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Cryohazard posted:Nihilism's pretty great because you can just embrace the fact that everyone is equally worthless. None of this people nonsense or human lives having value, just burn it all down and be done with it. Oooor you can realize that there's no inherent value in destruction either and assign the values you want to things. For instance, I value contributing to society. E: nihilism != climbing a bell tower with a sniper rifle.
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Jul 1, 2015 23:50
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FredMSloniker posted:Oooor you can realize that there's no inherent value in destruction either and assign the values you want to things. For instance, I value contributing to society. By your own logic nihilism = climbing a bell tower with a sniper rifle. nihilism != ICE CREAM. nihilism > X-COM. own values eh.
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Jul 2, 2015 00:13
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FredMSloniker posted:I sometimes envision a sci-fi scenario in which a group of about 100 people is isolated and, by some means, prevented from increasing their number (only as many births as deaths). In a number of ways, I think they'd be happier. I'm not claiming it's accurate in regards to how people would react to such a situation, but Gurren Lagann presents that kind of scenario, at least for a while.
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Jul 2, 2015 00:26
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I wasn't expecting the thread to briefly explode. Heh.
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Jul 2, 2015 00:49
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Let's focus on eradicating EXALT
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Jul 2, 2015 02:00
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Yeah lets sweep that one under the rug, this is too good an LP to really have this kind of derail.
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Jul 2, 2015 03:48
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drat, look at Speedball taking on race and gender issues and loving owning it. Cryohazard posted:Nihilism's pretty great because you can just embrace the fact that everyone is equally worthless. None of this people nonsense or human lives having value, just burn it all down and be done with it. IMO, nihilism is for lazy bums who don't want to care about anything. It's much easier to not give a poo poo than to care and have to deal with the baggage that comes with it. But what's the point of living if not to care about things?
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Jul 2, 2015 15:32
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ViggyNash posted:drat, look at Speedball taking on race and gender issues and loving owning it. to shoot them and to make them explode into piles of weapon fragments
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Jul 2, 2015 15:35
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ViggyNash posted:IMO, nihilism is for lazy bums who don't want to care about anything. It's much easier to not give a poo poo than to care and have to deal with the baggage that comes with it. But what's the point of living if not to care about things? ^This and the aforementioned gratuitous destruction are the kind of misrepresentation given by someone who has only heard about nihilism and not actually experienced it. ...or a troll "Why bother living when life is meaningless? What's the point anyway?" Is the standard noob question... being sapient means we can decide what to value on a personal level, and then act according to that (arbitrary) set of values. This requires conscious thought. "Why not destroy things since there is no intrinsic value in the universe?" someone might ask. For that the answer is that destruction is as worthless as anything else, and unless you're a complete sociopath there isn't a good reason to remove things which others may value, since almost any (sane) set of values implies either "don't be an rear end in a top hat" or "try to stay out of prison". etc. Not really the place for epistemological anecdotes, but from firsthand experience I can authoritatively say it takes more energy to maintain a nihilistic or existentialist philosophy than blindly accepting someone else's theological rhetoric they quote from a book they've never bothered to read. It's basically like the Hard Mode version of reading Descartes or Kierkegaard, while drunk. I value novelty/uniqueness and things which provide mental stimulation, such as the bizarre derails Speedball threads generate.
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Jul 2, 2015 16:42
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Cynicism is wonderful because it means you can make a low-effort post about nihilism and watch the thread burn itself down.
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Jul 2, 2015 23:49
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*Walks into thread* This is why we can't have nice things. Though I did appreciate watching the idiot arguing for homogenaity melt down and out himself as a literal fascist bigot. That was fun. Everyone else has pretty much said anything I would, but to tie it all together different groups of humans in competition for resources is what has always been the driver for human evolution, technological, and social advancement. If you took away mankinds predeliction to separate the world into us, them, and those fuckers (which you can't, but for argument's sake) man would become stagnant, innovation and advancement would stop, and species that don't change to adapt to new situations die. It really is our differences that make us stronger.
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Jul 3, 2015 00:06
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Civilisation is the endless struggle to stop those fuckers having our poo poo.
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Jul 3, 2015 00:36
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Could be worse I guess. No fascists in the Watch Dogs Chip Cheezum thread, but the game is so boring everyone's talking about everything except Watch Dogs.
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Jul 3, 2015 00:45
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Wow. What the gently caress did I miss? Lemme just say glad to have yiu back in action speedball. Hope you are feeling much better man.
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Jul 3, 2015 02:00
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Kind of hard not to since Watch Dogs is kind of boring. The plot's dull, gameplay's standard and you don't ever feel like the hacking god the trailers keep hyping you as.
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Jul 3, 2015 02:00
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bunnyofdoom posted:Wow. What the gently caress did I miss? Currently, the thread is discussing the connotation of the name Aiden as a result of Viewing_Canines and Beyond: Two Souls. They were talking about something else 20 posts ago. RickVoid posted:*Walks into thread* "Social Entropy" is what I call it. Too much entropy, and we're trying to blow each other up. Not enough and the world gets boring as gently caress because nothing changes. In that analogy, anarchy would be very high entropy, utopia would be very low entropy. Yes, that does imply that I think utopia is a bad thing.
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Jul 3, 2015 02:34
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bunnyofdoom posted:Wow. What the gently caress did I miss? Far from a hundred percent, but since the hernia got repaired I no longer feel like I'm being constantly kicked in the balls. As for what the next gimmick Exalt run will entail... Not sure.
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Jul 3, 2015 02:48
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ViggyNash posted:"Social Entropy" is what I call it. Too much entropy, and we're trying to blow each other up. Not enough and the world gets boring as gently caress because nothing changes. In that analogy, anarchy would be very high entropy, utopia would be very low entropy. Yes, that does imply that I think utopia is a bad thing. Fortunately we're super good at balancing that poo poo out. One group gets out of control, another is there to shut them down. Of course, that goes both ways: If we solved all of the world's problems by the end of the day, we'd have created a bunch more by the time the sun came back up. Speedball posted:Far from a hundred percent, but since the hernia got repaired I no longer feel like I'm being constantly kicked in the balls. Shiv-Squad. Terminator references. Final Destination.
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Jul 3, 2015 02:48
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RickVoid posted:Fortunately we're super good at balancing that poo poo out. One group gets out of control, another is there to shut them down. Of course, that goes both ways: If we solved all of the world's problems by the end of the day, we'd have created a bunch more by the time the sun came back up. I don't even think it has to play out on a macro scale. Just think of the small, everyday things that cause social disparity. Here's a simple example: you're a parent with two kids and only one piece of candy. No matter what, someone's gonna be bummed out that they didn't get the candy. It's these little things that keep us from ever truly homogenizing.
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Jul 3, 2015 02:53
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ViggyNash posted:"Social Entropy" is what I call it. Too much entropy, and we're trying to blow each other up. Not enough and the world gets boring as gently caress because nothing changes. In that analogy, anarchy would be very high entropy, utopia would be very low entropy. Yes, that does imply that I think utopia is a bad thing. Not a bad term for it. But if you're in an actual proper utopia (i.e. not a dystopia masquerading as a utopia as so many do), would you want change? Utopias are supposed to be perfect, right?
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Jul 3, 2015 02:53
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Not a bad term for it. But if you're in an actual proper utopia (i.e. not a dystopia masquerading as a utopia as so many do), would you want change? Utopias are supposed to be perfect, right? I remember explaining this somewhere else... let me see if I can link it. e: Never mind, can't find it. I wish I could search all posts I've ever made in every thread in a convenient way, because I can't remember where I posted it. Anyway, let me see if I can re-explain it here. Say we define utopia as a state of 0 social entropy. The "Heat-Death of the Universe" equivalent for society. My justification for that stems from the notion that in a utopia, no one has any negative feelings towards another. In other words, everyone is satisfied. Satisfied, not happy. The moment someone experiences happiness, others around them will be dissatisfied because they aren't the ones having that experience and thus incite envy or some other negative emotion, and therefore entropy is created. Therefore, no one can be happy in a utopia. Unless you create some bizarre hive mind where everyone feels exactly the same thing as everyone else all the time, a paradise where everyone is happy is an impossibility that you wouldn't really want. e2: I really wish I could find that post because I went into a ton of depth about it. ViggyNash fucked around with this message at 05:02 on Jul 3, 2015 |
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Jul 3, 2015 02:55
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RickVoid posted:Fortunately we're super good at balancing that poo poo out. One group gets out of control, another is there to shut them down. Of course, that goes both ways: If we solved all of the world's problems by the end of the day, we'd have created a bunch more by the time the sun came back up. It's not even that simple. Every solution is someone else's problem.
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Jul 3, 2015 03:19
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Speedball posted:Far from a hundred percent, but since the hernia got repaired I no longer feel like I'm being constantly kicked in the balls. Next gimmick should be a normal run, to remind us why you're doing the gimmick runs in the first place.
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Jul 3, 2015 03:34
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64bitrobot posted:Next gimmick should be a normal run, to remind us why you're doing the gimmick runs in the first place. I like the way you think.
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Jul 3, 2015 03:48
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The next gimmick run should use people you've barely used, in order to show just how important abilities and how much a different good equipment can make is on low ranked soldiers, compared to low rank soilders with starting equipment. Basically, Use the Super monkey you have in base.
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Jul 3, 2015 04:01
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Bobbin Threadbare posted:It's not even that simple. Every solution is someone else's problem. Yeah, that. That right there. You can't solve everything because the implementation of a solution will inevitably gently caress something up, somewhere, for someone. TooMuchAbstraction posted:Not a bad term for it. But if you're in an actual proper utopia (i.e. not a dystopia masquerading as a utopia as so many do), would you want change? Utopias are supposed to be perfect, right? That's the thing though, the Utopia literally cannot exist because man is a flawed creature that is not satisfied unless he and his have more of [insert scarcity here] than those fuckers. For a Utopia to function everyone has to have and be satisfied with their "fair share". Man doesn't do that, so inevitably someone will flip the table and take his neighbors share and then how do you respond to that? An authority has to be created to enforce the equality. And who runs that authority? Man. The flawed creature that is only happy when he's getting ahead of someone else in some manner or form. Bam, corruption. Bam, disparity. Bam, dystopia. But there will always be someone out there who says things like  "But it could work. With the right people in charge. Good people. There has to be some way to do it, we just have to try harder!" because they need to believe that the world isn't an awful, terrible place where people do awful things to each other everyday not because they are just bad people but because they are people and that poo poo is just built right in. And we need people who believe such things because they are the collective better nature of mankind and it's their job to endlessly drag us out of the abyss of our darker impulses.Man I hope that makes sense to someone because it's the closest I've ever come to actually articulating any of that.
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Jul 3, 2015 04:55
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RickVoid posted:That's the thing though, the Utopia literally cannot exist because man is a flawed creature that is not satisfied unless he and his have more of [insert scarcity here] than those fuckers. For a Utopia to function everyone has to have and be satisfied with their "fair share". Man doesn't do that, so inevitably someone will flip the table and take his neighbors share and then how do you respond to that? An authority has to be created to enforce the equality. And who runs that authority? Okay, this is certainly true in a world of scarcity. The question I have is, does it continue to hold true in a post-scarcity world? In other words, is this kind of behavior learned (and merely innate in everyones' cultures), or is it innate? It's easy to say that it's innate because we've never lived in a post-scarcity world -- and even the richest of us, who are arguably post-scarcity in many ways, still know that the world is limited and feel the need to continue to amass resources. I'd like to think that it's ultimately learned, and that after a few generations post-scarcity it will no longer be a problem. I don't know how you'd go about proving that without actually performing the experiment, so to speak.
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Jul 3, 2015 05:23
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So what you're saying is: - Mankind doesn't just want to better themselves, it's to be better/have better than the other - Utopia banks on the idea of everyone being happy - Because mankind can only be happy at the expense of others, the utopia idea that cater to mankind is unattainable - Those who say it is possible with the right mindset/people are denying the variable nature of mankind of wanting different things, at the expense of others - However these people who attempt to attain Utopia are necessary because they help humanity as a whole from our darker impulses If I'm right I guess it got what you're talking about. It's kind of like how Angels in SMT think that helping humanity out is by fundamentally changing what is a human mentally, destroying entire point of saving humanity. Because at that point you're not catering to people, you're catering to another species.
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Jul 3, 2015 05:24
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RickVoid posted:Shiv-Squad. I totally support more SHIVs. Especially if we finally get the fluff bit of them getting AI or whatever. 
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Jul 3, 2015 05:42
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Annointed posted:So what you're saying is: Yes. Yes yes yes yes.
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Jul 3, 2015 06:08
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Does the current human society deserve to exist exactly as-is, in perpetuum? Let's ask the all-knowing internet! Wait, what's with all these ads about retirement savings?
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Jul 3, 2015 06:16
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silentsnack posted:Does the current human society deserve to exist exactly as-is, in perpetuum? Let's ask the all-knowing internet! Wait, what's with all these ads about retirement savings? Humanity deserves to exist as much as anything else does. What we do or do not do doesn't make any difference in that regard.
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Jul 3, 2015 06:23
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I always think that human 'nature' is actually fighting against itself. Our nature should technically be no different from any animal's: Find food, Find shelter, breed, protect our spawn, etc. But our rational minds are aware that we can be capable of so much more than mere tribal survival. So what does that mean? Well, faced with hardship, both real and even imagined, we tend to fall back on survival instincts: Us vs them. It takes a lot of practice and willpower to resist that, and few people, if any, can do that naturally. It takes people continuously thinking of more than their immediate needs and surroundings to advance just about anything. A simple barter system recognizes that others can provide things we need for things we can make, but they need, rather than just strangling each other over it. Diversity, while scary to our 'nature' due to automatically perceiving the unknown as a possible threat, is also necessary for our rational selves to expand our understanding to create new things that benefit us. Of course, I'm no psychologist so my understanding is extremely rudimentary. But its fun to think about.
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Jul 3, 2015 06:50
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My "optimistic" view on the matter is that despite the progress of civilization, we still have wiring meant to deal with "It's the ice age and we have to kill this mammoth with a sharp stick". We'd have been pretty hosed without that, but it can prove to be inconvenient for the purposes peaceful civilization when something jostles the on switch to it.
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Jul 3, 2015 07:06
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Yeah, but the whole 'it's just human nature, what are you gonna do?' argument loses a lot of its strength when you gain access to genetic/psionic/cybernetic manipulation of said nature.
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Jul 3, 2015 11:02
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Ephemeron posted:Yeah, but the whole 'it's just human nature, what are you gonna do?' argument loses a lot of its strength when you gain access to genetic/psionic/cybernetic manipulation of said nature. The question is, is your nature still human following its manipulation? That could have been the big draw behind Civ: BE, but nooooo... 
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Jul 3, 2015 11:04
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Tomn posted:The question is, is your nature still human following its manipulation? One of the defining traits of humanity is the insatiable search for ever-increasing freedom for ourselves and mastery over our environment. Unshackling ourselves from the brutal rudiments of Ice Age is a perfectly natural expression of this eternal human urge.
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Jul 3, 2015 11:27
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Ephemeron posted:Oh yes - provided that you don't stop there. Unfortunately the legacy of that terrible movie will haunt us for aeons to come.
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Jul 3, 2015 11:49
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Ephemeron posted:Yeah, but the whole 'it's just human nature, what are you gonna do?' argument loses a lot of its strength when you gain access to genetic/psionic/cybernetic manipulation of said nature. I will say that I feel that the ability to psychically reach out and actually feel the emotions and pain of those around us would do so very, very much to better mankind as a whole. And now we've moved back into the realm of Trans-humanism and nature vs nurture arguments. Excellent. No time for a big effort post now though.
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Jul 3, 2015 14:09
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RickVoid posted:Yeah, that. That right there. You can't solve everything because the implementation of a solution will inevitably gently caress something up, somewhere, for someone. We could just strip everyone down to brains in jars and feed them elaborate simulations to make them happy while the 'real world' is handled by autonomous robots. Bam, utopia! Sure, everyone's just living elaborate fantasies where they're the best ever and god forbid if two simulations ever connect and the brains instinctively try to destroy each other...
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Jul 3, 2015 14:16
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