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At 3/28/09 10:59 PM, Ninja-Without-Sight wrote: Awww. :( You took my Canada example away...

I was gonna use that ;D

Yea no sorry, I'm the one with dual citizenship. haha.

Anyways, this isn't a politics club, so let's stick to some good pondering on why we exist shall we?

At 3/29/09 12:33 PM, DeathNoteetoNhtaeD wrote:

At 3/29/09 02:53 AM, SpiffyMasta wrote: Anyways, this isn't a politics club, so let's stick to some good pondering on why we exist shall we?

Why we exist? You mean a reason? If so, there is no reason for our existence, just the fact that Earth was the perfect distance away from a perfect star under perfect conditions to support life. Which sounds improbable, but with the sheer size of the universe, it was bound to happen somewhere. It goes from the Big Bang to the formation of the sun, to the formation of the planets around the sun, to planets being bombarded by elements from far away stars planetary nebulae/supernova, to over time these elements forming compounds essential to life (i.e. water), to life coming into being, to more complex forms of life, to evolution, to us. People misguide themselves into thinking we're here for a reason, but we're not. We just got lucky.

However, that was more science than philosophy. But still...

I didn't mean it as a literal question, I just meant that as a statement of our purpose, to discuss philosophy, which tries to answer questions such as why we exist.

But just make sure you don't mix up the fact that when the earth was under heavy bombardment, it was simply because the universe was still young and there was a lot of big debris floating around. Didn't really come from other stars. Oceans existed from about 200 million years after the Earth was formed. Life probably existed on this earth in the form of non-oxygen requiring bacteria from about 3.5 billion years ago. That leaves a lot of time for evolution. How life came about is somewhat of a debate, but experiments have shown to recreate Earth's early conditions and formation of primary amino acids, building blocks of life. Going from this to something more life-like is still up in the air...

It's very difficult for me, when you know all the things that come into play with our creation, not just necessarily from life forming on earth, but in our evolution in intelligent human beings. Our whole body is extremely complicated, as is a lot of animals' but our brain is simply astounding. So yea it's hard for me to believe that we simply evolved into what we are today. I'm not saying I completely discredit this theory, I think it could be either way, or even a mix of a superior power and evolution. Either way, I don't know that we can soon find the proof of either being absolute truth.

At 3/29/09 05:30 PM, DeathNoteetoNhtaeD wrote:

At 3/29/09 04:05 PM, SpiffyMasta wrote: I didn't mean it as a literal question, I just meant that as a statement of our purpose, to discuss philosophy, which tries to answer questions such as why we exist.

Oh. Ah well. Our purpose. Well, if humanity has a purpose right now, it's saving the world from ourselves. Eliminating pollution, protecting species, eliminating nuclear arsenals, all are required to do the best we can to stop the rapid destruction of our planet. That should be our purpose, if any.

I mean purpose of the club,

0_0

but that works too I guess.

Isn't that kind of ironic, saving the world from ourselves. Doesn't that mean we should just eliminate every human? I don't really believe in the rapid destruction of our planet. It survived without us before and will after us. Maybe the state it is in right now will change, but our planet isn't dying. There have been a lot of cyclic changes in the Earth's history. If I recall there use to be a lot of different lifeforms on this Earth that went extinct. I love how they make a big deal out of extinct species. It's not the end of the world, it's a species. There will be more created and some will die. With or without us.

At 3/29/09 08:33 PM, brianreece123 wrote: brianreece123
15
Feb 25

a week and a half ago i did a biography on Isaac Newton and ever since i became interested in calculus.

This is a philosophy club idiot. There's a math club if you want to talk about calculus.

At 3/29/09 07:39 PM, DeathNoteetoNhtaeD wrote: End of the world story

And don't ask me about those studies, I can't remember where I saw it. And I know it's shifty to base opinions off of shady facts, but it was just an example. I'm sure I could find others.

Look, I just took a climate change class this last term, I do know a little bit about this stuff. Currently if we would stop creating CO2 it wouldn't matter much, because the levels are already at a certain height, and the probability is that that will affect the temperatures already. It's on a very small scale of 1-2 degrees max within the next ten years and 5 degrees for a century. People that say it's always warmer because of global warming make me really laugh. There isn't that much of a global difference in temperature.
Now, the big problems is that small change can affect greatly the ice sheets around the South Pole (if it manages to stay the South Pole, pole reversal is an intersting phenomenon if you didn't know). I won't talk about the northern ice, because it won't raise the sea levels that high. If all the North ice would melt, it would only amount to a rise of about 10-20 feet I think. But the South can be pretty bad, because it's all on land. If you don't know about Archimedes principles now is the time to study up. The rise in sea levels from those ice caps would be huge.
Think about this, half of Florida underwater, California and New York's most populated areas flooded. Other countries would suffer the same fate.
Whether or not we are causing this, that's what will happen if the temperatures keep rising the way they are now.

The important thing to remember is that there have been plenty of climatic changes on this Earth in the past, there are various cycles caused by the orbit of the earth around the sun and the inclination of the Earth's axis, and life has survived throughout. I don't doubt that humans can be able to survive some very harsh conditions.

So think me a cynical, but life happens as some would say.

As far as Nuclear War goes, well if we all get killed it's our own fault. I guess it will just show that we have become too powerful for our own good. Harnessing nuclear power is something very impressive and very powerful, but of course deadly. Then again, everything in this universe is deadly.

At 3/29/09 11:18 PM, DeathNoteetoNhtaeD wrote: Yes, but I love the fact that we are the biggest threat to ourselves right now.

I think we have been our own biggest threat for a very long time. Think about it, most people die because of their health which they failed to maintained, or are killed by other humans. Of course there's natural disaster, and rarely other animal caused deaths, but humans have pretty much always been their own enemy. At least for history that has been recorded.

Do you think that this is just like nature's way of eliminating us? I mean think about it, when there are too many of one species in a certain area, they will normally die off, for failure of food. not the same, but still there's too many of us, so we have no choice but to reduce the population in some way.

Just imagine if we were to run out of space on this Earth, or more probably food and water...

At 3/30/09 04:46 PM, aninjaman wrote:

At 3/30/09 12:27 AM, DeathNoteetoNhtaeD wrote: It makes sense. Just think, not too many animals can kill an armed human, so it makes sense that we would do nature's work for her. In that sense, you could think of it as we being puppets, playing our roles in Mother Nature's perverse production.

What about miccrorganisms? They can kill billions of armed humans.

It depends what organisms you are talking about. Bacteria don't kill nearly as many people as viruses do, and viruses are not necessarily considered life forms because they can't reproduce. Bacteria replicate themselves as to where viruses need life form rNA to replicate, so they are not often considered as living things.
Most bacteria usually are curable and even useful i.e. yeast, milk cultures, bacteria that live in your body, but a lot of viruses are not i.e. HIV, Influenza, Ebola
The only truly deadly bacteria I know of or can think about is Anthrax, which if mostly controlled.
But still, we remain the highest cause of human death.

At 3/31/09 06:16 PM, aninjaman wrote: New topic:
Communism.
Is it achievable?
If it was achieved would it be fairer then capitalism?
Is it something worth trying ever again?

Didn't I say something about this earlier... no politics. They have a whole section for that on the BBS. Philosophy club.

At 4/7/09 10:26 PM, aninjaman wrote:

Also communism is a political philosophy so I think its open to discussion.

Communism as a philosophy was more of a social concept when Marx wrote about it. His idea was simply that the workers would come together and revolt against the oppressing big companies of capitalism. How he saw it was that the executives of companies paid the workers a small amount of money to make everything that brought them a hundred times more money than what the workers were paid. Basically they would profit immensely just by organizing the workers. I mean where would companies be if workers refused to work.

He pretty much believed in coops, where the workers owned the companies. This had nothing to do with government. I think it would be great if all companies were cooperatives, and all workers could profit more from the work they do. But to take this into politics is a bad idea, because once you have one person in control, like most communists do, greed comes into play and everything gets fucked up. In fact greed always comes into play anyway, however you put it.

The basis that was to spread out the wealth went to the head of a lot of people.

Now here's where the problem lies. If you put everyone on equal footing, and they don't have to strive to make money or survive, then your production goes down the drain. So yea, as much as it would be nice to have everyone share the wealth, we wouldn't go anywhere. Ever seen the movie WALL-E? If you have, all those humans is my idea of what would happen with no one having to work hard to get what they need. When you put people in a situation where they have to work hard to get where they want to be, they will usually work hard. Capitalism forces people to strive to be better. Communism says it doesn't matter how hard you work, you're all on the same level. How demoralizing is that. It's much better off to have certain people be ultra rich, and some people be ultra poor, than everyone be on equal footing, because you lose that competition, you lose that edge to strive.

Communism is a bad idea, as much as I think Marx was a smart man. It makes sense, it just does not apply because we are human.

At 4/8/09 09:08 AM, SeaBoundRhino wrote:

At 4/7/09 10:57 PM, MrCrawford wrote: Do I really need to fill in that criteria for joining? My alias is right here, my age is in my profile, and if I'm joining the philosophy crew, is it not quite patently to discuss philosophical ideas and treatises?

Foucault is my homeboy.

No, you don't have to. But I haven't been a member for a long time so I can't really say if you can join or not, but you probably can.

That's just the original rules. I had made some new standards earlier. I added into it that if you want to join, I would ask you a question, and if you answer with a well-thought out answer, then you'd be in. I'll make a roster at some point when I have time.

Here's your question Crawford, tailored to your liking of Foucault and his History of Sexuality: Why in your opinion was sexuality oppressed by the church?