).
Now if you think of God as a magical person, as the Mormons do, you have a case of a punishing dictator. But that has never been what any Scripture has actually been about. They merely didn’t make that distinction because most people in those days didn’t care unless there was a dictator involved and probably couldn’t conceive of a universal “Rule” (even one of nature). That willingness to use the mindset of the common people because it yielded more coherence of society was one of the faults (out of several) that has led to today’s contentions.
I can’t translate what you are saying there.
No. Of course I’m not talking about the person who said that he was going to go kill everyone. Who would ever get into office that way?
You are not born with the notion that you are going to kill yourself. You are born with the inherent urge to attempt to stay alive. But during that process (after all of the “governors” have been placed into office (“brain has matured”)), fragmentation of decision making occurs as well as semi-isolated decision making and misinformation. That is why it is analogous to a society. Most of the people in a society have no idea at all of what their governance is thinking or planning. They are busy merely living their own lives holding “good faith” that their governors are trying to be good people (sad mistake).
By the time they discover that their governors were plotting the murder of their entire people, perhaps due to a foreign allegiance, it is too late to stop it. But that doesn’t mean that they willingly go along with it at any time. They are merely trapped.
With a suicide, the exact same scenario takes place. The vast majority of the living fragmented components within any single person very seriously objects to the intent to murder the entire body. But they have lost their right to have a vote due to the cleverness of the governor, that “conscious mind”. A little too much aspirin and the game is over. The vast majority had no say in the matter.
If China’s governance chose to annihilate all of China, they wouldn’t tell anyone. They would just arrange that it happens without any way for the people to escape (again, much like the USA governance). But don’t you think that you might see that as murder rather than a suicide? If you think in terms of the entire nation as merely a single entity, it would be suicide. But reality is that it is not merely a single entity, but a collective. Every single person is that same way, a collective effort, being governed.
So the thought is that even if the governor within a person decides to kill the entire person, it is still murder of the majority. The Catholics have been right about that (not that they handle it well). And that governor, due to the de-monolithic nature of the decision was referred to as a “demon” “possessing” the person - the exact same thing as a dictator usurping control, “taking possession”, of a nation.
That governor is not where life began for that entity (in either a person or nation) and is not the only life that gets killed in the suicide. If the governor decides to merely remove himself from life/office, then no one objects. That would be merely a dictator deciding to leave office. But that is not the same as an actual suicide or the intentional destruction of a nation.
In addition, do you consider it a justified suicide (changing of the effort to stay alive) if it was a decision based on misinformation or deceit?
This seems like God either is or is indistinguishable from a force or law of natural process.
You previously said this:
Someone that actually carries out the act would have gone a way, and thus be different from your neutral rock, correct?
That’s part of why I am posing that to you. It seems equivalent to something you are stating.
What is this misinformation?
A refocusing of the analogy then. Using the governor analogy, to commit suicide, the governor would require cooperation from the constituents of the muscles, the lungs, the eyes, the spatial processing, the visual processing, the emotions (after all, the suffering is from emotions), the bones, the blood, the veins, the skin, the memory, and on and on and on. Without all of these great many things acting in concert over time to lead up to the final moment, the suicide would be impossible.
The person committing suicide is generally doing so in order to try to alleviate their own suffering, so they are generally always justified. If this suffering comes from misinformation or deceit from someone else, it is the person giving that misinformation and deceit that is to blame for the suicide. I will attempt to help end the suffering in another way to spare the life where I possibly can though.
How do you feel about lemmings and other animals that die because of their migratory patterns overextending their capabilities? How about Armadillos that just happen to jump up to about car bumper height when startled and end up commonly dying to vehicles rather than stay to the ground where they may be passed over instead? What about the many types of spiders that get eaten by their mates?
Harmony suggests order, suggests teleology, it is an inapt term for evolution. Sure religion places a harmony, and human moral value tries to see reason in the bitter struggle to exist. But we know as a species our existence rested on a knife edge several times where our or are ancestors’ numbers were so few we had only chance to exist, why we are alive at all is a matter of numbers, somewhere in the vast cosmos life exists. There is no harmony to that though, it just is. Chance and the rules of the universe dictate life, if there are infinite universes, there is only a brute number crunching machine, that says given eternity some life must exist. There is nothing more to it than that. Enough monkeys, enough type writers and enough time, then and only then in the chaos of entropic concerns will life promulgate. Harmony is a term that has a value, I don’t think the universe, or multiverse really has any order or enough to be harmonic.
God has always been a merchant who resides in the gaps in our understanding, we resort to God when we don’t have the data to hand to work out everything that makes life. I sometimes wonder as people have said or implied if God is just another monkey on a typewriter number crunching it’s way to Shakespeare.
Your position just as much flies in the face of common sense as well. You pretty much link life to ability to survive on its own. This even means that even abortions that are done legally, in the US, at least would be okay to ignore. You could even kill a 1 year old kid. They are not “life”. Nazi’s even did experiments with babies, and found that those that were giving all the necessary things like food, water, and protection from the elements, could not survive unless they got attention from humans like touching and etc. They could not even survive with all the necessary things to sustain metabolism and etc. So we could do a Predator v. Alien 2 (Requim), and do what the Predalien did to the babies in the hospital. They are not life and so you can abort it.
Lots of things are going on here. At what level of what does life actually begin? Fetal development? The ability to be responsive to or conscious of sense impressions? (Definition of sentient-Merriam-Webster Dictionary) That’s also a part of fetal development. Does life begin because it’s possibly potential life? That question has been asked in order to establish laws concerning abortion. It comes down to, once again, what a person feels life is.
In the meantime, JSS and suze are taking over the thread for their own, personal, discussion of their own, personal, points of view which may or may not have anything to do with the OP. Is there no other place for these discussions? They seem to take up time and space–sometimes with merit–but they don’t seem to leave much room for anyone else to respond.
Only_Humean? tentative? Am I being overly critical?
In terms of science absolutely nothing. In terms of people placing silly idealistic notions on the pure biological machinery of life, nothing substantial. Why what do you think it means, that life is some sort of wondrous candy factory, that produces marvels with no cost? Try telling that to the 99% of species that were annihilated by the process. There’s nothing harmonious about nature, it just is. Unless you take harmony to mean in accordance with natural and environmental selection pressures and then what you are saying is better left discarded, your pointless emotional attachments to a motiveless mechanistic process say nothing worth while except in terms of human psychologies endless drive towards filling in gaps in understanding with magical thinking.
Personally I think the law strikes a good balance at the point I would say a living thinking individual exists. I don’t find the idea that a collection of cells constitutes something that if destroyed will necessarily harm either. The religious arguments in particular are unconvincing, hence they tend to fail to drive legal and pragmatic concerns, as it should be.
Interesting.
What I think it means is that survival of anything in the entire universe requires that it maintain whatever it is. Is that too difficult to figure out? Require any “magical thinking” on your part? I mean, seriously. Either something maintains what it is, or it becomes what it wasn’t. If you do not maintain your life, you die. You really think that is “magical”? Interesting. Seems like just common sense to me.
What you (and anything else in the universe) is, is created and defined by the harmony of the contention within, “Self-Harmony”. Science agrees completely as far as I can tell. It would take some pretty serious magical thinking on your part to believe otherwise.
But then… “your pointless emotional attachments to a motiveless mechanistic process say nothing worth while except in terms of human psychologies endless drive towards filling in gaps in understanding with magical thinking.”
What about evolution denotes a condition that seeks harmony, since evolution seems to run counter to the status quo, as environments change, anything in harmony is destroyed if it tries to remain in harmony with the system in which it lives. In fact harmony is counter productive, at all times any biological system that counts on harmony will ultimately be destroyed. No you don’t need to maintain what you are in evolutionary terms of ability to survive, your ability to be in harmony with anything is a value term that will endlessly be a sliding variable by which you need to adapt. Maintaining what you are and losing your ability to adapt will get you killed by the thing we call evolution as environments change.
I’m not sure what you are saying, but what you are saying has nothing to do with what I said.
Well first what evolution might or might not need or want hasn’t a goddamn thing to do with what I need or want.
Secondly, evolution can ONLY WORK if people resist it. When you actually try to evolve, evolution doesn’t take place at all and dies. You merely get replaced by something that wasn’t so damn stupid.
Thirdly, as I stated, you ARE the harmony of the contention within you. That is an adapting entity in itself. So you proclaiming that you must adapt is merely affirming what I already said.
"In my epistemology life isn’t an issue of either life or non-life. Life is much like intelligence. Something doesn’t either have intelligence or not. It comes in a multitude of degrees and variations in type.
The ultimate defining characteristic of life is that seeks its own survival or its “self-harmony”. And by “seek”, I mean that it, by whatever means, identifies harmful from helpful, avoids the harmful, and approaches the helpful. But this characteristic also comes in degrees of just “how alive” something is. Growth and reproduction are merely a couple of the varied methods used to more secure survival."
I disagree with seek, an organism is blind it seeks nothing, it adapts because of its genes or it does not, it does not look for anything: seek harmony or seek to be harmonious, it just is, it’s environment determines which of it’s adaptable solutions lend it to evolve by sexual reproduction and other mechanisms such as mutation. You are putting the cart before the horse here, using words like life seeks. Life reacts it is not proactive. There is no “searching for harmony”, there is just living or going extinct. There are no things coupled to more secure survival either, it either does or it doesn’t, it’s mutations will either favour it in the face of adversity or not. It seems a rather mild point to argue about, but it is all: evolution is blind, non harmonious, and trial by error, with no purpose or drive it just iterates and reiterates, getting it wrong more often than not and right just enough to give it a small chance, always reacting never acting before the fact.
This makes no sense at all, how can you resist evolution? If we could resist evolution it would place us outside of nature, and I am not sure such a thing exists, everything we do is nature, no matter what we do.
Are you serious?
You don’t ever seek anything?
No job, no better opportunity, no food source, nothing?
Wow… You are going to be replaced.
And it never occurred to you that its genes might be what is causing it to seek survival?
Then what do you think causes people to want to survive, misunderstanding of their great god Evolution?
By not sacrificing yourself to the thought of it.
Get real.
If someone says, “gee, I want to evolve into something better. I think I will go off myself so that evolution will replace me with something better”, what do you think takes place? Their gene pool dies… completely - does not evolve.
Those who actually evolve are the ones who tried to survive, but were not quite good enough. Their genes continue and perhaps (or not) get better at it. That is what evolution IS.
You are an adapting creature as is (dubiously assuming that you can actually learn), so to evolve from that can only mean that you change into something that DOESN’T learn and doesn’t adapt. You can evolve into something that learns better… but ONLY IF you try as hard as you can to learn as well as you can currently and NOT have to die out and be replaced by those who were not so damn stupid.
We’re talking about evolution not me personally, in the grand scale of evolution I do not seek anything, That is the point, you are continuously placing values on what I might think or do, but to biological diversity and evolutionary fitness it means little unless it lends adaptability to “me”, or more correctly “my” offspring and over a great deal of generations of potential adaptation.
Evolution is a massively complex process, based on all life on Earth, it does not have any interest in either one species or my personal opinion about it, what I as an iota of life might do in my life time alone. Harmony, the process is so complex that you might as well call it a chaotic solution to existence, the more diverse and non divergent a system is, the more it diverges from “harmony” the more likely a key part of that system will survive, the more adaptable solutions no matter how seemingly pointless it throws up, the more likely given the environment it is to adapt.
Wait…
“We are not talking about me personally”… “I do not seek anything”.
Are we talking about you or not?
Are you an “organism” or not?
Well how did you get here if it didn’t lead to you??
So you are saying that people should sacrifice themselves for sake of future generations that might or might not include their own offspring? Guess what happens to those people.
Yet your personal opinion plays into it, because your personal opinion and the opinion that you convince anyone else to take, causes them to either struggle in this direction or that, which in turn plays into who actually evolved and who died out.
The smart people don’t bother with the game and just do all they can to survive.
If the thing “adapts” then it is still that thing and thus hasn’t lost the harmony that it was in the first place.
The "harmony is the pistons actually doing their job in the engine. You take that out and the engine gets tossed into the trash.
