No thanks. One lifetime is quite enough.

You wouldn’t say so when you are about to die. You now like to live tomorrow. Tomorrow you’d like to live the day after tomorrow. If you have good living conditions, you will want to live forever, even though now, when death is far away, you think a lifetime is enough.

Think of all the decisions that’ll have to be made! Natural death doesn’t give you any choices. Thankfully, I wouldn’t be able to afford the mummification procedure anyway.

Death sucks. If you come from a planet where you’ve never heard of death, you’d be horrified when you learn that humans have to die. You accept death only because you think it’s the norm. If people died every Friday in a very painful way, and were reborn on Mondays in an equally painful way, you’d be okay with that too. Such is the human nature..

Death is horrible mostly for those around the diseased. People who experience near death situations speak of calmness and acceptance.
Glad I’m programmed to accept death, and wont ever be a part of the mad rush for immortality. Like I said, far too many decisions to make. Thanks to gravity, friction, radiation, germs, stupidity and accidents coupled with relatve poverty, I wont be called upon to decide.

You’re not programmed to accept death. You just try to accept death because you don’t have a choice. That is of course what we all do. But if we had a choice, I think we should choose to live. Death sucks. If it is tragic for a five year old to die, it is tragic for a 50 year old to die, and there is no reason why it shouldn’t be tragic for a 85 year old to die.

There are only two things true in life, one is that you will die, the other is that sharanga is always right.

Not always. But about 98% of the time. It’s simple. I simply say the opposite of whatever you say.

:D

Sharanga, Would the average Sri Lankan be able to afford the process?

Not if you live in Sri Lanka, of course. Even if you have the money, your brain would die before it is taken to a facility. The following is from Wikipedia.

Costs of cryonics vary greatly, ranging from the basic fee of $10,000 for neuro (head or brain only) cryopreservation at the European cryonics company KrioRus, to more than $250,000 for whole body cryopreservation by Alcor with overseas and last-minute fees. Alcor’s neuropreservation (just the head) is priced at $80,000 while a full body preservation is priced at $200,000. There is an extra $500 annual membership fee during life by Alcor.[44][45] After payment of an initiation fee, ACS full members pay an annual fee of $300 currently.[46] To some extent these cost differences reflect differences in how fees are quoted. The Cryonics Institute fee of $28,000 or $35,000 does not include “standby” (a team waits for death to occur and begins procedures at bedside), transportation costs, or funeral director expenses outside of Michigan, which must be purchased as extras.[47] CI Members wanting Standby and Transport from cryonics professionals can contract for additional payment to the Florida-based company Suspended Animation, Inc.[47]

Your brain will be preserved, but there’s no guarantee that you will be revived. This is something you should do only if you can afford it.

“It’s simple. I simply say the opposite of whatever you say.” – hehe, spoken like a true…well…moron?

Thank God! Er.. I mean free radicals.

And a sense of humour to match the debating abilities.

Dodo the sore loser,

You don’t have to come up with incorrect, teleological evolutionary reasons to prove that there are people who want to die. All you have to do is show a person who actually kills himself. But that’s irrelevant. Let’s concentrate on the idiocy of your morality.

Fact1: You opposed death penalty because you thought death was horrible, and A should not be able to do something horrible to B.

Fact2: You support the lady who wants to die not because she has a particularly good reason to die, but rather because of her naturalistic bias. When an option is available for her to live further, choosing not to live is suicide. But you support her because you think it’s her choice, and you simply support her choice, even though death is a horrible thing.

Conclusion: If you find the same lady on a bridge, about to jump off and kill herself, you would tell her to “Go ahead, kill yourself. It’s your choice and I support you”.

Say she is 40, and has another 40 years to live if she doesn’t jump off. But you don’t care about that 40 years. You didn’t care about 500 or more years through cryonics. All that mattered to you was that it was her choice. Well, it’s her choice to jump off the bridge, and this time she has better reasons to kill herself than a naturalistic bias. So you simply cannot consistently try to persuade her not to jump.

So, basically, you are morally bankrupt.

There, I boiled a dodo egg.

Where did Dodo support anyone accepting a natural death? I didn’t see that.

@shammi

Really?

..death penalty is about what A can do to B. This is about what A wants to do with A’s life. Not comprehending the distinction doesn’t look too good on you.

you should also understand that voluntary self-sacrifice shouldn’t be such bizarre thing.

It’s not impossible for humans to want to die, it’s advantageous for someone to die if the total fitness of a population goes up as a consequences of that death.

And all this after saying I can’t “…put 1 + 1 together when it comes to death” because I said people should choose to live through cryonics if they have the option.

You missed all that?

Actually, I have a feeling that Dodo would be more likely to say “go! go!” to anyone contemplating jumping off a bridge. So that would be consistent with his views on A doing what they want with their own life. He wasn’t so much supporting it as acknowledging their right to do so, and saying that wanting to do so was not un-natural.

But when it came to his own life, I suspect he’d be on the side of cryogenics.

No one’s been arguing whether someone has right to kill himself or not. I’m against suicide being illegal and I’m totally for euthanasia. Dodo the sore loser’s moral philosophy compels him to cry go go to a person on a bridge. He cannot deny this without being inconsistent. If he agrees that that’s exactly what he’d do, then he’s simply morally bankrupt. Either way, I just boiled an egg.

I think he won’t deny it. He always claims that he has no morals.

I’m just saying. Hopefully he’ll clarify everything himself.

Moral bankruptcy it is then. Should I be really really ashamed of myself?

Gum boil,

You are the one who said people are programmed to want to live. That’s not a given at least not in all circumstances. The evolution argument was to show why wanting to die is not such a unreasonable thing from that perceptive.

You are the one who said people are programmed to want to live. That’s not a given at least not in all circumstances. The evolution argument was to show why wanting to die is not such a unreasonable thing from that perceptive.

Bullshit. Where did I say all people are programmed to want to live in all circumstances. Being human, I know that’s not true from my own experience. Sometimes life just sucks and you want to die, and I would want to have the option of death as a way out even if I’m immortal.

But it’s safe to say that all people prefer live, rather than to die, most of the time. If this isn’t true, people would kill themselves as soon as they are capable of thinking that life sucks. People don’t do that. Sure, some people are more suicidal than others. Some people would kill themselves if you scold them. But those people are very rare. So it’s safe to assume that some random commenter on an online forum wants to live.

Moral bankruptcy it is then. Should I be really really ashamed of myself?

Well you should. If you are morally bankrupt, you wouldn’t save a child about get hit by a bus. Why worry if it isn’t morally right to do it. I would save the child, not because I think there are objective morals written on some stone tablet, but simply because I’d feel pretty goddamn bad after not saving the child. You should be ashamed if you are not governed by any morals. But then, since you have no morals, you a literally incapable of being ashamed.

Anyway, this also shows that whatever the reasons for your opposing death penalty, they had nothing to do with any sense of morality.

I would have thought that the two examples, preventing a suicide attempt of an adult, and saving a child from an oncoming vehicle, would be prompted by two entirely different compuslions. The former might be morality related whilst the latter would be more instinctive, an act dictated by evolutionary requirements. But you’re the expert here Sharanga.

@shammi,

The following thing dodo the sore loser said earlier about evolution is the stupidest thing one can say about evolution.

The evolution argument was to show why wanting to die is not such a unreasonable thing from that perceptive.

Evolution has nothing to do with what’s reasonable or unreasonable (in the sense that whether they are rational or not). All it does is show us that there are reasons for whatever we do. Evolution is a scientific theory. To say that your actions are describable by evolution is same as saying your actions can be explained by the deterministic laws of physics. Of course, since the physical reality is deterministic, and since you are part of physics, your actions are lawful, and hence mathematically describable.

Evolution doesn’t say anything about what you should do or shouldn’t do. You can even override your evolutionary tendencies, simply because of the fact that evolution does not hide itself from us. That’s why we can now learn about evolution. Your actions are ultimately determined by other more fundamental laws of physics, but that’s a different story.

Whatever moral you have, be it saving a child from getting hit by a bus, or preventing a tormented person from killing herself, has evolutionary reasons. If there’s any difference between persuading a person to freeze her brain, and saving a child from getting hit by a bus, it is that former requires a generalization of a more fundamental rule of morality, while the second is more direct. To generalize, you’d have think, and develop a moral philosophy.

Never forget the fact that in our evolutionary past, we lived as tribes which consisted of fifty or sixty people at the maximum. Moral rules that are directly available to us developed in this kind of environment, not the kind of 7 billion people environment we now live in. In the past, it was okay to go and kill all the men, women and children of the neighbouring tribe. But over time, we realized that if it was bad to kill someone of our own tribe, killing must be bad, so killing a person of another tribe is bad too. This is a generalization, which required thinking.

If you see a person, about to jump off a bridge, you’d instinctively now that you have to help. You know she’s making a mistake. Death is bad. Now you meet the 80 year old person, who has the option of preserving her brain and living another 500 or so years. You’d never face this situation if you were living with a tribe in some African Savannah. But you can generalize the rule that death is bad to this occasion as well. This requires some thinking into moral philosophy.

In my opinion, if we really want to make a better world, in this over populated world with nuclear weapons, we have to develop a sound moral philosophy. Our instincts of what’s good and bad are not enough. We have to learn how to do good, and avoid doing bad. For example, I might volunteer myself to build houses for poor people. That’s good, and I’ll have a warm feeling afterwards. But concepts of economics work everywhere. Specialization simply works. I’d do more good by doing whatever it is that I’m specialized to do, make money, and donate the money to those who build houses for people, so they can use that money to pay for people specialized in building houses. I might not get the same warm feeling I’d get if I volunteered. But it’s the right thing to do, and I did more good. To hell with warm feelings for myself. There’s more at stake here.

P.S. Contrary to what dodo the sore loser said, and contrary to what you said about the dodo the sore loser, I don’t think he has no morals. Psychopaths are rare. People who suck at reasoning are more common.

OK, let’s accept that Dodo the darling is not completely devoid of morals. Then he’ll see the imminent accident as a case of B killing A.

Even you said “I’m against suicide being illegal and I’m totally for euthanasia.” I’m puzzled. Dont you think volountary natural death is less controverial?

A rather amusing straw-man you have here gum boil, does it talk back to you. If it does you should really get your head examined.

I never subscribed to the naturalistic fallacy. The point i have clarified many times over is to show how we ‘may’ possess ‘programming’, in other words evolutionary dispositions, that triggers suicide & self sacrifice. This is nothing exceptional, it is common in the animal kingdom. For example, voluntary self destruction in insect colonies is very well studied. Instead of responding to this simple point you have sought the loving embrace of straw-men.

I wonder if this gravitation towards the embrace of straw-men is a manifestation of deeper issues. Was it something to do with your childhood?

Psycho babble aside, I never had to deal with anyone jumping off a bridge or a kid about to be run over by a bus. Emotional gyrations aside, i’ll probably not bother too much with the woman who wants to die. Kids getting run over by buses is pretty awful. But it’s one thing to grandstand about playing hero, and another to actually do it. Most people lack the decisiveness and/or reflexes; most people just freeze. I’m just going to suspend judgement until i actually see the kid.

Dodo the sore loser,

First rule when comes to debating with me, is that you have to stay down when you are knocked down. That’s the second rule, and also the third rule, just like in the Fight Club.

So, when you said, The evolution argument was to show why wanting to die is not such a unreasonable thing from that perceptive. what you actually meant was not that it makes rational sense from the individual’s point of view to kill himself, but rather simply that it is describable by laws of science why a person would want to kill himself?

If that is the case, there’s two things I have to say.

1. Learn English, because it when you say The evolution argument was to show why wanting to die is not such a unreasonable thing from that perceptive, it really means that you think an individual has a very good rational reason to kill himself simply because he has an evolutionary tendency to kill himself.

2. You’re an idiot. If all you wanted to say was that some people want to die because they have evolutionary tendencies to kill themselves, what’s the relevance of that to this discussion, unless I specifically said that all humans beings want to live, and even when they seem to prefer euthanasia, what they really want is to die, so we shouldn’t even allow euthanasia. I didn’t say that. So basically, you are an idiot who says irrelevant things after jumping into other people’s discussions. Is this a childhood psychological thing?

***

So you don’t care about the woman who wants to jump off the bridge and kill herself? Oh. But you think the child dying is awful, so you’re not a psychopath. Basically that means you have a system of morality, but that system of morality is crap. You want to do good. But you don’t know how. You can’t even think of an abstract thought experiment without thinking about real world issues like decisiveness and reflexes.

So what does that make you. Not a psychopath, but a pleb. Just a plain pleb.

@shammi,

Shouldn’t be puzzling at all. There’s a difference between creating a moral philosophy through rigorous reasoning, and actually forcing that morality on other people through laws. I won’t do that unless I am infallible. I don’t think I’m infallible. Those who thought they were infallible ended up burning Copernicus and house arresting Galileo.

But if we make an Artificial Super Intelligence which wants to do what’s best for us, and is infallible, I’d have no problem if it enforce it’s morality through laws. The end result will actually be good for us.

Since we are not infallible, we have to think that laws are a necessary evil. Laws aren’t good. It limits what we can do. So we should have the minimum number of laws we should have. The purpose of laws should be stop us hurting each other, nothing more.

So if you want to not choose to live further through cryonics, when you really have that option, I will object to it vehemently, but I wouldn’t make it illegal for you to choose to die.

If you want to jump off bridge and kill yourself, under most circumstances I would object to it vehemently, but I wouldn’t make it illegal for you to do it.

When it comes to euthanasia, well, there’s the moral rule that pain is bad. People who choose euthanasia are in genuine pain, and death is the only way to stop it. I can imagine myself objecting to a person choosing to die. But I can also imagine myself turning the switch off myself. Whatever the case, I wouldn’t make it illegal for the person in pain to kill himself.

P.S. Since dodo the sore loser seems to have an opinion on everything in the universe, and have been consistently proven wrong, I wonder whether we can make a perfect source of information by simply reversing his stupidity. You can find out what’s best for everyone by asking him that, and reversing his answer. I’m thinking about doing some research on this.

You should really stop to smell your own manure. You are the person who ran around making generalizations about humanity’s dispositions; you are one who said we are not programmed to want to die.

Dodo the sore loser,

you are one who said we are not programmed to want to die.

Moron. I said shammi is not programmed to not want to die, assuming based on the fact that the very high majority of people want to live. Actually, everyone who is reading this, want to live at this exact moment. Their desire to live is greater than the desire to die. That’s why they are not dead yet. I didn’t say everyone wants to live at all times. I certainly hope you kill yourself, if I cannot make a perfect source of information by reversing everything you say.

You’re the one who jumped into the middle of the conversation, saying something completely irrelevant, thinking that I think suicide doesn’t happen. You’re a moron who jumps into conversations and say irrelevant things in a a way that seem relevant. Basically you’re a moron, and I have better stuff to do than prove that moron is a moron.

Dodo the sore loser,

You’re a moron who doesn’t even know the behaviour of learning curve. The case in Texas is not a learning curve, but you’d know what’s happening if you knew how a learning curve works. There’s a limit, moron. There’s always a limit. Texas had a murder rate that is far far higher than the national average in 1980. By 2000, it was only just above the national average. From there onward, they had maintained that, right there around the national average. You think you can drive the murder rate down to 0 when the national average is 5.4 per 100,000?

You’re a moron, and I don’t want to deal with morons.

Bye

P.S. Refer to my comment made on 2012-07-29 16:44:58 for further information.

have you ever considered what is keeping the national average where it is. it’s not the states that don’t execute people most states that don’t execute people have a very low homicide rate. much lower than the national average. Even states like Kansas which don’t execute people have much lower murder rates. Look at those numbers again without pulling the ostrich act.

Refer to my comment made on 2012-07-30 08:16:19

It’s ironical when things that are supposed to be sarcastic are actually right.

Am I smarter than an average person? Yes. I’ve measured my IQ.

Are most others morons? If by most others you mean dodo and realist, yes.

Do I have high morals? Yes, theoretically, as an abstract philosophy. Not that I actually have a superman complex.

Am I willing to use the law in a way that places a few innocent people’s lives at risk? Yes, as a means to an end, because ends do justify the means. I will do it if that’s what I have to do to save a lot of people. What would you do if lives of 20 million people depended on you killing one person after torturing him? You can worship your religion and your deontological morals and let 20 million people die because you don’t want to go to hell. Or you can calculate the consequences and do what needs to be done. I don’t know. You’d probably do a dodo.

Anyway, I’m done dealing with dodo the sore loser, and you trying to protect dodo the sore loser.
Bye.

You’re support for the death penalty is based on your super intelligence which tells you that the odds on an innocent being convicted in Sri Lanka is one in 20 million, with all the instances of corruption and political fiddling we hear about daily? I’d rather trust my own intelligence on this one.
Bye.

Your*

You’re support for the death penalty is based on your super intelligence which tells you that the odds on an innocent being convicted in Sri Lanka is one in 20 million,

Who said that? Not me. Have you learnt the dodo art of imagining that I said something I didn’t say, and saying stuff that belongs to another thread on this thread?

You said above, “What would you do if lives of 20 million people depended on you killing one person after torturing him?”

This hypothesis has no relevence to to the case of rape in Sri Lanka. The odds on an innocent being convicted here are much higher.

Who said it had any relevance to any particular real world scenario? I was simply making a case for consequentialist reasoning. If you want replace 20 million with 10 people. Nothing changes. Lives of 10 people are more important than the life of one person. Greater good makes sense. Ends do justify the means.

consequentialist reasoning is all dandy for keyboard warriors operating from their mom’s basement. but reality tends to poo poo those with a large number random variables. And all you are left with is vacant hubris and in this case a pathetic sense of humor.

It’s irrelevant anyway because even after you killed, perhaps an innocent, there’d be no deterrent effect.
Now there’s no point in going round in circles on that. Just refer to the statistics or agree to disagree.

@shammi/dodo the sore loser,

I don’t agree to disagree with morons. Death penalty has a deterrent effect, just like all other forms of severe punishment (stoning, beating etc.) have a deterrent effect. It’s true that you can use torture to get false testimonies. But you can use torture to get true ones as well. The simple fact is, torture can make people co-operate. Death is just like that. People fear death, and they would try their best to avoid it.

If you moronic logic is right, it should make no sense to fine a person for reckless driving, and send a criminal who raped an underage girl for, say 7, years, unless law is solely about justice, not deterring crime. One of the points of sending the person who raped a girl to jail for 7 years is because we want to make sure that other potential rapists see what happens if they really commit the crime and avoid doing it. If you think severe punishment does not have that effect, well, you are just being you.

Death deter crime. Torturing, stoning all that shit also deter crime. Of course, there are other concerns like people abusing power, and inefficiencies of the legal system. But that’s no excuse to make moronic claims like death penalty doesn’t work.

I showed statistics how the murder rate of Texas went down dramatically after they implemented the death penalty. Dodo the sore loser has been idiotically trying to prove me wrong by comparing Texas with other states. That’s just plain stupid. It is even more stupid to ask why the murder rate of Texas doesn’t go below the national average, after I have shown that they had to implement death penalty to bring the murder rate down to the national average in the first place, because in 1980, it was far higher than the national average. I discussed all this in that other thread. I made no reference to that thread here until you brought it up here as well. The fact of the matter is, you were convincingly beaten in that thread and you now act like sore losers. A winner doesn’t have to refer to the thread where he won every time he speaks. Only the sore losers do that. So I won’t be talking about that thread in this thread. As far as I’m concerned, I made my point there. I don’t have to bother myself with you sore losers and discuss the whole thing again.

To dodo the sore loser,

Consequentialism doesn’t work only for a moron like you. For a moron like you, the number of random variable that you have to consider is simply too large. So please do me a favour. Hold on to you deontological morals. There’s a reason why god told you “Thou shalt not steal”, and not “Thou shalt not steal unless you have a good reason to steal.” God knew that you are a moron who cannot compute a large number of random variable in your excuse for a brain. So please, stick to those simple rules like don’t steal and don’t kill. Only people like me can do consequentialism right. I never wanted you to be a consequentalist. And for god’s sake, don’t be a consequentialist. Even the thought is scary. Just live by the rules for morons.

You cant agree and you cant disagree. Fine. Take the third option then.

“Am I willing to use the law in a way that places a few innocent people’s lives at risk? Yes, as a means to an end, because ends do justify the means. I will do it if that’s what I have to do to save a lot of people.”

Looking forward to the spectacle of you matyring yourself as soon as the death penalty is re-instated in Sri Lanka.

Oh no. I’m pretty willing to do morally wrong things when it comes to my own safety and well being, and also the safety and well being of those who close to me. So don’t get your hopes up.

According to the International Society of Morons, it is an admission of defeat. Congratz! Now you can party.