The actual question - "Why don't you kill yourself?"

[Enmos]

My point is that it doesn't matter. I would like you to convince a judge that your genes made you commit a crime and that you had no choice in the matter.
You and your genes would go sit in a cell, padded or otherwise.

I agree that it doesn't matter. If people are a danger to society they have to be taken out of it, no matter what the cause.

 

[clusteringflux]

I will go a step further and suggest that people are able to change their minds/actions regardless of their genes as well.

 

[Enmos]

I will go a step further and suggest that people are able to change their minds/actions regardless of their genes as well.

Of course. But it kinda depends on how you mean that. Without genes you can't change your mind because you wouldn't be there to change it.

 

[S.A.M.]

There are varying opinions:

According to Jean-Paul Sartre death is non-threatening as long as we view it in the third person.

Friedrich Nietzsche admitted that with the end of Christianity comes nihilism, which is the "denial of the existence of any basis for knowledge or truth; the general rejection of customary beliefs in morality, religion, etc.; the belief that there is no meaning or purpose in existence."

Bertrand Russel, a famous atheistic philosopher, even admits that life is purposeless.

" That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyound dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built."

Nietzsche saw death as the ultimate liberation. He even emphasises the desire he has to freely choose when he dies. Kaufmann affirms this when he says, "We should also give up the unseemly Christian teachings about suicide and accept it as a dignified and decent way of ending our lives."[10]

When Sartre, who agreed with Nietzsche, was asked why he didn't commit suicide, he replied by saying that he didn't want to use his freedom to take away his freedom. This is an absurd solution though, because they say that freedom is the problem with its aimlessness, pain, and despair.

Kaufmann argues that if we live life richly and not expect to live long lives then when we die we can combat the hopelessness of death because we won't feel cheated or won't feel as though we need more time.​

Link

 

[Enmos]

Death in itself is not threatening, it's the way we die that is threatening. We are afraid of the pain.

 

[clusteringflux]

Without ______you can't change your mind because you wouldn't be there to change it..

lol, now we are pondering the trivia that is life.

I could replace the word "genes" in your scentence with a thousand other words like.

Food, Water, Time, Space, Air, Gravity, parents, Life,

At some point it ceases to be a discussion at all.

 

[Enmos]

lol, now we are pondering the trivia that is life.

I could replace the word "genes" in your scentence with a thousand other words like.

Food, Water, Time, Space, Air, Gravity, parents, Life,

At some point it ceases to be a discussion at all.

That also goes for your post, but (like I said) it depends on how you mean it.

I will go a step further and suggest that people are able to change their minds/actions regardless of their genes as well.

 

[draqon]

I don't kill myself because of my belief in reincarnation. If I kill myself it would be illogical for me to exist in the first place because I terminate my own existence, meanwhile in next life I will probably do the same thing that is kill myself, therefore I will go on killing myself in every life I live. So it is logical for me to do my best and get out of life what I can while being alive.

 

[Myles]

Man, what you guys can only intellectualize your answers and refer to theories.
Genes.
Self preservation instincts.
Is this how you experience yourselves?
Are you afraid your molecular biology professor is tracking all your communications?
As if genes were something other than you or another way of describing you.


How about desires to experience certain things?
love of certain individuals?
not wanting to hurt certain people?
not wanting to rule out this or that might happen or get better?
curiosity?
lust for knowledge?
Lust in general?


I swear to god the way people think they know themselves is such a joke. We'll all be walking around talking about ourselves in the 3rd person.

The genes would like a sandwich now.
My genes believe in determinism.
My sexual instincts seem to be focusing on you now, shall we go up to my apartment and mingle gametes?

Seriously, this makes me sick.

Self-abstraction is the opiate of the people.

As I have come to know you on here, you are never satisfied with a straight answer. You would much sooner sit around with Camus discussing abstract notions, in an attempt to dress the obvious in pseudo-philosophical clothing.

We are survival mechanisms, as are other animals. or we would be unlikely to be here talking about it. If I were to commit suicide today as opposed to yesterday, what has changed ? I would say my mood, outlook or whatever resulting from a change in my brain chemistry, A typical coroner's verdict is " suicide when the balance of his mind was disturbed" This confirms that suicide is not regard as rational behaviour; a failure of the normal genetic drive to survive. Has anyone ever said that each time genes replicate they always produce perfect copies?; rather its the reverse

That's it.

 

[lucifers angel]

most people are to affraid to kill themselves!!

personaly IMO weak people commit suicide, people who can't face dealing with things in a proper manner!

 

[Enmos]

As I have come to know you on here, you are never satisfied with a straight answer. You would much sooner sit around with Camus discussing abstract notions, in an attempt to dress the obvious in pseudo-philosophical clothing.

We are survival mechanisms, as are other animals. or we would be unlikely to be here talking about it. If I were to commit suicide today as opposed to yesterday, what has changed ? I would say my mood, outlook or whatever resulting from a change in my brain chemistry, A typical coroner's verdict is " suicide when the balance of his mind was disturbed" This confirms that suicide is not regard as rational behaviour.

That's it.

It may even act to get rid of unfit individuals from the population. In times of great stress, especially food shortage, the population will benefit from a few suicides.

 

[nietzschefan]

The greatest weight.-- What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?... Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.341, Walter Kaufmann transl.

An exercise in the affirmation of life. Nietzsche's basic point is - life has no purpose, so WE must make it have purpose. I prefer Albert Schweitzer for this topic:

True philosophy must start from the most immediate and comprehensive fact of consciousness: 'I am life that wants to live, in the midst of life that wants to live

 

[shichimenshyo]

I dont feel like it.

 

[draqon]

It may even act to get rid of unfit individuals from the population. In times of great stress, especially food shortage, the population will benefit from a few suicides.

especially those who suggest this.

 

[Enmos]

especially those who suggest this.

I've read that somewhere. It makes sense.

 

[Myles]

An exercise in the affirmation of life. Nietzsche's basic point is - life has no purpose, so WE must make it have purpose. I prefer Albert Schweitzer for this topic:

Schweizer, as I understand it, is not claiming that life, per se, has a purpose.

 

[draqon]

I've read that somewhere. It makes sense.

oh it makes great sense to catch all the animals on Earth, deep fry them and store the food in a vacuum sealed packages for future generations to come...as well...

 

[Myles]

especially those who suggest this.

Those who are convinced they will reincarnate should be unselfish and die first. The rest of us have only one life.

 

[draqon]

Those who are convinced they will reincarnate should be unselfish and die first. The rest of us have only one life.

I just told you why death for me would be illogical.

 

[Enmos]

oh it makes great sense to catch all the animals on Earth, deep fry them and store the food in a vacuum sealed packages for future generations to come...as well...

That doesn't make any sense at all.