On Feb 22, 5:30 pm, Charlie Pendejo > wrote:
>
>
> Why do you say that?

Because excuses are usually only made when one isn't at all interested
in the first place.

> If your concern is for the animal's experience - you yourself used the
> word "empathy" - why do you then throw up your hands and say that the
> animal's experience is irrelevant and what really matters is following
> a simplistic black-and-white rule?

But I haven't said that at all. I think I summed it up quite
succinctly by noting that it all just comes down to whether you would
like that being done to you. That's all.

> Supposing hypothetically that you or I were faced with the
> incontestable choice to either live a full and happy life which ended
> around age ninety with an unjust and intentional, but quick and
> painless, assassination, versus a radically shortened lifespan as a
> tortured and malnourished hostage locked in a filthy closet for
> fifteen years before the same execution.
>
> I might be a little ****ed off about my life being terminated with a
> bullet through the brain (and even here, I think there's an enormous
> difference between living daily with the horrible advanced knowledge
> of this vs. its happening with no warning or understanding of it), but
> I sure as hell know I wouldn't shrug and say, "toss a coin, after all
> the distinction is simply a lawyer's game."
>
> You? If you were making the choice for yourself, or for me, or a
> relative or loved one?

What? How is your tangent at all related to the discussion we had
been on?

> Nope, sorry but that's projection. That's actually you with "only
> people with a biochemical imbalance want to, and therefore engage in,
> exercise".

You can dismiss anything out of hand -- "any excuse will serve a
tyrant" -- but the fact remains that empathy is what makes us human,
and it is our humanity which makes us imagine an animal's fate as
being one which we would not wish on ourselves.

> Boil everything down to a simple yes/no black/white question, and good
> luck leading a satisfying life.

You can dismiss anything for whatever reason, but facts are stubborn
things, and human empathy is a fact. This empathy, by its very
nature, extends out from ourselves to others, whether that be
foreigners or even non-humans.

> Yes, one would need his head buried pretty deeply in the sand to
> ignore all this.
>
> Same time, one's head must also be buried in some other dark place to
> see one's only reasonable response as being total submission to every
> whim, because, hey, ya just can't fight determinism.

It's a fundamental misunderstanding of the world which posits, I
quote, "simple yes/no black/white"...the issue isn't between
determinism and free will. As a matter of fact, there is no struggle
at all, no dichotomy between our sense of ourselves as determining our
own actions and those actions being informed by genetic dispositions.

> Heh, you've got it all figured out, eh?

Why does a questioning attitude suggest a knowing one to you?

> Listen, we've had heroin for decades. Why not go out in a blaze of
> neurotransmittorial satisfaction right now, rather than endure more
> odious years of wage slavery, chores, physical demands, and all the
> other slings and arrows of this primitive all-too-human early twenty-
> first century life? Why wait for some technologically equivalent
> dystopia?

Who's waiting?

> Seriously, why not heroin?

Why?

> Or the myth of Sisyphus to a modern deterministic dystopian.

Sisyphus indeed -- he rolled the rock simply because the Gods, in
their empathy, caused him to enjoy it. It was not his "free will" to
somehow rewire his brain to the task.