There is no god.

Truth. Sometimes I think bogie is deliberately trolling...

I'm kind of thinking you mean modern standard of living when you say prosperity. What proof do you have that people are overall happier and more prosperous now than before god was killed and during the three estate system before money was widely used?

I'm leaning toward the opinion that you're judging human life by materialistic standards that having stuff and living twenty years longer= prosperity.

From all accounts people were generally happier when there was a reason for their suffering, rather than the meaninglessness of a cold and uncaring and ultimately alien-to-human universe.

so you prefer the blue pill?

This post was edited by duffman316 on Sep 6 2014 10:47am

Indeed people aren't overall happier, I was primarily referring to economic prosperity.

We're gonna be overall happier in the next ~25 years due to technology though

I think the blue pill is pretending that the world is a logical and rational place that can be understood on human terms, that science somehow through a miracle presents objective truth, and that calling the same things by different words based on arbitrary categories and taxonomies is anything different than what we had been doing is actually getting to know reality in any meaningful way.

I'm not anti-science, I am pro-science being described in accurate terms, which is a toolset to create operational truths that remain true until they cease to work, and nothing more, with the truth being purely subjective and temporal and having no meaning whatsoever outside of human experience.



The industrial revolution was a scientific revolution if there ever was one and the world on the whole is a much more miserable place because of it.

As long as technology being developed is in the name of splitting the atom for maximum destruction, cloning which kills life's diversity (the most important trait), and how to better make work's individual tasks as menial as possible in the name of efficiency, then I see nothing but misery and degradation as a result.

This post was edited by Skinned on Sep 6 2014 11:09am

no one calls science objective truth, it's just a question of do you or do you not recognize it as the best tool we have available for acquiring knowledge of the world around us or do you consider it equivalent to the same modes of thought which led us to believe illnesses were caused by mythical creatures

as for the second bit, dogs are quite happy but no one aspires to obtain the happiness of simpler life forms over the value of the technological revolution

we can worry about first world problems like finding a meaningful purpose in life after we've solved problems with hunger, clean water, breathable air etc.

Clean water and breathable air? So the plan is to use science to fix problems created by the use of science?

Not a terrible strategy, I'm just skeptical. That seems like buying free trade coffee to mitigate the economic imperialism the place that grows the coffee suffers from. Like putting a band-aid on a cancerous cell.

This post was edited by Skinned on Sep 6 2014 11:24am

The ability to genetically engineer well-being or otherwise directly manipulate the mind to our will offers unimaginably positive prospects for the future happiness of (post-)humans.

Frontal lobe lobotomies offered the same thing and those turned out poorly

Those are noble goals, but I think A Brave New World wasn't very appealing. If you remove the suffering you remove the passion. It would be the end of the humanities, because it would be the end of humans.

I suppose you have an eye for the assumption of becoming a higher form of life, but I personally believe that there are now higher forms of life nor lower forms of life...there is just life and it is all equal before nature. Some life (human life) is more capable of seeing that absurdity.