Buddhas don't play games.
Why do ppl like Stephen Hawking so much
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Buddhas don't play games.
spidergoat
Valued Senior Member
That's all they do. Because they have to trick you into waking up. You already have everything you need, you just have to realize it. Buddhism itself is a joke. That's why enlightenment is often accompanied by laughter. Only part of it is relief from the human condition. The other part is how funny the pursuit of enlightenment was, like looking for your glasses while wearing them.
But people don't want to be emptied, they want to be filled up. You don't want what I can give you because it will leave you empty, and you already told us lack of purpose is incompatible with your worldview. You want meaning, purpose, you want expectations fulfilled. The essence of Buddhism is the opposite of that. It will take your preconceptions and dash them against the rocks.
But people don't want to be emptied, they want to be filled up. You don't want what I can give you because it will leave you empty, and you already told us lack of purpose is incompatible with your worldview. You want meaning, purpose, you want expectations fulfilled. The essence of Buddhism is the opposite of that. It will take your preconceptions and dash them against the rocks.
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No.
No.
You're forgetting the countless people who are helping him - Stephen Hawking did not build his special chair, nor his voice box, nor his computer. He can't feed himself, he can't wash himself, nor clothe himself. Other people have to take care of all his needs. Other people have to make sure that he can express his needs at all.
The phenomenon "Stephen Hawking" is rather a "group project."
And I will likely challenge the SOF.
If I have to tell myself "this is it," then it quite clearly, it is not it.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Oh thank you thank you!
Well then, same to you: three thank-yous for finally telling us where you're coming from.
Or perhaps it's because this forum has about twenty atheists for every religionist so you find yourself more often confronting atheist arguments that you don't like than religionist arguments of that nature. Surely you can see how your responses to that majority of the membership give the impression that you're a religionist.
I'm just covering all the bases. It's certainly not a plan I expect with anywhere near 100% certainly. But it's one of those things which, despite its low probability, has a high impact, and therefore from the standpoint of rational risk analysis and management, I must deal with it. If my wife dies first, which is statistically unlikely, and if I end up lying in a hospital bed in psychological agony, physical paralysis, or worst of all an apparent coma while actually being conscious and aware of my surroundings but unable to move or speak--I demand the right to prepare for this by having legal documents drawn up allowing my attorney or other caretaker to end my suffering, and in the bargain, prevent the predatory "care" facility from siphoning off my entire estate so the relatives, friends and charities to whom I have willed it end up with nothing.
Actually helium has nothing to do with this, it's just a generic stand-in for taking charge of one's own end since it's been in the news. However, if I do end up in a state of consciousness and mobility but with a condition that is going to put me in one of those institutions shortly where I will no longer have the power to control my destiny, I'd certainly have the helium ready.
This has nothing to do with the quality of my life and the salutary nature of my outlook. It's all about said quality and said nature at the end of life, which is usually much different if one is not fortunate enough to suffer a coronary fifty miles from the nearest ER.
I assure you that when you're approaching 70 you'll start thinking about these things in much more detail, even if you don't reach the same conclusions my wife and I have. You can be proud of what you've accomplished and at peace with your life, but still want it to end before it turns horrible.
Fair enough.
Like most of us I adopt a rather one-dimensional personality on SciForums. When I'm invited to dinner and the family says grace, I bow my head and think of someone like Martin Luther King. Or perhaps Sheryl Crow.
I don't start arguments with my neighbors when I see them heading off to church. I have a couple of friends who are devout Christians and we have spirited discussions, but they've never felt insulted or demeaned.
Even Christians say, "hate the sin but love the sinner." Despite my over-the-top rhetoric on a website that incites that sort of rhetoric, the only religionists I hate are the small minority who whip their flock into a frenzy of righteousness and try to curtail my rights or the rights of others such as my friends who are, for example, gay, Muslim, or burdened with a problem pregnancy.
Regardless of the messages in their holy books, the various religions as they are practiced in real life have many aims. That's certainly one of them for a lot of people. As I noted earlier, (sincere) prayer releases endorphins and endorphins are powerful analgesics.
That's a reasonable attitude and one that's not at all uncommon. A sensible person accepts the inevitability of death. But nobody wants to feel pain and everybody will go to reasonable lengths to avoid it. (Well almost everybody, there are the cutters and other masochists.) This is obviously the point of the furore over end-of-life issues as the elderly become the dominant demographic in American politics and culture. We would rather die now than suffer and die in a few days, weeks or months anyway.
Choose youre words carefully when talking to someone who will turn 69 in a few months.
No no no no! Once again, you seem to be completely blind to the magnificence of civilization. This is what we do that matters. The hundred billion human beings who have lived on this planet (estimates vary but that's more-or-less the right order of magnitude) started with no clothes, no tools, no language; nothing more than a brain considerably larger than the chimpanzee-like creatures they descended from. They lived very much like those creatures, hunting and gathering across the landscape with no permanent home.
In a couple of million years (yes I'm including a few ancestral species with smaller brains than ours but their numbers don't have much impact on the total) they have invented clothes, language, controlled fire, stone tools, agriculture, cities, metallurgy, industry and electronics. Who knows what our descendants will accomplish over the next couple of million years?
I'm enormously proud to be part of this project. I know that (so far) I have left the world a very slightly better place than I found it. Because of me, everyone who comes after me will have a slightly better life than those who came before me. Well on the average anyway; there will always be winners and losers because there will always be luck.
Because I care about all those people who will come after me. Hell, I care about all the ones who are alive right now. That's why I vote, teach, write, take out my trash, and natter away on SciForums.
I'm a pack-social animal just like my ancestors. I'm programmed to care for my pack-mates. So are you!
I'm not familiar with Camus. Mrs. Fraggle is the literary scholar in the family; I get my sound bites from song lyrics and no, I never agreed with "Hope I die before I get old." Still I doubt very much that when he wrote that he was concentrating on people lying in hospital beds attached to tubes and forced to endure a pointless, painful and degrading stage of life, just because our technology can extend that stage of life for many agonizing months longer than the doctors of Camus's day could have done.
Yeah, but to a qualitatively much lesser extent than out ancestors. We have been transcending nature since the first Australopithecus discovered how to make a knife out of a piece of flint.
I disagree. I think that risk is almost immeasurably small. I don't know how many planets there are in our galaxy, although there are people who have a pretty good estimate. How many of them get smashed in, say, a million years? Six? This strikes me as even sillier than focusing our national politics on protecting ourselves from terrorists, who kill the same number of us as peanut allergies.
Dude, you're getting down the the level of probability that the religionists are right after all, and some supernatural creatures are going to show up with croquet mallets and use the Sun's planets as their balls.
We each get to define our own Grand Scheme.
Sorry, Mrs. Fraggle doesn't like this website at all and is not even a member.
That's a tough question to Google so I haven't been able to confirm your answer. Where did you learn that? Considering the huge number of Buddhists who play go (my favorite game), are you saying that every one of them is denied the path to becoming a buddha?
Rather, in our current state: If anything (Aside from ourselves) threatened us on a global scale, we are unable to do anything about it.
See: Touchy Feely Disney's Armageddon, starring Bruce Willis. The movie was fun, but unscientific- We'd be powerless against what they described.
Neverfly
That depends on the threat and on how much time we have. Asteroids we could divert, simply land a mass driver on the rock and slowly change it's orbit. Comets we could deal with the same way but would need much more lead time(their velocities are orders of magnitude greater in most cases). A very large star going supernova would need to be one hundred light years away or less to affect Earth, none are currently that close. The same goes for possible GRBs. Man, for the first time has the technology to do quite a lot about some things that just 100 years ago might not even be noticed before they struck. If we had the need we have adequate technology.
Grumpy
That depends on the threat and on how much time we have. Asteroids we could divert, simply land a mass driver on the rock and slowly change it's orbit. Comets we could deal with the same way but would need much more lead time(their velocities are orders of magnitude greater in most cases). A very large star going supernova would need to be one hundred light years away or less to affect Earth, none are currently that close. The same goes for possible GRBs. Man, for the first time has the technology to do quite a lot about some things that just 100 years ago might not even be noticed before they struck. If we had the need we have adequate technology.
Grumpy
Hence ... "meanwhile your molars rot"
Good recipe for raising a child to be an idiot in adulthood
You really are trolling at this point.
It's well established that "our molars" rot. It's established we will succumb to death.
Do you have an actual POINT?
that the insurmountable material nature rolls on even if you pretend you are not affected by it or declare advancements in technology as sufficient to live within the confines such a state ... which tends to explain precisely what is conspicuous by its absence in the treatises of Hawking et al
:shrug:
You commented to this quote:
with:
Explain how an inability to defy death or aging has anything to do with Randi's statements.
The fantastical offers no help for death or aging. And talk about 'pretending to not be affected...' I can think of no greater pretense than "Eternal Life beyond Death."
its simply fantastical to think that the problems of death, old age and disease can be glossed over by computer technology etc
:shrug:
Ah, ok I understand now... You think that belief in the supernatural is not fantastic but acceptance of medical advances is.
Got it.
only if one thinks medical advancements are adequate solutions to the problems of rotting molars and other such bench marks of old age visited on the path of inevitable death
:shrug:
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I think his mind - where it's been - overrides that.
And then I came and asked you something different. I asked you about being present to nature, particularly its most mysterious and profound aspects. Does that raise a challenge, too, if so, what?
I think "this" divides into two kinds. There's the buddha's mudane "this", then there's the Hawking's supramundane "this"... matter coexisting as radiation, the bending of space and time, the mutual influence of objects at a distance, virtuality, timelessness, etc. The contemplation of timelessness alone, to me, juxtaposes the mind of Hawking and the perfected mind.
You never cease to amaze me. I always enjoy your posts, even when you're fending off nonsense. But this is great. What a great voice and what a great expression of this concept.
lightgigantic
They are, after all, the ONLY effective methods man has found so far to EASE those affects, there are no others that offer more. Our current life expectancy is about 80 yrs. on average, but that means some die at 45 and some die at 100. Before medical science existed the average was closer to 40, with many dying before 5 yrs. and a few living past 60. And they had ZERO dentistry to treat those rotting molars you're so worried about, many died of abcessed teeth and sepsis. We do have adequate dentistry so it is almost unknown for that to happen today, at least in industrialized countries. But our teeth evolved to last us long enough to exhaust our reproductive ability, in Nature you were then expected to die having fulfilled the only function you evolved to do(IE about 40 years). Without scientific medical advances we would still have a life expectancy of 40 years. The flu pandemic following WW1 illustrates how it used to be. The troops spread the virus worldwide and one out of three people died, worldwide. Today we complain if our flu shot gives us some cold symptoms. The Mideaval plagues were even more deadly, we can cure that now in most cases.
So what is it you are babbling about(again)?
Grumpy
They are, after all, the ONLY effective methods man has found so far to EASE those affects, there are no others that offer more. Our current life expectancy is about 80 yrs. on average, but that means some die at 45 and some die at 100. Before medical science existed the average was closer to 40, with many dying before 5 yrs. and a few living past 60. And they had ZERO dentistry to treat those rotting molars you're so worried about, many died of abcessed teeth and sepsis. We do have adequate dentistry so it is almost unknown for that to happen today, at least in industrialized countries. But our teeth evolved to last us long enough to exhaust our reproductive ability, in Nature you were then expected to die having fulfilled the only function you evolved to do(IE about 40 years). Without scientific medical advances we would still have a life expectancy of 40 years. The flu pandemic following WW1 illustrates how it used to be. The troops spread the virus worldwide and one out of three people died, worldwide. Today we complain if our flu shot gives us some cold symptoms. The Mideaval plagues were even more deadly, we can cure that now in most cases.
So what is it you are babbling about(again)?
Grumpy
...And fine, if you wish to
Glorify Krishna and Vishnu
In a post-colonial, condescending
Bottled-up and labeled kind of way
Then whatever, that's ok.
But here's what gives me a hard-on:
I am a tiny, insignificant, ignorant lump of carbon.
I have one life, and it is short
And unimportant
But thanks to recent scientific advances
I get to live twice as long
As my great great great great uncleses and auntses.
Twice as long to live this life of mine
Twice as long to love this wife of mine
Twice as many years of friends and wine...
-Tim Minchin, Storm. (Disclaimer: Language may offend some of our more sensitive readers).Glorify Krishna and Vishnu
In a post-colonial, condescending
Bottled-up and labeled kind of way
Then whatever, that's ok.
But here's what gives me a hard-on:
I am a tiny, insignificant, ignorant lump of carbon.
I have one life, and it is short
And unimportant
But thanks to recent scientific advances
I get to live twice as long
As my great great great great uncleses and auntses.
Twice as long to live this life of mine
Twice as long to love this wife of mine
Twice as many years of friends and wine...
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That is awesome! Thank you.
If you think that the actual problems of aging, illness and death are the decaying health, decaying tissues, infections, fractures and such,
then you are operating out of a very limited - and misleading - understanding of the problems of aging, illness and death.
:bugeye:
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