Latest entries tagged in philosophy

My name is clux, and I’m a pirate.

“Yarr, clux!”

yarr..

I started downloading in my teenage years on napster as a result of peer2peer pressure, but later I moved on to more powerful stuff like direct connect and bittorrent. I felt like all the information of the world was ready to infuse with my brain on mouseclick demand. Generations’ worth of music was ready to play after a little loading; I told myself I would just duplicate those files a little more before I went to bed. I only had a small circle of likeminded users to call my friends, and my social ineptitude only aggravated my addiction. Little did I know I was trapped in a downward spiral; a gateway to death metal.

My bitstream IV is clocking in at hundreds of Gigabits a day, and still increasing, but nowadays people look down upon us. “Why would you autodownload everything via a feed” they’d say. They could not understand. The ease. The efficiency. It’s simply too great.

Then we have the filecatchers; the most soulless of the lawyers. Always looking for us delinquents, monitoring the activity on major torrents, forcing us to move underground; to less stable releases. Monsters, they are, other releases are encoded by newbs and does not conform to the strict regulations of scene releases. They know what they are doing. They want us to stop using. Try our free program they’d say, tis just like bittorrent. But then you have to pay to download unless you want lots of ads or Beyonce. I’m a student! Do you want me to sell my body for music! I had a friend who did that, but he said he got DRM from some guy who wasn’t protected. I don’t want to end up like that.

For the last couple of years I have been using ip blacklisters while delusionally believing things would remain the same, but they are clearly not. I have a disease. And until I admit I am powerless to this disease and place my faith in a higher power, I am going to continue to alienate those around me.

Even if they aren’t the sharpest people.

Thank you.

Your mind directs your choices. It would be easier if this director had admin rights.
NB: This is really just some ramblings of my own. But feel free to read.

I contend that we don't control the thoughts that come into our minds; they are a complex consequence of your current emotional state and quantum physics. You can't control your next thought without using your current one. It's impossible to predict with perfect accuracy your next thought.

Your objectives and habits are hardcoded consequences of experience and circumstance. To alter or reverse these would take systematic effort telling yourself that your goals are wrong. For instance; quitting smoking, abstaining from internet pornography, starting and sticking to an exercise routine, starting dieting, or to start going to church to save your soul. You laugh, but for the right reason - in my case; the irrefutable evidence of the afterlife and some religion - you would do it, or at least try. My inherently hedonistic lifestyle would make it very hard for me however.

At any rate, my point is this. We repeatedly make unsound choices based on settings in our brain that are really hard to override. And while - if we talk large scale repercussions for a minute - having the ability to change them yourself might be convenient at times, having everyone do it would be a disastrous idea; imagine the stability of society fading as people play with their master switches - maybe a certain setting makes you object to touching the switches again, eventually ensuring the smooth convergence of mankind into one bland personality type. No. To overcome ubiquitous challenges for mankind, we need to really work together, and feel each other. Governments can at best be held accountable and represent the interest of the constituency, and at worst allow individuals to exploit fallibilities of the system for their own good and at the cost of others. A global infallible government would be unthinkable as it represents such radically different expectations in terms of lifestyle changes as true equality gets the spotlight.

So for a prosperous future and a high stability of mankind, someone, or something, I propose a computerised hive mind, to control our goals for us - based on a perfect blend of scientific evidence for what behaviour patterns make us happy, and what common sacrifices are needed to survive our raiding of the earth. I.e. we need to effectively strip ourselves of what makes us human. We would work together to solve our problems, we would remain in love, never cheat, as the stability of mankind would necessitate keeping the switches set on love - if you have paedophilic urges or if there are no mates in your nearby area, you would be implored to exercise abstinence - but successfully. Bureaucratic systems would be rendered obsolete in the face of universal human morality.

Until we can create such a system, I believe we are but a global pathogen, a large scale disease, awaiting planetary extinction quite possibly caused by our own inability to work together. Until then, we will spend our lives mostly preoccupied with being better - in your personal metric - than our neighbours. Until then, we will live under the eye of God, whose outdated morality only continues to drive humanity into a wall, whose existence is unverifiable at best and illogical at worst. Until we realize that our existence is meaningless and purely incidental, we are not going to be able to effectively do the one thing that we ultimately all strive for on this earth; to make ourselves and/or others happy. If we can optimistically embrace this existential nihilism, we can work towards changing mankind for the better - and as you can see I do not put any limits on the type of change here. Failing that - obviously - get a mad scientist with a runaway budget to invent a God of a supercomputer to enable the singularity.

Until then, xkcd has my philosophy:


wow. other than about what specifically prompted this, feel free to ask/discuss.