Think about it this way. The past 28 years of your life are already dead, as history is not something living. The future years of your life, meanwhile, have yet to come into existence. You have already lost all of your past; and as soon as you “gain” your future, you already lose it. All you are is but an ever-changing state; the “now” that you inhabit is but an instruction pointer in the registers of a machine that is continually executing instructions.
What do you care if the machine stops processing at any point? Do you think you will notice? Does a program’s thread of execution notice when the OS swaps it out and resumes execution on another thread? Does a thread of execution notice if it is never resumed?
I’m not claiming that we are but software running on the hardware of the universe, but this is what you seem to posit; and if this is so, then death is no more terrible than it’s terrible that the sky appears blue, or that the grasses appear green, or that the Sun appears yellow.
And yet, you seem to believe that death is somehow “horrible”, so you are sad when it takes place; and you believe that other things are somehow “good”, so you are happy when they happen. This seems to be at odds with the things-just-are view that you otherwise represent, and it tells me that these feelings of yours are based on something more fundamental, something more axiomatic than reason. Reason is a consistency vehicle; but these feelings of yours, they are. Reason may help provoke them, but they exist independently of reason. And indeed, such feelings are known to distort the reasoning process in people substantially, causing them to delay validation of critical basic assumptions, thus causing them to reach and stick by invalid conclusions even though their reasoning process may be sound. Garbage in, garbage out.
This reason-distorting effect is why emotions are thought of as at odds with reason. And with good reasons. :)
You so completely miss the damn point that, after downvoting you once for willfully insulting Eliezer’s completely rational and well-expressed intimate feelings, I’d downvote you 10 times for general stupidity. “Reason” can only be driven by an external cause! (whether it’s hedonism, ambition, curiosity, altruism, etc) If all YOU truly cared about was the “things-just-are”, you’d act completely at random, which is hard to conceive even in a mental patient.
We need the truth as a weapon to carve what we want from an uncaring universe and keep it from squashing us. Yet it can only illuminate and clarify our desires, not shape them.
EDIT: after looking at Mr. Bider’s profile and contributions, I have a weak suspicion that he’s a troll. Well, I don’t care about that.
Think about it this way. The past 28 years of your life are already dead, as history is not something living. The future years of your life, meanwhile, have yet to come into existence. You have already lost all of your past; and as soon as you “gain” your future, you already lose it. All you are is but an ever-changing state; the “now” that you inhabit is but an instruction pointer in the registers of a machine that is continually executing instructions.
What do you care if the machine stops processing at any point? Do you think you will notice? Does a program’s thread of execution notice when the OS swaps it out and resumes execution on another thread? Does a thread of execution notice if it is never resumed?
I’m not claiming that we are but software running on the hardware of the universe, but this is what you seem to posit; and if this is so, then death is no more terrible than it’s terrible that the sky appears blue, or that the grasses appear green, or that the Sun appears yellow.
And yet, you seem to believe that death is somehow “horrible”, so you are sad when it takes place; and you believe that other things are somehow “good”, so you are happy when they happen. This seems to be at odds with the things-just-are view that you otherwise represent, and it tells me that these feelings of yours are based on something more fundamental, something more axiomatic than reason. Reason is a consistency vehicle; but these feelings of yours, they are. Reason may help provoke them, but they exist independently of reason. And indeed, such feelings are known to distort the reasoning process in people substantially, causing them to delay validation of critical basic assumptions, thus causing them to reach and stick by invalid conclusions even though their reasoning process may be sound. Garbage in, garbage out.
This reason-distorting effect is why emotions are thought of as at odds with reason. And with good reasons. :)
You so completely miss the damn point that, after downvoting you once for willfully insulting Eliezer’s completely rational and well-expressed intimate feelings, I’d downvote you 10 times for general stupidity. “Reason” can only be driven by an external cause! (whether it’s hedonism, ambition, curiosity, altruism, etc) If all YOU truly cared about was the “things-just-are”, you’d act completely at random, which is hard to conceive even in a mental patient.
We need the truth as a weapon to carve what we want from an uncaring universe and keep it from squashing us. Yet it can only illuminate and clarify our desires, not shape them.
EDIT: after looking at Mr. Bider’s profile and contributions, I have a weak suspicion that he’s a troll. Well, I don’t care about that.