Would you choose to be a vampire?

General Discussion
1

An interesting thought experiment that reveals how hard it is to change.

I know people change, they lose religion, they become Nazis, they quit smoking, but I’ve never seen someone change overnight. We don’t do that for the reasons discussed in this article. We can’t envision the new self clearly enough to make the choice so we stick with what we have.

To change, we take a class, read a book, pick up a new hobby, step into something that exposes us to new ideas. Eventually, we say it’s who we were all along.

2

Quite the planned organized life. Then ya minding your own business walking down the street and then “she” offers a smile, like cupid’s arrow straight into your heart. Ya fall hopelessly love, (WTF love at first sight - that’s supposed to be a myth).
Ya meet and turns out, same thing seems to have happened to her. A little later, only to discover she has two young kids? It’s off to the races? Of course, now is the time to stop, reflect, calculate - then of course dismiss the bodily passions that are flooding your mind, and body.

Yeah, no. It doesn’t happen that way. Walk away from her and you’re now empty, worse, in misery. That’s why I’ve always found it best to recognize life as an adventure - plans never seem to work out the way one plans for them. I let that soak in fairly early.

It’s back to doing the best you can with what you have, and hope.
Which is perhaps Life’s First Law.

In Transformative Experience (public library), philosopher L.A. Paul illustrates this paradox and examines how we are to unbind ourselves from it in a simple, elegant thought experiment: If you were offered the chance to become a vampire — painlessly and without inflicting pain on others, gaining incredible superpowers in exchange for relinquishing your human existence, with all your friends having made the leap and loving it — would you do it?

From the book:

. . . Choosing rationally, then, may require us to regard big life decisions as choices to make discoveries, small and large, about the intrinsic nature of experience, and to recognize that part of the value of living authentically is to experience one’s life and preferences in whatever way they may evolve in the wake of the choices one makes.

Using classic philosophical examples about the nature of consciousness, and drawing on recent work in normative decision theory, cognitive science, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind, Paul develops a rigorous account of transformative experience that sheds light on how we should understand real-world experience and our capacity to rationally map our subjective futures

No arguing with that, probably a fascinating book. Still, the fly in that ointment, in that, we are not rational beings. We are still instinct driven, and rationalize result from hindsight.

3

He says, “our capacity to rationally map our subjective futures”. No need to make arguments where they don’t exist

4

I think it was the claim of our supposed rational mapping of our futures, that was worth calling out.

Our choices regarding the future are more emotion driven than rational, planning and weighting contingencies.

When faced with the most transformative experiences, we are ill-equipped to even begin to imagine the nature and magnitude of the transformation — but we must again and again challenge ourselves to transcend this elemental failure of the imagination if we are to reap the rewards of any transformative experience.

If you were offered the chance to become a vampire — painlessly and without inflicting pain on others, gaining incredible superpowers in exchange for relinquishing your human existence, with all your friends having made the leap and loving it — would you do it?

When you find yourself facing a decision involving a new experience that is unlike any other experience you’ve had before, you can find yourself in a special sort of epistemic situation. In this sort of situation, you know very little about your possible future, in the same way that you are limited when you face a possible future as a vampire. And so, if you want to make the decision by thinking about what your lived experience would be like if you decided to undergo the experience, you have a problem…

Sorry, the whole framing of the situation, I don’t see it relating to the real lives around me.

5

That’s why it’s a thought experiment. It’s not a story of a chance encounter. It’s not a reflection on a moment in your past. The “claim of our supposed rational mapping of our futures” that he is making is that we are not as rational as we often think we are.

Edit: after watching this Should we just give up the debate? - Religion and Secularism - CFI Forums

This “calling out” of yours is troublesome, given previous conversations we’ve had where I pointed out that you ignore the emotional drives. You lament a lack of response to your outreach and blame greed and selfishness but don’t engage my conversations about how greed is promoted by powerful propaganda.

6

What’s the point of even trying? You missed it, if you were thinking my story was simply about a “chance encounter” - It was an example of how we humans go about planning for the future during our flesh’n blood lives.

Mind experiments are fun, but too often, do more to illustrate our idealized foundations of thinking, than helping us navigate our lives.
Mind experiments can also help to inform, leading to better choices, but still, they’re no good for building one’s life around, which I’ve seen some others doing.

Look at the state of human society and cooperation and dialogue and rational forward thinking - but I’m supposed to be happy with it? I think not. Seems to me there’s plenty worth calling my fellow humans out on! Oh but that’s no way to make friends - weelll, sometimes defending honesty and truth and sober thinking is more important than making fair-weather friends.

Oh and besides, you don’t think we’ve made humongous mistakes, and that the level of public dialogue is in the toilet? Oh, but then you hand me the blinkered Pinker and Vampire stories, and think I should be satisfied. Seriously?

I offer up Arthur Reber and get dumb looks.

Why not list the most important? Our self absorption. Also I wish you’d appreciate I would prefer “self-serving nature” - rather than the simplistic ‘selfishness’.

Every time I try to seriously engage with your conversation it offends you.

Used to be it really bothered me, now I don’t give a fart anymore, because I wasn’t shut down by attitude and continued on my journey, getting what I could out of the feedback od insults and derision, and making headway best as I could.

I’ll do my best to be civil.
But, I’ll draw the line at denying what I know to be solid and supportable, to rational good-faith thinkers. Lordie knows I’ve seen enough of it reflected in the writings of some the smartest scientists around. Oh yeah! Silly me, those are who I made a point of learning from.

I don’t understand why you keep implying I’m failing at reaching out to the Religious Right? I’ve given up on them, too dumb to dance - Grrrrrr. I mean they are hopeless and won’t do any changing until they get personally slammed with catastrophe.

The people I’m looking for, are those who are already dedicated to rationality and honesty, and respectful of the scientific method. People who are as frustrated by the failure of philosophy to get to grips with the biological reality of evolution. And the fact that we are individual animals, that are part of a greater whole, that was evolved down on this miracle planet Earth. People for who dumped the God-notion, and for excellent reasons, but who now feel a lost. I don’t understand it, but I’ve experienced them in the meta-physical thinking lovers out there.

People who could actually benefit from better understanding our connection to this planet. And a deep appreciate for Evolution and the fact that it’s more than a notion—it’s actually and literally coursing through our body.

While too many others simply what to celebrate the wonder of our amazing minds and the fantasimagoro that philosophy can produce for us. Debates, often more dedicated to finding the master-debater, that teasing out the real conundrums of life.

It’s sad to think your religious legacy is still so alive in you that you still can’t recognize what the Earth Centrism in me is about. No wonder we keep having these mini blowouts over nonsense.

Sorry, no offense intended, but who you imagine you’re talking to, doesn’t track well with who I am. It does take two to tango.

That’s why I’m doing my best to define what I’m talking about. Especially now that the last major pieces have fallen into place.

PDF copy: Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death

Professor Nick Lane

Chapter 5 : Epilogue: Self

https://cdn.bookey.app/files/pdf/book/en/transformer-by-nick-lane.pdf

That chapter is worth a dozen rereads to facilitate complete digestion. :waving_hand:

I’ll share my study guide to Arthur Reber: A Novel Theory of the Origin of Mind @ UQAM once I finish with it.

7

I ask myself that about you a lot

In this case, it exposes the weakness of the foundation.

And here’s where I keep repeating, “I didn’t say that.”

Actually, that one, I say that all the time

My point is, you talk about the self absorbtion all the time and say we should be rational, but here you’re saying, “oh, but we’re not rational”.

Nit picking words like always

Disagreement is not being offended

I didn’t say you were. The point of that video is how atheists should be building their movement. Understanding who we are addressing is one part of it.

8

Well because it is precisely the Self-absorption, and Self-serving nature, that at least the philosophers ought to be taking on. Plus absorbing the reality of evolutionary biology and what it’s telling us.

Because - I’ve been watching over half a century to human thinking back-firing and back-sliding. Of the respect for honesty being gobbled up by our inventions and egos and expectations.

Philosophy is supposed to be all about taking apart our preconceptions. But they resent having to face why we’ve lost this Faustian Bargain humanity was being made aware of when I was a young child. Heck resent its very mention. Good scientists have been marginalized, but the growth of knowledge continues, and all the evidence points at a sober physical evolutionary unraveling of all our favor questions. But the human ego continues to get in the way. We passionately cling to some notion of exceptionalism, and a connection to the gods, and metaphysical skyhooks.

We can’t even say: Yes we do know where God(s) come from!
Our God(s) comes from within ourselves.
Which explains why they are tailored to ego.
The duality of Body/Brain v. Mind is solved within an appreciation for the Physical Biological Reality ~ Human Mind (scape)

Together with an appreciation that our mind is best understood as the interior reflection of your body communicating with itself in the process of living. It that straightforward.

The wonder of now, for me, is that I can point to rigorous science and physical evidence. At every step of the way. The hard work has been done by tens of thousands of passionate, professional, exacting, tenacious beyond belief - with a few superstars who can explain what these studies are telling us to mere mortals

to understand things, we could only wonder at before.

No idea what connection you made there. You’d have to unwrap it a little.

When I look at the choices people are making big, and little, when I look at economy and what’s popular, and what ignored, rationality certainly does not seem a part of most of it.

Oh, here we go:
We have the ability to be rational, but we are instinctive creatures deep down.

9

Here’s what you said

Seems unambiguous to me, but now younow need it unwrapped?

You say this now,

I guess you’ve forgotten how vehemently you argued that we should be able to overcome those instincts.

10

I know what I said and why, it’s your confusion I was trying to wrap my mind around.

Please do share quotes.

Yes we ought to work on getting a little better mastery of our instincts - that starts with better appreciating where they come from and what we are.

What I get vehement about is the need to explicitly recognize the fact that our body-brain produces our thoughts and belief!

We are instinct driven animals, but our mental hardware is supposed to enable us to do better than pure instinct driven behaviors.
We have the ability to temper these behaviors, not necessarily with free will, but with FREE WON’T - those moments of reflect we have between an impulse and an action. When reflection offer options.

As for the comment that humans tend to act first and justify after the fact, if that makes no sense to you, then you aren’t near a well read as I assume.

11

This is the thread that most comes to mind, but it’s not the only one

David Bohm -Dalai Lama conversation - Event Announcements - CFI Forums

Like right here, above, instead of addressing the emotions, you want us to understand where they come from. You can’t change your emotions by knowing that come from body-brain. If you are found to have a chemical imbalance, sure, you can get a prescription. Or if you are self-medicating, you could change that. But if you have experienced a great loss or trauma of some kind, you need to talk about that, or balance it with some positive experiences. Or in the case of trying to shift someone’s thinking on abortion or climate change, it can help to listen to what’s going on in their life, the stresses that they think are a priority.

I have literally said that, more than once. You said a bunch of stuff that I didn’t respond to because they weren’t on the point I was trying to get to. Maybe I should have quoted your phrase before that one, “we are not rational beings”. You were framing this as an either/or and I pointed out the statement that this is about our “capacity” to be rational. You seem to agree it’s about rationality and emotions, the mix, but you want to make this an argument, so you pick out something, misstate it, and start one of your lectures.