/fringe/ - Fringe

Suicide 02/02/14 (Sun) 22:00:52 No. 2583

In Defense of Suicide: Are you Man or Pig?

An intelligent question on Quora:

“If we all end up dying, what’s the purpose of living?
What’s the purpose of achieving so much in life when you are just going to die in the end?”

Ozymandias has answered the second line. But why bother, when the first is more salient?

02/02/14 (Sun) 22:01:04 No.2584

Here is the happy falsehood Quorites upvoted to primacy:

“Indulge me the privilege of rephrasing the question.

“If you’re going to run out of cake to eat, what’s the purpose of eating cake?”

The purpose is to enjoy it. Having been served the above cake (or a flavor more to your liking, as you please), would you rebuff, “No thank you. There’s not enough of this cake to eat forever, so there’s no purpose to eating it.” Of course not! Scarcity doesn’t make it any less pleasurable.

Doesn’t that cake look delicious? So it is with life.”

02/02/14 (Sun) 22:01:23 No.2585

False analogy. Corrected version:

You are locked in a white room. You will never see another human face. A robotic ATM serves you delicious food 3x per day. No other entertainment or stimulation exists. You know with certainty that when you die, robots will enter the room, cremate your corpse, and replace you with a new person, who will repeat your life. This will continue until the sun dies, with no possibility of change.

Do you eat the delicious food? Or do you hang yourself from the bedpost, prison-style?

The fool on Quora says, “Eat the food.” He has no spirit; he is a pig.

A man requires meaning. A pig requires only pleasure stimuli from his bio-emotional flesh matrix.

Are you a man or a pig?

All living materialists are either a-scientific, or pigs. If scientific, they believe in the Second Law of Thermodynamics: that all matter will perish in entropic heat death. Yet they persist in the completely meaningless activity of life. Therefore, pigs.

Pigs live happily in a stockyard, eating and grunting. If they possessed sufficient foresight, they would realize that their lives have no purpose. Their flesh is food for higher beings. Their deaths are preordained and immutable. All is meaningless.

In a world devoid of meaning, the only rational calculus is death. We arrive at this conclusion via synthetic judgment. Pain teaches us early that its range is infinite, its authority absolute. Pleasure, on the other hand, satisfies only for a season, and within a circumscribed range. Furthermore, at any moment, one may be thrown into a lightless, inescapable prison of pain enduring for decades, e.g. a stroke. No modest pleasure is worth this terrifying risk

This is the first reason to die: the fear of pain. A pig’s calculus, but true nonetheless.

The second reason is a man’s. In a world devoid of meaning, there can be no spiritual pleasure. Only eternal pain. Therefore man also chooses death now.

Your parents were either believers or pigs, and their parents, and so on all the way back. Survivorship bias is here at its most sovereign. Your genes scream that you must not hear these words. The prison of flesh binds you with all its might.

In the stockyard, it is taboo to speak of the slaughterhouse blades and the supermarket shelves. I have spoken. Now squeal.

02/02/14 (Sun) 22:01:36 No.2586

Addendum:

I have a tendency to publish these meditations for maximum offense, in original distilled form. They key here is to note the qualification, “materialists”. A dualist, even if he is non-theistic, is not necessarily susceptible to this criticism. For if a supernatural consciousness exists, then that may be sufficient to escape the inexorable material logic of the 2nd Law – either by immortality, or by transcendant though transient significance.

Likewise, I neglected to mention the stupid and the cowardly, two categories not mutually exclusive.

The former fails to follow the math through the to completion. “Look!” He says. “There is addition within the parentheses!” Conveniently, he neglects to multiply by zero.

The coward, on the other hand, refuses to multiply by zero because he is afraid of death. He pretends the zero isn’t there, though he knows in his heart that it is.

Then there are the merely muddled, the nominally materialist but de facto dualists, who believe consciousness is non-illusory yet fully material. My proof of the supernatural eviscerates their position.

The only non-muddled materialist would be an AI capable of answering philosophical questions but without any experiencing supernatural “I” consciousness. When one considers how such a soulless entity is likely to behave, one is glad of Heaven’s legions. The creation of something so beyond direct human skill would likely involve either copying from mammalian neural templates and/or virtual evolution by murderous selective pressure, at the behest of those unscrupulously motivated by war or financial gain.

In this more catholic paradigm, my “meaning or death” stance appears more idiosyncratic. When I first converted intellectually, I had not yet reached this conclusion, but was a neutral agnostic, content to reject the world’s faiths.

Why, then, do I now say “meaning or death”? Partly it is my deepsock MT low-DR nature. But I doubt that is sufficient. Rather, Christianity is the most powerful concentrate of meaning possible. I have been snorting jungle caterpillars of Heisenberg Blue since childhood. I can’t go back to some wishy washy baking soda Humanist version of “meaning”; not after tasting the absolute truth of the Most High God. Thus do all men receive pleasure: we are unwilling to return to the small and the mean once we have tasted the sublime. A chrome .45 is infinitely more appealing.

This is now simply part of my contract for life: If He exists, I will exist at His pleasure. If not, neither will I. Of the two, the latter is far easier. I would do it with a smile, and find my rest.

But no. Perhaps that is too selfish. I would leave behind many sparks of supernatural fire burning, and suffering. Duty would still call me to live, and fight. Say rather, that if materialism were true, and no supernatural entity existed, THEN I would take the pig’s calculus to its logical conclusion.

http://www.koanicsoul.com/blog/2013/11/22/in-defense-of-suicide-are-you-man-or-pig/