Discussion thread [Serious]

[atomtengeralattjaro]

I need to think before I post.

don't do that, it might cause raspberries to fly towards Morocco..

[klinscy]

My favorite number is 1.potato

[Peemore]

1. I was a Baptist Christian up until the age of 18, which was when I stopped believing what I was told to believe, and thought for myself. Not bashing Christianity, just saying that its not something I believe in personally anymore. A higher power though? Impossible to rule out, just as its impossible to prove. My favorite philosopher Rene Descartes brought up the point that our minds do not perceive anything directly. It's all filtered through our senses and then sent to our conscious. He also pointed out that our senses can be faulty, misleading, flat out wrong sometimes. (A stick dipped in water looks bent, intuition is what tells us it's not.) So his whole idea here is that we don't have any proof that this material world really exists at all. For all we know, we are only a mind being deceived by some demon into thinking there is an outside world. Not that I believe this, but I find it VERY interesting to contemplate. You might recognize Rene Descartes famous quote, "I think, therefore I am". Turns out, the fact that you YOURSELF exists, is all that you can TRULY know indubitably. As soon as you question whether you exist or not, you realize you have to because who is doing the questioning? Just some thoughts there. Don't know if I personally believe in a higher power.

2. The afterlife... Huge topic. I find it fascinating that nobody alive will ever know what happens after you die. The one thing nobody alive will ever know. I used to think that there was heaven and all that jazz, then when I stopped being a Christian I sort of just believed that you die, no more conscious, no more existing. But I have had this on my mind for quite a while now and for some reason, just DYING doesnt sit right with me. I feel like consciousness will continue somewhere, somehow. I'm still trying to find something I really believe in, but as of right now I've been entertaining an idea. When we sleep we dream. Our bodies are mostly shut off, sure our brain keeps going but that's besides the point. When you dream, you're not seeing what your senses are telling you are there, you are seeing what your mind itself constructs. I'm not sure if any of you are familiar with lucid dreams, I absolutely revel in that shit. But anyways, sometimes I feel like when we die, our minds will just go into a forever state of lucid dreaming. A world that is whatever you make it to be. Could be heaven for some, or hell for others. Depends on what you got out of life and how it affects your conscious/unconscious. I just find the idea of consciousness so abstract and amazing that I find it hard to believe it will end just because our body dies off. Consciousness just feels like an eternal thing to me for some reason. Lol. My two cents.

3. To each their own. I considered myself an atheist for awhile but believing in nothing for awhile started to ache at me. I would say I have more against religious people than I do atheists, but I'm not one to judge in general. There are good people in every group.

If you haven't read the short story called egg, please look it up on google. Very short, very beautiful, whether you find it plausible or not.

Oh and hello again to all my fellow asdf'rs I haven't spoken to in years.

[atomtengeralattjaro]

:O Hey look, a Peemore!
by the egg story do you mean this? i just read it and it was interesting.

[Peemore]

Yo atom! Been a long time! And yeah that's the story, somebody showed it to me about 6 months ago and I took a fancy to it. Whether its plausible or not, the idea fascinates me to no end. I had been contemplating the idea of solipsism a lot when I read it and those two ideas sort of mesh together in an interesting way. Solipsism also sort of derived from Rene Descartes as well. For those who don't know, solipsism is the idea that you are the only conscious mind in the universe. (Pretty egotistical, but fun to think about none the less). Plus the whole theory of observation, where particles don't fall into place until they are observed by something (if a tree falls in the forest does it make a sound?), ALSO seems to mesh well with solipsism. We don't know what the hell is going on in France.. Unless we travel there or watch tv or go online (observation). It's just another crazy theory that can't be disproved, lol. I just love talking philosophy, I could do it all fuckin day.

[atomtengeralattjaro]

these theories are interesting, but i don't look at them as plausible theories about how the world works, more like thought experiments that help you open your mind.

but since we're at the subject alternate ways of perceiving the world, i've been reading some about the concept of circular time.
it's pretty interesting to know that the ancient humans (and mostly all people before historical events started to shape their knowledge) rejected history, or at least tried to. They lived in an ever-repeating cycle of life, where every day, week, month, year, etc. the same things happen, everyone does the same things, and they put everything they knew about the world into this model: birth and death, sowing and harvest, the cycle of seasons.. at the end of every year they "forgot" what happened last year, everyone had a "clean start", even the gods were reborn.

Today our world is very linear, but we all know that our relationship with time is nothing like that of a clockwork - some minutes pass like hours, sometimes we feel no passage of time (under some psychological or emotional effect), there is deja vu, jamais vu, etc. and then there is how time passes while reading a book (not on the outside, but for the reader). Time is a curious thing.

[assdef]

1. My favorite philosopher Rene Descartes....

Rene Descartes walks into a bar, sits down, and orders a martini. He drinks it. He orders a second martini, and drinks that. He then orders a third martini, and drinks that. The bartender then asks him, "Mr. Descartes, would you like a fourth martini?"

Descartes says, "I think not."

And then he disappeared.

(While I realize this is likely the 4th time I've told this joke in this forum it's not every day someone brings up the topic of Rene Descartes and I can tell it again!)

2. The afterlife...

There is an irony somewhere in the fact that we debate what happens after you die, and use that as a motivation to live a good life, when, realistically, the fact that we are alive right now and able to live a good life should mean so much more to us than what may or may happen in the afterlife. That's arguably the core of religion: live like X, and Y will happen after you die. And I think one viewpoint to take is that it speaks volumes about the human ego that we are so concerned with ourselves and our existence that not only do we worry about how we should live life, we worry about how we will exist after life. As if the time we already have on this planet isn't enough!

Don't get me wrong, I think it's good to be curious and ponder what will happen when we die, and find it to be a fascinating subject as well. I, too, was born and raised Christian (specifically Roman Catholic - Habemus Papam!) but no longer actively participate in any organized religion. But still have personal beliefs that align with most religions: A) Everything happens for a reason and B) Good things happen to people who do good things. How those beliefs will impact my existence after I die seems to me to be less important than how they will impact me while I'm alive. And I wonder at times if that is the secret to life: not worrying about those things outside your control, but doing what you can to influence yourself to live the most fulfilling life you can. And then, if you can do that, what happens after you die somehow becomes irrelevant.

But I'm probably wrong. Who knows.

[atomtengeralattjaro]

So how are you guys over the pond doing with the reboot in safe mode?

[Anonymously Famous]

By this do you mean the so-called government shutdown? It hasn't affected me personally, except for causing me to shake my head more than usual.

[atomtengeralattjaro]

too much head shaking can kill you [citation needed]

[MTG09]

Hi. I wanna talk about being vegan....serious-like

[atomtengeralattjaro]

the save-the-animals kind or the lets-stay-healthy kind? i don't really see the point of either, care to explain?

[MTG09]

Mostly let's stay healthy. The main thing that pissed me off was that companies lie. Milk doesn't give you calcium. The protein in milk is acidic and it takes calcium to neutralize it, morn than whats in milk. So it takes it from your bones.

[Anonymously Famous]

Is there a study that backs that up? I've never heard from anyone, until now, that milk strips calcium.

[MTG09]

There's one somewhere

[MTG09]

Apologies for double post
http://saveourbones.com/osteoporosis-milk-myth/

[atomtengeralattjaro]

unfortunately i'm too lazy to go and find anti-proof of all that. Actually i'm not even reading that, the whole thing looks very tin foil hat, sorry.
all i can say is humans have been drinking cow's milk for a pretty long time, and it doesn't do any harm. You don't have to drink it though, as long as your diet gives you sufficient calcium, protein, etc.

[MTG09]

Well yeah. The point was tho is that its not healthy

[Anonymously Famous]

I don't tend to trust sites written by people who put "MA" after their name as though it were a doctorate degree. I have an MA. Sure, hers is in Nutritional Sciences and Biochemistry, but there are several people with the same sorts of degrees who will support milk. Give me a .edu site, or something that's been peer reviewed.

Here's a site from the Harvard School of Public Health about milk and calcium: LINK. It, unfortunately, appears to say a lot without saying much. It says that there are possible risks with drinking milk, but not that it strips calcium.

Anyway, I don't have the time to type more right now, but this is an interesting discussion.

EDIT: Sorry. Had something to do that interrupted me. Where was I?

Oh yeah, that Harvard page lists some of the risks (lactose intolerance, high saturated fat if you don't drink only reduced fat milk products, some increase in cancer (though one of the studies mentioned links it to calcium itself, and not milk)), and mentions that there are other sources of calcium, but it notes, "At this time, however, the optimal intake of calcium is not clear, nor is the optimal source or sources of calcium." There's also a list of references at the end.

[MTG09]

Another serious discussion. I may be insane.