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Re: Confessions about love, relationships guilt and the world from a young sociopath.

i have read all of your posts and i found them very, very, great. i have learned a lot, and i loved your writings. i will print them and will read them from now. i "love" the way you see life dan, and i "love" too how the doctor finds a justification for everything in life. i dont want to interrupt on your conversation, but i didnt want to create a new thread.

now i got to my 3 final hypothesis, conclusions, thoughts, i dont know what they are.

humanity is overrated. it sounds kind of dark/emo t-shirt slogan, but its the truth. what we do or don't, it really doesn't change anything on the universe. when we are gone, the plants are going to grow again, and the damages that we did to the world will be cured. the planet will take care of its own without us. so f*ck up do whatever makes you happy!

i find it great that there are laws and the bible, and that stuff. i dont want to live in a world where everyone takes what they want. if it was like that, we would never be organized, and the world would be a chaos. i like to be the only sociopath in my social circle, its easier.

God is just a metaphor of life. i find it great, interesting. if you learn how god works, then you learn how society works. god is everything, the heaven and hell are what you get here in the planet based on your actions. we dont have conscience (conscience=soul i read somewhere), so we dont go neither to heaven or to hell (we dont have peace and we dont get punished for our acts). some call it karma, well, karma isnt for us too.

i will be reading more of your writings, theres a lot to learn.

Website: buscamusik.com

Re: Confessions about love, relationships guilt and the world from a young sociopath.

Good doctor -

Here’s a little anecdote that I just read which I think says what I wanted to say about why science and naturalism is the preeminent epistemological method in my worldview far better than I did:

“Imagine you have two friends, one named Theo who tends to tell you what you want to hear -- old and flattering stories that makes things simple and certain -- and one called Phil who tends to tell new stories without quite the same regard for what you want to hear. Now for the longest time, it seems to make no practical difference just who you listen to, so you tend to favour Theo, perhaps because your parents swear by him, or perhaps because you happen to like his wondrous worldview.

Then one day Phil introduces you to his younger and equally innovative sibling, Nat. Now at first, you find Nat rather irritating. Not only does he avoid answering the interesting questions, he seems to make things pointless and unnecessarily complicated. But to your astonishment, you discover that his explanations make a real practical difference. In one breath he says, 'humans are but one animal among many,' and in the next breath he tells you how to track and avoid cholera epidemics. And as time passes, he starts talking more and more, and the things he makes possible become more and more remarkable: supercomputers, MRI's, thermonuclear devices -- things that entirely transform your life.

As this happens, you can't help but look somewhat askance at Theo and Phil -- after all, Nat has inadvertently provided you with a pretty imposing yardstick. You still like what the duo have to say -- even more, you realize they're saying things you need to hear to make sense of your life, especially in the indifferent world of blind processes revealed by Nat (the 'disenchanted world'). And yet, they just don't seem to measure up. Their claims still don't make any practical difference, and they remain utterly incapable of resolving any of their debates -- certainly not the way Nat the wunderkind can.

Because of the extraordinary successes of scientific naturalism (Nat), both religion (Theo) and philosophy (Phil) have become fallen forms of cognition, or knowing, in contemporary society. Our culture is filled with curious phenomena that attest to this 'fall.' Religious belief, for instance, has become a matter of 'personal preference.' Traditional prohibitions, like working on the Sabbath or viewing pornography, and traditional biases, like those against women or homosexuality, have either fallen or are presently falling by the wayside…

Scientific method is a hodgepodge of techniques and procedures that enable (albeit in a messy and retail manner) the world rather than our fears and biases to determine our conclusions. It's a kind of discipline, a 'cognitive kung-fu,' and it's utterly transformed our lives as a result. Before science, however, we were able to interpret the world pretty much anyway we pleased. We had no procedural discipline, no way to avoid our hardwired tendency to anthropomorphize or to guard against our hardwired weakness for flattery, oversimplification, and blind certainty. So we tried to understand the world the way we understood each other, as a something possessing purpose and motive. We saw the world as something personal rather than an aggregate of blind and indifferent processes. Existence, we thought, was a kind of extended family, where pleas (prayers) or demands (incantations) were often heard and answered. Before science, in other words, we still saw ourselves as fundamental participants in the world -- as helpless as we were! We knew nothing, and yet things made sense…”

Naturally you can see why I am more inclined to look for understanding of experiences like love in the nautural sciences than am I in, say, philosophy.