Why not end it?

[Thanatos13]

43 minutes ago, SOUL said:

You are the one who has posed the conflicted query in this thread and you are offering contradictory evidence thinking it somehow supports your conclusion.... besides, it really does seem as if you still are looking for a cookie.

Trees? Um..... ok

Because it does. The only reason I haven’t gone through with it is that the biological programming to survive is rather strong and difficult to overcome. You haven’t given evidence to refute my position. 

 

54 minutes ago, Max_V said:

@Thanatos13 Can you consciously recall your ego choosing your body to be born and manifest?

You’re going to have to give evidence for that “born and manifest” nonsense (and yes I am calling it nonsense). The self is a construct of the mind (and likely the brain) to make sense and navigate the world around us.

[SOUL]

@Thanatos13  You are missing the point that the evidence you seek is something only you can supply.

You're making assumptions about the state of my life and what I have been through. This isn't a pissing match about who has it worst or  who overcame more.

 It's about whether you have the will to carry on and find your own well-being in whatever way you can regardless of the circumstances in your life.

 There isn't anybody that can give that to you, it's something you search within yourself for.

 

[Ben Landrail]

As Camus wrote in the Myth of Sisyphus, committing suicide because you can't see a meaning in life is absurd since that claim implies that some absolute truth about the nature of existence is available to you. Which is false, because you are merely a human being, with all the accompanying cognitive limitations. 

On 1/16/2018 at 1:16 AM, Thanatos13 said:

Sorry but that isn’t a correct evaluation. The body and the mind (which is all there is) do so, especially in the face of the logic where one doesn’t  HAVE to do anything really. We don’t need a purpose, we don’t need to live, the more you ponder it the more death seems logical. 

I would comment that you're operating based on logical assumptions. But why does existence has to be logical? Human capacity for reasoning seems to be a by-product of evolution, which we use today for the oddest purposes like justifying one's existence - or suicide. 

If you want to alleviate suffering, you can devote your life to hardcore spiritual practice, become enlightened and live in a constant state of bliss away from society. Why not get the best of both worlds?

I am not particularly interested in entering this deep and murky discourse of meaning and purpose. It would probably take years to master, and what for - to satisfy my need for logic? So that my life would be logically impeccable? I couldn't give less shit about it. I should admit, however, that looking into these things helped me clarify my position towards life.

Knowing that I will die and that I want neither to kill myself nor to become a mystic/hardcore philosopher/scientist (who might believe that science will find meaning in the future, when humanity as we know it ceases to exist), I'm choosing to play the game, even though I didn't ask for it. And to get as much happiness and fulfillment as is available to me. Luckily, the problem of happiness is much more down-to-earth and can actually be solved. 

 

 

[StephenK]

On 1/15/2018 at 11:14 PM, Thanatos13 said:

One thing that I never understood was why bother doing literally any of it when suicide is a more expedient alternative. 

 

Its like an insight I had one day when I realized I don’t have to or need to live. It’s optional 

I think that largely depends on your brain chemistry and genetics (that call needs to be made on a case by case basis). Suicide is most certainly an option for certain people. Sometimes life is shit and solutions are incredibly improbable. Sometimes it won't get better. Sometimes it will. I think most humans vastly underestimate how painful life can be. But at the same time, there are genuinely people that do enjoy life as a whole (winning the genetic or upbringing lottery). I personally don't do it because of fear.  It's that simple. I am also aware of how pleasant life can be when the ego gets out of the way. If I can get to the ego-less space in 10 years, I think it'll be worth the pain. On the other hand, if no progress is shown as I get older, I wouldn't be completely opposed to ending it. 

[Thanatos13]

23 minutes ago, StephenK said:

I think that largely depends on your brain chemistry and genetics (that call needs to be made on a case by case basis). Suicide is most certainly an option for certain people. Sometimes life is shit and solutions are incredibly improbable. Sometimes it won't get better. Sometimes it will. I think most humans vastly underestimate how painful life can be. But at the same time, there are genuinely people that do enjoy life as a whole (winning the genetic or upbringing lottery). I personally don't do it because of fear.  It's that simple. I am also aware of how pleasant life can be when the ego gets out of the way. If I can get to the ego-less space in 10 years, I think it'll be worth the pain. On the other hand, if no progress is shown as I get older, I wouldn't be completely opposed to ending it. 

Assuming such a state like ego-lessness exists.

 

1 hour ago, SOUL said:

@Thanatos13  You are missing the point that the evidence you seek is something only you can supply.

You're making assumptions about the state of my life and what I have been through. This isn't a pissing match about who has it worst or  who overcame more.

 It's about whether you have the will to carry on and find your own well-being in whatever way you can regardless of the circumstances in your life.

 There isn't anybody that can give that to you, it's something you search within yourself for.

 

Except there really isn’t a point to carrying on. Everything ends the same way ultimately. 

[SOUL]

1 hour ago, Thanatos13 said:

Except there really isn’t a point to carrying on. Everything ends the same way ultimately. 

That is just your personal belief, you are entitled to believe it and  act  according to it as you see fit but it doesn't make it fact or truth for everyone.

So be it.

Edited January 31, 2018 by SOUL

[StephenK]

12 minutes ago, Thanatos13 said:

Assuming such a state like ego-lessness exists.

I've had numerous experiences of it, so I have personally validated the benefits. For you, what I am saying is just anecdotal evidence. I can do nothing to change that. Yours is your own life to live (or not live). Mine is my own. That is the neurological diversity that exists within humans. The universe is a complex, messy space. Trying to make the diversity of life (and diversity of other minds) conform to your personal experience (your personal neural-wiring) of life is irrational. 

Edited January 31, 2018 by StephenK

[AlwaysBeNice]

You don't just get enlightened in spirit without going through your process because you can't kill the emotional/mental body by killing the physical body.

And you chose to be here from spirit to

1. Gain the experience of a human being and shape yourself as a being,

to experience going from from limitation to freedom, from judgment to love, to become wiser/greater than before.

2. To experience the proces of enlightenment, and eventually live an incarnation of a free enlightened human life (which is not a lesser experience than being in spirit), then you can and will truly move on satisfied. 

[Thanatos13]

50 minutes ago, StephenK said:

I've had numerous experiences of it, so I have personally validated the benefits. For you, what I am saying is just anecdotal evidence. I can do nothing to change that. Yours is your own life to live (or not live). Mine is my own. That is the neurological diversity that exists within humans. The universe is a complex, messy space. Trying to make the diversity of life (and diversity of other minds) conform to your personal experience (your personal neural-wiring) of life is irrational. 

It’s not my “wiring” (which there isn’t much evidence to suggest people are hard wired) has nothing to do with it. It’s not my fault that people don’t want to accept reality.

You had an “experience” but there isn’t anything to suggest it was egolessness. People use that line to validate all sorts of beliefs that don’t survive repeated tests.

40 minutes ago, AlwaysBeNice said:

You don't just get enlightened in spirit without going through your process because you can't kill the emotional/mental body by killing the physical body.

And you chose to be here from spirit to

1. Gain the experience of a human being and shape yourself as a being,

to experience going from from limitation to freedom, from judgment to love, to become wiser/greater than before.

2. To experience the proces of enlightenment, and eventually live an incarnation of a free enlightened human life (which is not a lesser experience than being in spirit), then you can and will truly move on satisfied. 

I’m going to stop you there and say that none of that is true. Even if it were, it doesn’t make any sense. Why bother with human existence? What is preventing a spirit from just moving on? Isn’t “deciding” to come here a move by the ego? So then the ego isn’t lost when you leave but still remains. Perhaps the “transcendence” of the ego is an illusion of the mind. 

There is literally no sense to any of that if it were true. Thankfully it isn’t. 

[StephenK]

18 hours ago, Thanatos13 said:

It’s not my “wiring” (which there isn’t much evidence to suggest people are hard wired) has nothing to do with it. It’s not my fault that people don’t want to accept reality.

You had an “experience” but there isn’t anything to suggest it was egolessness. People use that line to validate all sorts of beliefs that don’t survive repeated tests.

 

Yes, yes it is your wiring. The universe itself is 'wired' so to speak. Ask an apple not to fall under the influence of gravity when there is no obstacle in the way. When genetics and environment are taken into account, you are pretty much hardwired (there is a small set of behavioral and experiential modalities that your mind and body can exist in, given your unique neural wiring and physiology). This is not an opinion. This is a fact. Can you regulate your heartbeat on command? Can you induce a state of euphoria for the rest of your life? Can you choose to grow a third arm? Can you choose to be without thought for 20 minutes? People are born with different starting points in life. Some people are born into misery, poverty, abuse etc, and others are born into loving homes, are well fed, have won the genetic lottery of life and are pretty happy. Game theory would suggest that there are different strategies to be played out depending on the cards you have been dealt in life. What you're proposing in this thread is that there is a single strategy to be played that trumps all other strategies, for all players, and masquerading this strategy as reality. From a game theoretic perspective (that is, from a mathematical perspective), you are simply wrong in your assertion that there is a single rational strategy to this problem. I will however grant you that for most people in human history, the game is not worth playing. This however does give one the liberty to make existential claims about the nature of reality, since the human machine with its unique design is but a subset of reality, and to propose models of reality based on a human-centric model is flawed to begin with.

As for my experience of egolessness, your assertion that 'there isn’t anything to suggest it was egolessness' means that there is first hand information about the event that you were privy to, and that I was not? Pray tell, were you channeling my mind with dark voodoo magic during this experience? Were you there in my mind? Did you cognize and order the experience as I did? Did you see as I did the neuroses fall one by one from the mind and therefore witness the dropping of suffering from awareness? If you're incapable of getting to these places, or you simply haven't tried, well then all I can say is that it must suck to be you. I don't mean to come off as rude, but that's as clear as I can put it.

Edited February 1, 2018 by StephenK

[StephenK]

20 minutes ago, StephenK said:

double post

 

Edited February 1, 2018 by StephenK
double post

[Thanatos13]

On 2/1/2018 at 3:41 AM, StephenK said:

Yes, yes it is your wiring. The universe itself is 'wired' so to speak. Ask an apple not to fall under the influence of gravity when there is no obstacle in the way. When genetics and environment are taken into account, you are pretty much hardwired (there is a small set of behavioral and experiential modalities that your mind and body can exist in, given your unique neural wiring and physiology). This is not an opinion. This is a fact. Can you regulate your heartbeat on command? Can you induce a state of euphoria for the rest of your life? Can you choose to grow a third arm? Can you choose to be without thought for 20 minutes? People are born with different starting points in life. Some people are born into misery, poverty, abuse etc, and others are born into loving homes, are well fed, have won the genetic lottery of life and are pretty happy. Game theory would suggest that there are different strategies to be played out depending on the cards you have been dealt in life. What you're proposing in this thread is that there is a single strategy to be played that trumps all other strategies, for all players, and masquerading this strategy as reality. From a game theoretic perspective (that is, from a mathematical perspective), you are simply wrong in your assertion that there is a single rational strategy to this problem. I will however grant you that for most people in human history, the game is not worth playing. This however does give one the liberty to make existential claims about the nature of reality, since the human machine with its unique design is but a subset of reality, and to propose models of reality based on a human-centric model is flawed to begin with.

As for my experience of egolessness, your assertion that 'there isn’t anything to suggest it was egolessness' means that there is first hand information about the event that you were privy to, and that I was not? Pray tell, were you channeling my mind with dark voodoo magic during this experience? Were you there in my mind? Did you cognize and order the experience as I did? Did you see as I did the neuroses fall one by one from the mind and therefore witness the dropping of suffering from awareness? If you're incapable of getting to these places, or you simply haven't tried, well then all I can say is that it must suck to be you. I don't mean to come off as rude, but that's as clear as I can put it.

Well if we are going by the claim of “you’re already dead”, then by that logic doctors should not “save “ people’s lives or relieve their pain.

[StephenK]

6 hours ago, Thanatos13 said:

Well if we are going by the claim of “you’re already dead”, then by that logic doctors should not “save “ people’s lives or relieve their pain.

I'm not sure what to make of the claim 'you're already dead'. If that is a comment on the nonexistence of the self, then yes I agree. I guess you could say that the self concept never existed in the first place. In that sense, yes, you (the self concept) have always been 'dead'. However, by logic alone, one can not specify what a doctor should or shouldn't do absent a desire. This is largely encapsulated by the is–ought problem. There have been many attempts to overcome this problem, none of which seem very well reasoned out. Given that, one always needs the premise of desire or aversion in order to drive cognition. That is, in order to 'act' in an utterly indifferent universe, one needs certain premises to motivate thought. Logic alone does not give rise to 'should' statements. Logic alone does not say whether 'you should or shouldn't kill yourself'.

An interesting thing to note is that the entirety of the mind is a set of inferences based upon arbitrarily set desires put in place by evolution and society. In this sense, the things that mind infers about the world are paper thin. When one experiences the pain caused by the desire to, say, fit into a social group, one can respond in one of two ways: either one strives to fit in, satiating that neural pathway and getting a serotonin or dopamine hit, or one says, "Hey, this script in my mind that drives me to look for social acceptance is pretty pointless. It causes pain. I am going to liberate myself of this pointless script running in my mind". This second approach is what I think spirituality is largely trying to do with various scripts in the mind, but people prefer to embellish spirituality with some really wacky ideas and flights of fancy to sell the idea to susceptible minds. 

 

Edited February 3, 2018 by StephenK

[Patang]

life is a gift given to "you" to play in a playground called reality. "you" are just a player who experiencing life. "you" can live "your" life been immersed in reality as "you" grasp it, or "you" can watch it according to what it really is and act respectively. I am full of gratitude for the opportunity given to "me" to play in this wonderful playground.

Edited February 3, 2018 by Patang

[Thanatos13]

5 hours ago, StephenK said:

I'm not sure what to make of the claim 'you're already dead'. If that is a comment on the nonexistence of the self, then yes I agree. I guess you could say that the self concept never existed in the first place. In that sense, yes, you (the self concept) have always been 'dead'. However, by logic alone, one can not specify what a doctor should or shouldn't do absent a desire. This is largely encapsulated by the is–ought problem. There have been many attempts to overcome this problem, none of which seem very well reasoned out. Given that, one always needs the premise of desire or aversion in order to drive cognition. That is, in order to 'act' in an utterly indifferent universe, one needs certain premises to motivate thought. Logic alone does not give rise to 'should' statements. Logic alone does not say whether 'you should or shouldn't kill yourself'.

An interesting thing to note is that the entirety of the mind is a set of inferences based upon arbitrarily set desires put in place by evolution and society. In this sense, the things that mind infers about the world are paper thin. When one experiences the pain caused by the desire to, say, fit into a social group, one can respond in one of two ways: either one strives to fit in, satiating that neural pathway and getting a serotonin or dopamine hit, or one says, "Hey, this script in my mind that drives me to look for social acceptance is pretty pointless. It causes pain. I am going to liberate myself of this pointless script running in my mind". This second approach is what I think spirituality is largely trying to do with various scripts in the mind, but people prefer to embellish spirituality with some really wacky ideas and flights of fancy to sell the idea to susceptible minds. 

 

None of that addressed my point about doctors.

[StephenK]

2 minutes ago, Thanatos13 said:

None of that addressed my point about doctors.

You never had a point to begin with. Logic alone does not call for any action to be taken -- it never did. Even if you're suffering immensely, logic alone does not dictate that one should or shouldn't end it. Suffering just 'is'. You are deriving a normative statement from a set of facts and trying to bridge the is-ought gap. Doctors can do whatever the **** they want. You are in effect saying nothing, so I can't really respond to anything. Besides that, this topic of 'doctors' you've brought up is a big bait-and-switch from the original topic.

[Thanatos13]

33 minutes ago, StephenK said:

You never had a point to begin with. Logic alone does not call for any action to be taken -- it never did. Even if you're suffering immensely, logic alone does not dictate that one should or shouldn't end it. Suffering just 'is'. You are deriving a normative statement from a set of facts and trying to bridge the is-ought gap. Doctors can do whatever the **** they want. You are in effect saying nothing, so I can't really respond to anything. Besides that, this topic of 'doctors' you've brought up is a big bait-and-switch from the original topic.

It’s related to the whole “you are already dead”. If you “are” then there isn’t a reason to save your “life” because there isn’t one to save or help.

[StephenK]

 

24 minutes ago, Thanatos13 said:

It’s related to the whole “you are already dead”. If you “are” then there isn’t a reason to save your “life” because there isn’t one to save or help.

Regardless of whether one believes in the self or not, first-person experience still takes on positive or negative qualities, and these positive or negative experiences will drive desire or aversion. The negation of 'self' is not a negation of direct experience itself.

[Nahm]

@Thanatos13 What if you argued for your happiness?