OT: Desk Attack

Is this a case of "Like Charges Repelling"?

Cats are natural Libertarians.

Mark Zenier snipped-for-privacy@eskimo.com Washington State resident

On what grounds do you accuse me of being merely human? Since you have already granted superiority to cats, why not one who is sentient, and whose consciousness encompasses the little playpen of cats and their humanoid toys/servants?

What other animals, besides evil humans, torture other animals for fun?

Thanks, Rich

It's because you've been deigned worthy to service their shit and other toxic effluvia.

You do, after all, choose your own master.

Thanks, Rich

--
That, however, guarantees no acceptance by the master.

I think you've got it in one.

I wonder who he "deigns worthy" to service his toxic effluvia. Oh, right; everybody.

Mark L. Fergerson

Do you mean, deal with my own shit?

I do, you cat-serf.

Feh. Rich

You operate your own waste-disposal plant? Wow! Where do you sell the sterilized effluent?

Mark L. Fergerson

The people that do the work are paid by my water/sewer bill. They can walk away from the job if they want to. ;-)

And if you say, "Ooohh, widdle pwecious pays me in WUV!" I will definitely be incapacited by paroxysms of projectile vomiting.

Good Luck! Rich

Well, if you can explain where the love is in torture, then you win the prize, I guess.

Please continue...

No, I'm noticing loving versus unloving intent. There is one moral and ethical absolute that I will fight for, to the death if necessary until spirit either clues up or returns to the void where unloving intent belongs, and that is that Love is Life, Life is Better Than Death, and Overriding Free Will is Unloving, and the True Root Of All Evil.

These are my own personal, inviolate, absolutes. Which also happen to be in alignment with Mother. Or, with those of her PIAs that translate to words. Even a freakin' ameba will run for its life! Why?

And, maybe the most fundamental "moral and ethical absolute" is, I Am. And I Am Because I Feel. And the rest is play, love, work, school, whatever you want to call it, and whatever you want it to be, and calling each other names is just part of the Big Cosmic Dance Fest. It's a party goin' on, you know, and I have to let those who want to play rougher than I like to play, play as rough as they want - but I don't want their rough play to disrupt my little chamber orchestra.

So let's talk. :-)

Descartes was a dork. You think, therefore you think you exist. I feel, therefore I _must_ exist. I am the medium in which thought takes place.

I guess I could go full-on Kozmik, and say that in the long run none of this matters, because I am on the path to True Enlighenment, where All That Is Is Love, but interestingly, that is, in fact, the case right now. (all there is is love, and love is much bigger than any of us can possibly imagine, i.e., there's room in it for all those things that we see but don't like)

I just wanna not hurt any more, and I want nobody else to ever have to hurt again, unless it's something they've freely undertaken fully of their own Free Will, like jumping off a cliff trying to fly or something else stupid. And I guess the responsibility of deciding what one wants to do or not lies with the individual. ("Will that hurt?" "I dunno - try it!" **CRASH** [SILENCE] "Did it hurt?" [SILENCE] "Welp, he didn't say it hurt!" **CRASH**)

I guess maybe "signing up to get sent off to war" would fit in that category, but when you get into "go get revenge for a heinous crime" it gets a little complicated, and "sitting in an office building minding your own business when some religious fanatic crashes an airplane into it" presents a moral dilemma of an entirely different dimension. But I do claim it's essentially practically indistinguishable from "sitting in your house minding your own business when some world leader bent on justice at any costs drops a bomb on it", from the recipient's POV.

Thanks, Rich

[snip] [snip]

What a pile of BS! You've obviously never had a cat for a pet.

May all the cats in the world use your grave as their potty ;-)

...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | | | E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat | |

| 1962 | I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.

I can play on this level too, but I don't like to capitalize as much as you do. ;>)

Absolutes have no place in the physical Universe because it is based on _change_. Love is an absolute in some other timeless level of existence, but it comes in degrees _when it's expressed in the timebound "real" world_. Not only that, but a loving act may well be expressed in a form that we, with our limited experience and capacity to understand, looks completely unloving.

Cats (and all other things that exist in the "real" world") quite sensibly love themselves and their progeny more than anything else. Hence they do what's best for themselves, in the sense of ensuring their own survival, the best way _they know_. Part of their specific constellation of efforts toward that end is to make sure they're eating the healthiest possible food. These behaviors evolved over a very long period of time, and basically, it's just too damn late to complain about it. We'll get to the mouse's participation in a bit.

Why do you ascribe human gender qualities to alleged entities that have no need of such?

Why will an amoeba "run"? To ensure its survival, of course.

"Feeling" is entirely subjective, and is determined by the hardware you have with which to feel. You are aware that "feelings" are mental states strongly influenced by hormonal activities in organs not subject to mental control, not to mention, um, chemical modifications of same?

Now consider the "feelings" of other critters. They usually have entirely different hardware from yours and simply cannot be expected to have anything resembling a subjective experience remotely comparable to yours.

You are completely unfairly judging the validity of another's experiences by your criteria here, Rich, especially as you haven't taken the trouble to understand why you use the criteria you do or why others use their own criteria. Grokking this is absolutely essential if you're gonna call yourself a philosophizer; _experiential validity is individual_.

Oh, and what you want _does not matter_ in the Great Scheme of Things, except as you learn to want less and less because you learn what's really important, like not insisting that the entire Universe see things through your own particular glasses because they just might not be applicable to all others' timebound circumstances. And that works both ways. Where the hell do _you_ get off not accepting others' criteria uncritically? How can you be absolutely certain they're not more "right" than you are? You can't; you can only "feel" your way along, and I've already pointed out the limitations to that.

No, therefore you _feel_ that you exist. Neither position is sufficient proof of existence, except to the individual doing the experiencing.

Exactly what I tried to tell you above. You won't like this, but try it on for size anyway, since we haven't gotten to altruism; you are misinterpreting the mouse's loving act of giving its body to the cat, thereby helping it hone its perception of what's good to eat.

Now ask the mouse's (whatever's left after the body's dead) how it feels about helping the cat.

Pain hurts for a very good reason; it lets us know we've just done something we shouldn't have in personal-survival terms, but personal survival isn't everything.

Besides, why are you in such a hurry? The Universe has a few billion years of life left in it, and that's plenty of time for all of us to learn what we need to.

_To the limits of the individual's ability to choose_.

I can only speak for myself. When I signed up to go off to war (thirty-some years ago), I did it because the survival of those I love that can't fight for themselves is more important to me than my own, not for imagined revenge.

Apparently, the reason you have trouble with "who started it" is because you don't want to recognize the timebound nature of learning. If we knew It All, we wouldn't bother to keep breathing, nor would we take any note of the squabbles (learning processes) of those who don't.

Again, don't be in such a hurry. You understand the wisdom behind the part of the A.A. prayer about not stressing over things you cannot change? Now realize that some of those things are none of your business to begin with. You are neither cat nor mouse; let them work it out by themselves.

Mark L. Fergerson

I hate philosophers. They're grown men trying to argue in a way that to the average person looks educated but is a poor excuse for true scientific research...

Tim

-- "I've got more trophies than Wayne Gretsky and the Pope combined!" - Homer Simpson Website @

Well, here's the rub. "Feelings," as you so cavalierly dismiss as "mental states", are the magnetic field being experienced, and expressed, by the very material of which Everything There Is is made.

Free Will is the fundamental raw material of Creation, and Desire is the Cause of Existence.

It's just that for all of this time, spirit, which has the thoughts and the power to withhold itself, has thought that it was supposed to be calling the shots, and in its arrogance, has been ignoring the pain that has been caused by the act of ignoring that which is hurting.

In the beginning All was One, and perfect, and had done everything and all that, and after an infinite time of playing with itself, realized it was alone. So it had many conversations with itself, and other little pockets of consciousness here and there, and came to the conclusion that there should be An Other. So, after a few gahooption millennia of contemplation, All decided to tear itself in two.

Nothing like this had ever done before. And this was the point at which it was discovered that Pain Hurts.

But it didn't hurt the two halves equally - or maybe more accurately, the two halves had one little difference that has become an imbalance that has resulted in all of the pain and suffering that we see now.

The half that was more electrically, mentally, spirit polarized had the ability to "shake it off" - heal the pain of the wound, and move right on with its business of "getting to know the other."

The magnetic, feeling, will half didn't get off so lucky. It doesn't have the ability to "just shake it off". It gets stuck holding the pain until the Light of Unconditional Love gets around to noticing it and healing it.

And all of this is going on while creating all of the infinite variety that we see around us, every single component entity of which is suffering from the pain of the original split.

Spirit has been in the habit of dismissing Will's pain, and feeling smugly superior, "Well, you're just as much God as I am, what's wrong with you that you can't heal yourself like I can?"

Well, that isn't the way reality works.

But no spirit, no electrically-polarized consciousness, can know this until it undenies its own, living, breathing, feeling will.

And once you do decide that there is more than one way of looking at things, the process of opening up your "eyes" is about as complicated as opening your eyes.

All it takes is intent to be whole.

Thanks, Rich

When you feel your own Will, you will know.

Have Fun! Rich

=================================

Very interesting but sorry to be so disappointing. Free will is maginary - there's only Shroedinger's cat.

Oh, if you even knew the half of it.

It's a kind of lonely multidimensional infinite playground out here, watching all the mundanes in their little boxes, each insisting that he has "scientific proof" that that's all there is, world without end, amen.

But when you undeny enough of yourself to actually feel your own Will, you will know.

Hint - the sound of one hand clapping has nothing to do with acoustics. =:-O

;^j Rich

=============================

Meow!

Cheers! Reg.

You ought to know better than to misapply words like "magnetic field" in this context, but I grok what you mean.

I "cavalierly dismiss" nothing; I'm simply trying to point out to you that the physical manifestations of All are limited by the apparatus doing the manifesting. You know very well that in the physical, our ability to experience All (to capture the "flux lines" of the "feeling field") is strictly limited by our physical state-of-being at a particular time in our lives. That's why feelings change; our "cross section", "permeability", and other relevant properties are determined by our organic hardware "chipset" and the "software" (memes and like that) running on it.

"Lower critters" are limited in their ability to experience what we, in our overblown egoism, call the "full emotional spectrum", simply because they haven't evolved the organic hardware upgrades we have and can run only relatively simple emotional software. This is complicated by the fact that many memes are firmwired into their _and our_ hardware.

But we have no idea what further upgrades are possible, so we don't know what our bandwidth limitations are WRT the full possible spectrum.

Where you see "evil intent" I see hardwired behaviors in the earlier organic hardware revisions available to "lower" critters. They are _not capable_ of "evil intent" as we define it because that level of emotional software simply cannot run on their hardware any more than DOS apps can run on a four-banger.

What some of us call enlightenment can be seen as deleting bloatware (millenia of accumulated interactive memes etc.), freeing up the inherent speed and total abilities of our minds. Thus it should be blindingly obvious that a given critter, _while in the physical_, can only achieve those levels of enlightenment that can be encompassed by their hardware.

See, if you can misapply terminology, so can I. But then, there's no agreed-upon terminology for this sort of discussion, so we have to make do with sloppy analogies.

Careful, you'll set Steve off.

Sure it is. But one half is timebound, and that's why it holds onto its pain until it figures out how to let go.

That's the snag in your reasoning. Intent cannot be whole in a "partial" mind, and _all_ minds are partial because they're hardware-limited. You have failed to take "lesser" minds' (human and otherwise) incompleteness into account. Do not be disappointed that amoebas can't soar with eagles, or that cats can't behave in accord with your idea of ethics. That's completely futile and will only stress you unneccesarily. Rather, celebrate that they've achieved what they have.

Consider what larger minds than ours think of our ramblings...

Mark L. Fergerson