An intellectually satisfying paradise

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- Mount A Bison
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Re: An intellectually satisfying paradise
Reply #30 - May 22, 2011, 11:50 PM

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- Mount A Bison
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Re: An intellectually satisfying paradise
Reply #31 - May 23, 2011, 12:04 AM

Quote from: Lara91 on May 22, 2011, 11:09 PM
not to interrupt your discussion, but this is a great movie about death, paradise and hell. here u create ur own paradise kinda like some of you have been saying..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4FM1XaF6jo&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pHCtLzmras

If you don't quit posting movies that catch my eye young women, I will spank you till your spirit takes flight. Don't test me. I will do it.
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Re: An intellectually satisfying paradise
Reply #32 - May 23, 2011, 12:24 AM

Quote from: Mount A Bison on May 22, 2011, 11:50 PM
Immortality once the bloom of youth has withered is akin to a tortoise without a shell. What's the point? To roll out existence to the outermost reaches of eternity means to attack the process of ageing, to replace decaying organs and body parts, to substitute even the brain like a scene from a Heinlein novel. Medicine is not remotely close.

Various organs have been created from stem cells now and transplanted, medicine is a lot closer than you think.

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What keeps the fires of my interest burning in the subject is in that all the systems of post-mortem remuneration lies the unspoken notion that pain surmounted is bliss achieved. Fiddlesticks! The pastimes out of which we draw most joy, literature, music, theatre and cinema deal in essence with the interplay of emotions. They are studies in conflict. The hero falls for a young lovely, they break up, she is kidnapped by a villain, he ties her to a railway track and the hero comes to rescue the day. Such in very basic outline is the trajectory of all narrative plot lines.

I would agree with this. I wonder if part of the reason we enjoy pain is because of whatever healing process follows, rather than the pain itself. To borrow Spinoza's terminology, pain is descending to a lower state of completeness that you may reascend and experience pleasure. What say you?

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What does it mean to have no concept of suffering?

The same thing it would mean to have no concept of pleasure, I would think?
- Mount A Bison
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Re: An intellectually satisfying paradise
Reply #33 - May 23, 2011, 02:02 AM

no.
- Bane
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Re: An intellectually satisfying paradise
Reply #34 - May 23, 2011, 04:24 AM

Quote from: Mount A Bison on May 23, 2011, 02:02 AM
The ideal vision of paradise to my eye is not the decay of unpleasant sensations, but its proper regulation. A life so constructed that one might erase painful memories at will. I don't think pathos, correctly understood, is what man objects to. What he objects to is needless suffering that serves no edifying purpose. We don't resent the disconsolate poem. We resent the mugging. Of such are most painful experiences. On this theory there are gradations of suffering as there are levels of pleasure. Sex and painting both stimulate bliss, but they occupy different planes of ecstasy. The ideal vision of life, if it is to allow room for so elemental a human trait as free will, could not terminate suffering, but it might afford an off switch for such forms of pain as prove too heavily taxing. At the present we have to live with our bad experiences.

Had God consulted me on this matter I would have told him that He’s going about the enterprise wrong-headedly. One cannot be made unhappy by what one does not recall. Selective amnesia as an anti-depressive. Bliss in other words found not through external stimuli; for that is a prehistoric conception of where, in the human body, wellbeing is generated, but though exercising full control over one’s mind as one might over a computer. Control both input and output.

This republic of amnesia is not free of its own problems true enough as emerges on further reflection, but it seems to me preferable to the pain-free nullity offered by the resurrection-men that manages to strike at both the concept of suffering and free will in one fell swoop. Impressive. Ask not then for the death of pain, but its regulation. Stray thought: I need a stiff drink.

Oh how impressive. I agree wholeheartedly.

Get crunk.
- _truth_
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Re: An intellectually satisfying paradise
Reply #35 - May 23, 2011, 04:53 AM

one that does not consist of idiotic theists
- toor
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Re: An intellectually satisfying paradise
Reply #36 - May 23, 2011, 09:27 AM

Better to die and be belaboured no more by being than to live forever.

Youth be damned. Memory be damned. Pain be damned. All must die.

Before it gets too late, you will find escape.
- Mount A Bison
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Re: An intellectually satisfying paradise
Reply #37 - May 23, 2011, 09:01 PM

^ The poverty of your imagination is the only thing which must perish you little donkey. One's memory, as Arthur Miller says in this lovely interview, will persist. But what does a little chit like you know about that?
- toor
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Re: An intellectually satisfying paradise
Reply #38 - May 23, 2011, 09:05 PM

We are the only species that can fool itself into thinking that it has a purpose, and that any meanings we superimpose upon what we see are worth a damn.

We will one day become extinct; who will we delude then?

Before it gets too late, you will find escape.
- Mount A Bison
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Re: An intellectually satisfying paradise
Reply #39 - May 23, 2011, 09:08 PM

Quote from: Bane on May 23, 2011, 04:24 AM
Oh how impressive. I agree wholeheartedly.

I know we haven't been introduced properly, but would you care to roll in the hay?
- Mount A Bison
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Re: An intellectually satisfying paradise
Reply #40 - May 23, 2011, 09:09 PM

Quote from: toor on May 23, 2011, 09:05 PM
We are the only species that can fool itself into thinking that it has a purpose, and that any meanings we superimpose upon what we see are worth a damn.

We will one day become extinct; who will we delude then?

Pish posh! What's that got to do with designing the perfect Jannah? So come now my desi brother, what's your design? No way you can top mine.
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Re: An intellectually satisfying paradise
Reply #41 - May 23, 2011, 09:18 PM

Quote from: Mount A Bison on May 23, 2011, 09:09 PM
Pish posh! What's that got to do with designing the perfect Jannah? So come now my desi brother, what's your design? No way you can top mine.

My complaint is that an intellectually satisfying paradise is a contradiction in terms.

Our short lives give us meaning enough. That some of us are would forever prolong a particular state of sentient existence strikes me as some form of moral deficiency.

Before it gets too late, you will find escape.
- Mount A Bison
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Re: An intellectually satisfying paradise
Reply #42 - May 23, 2011, 09:26 PM

Moral defect? An explosive word. That's the kind of thing which makes knives start flying in my home. You had better explain yourself.
- toor
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Re: An intellectually satisfying paradise
Reply #43 - May 23, 2011, 09:49 PM

Deficiency rather than defect. In this case, an unwillingness to believe in one's eternal mortality strikes me as an exercise in wishful thinking. I suggest that to elevate its afterimage - an idealised perpetual life - into something desirable, much less achievable, is to devalue what life we do lead.

I cannot find this commendable. What say you?

Before it gets too late, you will find escape.
- aife
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Re: An intellectually satisfying paradise
Reply #44 - June 06, 2011, 01:15 AM

@ MaB - are you "ofchrist" ?
Used tenners will be fine...
- vagabond
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Re: An intellectually satisfying paradise
Reply #45 - June 16, 2011, 05:49 PM

I would like to peer into Gods own mind

"What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say."
- RaccoonR
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Re: An intellectually satisfying paradise
Reply #46 - June 16, 2011, 06:00 PM

A satisfying paradise would be in the back of my car, as described by MC Chippy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmy_uLHyl6I

"In battle, the well-honed spork is more dangerous than the mightiest sword" -- Sun Tzu
- Merry_Squirell
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Re: An intellectually satisfying paradise
Reply #47 - June 17, 2011, 12:12 AM

That's my idea of heaven too.

Isn't it funny how cats can understand people without ever reading a single psychology book?
- Merry_Squirell
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Re: An intellectually satisfying paradise
Reply #48 - June 17, 2011, 12:43 AM

I mean-a never ending library with internet access.

Isn't it funny how cats can understand people without ever reading a single psychology book?
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