I dont know, but… uhm…
Not sure if there is some joke behind that that I’m not familiar with, but it may be the one that kills this thread.
And the sad panda walked across.the land,.seeking solace in mediocre China buffet food.
In other news , genocide is only funny if it is fashion related,
A priest a monk and a rabbi walk into a bar and the bartender says “is this some kind of a joke”?
Here’s a good one. Probably the most amazing pic I’ve seen. A while back NASA released a picure from Cassini that showed a ‘pale blue dot’ that caught some attention, and I guess they’ve recently finished stitching together the whole collage to build a 9000x3500 pxl image of Saturn. So much detail in it. You can pick out a number of the moons in different phases and even casting shadows across the faint outer rings. It’s one of those pictures that just doesn’t look real.
Let’s talk about the six human needs:
Why people do what they do:
All behavior, including the action to hijack threads or offering them to be hijacked serves to satisfy one of the following needs:
The primary needs
- Certainty (Stability and comfort. Plain survival. Will the ceiling hold? Do I know what’s going on? Won’t it eat me?)
- Variety (Stimulus and change. Is my life interesting?)
- Significance (How special am I? How worthy of attention?)
- Love/Connection (Do I have friends? Do I love, am I loved?)
Every brain makes sure to get them, even if it’s in a totally bad way. Once the need is strong enough and the situation is bad enough, quality doesn’t matter anymore. Long term stability is out of the window.
There’s the two spiritual needs which many people mostly do without:
- Growth (Am I expanding intellectually, spiritually, financially? Do I have more freedom…)
- Contribution (Do I live beyond my personal needs? Am I able to give?)
Most people live these needs from top to bottom. They strive for certainty above all else, that’s why doubting is so popular. Instant certainty, even if unfounded. That’s why they fear to do something new.
If you live these needs upside down, you have a good chance to get a fulfilled life. That doesn’t mean throw certainty out of the window, but don’t let this need rule your life.
You might even say: properly take care of growth and contribution, and the rest of the needs come naturally.
Cheers
Haunt
I contribute to the growth of fungus upon my back, I love it and think it may be important one day. It has many shapes and flavors and will die one day.
-Zen-
LOL
But in all seriousness,
I contribute to others before I fill my plate,
I look desperately for love in a situation that there really isn’t any
I struggle with how unimportant I am as a shaved ape,
Everyday is exactly the same,
and everyday is exactly the same.
I get up, get my daughter to school, and try not to get kicked in the face, bitten or flogged… (she is on the autism spectrum) - and is the brightest little beautiful girl, and truly the gooey center of me…(here is the love)
I take care of my girlfriend who has given up hope, and dies a little each day in front of me from IBM/MD
who was never really that nice to me in the first place… and is starting to slip into treating me like a doormat.
I am 2,456 miles from anyone who may care.
O yes, and I have to rely on public assistance as I have about 36 seconds every 3 hours to work…
and they don’t think that I should own my own home, car, or be able to afford clothing.
So yea…
I am happy though, because my skull is full of nonsense and laser beams.
And Everyday is exactly the same…
Being the rebel that I am I will not steal this thread just because you aren’t the boss of me. =b
There’s actually 7. You forgot bacon.
Many of us can’t live without it, and those who claim otherwise are cold and dead inside. You do not know true satisfaction, until you’ve tried it with bacon.
On a serious note though, I think this thread falls under the ‘Variety’ category. Sometimes it’s just fun to be silly, chaotic and loud for no reason. Kids do it all the time - keep a log of their laughing and giggling time - they seem quite happy when they do it.
A being after my own heart. It is said that silliness is a double blessing for it both sheds authority and discomforts the uptight. Here, have a slapping good cod on me.
One problem of existence is, what ever else is there, at its heart also are both absurdity and tragedy. Tears and love are the only effective responses to tragedy. But silliness is the only effective antidote for the random chaotic absurdity of existence.
Certainty: There is no certainty for the living except that we will die. Eventually, once you’ve lost most friends and loved ones to that certainty, it seems to loose its relevance. A kind of dark enlightenment. I don’t think people have a drive for certainty though they certainly have a drive for security.
Contribution: “(Do I live beyond my personal needs? Am I able to give?)” I would think the question is, am I actually able to love. Love should never be confused with the desire to own or control or exploit some thing or some being. In love one protects and nurtures the loved for it’s own sweet self. This is not altruism for the flourishing of the loved is the reward. Contribution is an expression of love.
Excellent steal of the thread, BTW 
BluePrintRandom, your love for your daughter is a virtue beyond measure. I salute you with true respect sir.
hail nonsense and laserbeams!
You can boil actions down to even more primal reasons: avoid pain and experience pleasure.
On a very serious note:
The addiction to certainty is very destrcutive.
If one needs certainty badly enough, they might indulge in behavior that gives them the certainty that the bad times will stay. Death provides certainty, too, so one might wish to die in order for the uncertainty to end. Once and for all. To get peace.
One can also be a destroyer of ideas. Because the easiest way to get certainty is doubting. BOOM, instant certainty. I don’t think this idea Haunt has will work. Now this assumption normally isn’t even questioned and the doubts totally go undoubted. People have the amazing tendency to blindly trust their doubts (lolwut?). If you quickly make up that something won’t work, you don’t have to admit that you don’t have a clue of what’s going on or what’s going to happen. And while rejecting to even really know what they’re rejecting, they don’t realize that they’re actually missing out on something great.
Cheers
Haunt
Well you can forget a few things . . .
Attachments
The addiction to certainty is very destrcutive
.
Addiction to the non-existent is indeed a pathology.
But I will modify my assertion that “for the living the only Certainty is death” to recognize that certainty of correctness, i.e. truth, is available within formal systems. Of course those are necessarily tautological and so of limited existential comfort. Beyond these, certainty and its corollary absolute truth do not exist. At best it is pure folly think otherwise. At worst it is a fantasy that can be used to justify any atrocity one chooses.
BTW There is no certainty even for facts (knowledge) (see the Gettier problem in philosophy). For example all scientific truths are contextually contingent.
I think the brain doesn’t care for philosophical absolutes. Just as the brain doesn’t take the size of the universe to scale down tooth aches. Some things are purely subjective and certainty is what the brain perceives as certain. And for most practical aspects, relative certainty is enough.
I think we are agreeing here though I
would want to explain why I believe that is the case as it is not
necessarily self evident. At least in theory the brain can be
modeled as a formal neural network. There exists a formal transform
(between domains, like the Fourier Transform) between neural nets
and Fuzzy Logic. Though Fuzzy systems do not banish the Aristotelian
model of the categorical distinctions between truth and fallacy such
formal models do provide a path for determining to which categories
it is appropriately applied as is, and to which categories true and
false are orthogonal basis vectors of a continuous space. Many of the
absolutes uttered by philosophers are built on tacit erroneous
assumptions as to the appropriateness of the purely Aristotelian
model for the categories to which that model is applied.
I think Probability Theory and Epistemology are very good for making our limitations clear. In a Bayesian sense even death is not 100% certain. We make this assumption without all of the comparative data. A lot of the issue with our heuristics may be rooted in breakdowns in communication. Expressing an idea between individuals can be challenging because the two are unlikely to have grown under the same conditions. A shared idea is likely to change as it’s passed along. This could be a good or bad thing and is probably both. All in all we’re making assessments from what is probably an extremely limited domain. We could only be expected to make approximations subject to our tool set. Technological advancement and some form of non-ambiguous language to communicate the findings is the likely cure…I think 
Debates tend to be where it all goes south and even math is subject to gamesmanship from time to time. It’s difficult for us to get beyond our heuristics, Behavioral Biology and Operand Conditioning. We’ve developed a long list of cognitive biases that support them. :o
While the max limitations of humanity as a whole are certainly interesting, as long as most people live in the < 10% range of their potential, I’m more interested in practical application of raising potential. Or let’s say it that way: I rather be responsible for a nation of good runners than the fastest person in the world.