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Indoor Farming
Buildings with artifial lighting, weather control, and farms on every floor. | |
Actually, let me start from the beginning: The idea I am about to tell is part of a larger utopia that I have; the Super Society of the future. The 21st century is here, and with what? Wars, economic crisis, starvation.. It is a shame for the whole world, but especially for those developed countries.
As an Existentialist, I believe we have to start over; we have to restructure our world (and genes too actually, but that's a different topic). It is time to build a society where no one starves and everyone has a place to stay (no, I'm not a communist). For this, certain foods should be very cheap, such as canned beans, or flour. Everyone in the world should have a share of these foods, so many grams per person per day for instance. The way to do this is to form a World Government that is responsible for collecting tax from everyone in the world. With this tax, 10 - 15 story buildings will be built, either over ground or underground. Each floor will have artificial lighting and weather control. There will be automated planting, irrigation, and harvesting systems. The food produced this way will be much cheaper because: 1. land use is less 2. less labor involved 3. it is more efficient (you can get 1000% more harvest from it.
Now of course you will tell that this is the most idiotic idea because energy prices are much higher than food. Well dear idea busters, I didn't say we will be using the current energy sources. All this will be accomplished after we get the EMP Fusion to work. And this is how that goes:
1. Take Lithium Deuteride (LiD)
2. Make it into a ring shape
3. Coat it with a Tantalum (high melting point)
4. Heat the whole thing to 1000 C (LiD melts)
5. Since LiD is a salt, it conducts electricity when has melted
6. Now take an Explosively Pumped Flux Compression Generator (EPFCG) or another EMP (electromagnetic pulse) device
7. Put the LiD ring at the end of the EMP device
8. Hit it with EMP. It will heat up very fast!
9. The LiD fuel goes thru fusion and releases heat
10. Collect the heat to generate power
Now we can start building our utopia.
Wikipedia: Existentialism
http://en.wikipedia...wiki/Existentialism
[jutta, Feb 02 2009]
Concrete Cow?
Concrete_20Cow
Shameless self promotion. [Zimmy, Feb 02 2009]
Existentialism
http://plato.stanfo...ies/existentialism/
Good luck [nineteenthly, Feb 02 2009]
Overbaked (discussion group on Yahoo)
http://groups.yahoo...m/groups/overbaked/
A place to discuss existential fusion reactions and other things that descend into circular and uninformed arguments. [bigsleep, Feb 03 2009]
Baked long ago!
http://www.verticalfarm.com/
It is already being invested billions of $. I guess it is about presentation. [xkuntay, Nov 06 2009]
[link]
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Ive seen the first part of this idea on teddotcom or
possibly daily planet. You probably saw it too, forgot, and
thought it was your own. |
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I have never heard of the second part of your idea though,
which sounds really promising. (the part about utopian
power generation) maybe post that as a separate idea and
that part will be recieved better? |
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something about nuclear powered marijuana grow-houses |
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Oh. Ok. Sounds like quite a good idea now. |
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... could have something to do with asteroid mining... |
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Unfortunately, if we get fusion or some other throbbingly good energy source to work we'll probably stuff up the planet in whole new ways. (Remember when we thought global warming was the biggest problem? Oh, for those glory days.) |
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Glass half empty man here again, saying that in this Utopia, the tantalum probably comes from a certain country which is most definitely not a utopia and fuels war there. You could presumably get it out of old mobiles, as well as the lithium. What sort of a scale are you thinking of here?
The relatively exotic materials you suggest are relatively hard to come by and extract, transport and so forth. I prefer to use stuff which is currently lying about. There are old bikes and a defunct washing machine in the back yard right now which i can potentially rig into a pedal-powered generator, then connect it to an old lorry battery and use it for power. I haven't got very far with this yet. |
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Then again, if i were as critical of my own ideas i'd never get round to posting them. |
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What has being an existentialist got to do with revolutionising the infrastructure? Where is the link between Hamlet's "to be and not to be" and a technique for generating fusion power? Perhaps you meant to say that you are a survivalist, though that's a kind of different thing too. |
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How is EMP sparked fusion any different to other forms of fusion? The REAL problem is not getting fusion to happen, it's getting it to happen SLOWLY enough not to destroy the equipment used to control, and extract energy from it. Setting of a great big EMP that'll likely fry any control electronics required to control the subsequent blast isn't going to help much. |
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But I like the growing plants in stacked greenhouses idea, and the idea of a world authority tasked with ensuring that everybody has enough to eat - you could probably manage both of those things without fusion power. |
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//a world authority tasked with ensuring that everybody has enough to eat - you could probably manage// Much like the UN ensures that countries don't fight? Call me a cynic, but I'd reduce my goal to the stacked greenhouses alone. |
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Is it harder to try and feed everyone than it is to stop everyone from fighting? Not sure, I'm basing my assumptions on children's birthday parties here - specifically, I'm assuming that it's easier to organise a party for five year olds where everyone gets a bit of cake, but less so to avoid any fights breaking out. |
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Sorry for popping in an only slightly relevant story but, it's kinda what I do. |
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When I was a kid we moved to a recently renovated low rent apartment building and then found out that the reason for the renovations was that the building had been built for immigrant families from East India who proceeded to spread topsoil over the carpets and grow gardens in their living rooms. One family supposedly even had a cow on the second floor. |
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It's all hearsay of course but almost legendary in a town that small. |
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//I'm assuming that it's easier to organise a party for five year olds where everyone gets a bit of cake, but less so to avoid any fights breaking out// |
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Well that is a semantic argument if ever I saw one. Sure kids will fight over who has the bigger bit and the bit with more icing on, but it is hardly likely to descend into nuclear cake profiterolation. |
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Cake is far less valuable than blood diamonds, so which ever way you slice it, rebel leaders are going to get less money. |
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Stacked greenhouses, or at least several "storeys" (hello American spellchecker!) of crops, are one of permaculture's ideas, for example for growing food on a balcony. The sun presumably comes in from the side, but you could use mirrors.
Concerning existentialism, to be fair the idea of starting again with new genes is rather Nietzschean, so it isn't completely off the wall to say that. You could also say that our current world system encourages bad faith in the Sartrean sense. I find it both intriguing and a little disconcerting to imagine what existentialist politics would be like. Sartre clearly saw it as linked with communism, but that's pretty clearly complete garbage to me. Heidegger seemed rather comfortable with Fascism. If two existentialists can arrive at such different conclusions, what do you do with that? I almost said "God knows what kind of politics existentialism entails", but in the context that would be a bit silly. |
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There is currently no shortage of food in the world. You may point to starving people, but that is a distribution method. We can produce enough food already to turn everyone into 300 lb blobs. The idea that you have to stack these growing facilities makes me think along the lines of we have already no place to plant. Maybe you want to save wild places? Stacked greenhouses will have heat issues. I suppose that issue has to do with scale though something you have not nailed down. That can be overcome to a certain extend because many plants will do just fine with red and blue light. Red for regulation blue for energy. |
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In the end though you are communist. You want a large capital investment to make something totally under priced. Capital investment follows profits and to everyone’s benefit. This process balances needs. My guess is that we don't really need much more food. We don't need to divert any more energy into food than the market dictates. If the market dictates that people starve then you should complain about the starving people's government's interference. |
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If I was going to make lots of cheap food. tell you what I'd do. in my own idea... |
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If you are not a communist and will let people sell this stuff and it truly is cheap to make then people are going to make fuel out of it for systems not hooked into your electric grid. it will always be on par with oil prices as it is now. That is not to say you cant push down oil prices. You can't separate prices nor do you want to. |
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No matter how many times over you can feed the world there will be starving people under repressive regimes just like now. |
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[wags] not sure if your what is directed at me, but in case it was, if the UN (for example) had its remit limited to feeding people, rather than preventing conflict, feeding people, and all sorts of other things - I'd venture that, measure for measure (say mouths fed vs bullets not fired - how you'd measure it I don't know) you'd be more successful if you limited it to feeding people. One reason being, when you try to feed hungry people, you have at least the willing assistance of the people being fed - whereas, if you try to stop two sides from fighting, you may not be able to count on either side's support. |
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The cake analogy stands true on that level, as handing out cake to children who want cake is easier (in terms of tears shed, sulks etc) than breaking up some low-level sibling rivalry scenario where immediate motivations might prefer the dissonance to continue (in order to procure some more cake, for example) |
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Granted, it's EVEN easier to not feed everyone as well, and just build greenhouses, but the original point was that fusion power was a necessary ingredient for this Utopian ideal, I was just saying Fusion might not be a precursor. |
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Existentialist politics: Equal rights for beetles! |
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I'm working on my communication skills, but i know they're not good. |
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OK. Permaculture is a Green way of growing food. One of its techniques is to grow food in several layers. That's like part of this idea. |
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[xkuntay] says he's an existentialist. Existentialism involves beliefs like: we are forced to be free, life is meaningless, we are all basically alone, Hell is other people, awareness of death is the most important thing about being human and that people try unsuccessfully to adopt roles to escape meaninglessness. Different existentialist philosophers believe very different things, but almost everyone agrees that Jean-Paul Sartre was an existentialist. He was also a communist, which makes no sense to me because communism isn't about being alone. Nietzsche believed in supermen and breeding a master race, which was however partly Jewish. |
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Does that make any more sense? Does anything make any sense? Is life meaningless? Am i free to choose to ignore the Halfbakery or am i trapped here forever by my freedom? Do any of my ideas mean anything? Is all this futile? |
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//Buildings with artifial lighting, weather control, and farms on every floor// |
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We've got plenty buildings, why not just add a farm in every yard? The "Super Society of the Future," if it is to be built, will be built from the bottom up, not the top down. |
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//The "Super Society of the Future," if it is to be built, will be built from the bottom up, not the top down.// |
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If computer programming is anything to go by as an analogy, it will be a good mix of both with a lot of sticky tape and glue in the middle. Democracy may well provide our top down goals of "Rocket to next inhabitable planet" and "Combat global warming", with its sub-goals of more fuel efficient stuff etc (minor use cases). The bottom up stuff is that these goals need a stable intellectual workforce. The global market, as I see it, is some kind of pyschopathic middle manager. |
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[z_t] - It wasn't, but thanks for the cake clarification. |
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Oh no, actually it was. I was (and still am) trying to figure out how existentialism got mixed up in all this. It's probably because I'm a little unclear what existentialism actually is. In fact *very* unclear might be more exact. I've asked wiki but it just burbled at me. |
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I guess existentialism is what you understand from it. What I understand is, today's human society is made up of patches, glues, tapes, pieces that have been cut and stapled and tried to put in some kind of shapes, and we finally built this skyscaper that is ready to rattle down with an unexpected wind. What existentialism tells is that what makes human is conscious mind, which will never ever be explained no matter how long we live, and yet what distorts the human mind is also conscious mind, so we have to unify our being with our conscious mind (with the leadership of the conscious mind, through the ultimate awakening, as existentialism dictates) and have the strength to first demolish everything, our ideas and culture in the first place, and re-erect them just like a phoenix does when she burns herself and re-emerges from her ashes (this was a total copy paste from Nietszche). In short, the duality of conscious/unconscious has and always will torture the human (because it is inexplicable with logic), and the only way to let this go is: a) to become animal again b) to become superhuman. Unfortunately the (b) choice is not realisable due to the inperfections in our genes (inexclusively), and the only way to reach that high idea is to collectively work on that one goal only, to create the superhuman. This collective goal can be achieved through a communist society. Breeding races is not an option, because it will only result in more humans. Since what makes human is technology, which is a direct product of the conscious mind (and that is to say apes may have some degree of consciousness), the way to progress to another level must also be through technology, which we now possess in the form of Human Genome. |
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On the flip side of this idea, indoor farming may be the solution for humans to colonize other planets. |
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The thing is, various people have been seen as existentialists, and there's no agreement on who is and isn't one, except that Sartre definitely is. As a result, people have different ideas about what it is and there's a lot of confusion. |
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I think i've got it. Existentialism is a big thing in 'Buffy' season six. I don't know if you've seen it, but it hits the spot pretty well. |
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It was from the op's bit where he said: |
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//As an Existentialist, I believe we have to start over; we have to restructure our world (and genes too actually, but that's a different topic).// |
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I'm not 100% sure if this is right (but am sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong) but for what it's worth, I think existentialism is a sort of counter notion to Plato's 'forms' which suggests that the abstract essences of things are foremost and our experiences of them are mere projections of their existence. Existentialism is much more interested in how it feels 'to *be*' in an almost Hamletian ("to be or not to be...") sense. Edvard Munch's 'The Scream' is very existentialist in that there's a vertiginous sense of the lonely (nihilistic?) experience of existence. It's about the experience of existing, without the slightest notion of why, or how, or what for - and the impossibility of communicating that to anyone else, because deep down, you can't be sure that anyone, or anything else exists except your own thoughts and internal experiences - Going back to Plato for a moment, some of his greatest detractors were the Solipsists who, rather than accepting his idea of a higher plane populated with ideal forms that contained the essence of truth, said that all that anyone could count on was their internal mental experience - Existentialism takes this idea and adds a flavour of angst, disquiet, absurdism (set against the backdrop of turmoil in Europe) - based on the simultaneous idea that all of it is bollocks - i.e. that you can't trust, know or understand your own consciousness either - shit! |
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Again, looking for examples, I'm not sure but think that Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" is a good example of something that's got an Existentialist flavour. Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis is another good pointer. |
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Again, for what it's worth (since I started this anno, there's been two others posted) I don't really take Nietzsche as being an existentialist at - his nihilistic start point is the same - that there was no underlying meaning to anything - only rather than get caught up in paradox and what it feels like to be in the human condition (i.e. the very subject of that paradox), he rationalised his own set of ethics to put in stead of the ones he tore down, basing these on the rational thinking of the time. An existentialist wouldn't be interested in abstractions, breeding ubermenchen, or concerning themselves with the will to power - rather, they'd be busy trying to find themselves in those moments that validated their own existence, giving it meaning and affirmation (except that it doesn't - this paradox being at the root of existentialism, and the cause for the mind-numbing angst that goes along with, and almost defines it) and then, having done that, telling as many young girls about it in the hope of getting off with them. Then finally, they'd probably drink copious amounts of absinthe and slip into a depressed slumber in some unheated bohemian garret. |
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Two annos in a row, this one to [xkuntay]. The first part of what you said sounds like German idealism to me, and Nietzsche hated that passionately - well, he did everything passionately, so it's hardly surprising. He was into Schopenhauer as a young man, but thought it made more sense to replace the Will with the Will To Power, so all things are the Will To Power, sometimes active, sometimes become reactive. Part of our problem, according to Nietzsche, is that we think of ourselves as the top of the pile, and as a result we close ourselves off from becoming superhuman. Other species don't do that, so they don't restrict themselves in the same way that we do. Therefore, rather than thinking of ourselves as human, which is limiting, we should think of ourselves, and behave, like animals, since paradoxically that makes us more than human rather than less. |
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There are bound to be emergent properties in the genome. Simply because you can take a watch to bits doesn't mean you can put it back together and make it work. If i could look at however many lines of source code make this place work, it wouldn't help me understand it because (a) i'm not a programmer, and (b) it couldn't capture the ideas and the interactions between us all which are really the essence of this place. |
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There is no essence to humanity, according to existentialism. I would say we have stumbled upon language and much of what we think of as making us human is the result of that accident. Even if we are the only species capable of language, it doesn't follow that we would invent it. There's a dislocation between those two (and there is no language instinct). |
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Technology is largely dependent on the use of language, though not entirely. Not even that is part of our essence. We have the world as if expressed in Cartesian coordinates, where there is no space for us, no "here" or "there", no "now" or "then", and we have the world as expressed in terms of something we "own", personal space, clutter and home versus away. Our way of being in the world is to pick up stuff and use it, and that stuff matters to us. In that sense, technology is important to us, but it's not essential. What is essential, and we can't even say it's essential to humans because we can't step outside ourselves to say that, is the possibility of things mattering to us. Matter matters, as it were. You can't peel consciousness off like that. |
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However, yes, space travel with hydroponic gardens powered by something sustainable is good. Going back to my probably utterly obscure and mad point though, is that spacecraft up there "^" and are we down here "v", or is it at some set of coordinates different from this set of coordinates? |
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OK, here we go again. A slogan for existentialism is "existence precedes essence." We are thrown into existence and the world doesn't belong to us yet. Think of a baby and its frustrations with the uncooperativeness of the world. We never really leave that state. I can only fly in dreams. If i step off a tall building i will be confronted with the stubbornness of reality pretty fast. That's life, and ultimately that cussedness presents itself to me by the truth that one day i will die. Yes, it is very much allied with the final rejection of Plato's "forms" doobrey. Yes again, Samuel Beckett and Kafka are very much in this vein, though with Beckett the pauses, i.e. what he doesn't say, are significant and he has a project of trying to write as badly as possible and tends to parody, for example, Cartesian dualism. There's a lot going on in Beckett - my favourite playwright, actually. |
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For me, one of the interesting things about Nietzsche is that he is thought of as "going" mad. Right, so he ran down the staircase to stop that bloke whipping the horse and then he was mad? Well, why choose that moment? Then you can just write off everything else he does after that moment as insane and either ignore it or see it as symptomatic of schizophrenia. That's a way of defending yourself against insanity, but if you're going to do that, why bother to take anything he did in his life at any time seriously? When people become what we might call psychotic, they do so in keeping with their own personality. That's very threatening, but if you're going to take Nietzsche seriously, you have to follow him into his madness and, in effect, go mad yourself. Otherwise, just ignore him because he can't help you unless you take all of him seriously. |
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pretty sure I don't follow that [19th] are you saying that if I have a manic depressive grocer I should watch out for mutant vegetables ? |
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I have now reached the stage where i think i understand what i'm saying but no-one else does, and i fear that state is sometimes referred to as "round the bend". Then again, you can make money out of going mad, as David Icke and Philip K Dick demonstrated. |
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//"round the bend"// ah, now we're getting somewhere. |
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//What is essential, and we can't even say it's essential to humans because we can't step outside ourselves to say that, is the possibility of things mattering to us.// |
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That's a fairly easy thought experiment. Just step back 40,000 years and you see a human without technology and civilization as we know it, but still 99.9999% genetically similar. They had pets, tools, art, cared for their weak and pondered the great unknowns in life. |
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Technology is a bit like and art/tool combo. A new and exciting gizmo is like an artwork, but when the novelty has worn off its function as a pure tool is realised. |
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Personally I'm not a fan of philosophers, most were just lazy bastards pondering the meaning of 'ponder' in circular semantic arguments. "Oh the existensialism of having too much time and owning a dictionary !" |
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//That's very threatening, but if you're going to take Nietzsche seriously, you have to follow him into his madness and, in effect, go mad yourself. // |
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Not really, you just need to make up your mind at which point he is talking complete and utter rubbish. We are spoiled these days in how knowledge is presented for both historic and current knowledge. Just go back 100 or 200 years and the science / alchemy / witchcraft / 'apparently mad' split wasn't as distinct. When you read about history's great scientists and philosophers they have been re-written through a sanity filter. So much so that people don't often know about Newtons turning lead into gold phase or his precise calculations for the date of the second coming. Its all nicely chaptered up into his 'sciency stuff' and 'the mad stuff'. |
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May be black and white thinking on my part again, like the organisation thing. |
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OK, you do know that i'm a philosopher, don't you? This is what i'd say. I threw a wobbly a couple of decades ago when i got sick of academic philosophers making excuses for the way the world was rather than trying to fix it, and left a promising academic career. I would say the situation is more complex. Postmodernism really is crap. The problem with it is that it focusses too much on a single issue. However, there's no need to focus too much on that yourself. Analytical and Greek philosophy is another matter entirely, and even some continental stuff is worthwhile. |
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For example, someone with an eating disorder might look into a mirror and "see" an obese person. Are they really seeing that? It's arguable because they actually have a mental image of their reflection and it isn't just like a photograph of themselves. Their representation of themselves is biassed. If you can undermine their assumption that they have a mental image of themselves that is like a photograph, you can undermine their negative self-image. If this is done successfully, you may have saved their life. |
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Another example: Whenever someone stubs out a cigarette, they have become a non-smoker. They continue to be a non-smoker until they light up again. The same doesn't apply to alcohol because ethanol has different pharmacokinetics. Therefore you need a different approach with different forms of substance abuse and the relationship between that substance and one's identity. This is partly the anti-smoking writer Alan Carr's point - nicotine is the cause of withdrawal symptoms, not the lack of nicotine. That's a philosophical point, and again, it could save someone's life. |
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Also, aren't you right now using a machine whose workings are based on formal logic? Where did that come from then? Was Boole a mathematician? What about Frege? Is there a link between object-oriented programming and Quine? |
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//OK, you do know that i'm a philosopher, don't you?// Err. No. <foot in mouth detector sounds /> |
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//Postmodernism really is crap// Probably what I was refering to. You could say that in its pursuance of the irrelevant it was very half-baked philosophy. Maybe my statement was a bit sweeping, but philosophy is a field where you do need to filter more than not. |
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Coincidentally there was a doc on John Ruskin last night. He's an example of what I'd class as a great thinker (maybe philosopher), and he was part mad. I guess accepting someone as a whole is just like how one accepts ones house. At times a room or two will descend into chaos as you organise other bits of your life. |
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//look into a mirror and "see" an obese person. Are they really seeing that?////mental image,reflection,photograph// |
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I have to say that this does sound very philosophical and a bit nonsense i.e. trapped in semantics. Are the visual references an attempt to communicate with a patient ? Can an obese person have a word based self image based on listening to the radio ? Is either facet of self image patronising to someone who cannot relate to either ? I'm not picking on you but just the danger of philosophic language which may pick on a particularly bad expression of what maybe a totally valid idea. |
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The smoking example is another one that picks on a counter-intuitive definition of what it is to be a non-smoker between cigarettes. Why not just say "Well you don't smoke during your sleep, so just try and smoke later and later in the day after you get up." |
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Don't worry, no offence taken. |
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On the last bit, yes, that's one strategy which could work for some people and a different one would work for others. |
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Concerning postmodernism, what i think happened is that it got fashionable to the extent that it wasn't possible to get anywhere career-wise without paying lip-service to it, and because of that it was a sacred cow. Since philosophy is supposed to question everything, it makes no sense to have untouchable positions like postmodernism became. It didn't influence all of philosophy though. The other thing about it is, if you're going to announce "The End Of Philosophy" and you really believe that, the honest thing to do is to resign and become a plumber or a lorry driver rather than continue to draw your considerable academic salary and enjoy the kudos of being a pundit. I wonder why they don't do that. |
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There's a place for non-academic philosophers too, for example WIlliam Blake and Thoreau. Nietzsche's stuff about being in prison or executed as a result of being a philosopher has a lot of truth in it when applied to such people. I identify with such people and i would say yes, we are more than a bit mad. |
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Suppose i get someone to think of a comb and i then ask them how many teeth it has. It's common for them not to know. If their image of a comb was like a photograph of a comb, they would either know intuitively how many teeth it had or be able to count them in their mental image. The fact that they seldom can indicates that for them, mental images are not like photographs. Then they have a mental image of their own body. If they think they're obese, a major feature of this image is probably going to include the roundness of their abdomen, flabbiness of their arms and perhaps very little else. That isn't like a photo of their body and it's more flexible. |
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These thoughts are more specific than most philosophical counselling. A more common example might be whether it's better to see opportunities which aren't there or not to see ones which are. That's a philosophical issue which has strongly influenced my life. |
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Where there's obscurity in what i say, as i've said before, i am working on communication skills but don't seem to be getting very far. |
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Actually, i think plumbers and lorry drivers probably earn more than philosophers, but they actually earn it maybe, rather than being given it for no apparent reason. |
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//Suppose i get someone to think of a comb and i then ask them how many teeth it has// |
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Another semantic argument that reduces into nothingness. So few people have photographic memory to that detail (I could assume none). Again the point is whether they are bothered about combs and if so what details are so interesting to them as to warrant storage in short term memory. Surely its better to discuss how their self image is distorted by them relating it to other influences e.g. magazines. There is no comb ! |
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Apologies to xkuntay. We should have taken this to overbaked long ago. |
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Well, let's do that then. I'm going there now. |
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I consider myself logical and philosophical. I cant remember anything that struck me as more irrelevant than what has been presented to me of the people you all have brought up. Has anyone based any new conclusions they have had on the proof of their existance? I don't think anyone ever thought about not existing. I don't think anyone associated their perceptions with being a full discription of an object. I think therefore I am what? To be or not to be is there an option? I think these truths are popular because no one ever bothered to understand the useful conclusions in philosopy so compared to things you don't understand usless facts that you already recognize may seem like the cream of the crop. It is however only the things that we do not know that we have need of knowing. I certainly like conclusions based on simple concepts. but when you use that fact that perceptions can be deceived what does any conclusion derived from that bear on how we utilize perceptions? |
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That is my working theory on the subject. feel free to inform me. |
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A lot of this is completely irrelevant to this idea, which is why i've gone to overbaked. Anyway, existentialism isn't exactly my favourite philosophy, i'm just trying to express what i think existentialists were talking about. Its relatives, phenomenology and hermeneutics, are a whole lot more relevant. |
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People most certainly do contemplate non-existence. It's hugely important to most people, because non-existence is death. When you're dead, you don't exist, and most people feel death is highly relevant. That's part of what Sartre meant by nothingness. |
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You're talking about proof. That kind of concept belongs to analytical philosophy, that branch of academic philosophy mainly pursued in English-speaking countries by the likes of Bertrand Russell, Daniel Dennett and W.V.O. Quine. It's an admirable exercise and one i'm more comfortable with. What we're talking about here is the continental tradition, much of which i consider to be of dubious worth. |
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People do sometimes consider their perceptions to be complete descriptions. That's German idealism. There is an issue about the relation between minds and concepts, and it could be resolved in this way. It is of course garbage, and not even wrong in interesting ways. |
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I've run out of time, so i'm going to have to cut it short there. We should seriously be doing this on Overbaked. |
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As I said, the conscious paradox can occupy people forever. You can go overbaked, uberbaked, or hyperbaked, it will still reveal itself from its ashes. I guess existentialism is the real phoenix itself. But interesting that we had long forgotten about this topic. At least since the 80s people did not talk about it. And as I said, to forget about this is basically to forget you are human, which is to say to become animal again. We can thank globalism for ridding us off this utter rubbish (?). Indeed since the whole world is American nowadays, all the world is living happily as primitives ("..So you ride yourselves over the fields / and you make all your animal deals.." remember Thick as a Brick?). So we have become "Comfortably Numb", almost losing conscious, and conscience which goes along with that. But the ubermenchen is not dead yet. It is evolution calling, and there is no way to stop it. Maybe not in natural ways, but will end up in natural ways, as the "Second Nature". |
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Link to overbaked provided. Long live the ubermunchkins ! |
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[xkuntay] you are raving - existentialism (and its post-modernist spawn) has been alive and kicking all through the 80s, 90s and permeates our culture (whether we like it or not) today in the form of film, tv, music, art, advertising, - all our media are (almost by definition) post-modernist (and by parentage, existentialist) in nature. |
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The audience is sophisticated* these days - that is to say, it's self aware, it's communicated to at a different level to classical (and 'modern') audiences - there are in-jokes, self-references, self deprecating irony, the shared understanding (or myth - depending on your point of view) that "it's all bollocks, but we're going to do it anyway" - The Simpsons, Family Guy, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Ben Stiller - taking yourself seriously is the post-modernist vice, and that is a direct, equal and opposite reaction against the existential angst of the mid 20th Century. So even if we don't embrace existentialism, it still manages to inform our entire culture, albeit from askance. |
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Is all the world American? Iran launched a satellite yesterday, and China owns most of the US' massive national debt. And who are these primitives you are talking about? You're not making sense. Evolution doesn't call - it just is, or rather, it just does. |
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And if you're going to bring evolution into it - that's been going on since year dot - not just on a biological level, but at a societal one - it isn't news to suggest that a (relatively) free market economy backed up with an expansionist militarily enforced hierarchy populated by a regionally selected executive seems to have been the 'fittest' over time. Short of a cataclysm analogous to the K–T event that wiped out the dinosaurs (and much of the non-dinosaur life on earth as well) it would seem that evolution has chosen that model, and 'revolution', or 'starting over' just isn't necessary, or desirable. |
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* from the original Sophists - The Existentialists of Antiquity |
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I've gone to Overbaked.
I've gone to Overbaked.
I've gone to Overbaked.
Concerning your actual idea, if it can be made to work as it stands, i think the best thing to do would be to use recycled mobile 'phone bits. They contain both lithium and tantalum. Deuterium is everywhere anyway. |
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[zen_tom] Your first paragraph does not contradict with what I say at all. I told existentialism could end up in two ways, and world has chosen option (a). |
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Knowing is not always feeling. Yes, people nowadays 'know' but they hardly 'feel'. It is like you were told the handle is hot. 'The handle is hot, the handle is hot..' you repeated yourself. But they asked you to be brave and hold it. You held it (from your animal instinct, the instinct to survive) it still is hot, but you don't feel it anymore. When someone asks, 'isn't that handle hot?' you say it is, but you still can hold it, because you don't feel the pain anymore. Immune, so to say. Just like in 9/11, do you think most people really felt mercy? I only saw amazement in their eyes when those towers collapsed. Same with the people/children dying in Irak. Yes, people know it is wrong, but 'Whatever.. We are the fittest nation so it is meant to be. We made a mistake and elected a moron. Oh well. Then we'll have Change next time. Just another attraction to the boredom of life. hehehe.'. |
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Knowing is different from feeling. Matter of fact, the conscious can shut down certain parts of the brain, emotional parts, so as to be more agreeable. That is exactly what I meant. |
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As far as the whole world being US, it is conspicious. Iran and China are also postmodernist characters created by American culture. I can bet Amedijinad is working for CIA. The country itself is not the key, it has already colonized its culture around the globe. (Which is, by the way, I should edit, is probably the best option humans currently have. Can't do any better than this unfortunately.) |
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As far as evolution; wherever there is probability, there is evolution. They are almost synonymous. Biological evolution today is bull. It stopped at least 200 years ago, when warfare started targetting civilians. The only way for it to continue is to allow rich men to have more wives, or better yet a Wife Tax. Then Bill Gates should've had 1000 wives and 10000 children. See how complicated it gets? So, there is no biological evolution. That is yet to take place. But since there is no mutation that can make a drastic difference, it has to happen in the labs. |
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I know you think my theory lacks logic, since I said humans are now like animals, and then I go on saying they 'know'. If you believe in psycoanalysis, which in my opinion is totally logical, the explanation is as follows: excluding superego, (one can assume) there are four partitions of brain (brain can't be categorized in reality): conscious-instincts (emotions), unconcsious-instincts (instincts), conscious-knowledge (c-ego), unconscious-knowledge (u-ego). For animals, it is all instincts. For superhuman, it is all conscious. For old time people, it is all four. Not for today's humans. For today's humans, exclude most of emotions and certain instincts, and most of u-ego, since it turned into c-ego already, and you get there. You can't deny that most of emotions are locked up in the cellar nowadays. c-ego may know them, but themselves aren't conscious. |
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It is told that extreme entropy leads to a state similar to the low entropy times. If things get too sophisticated, they end up being simple. It is like you've got too many waves and they end up cancelling each other; white noise. It is kind of what I see in today's society unfortunately. It is most conspicious in music. Today's bands all sound the same to me. Maybe I'm wrong. But if I'm not, there is no return, because entropy cannot be reversed. Sad. |
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Sorry [19thly]! Never again. I'm transporting to overbaked. |
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