What a complete load of crap. Optimissed told you I am prone to self-aggrandizing? Lol. That's rich.
Self-aggrandizing would call for me to be spouting off stuff all the time. Except that I don't mention details about my life or accomplishments unless somebody is being a jerk and makes ridiculous assumptions I need to set straight. The way you did with your "power tripping manager" chip on your shoulder, for example.
Are you really going to tell me that you can't figure out what my "poetry" was talking about? Let me spell it out...while you were "in the space" in your head that you claimed we were both in, I was playing a video game, and only reading your garbage while the game was loading data between star systems, and pausing to reply if you posted something new.
You imagine that this back and forth is a struggle on both ends. It is not. But if you want to keep posting blather for me to pick apart, be my guest. I make a habit of mirroring people's malice back at them (minus the "dunces" and harassment you prefer, that will eventually get you muted). As you said, I've been doing it for a decade here, and for 4 decades in total. I don't care about how I am perceived here, and I may make pointed commentary, but I don't cross any lines. I have an ethical framework, as it turns out, one that does not come from anything but my own conscience (and no, I am not beholden to anyone or any organized religion for it).
So, I'm not going anywhere...it's draw or lose for you. Those are your two outcomes. If you want to be another poster to trash your own reputation here for a decade, again, be my guest. I will call you out every single time you get into it with anyone on the forums, and I will hold up your behavior for everyone to take a gander until you are just sick of it and either change your behavior, or leave.
Think of me like the guy that comes to the park to calmly oppose the crazy anti-government guy with the bullhorn on a soapbox, ever single day, week, month, and year until the guy finally leaves the park because he can't get his message out unopposed and he's just tired of the hassle. There's no rancor. See, I just don't like malicious behavior in people, and I'm a retired systems design and analysis guy who loves to dissect things that are wrong/dysfunctional and try to fix them.
I've got all the time in the world. It will be calm, measured, and incessant, for as long as it takes for you to change...and you will change. Even if it is just to be stressed out before posting something you know I am going to call you out on. Ask your new friend about posting about his IQ or his "paranormal abilities". He is constantly aware that I am going to take him to task when he puts people down by claiming to be smarter than everybody else, or when he claims to be some kind of chosen one with powers that naturally place him above other human beings.
I don't do this via harassment, and it's not personal, I don't use /follow, I will never PM you. There's no stalking. I won't seek you out at all, but I will run into you anyway because you like to post diatribes full of invective when you are on the attack, like most trolls do. At any point, you can drop the malice and start being a better human being, and I will have no bad behavior to point out anymore. I don't really attack people, I just point out their bad behavior, over and over and over until they stop. The people I call out are not special. I don't have a nemesis. I don't hold a grudge, or rage about it, or get stressed out, so I can do this pretty much forever. Ragequitting is not in my nature.
That is what you are signing on for. It's 2025 now, how many years are you planning to post here? Average life expectancy says I will probably be around til 2050, 2060 if you are unlucky.
I actually feel satisfied now knowing that, in your response to my elaborate explanation as to why you have this need for self-aggrandizement, you deny it but then couldn't even help but go on for paragraphs with yet more self aggrandizement... And that's because, again, your notion of morality is entirely contingent on the self. Which you even admitted in your post. You've ceded everything I just said, it's hilarious. But you're in a catch 22, since it's hard for you to make a moral argument without doing this. But without any morality... it's hard to make an argument at all.
"Self-aggrandizing would call for me to be spouting off stuff all the time. "
No, only when you need to make a moral argument. Spouting off all the time doesn't benefit you. And otherwise you can just pursue your self interest in your life, in the choices you make.
re conscience: How is the reasoning of your conscience formed, exactly...? Was its reason inherited, or were you born with your conscience as it is? Does the consensus view of the crowd inform your conscience? Is your conscience influenced by your personal desires? You don't know. But it's ok, I've been explaining it for you. It's conscience which leads you to comform with authorities to violate / disregard peoples natural rights in pursuit of your own ascension. Conscience alone is mere subjectivity, and it can be derailed just as human reason can go astray... and infact, you can hardly define conscience.
You're not beholden to organized religion, but you're also not beholden to transcendental philosophy, or the higher level reasoning you mischaracterize as dogma, or to mystery religions or Jungian psychoanalysis, or to the divine source and destiny of all things. Hence when I ask you how did the universe originate you have nothing to say, you just ignore it... Likewise you fail to distinguish between biological and chemical evolution, because you ignore the divine reasoning. These things were necessary for you to justify your statements, but you don't pursue them, you're content with ignorance. With organized religion you just threw the baby out and claimed it was bathwater.
"Are you really going to tell me that you can't figure out what my "poetry" was talking about? Let me spell it out...while you were "in the space" in your head that you claimed we were both in, I was playing a video game, and only reading your garbage while the game was loading data between star systems, and pausing to reply if you posted something new."
Apparently it's beyond comprehension that a person online would have no idea about the video game you're playing at the moment. Self-absorbed much?
You sure paused a while though, didn't you? Throughout these pages you've written a chapter worth of material, you must have spent an hour at least typing all these pages. It seems to me your video game took the back seat to this debate. Not as casual and ambivalent as you'd like to seem, I'm afraid. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
"Ask your new friend about posting about his IQ or his "paranormal abilities". He is constantly aware that I am going to take him to task when he puts people down by claiming to be smarter than everybody else"
This is actually the most interesting thing you've ever said, though the idea didn't come from your mind, not surprisingly. @Optimissed is correct as far as the paranormal goes, I've witnessed such things myself many times. Actually, this is far more common and known than you realize... there is an entire subculture of people aware of this sort of thing, who do this. Now, most of them are confused imbeciles dabbling in things they do not remotely understand, so you run into all kinds of superstitions and perversions of what's happening, but even so. It's actually a rapidly growing subculture due to the spread of esoteric knowledge online. And infact, in other countries such as india... it's part of their traditions and quite a large constituent. In the West you're much more insulated from a subculture like that.
Just to make an even more radical claim - this is actually an empirically observable phenomenon, I've tested it many times. It's completely reproducible... I don't refer to it as paranormal, if you want a secular explanation... macro scale quantum retrocausation combined with Penrose's theory on microtubules comes close. It's incomplete, but if you want someone who talks about this at length - Deepak Choprah is probably the most well known person. Though probably the most serious physical explanation is with the cognitive theoretic model of the universe by Chris Langan. And Langan is actually off record stating he's witnessed many paranormal phenomenon himself, and developed his theory of physics as a way to explain that experience. Unfortunately you will run into alot of confused babble on this topic, simply because people are lacking an explanation, lacking the language and the coherent mental framework to describe such events.. and there's alot of tradition and dogma carrying forward, inherited from cults, that pollutes peoples understanding. But actually... MIT has proven the occurrence of macro scale quantum events in experiments, the science is actually slowly converging on an explanation. Go watch the first quantum physics video in the course from MIT available on youtube, the professor will describe to you in the introductory video the experiment he conducted where he proved the occurrence of a macro scale quantum event (in the past some people argued this was impossible). What secular ignoramuses such as yourself get wrong about Deepak is they assume he's perverting science to his philosophy.... and many are also pseudo-skeptics. No, Deepak is looking to science to explain his lived experience. He's just unable to actually convey to you the full depths of his experience, because you are so shut down mentally you've completely pushed the possibility of such things out of your mind. But probably if you were to actually witness and comprehend some paranormal event... well one of 2 things would happen, a) you'd simply refuse to believe it and put it out of your mind again, literally just forget it happened, b) your whole mindset and worldview would be shattered. Especially once you realize the effect is reproducible, and you can invoke such events at will.
I'm more of the opinion every human being is in principle able to mentally invoke and experience such things, however due to the rigid dogmas people hold, including the conventional understanding of causation and models of physics which do not model things like will or cognition, many people actually preclude themselves from the possibility of ever doing so. And you would fall into that category. You could say that intelligence is useful insofar as it enables people to see past dogmas and maintain their own independent understanding, clearing the way for such an experience, but I really think it's a mostly natural phenomenon that hasn't been documented hardly (though in the quantum field equations there does need to be a transcendental function to coordinate things on a macro scale for this to be possible). And again, there are cults who have been doing divination in various form for thousands of years.
I could tell Optimized was much more intelligent than you simply because he recognizes key distinctions, like the difference between chemical and biological evolution you overlooked earlier. And this conversation is probably already multiple levels above where your head is capable of going...
Keep trying though!
Firstly, you seem to have an emotional need that adverse premises should "fall apart". But you don't know what a premise is and certainly, what you are trying to criticise is not a premise but a firm conclusion. You try to counter with the argument that you don't "think about most posters" (implying that no-one else challenges you). In fact, you exhibit the same reactions to anyone who dares to counter the torridly self-conscious statements which you continually wish to convey as facts. Of course you don't consider others, since there's only a regard for the self.
Point taken