"We all just meat bags."
No.
Can we stop with the nerd reductionist attitude so prevalent on sites like this? The majority of people don't consider human life to be simply "just meat bags."
Sorry for the loss of your friend.
Sorry for the loss of your friend.
If you are going to deconstruct that way, why stop there, why not bags of water? Or a random assortment of atoms?
By that reasoning a work of art is just random colors and there is no reason to admire it.
But in actuality the whole is greater than the parts, and that applies to people too.
I disagree. There is no conflict between admiring the organization of the fundamental particles and realizing that stuff is ultimately just big collections of fundamental particles.
By that measure every single thing that exists is exactly identical to everything else. If nothing is different, then nothing matters, and nothing has value.
Let's just short circuit that entire pointless line of thought and look at the whole, not just the parts.
"By that measure every single thing that exists is exactly identical to everything else."
Where do you get this idea? "X is ultimately just a big collection of fundamental particles" and "Y is ultimately just a big collection of fundamental particles" does not imply "X is identical to Y".
It's like saying you should never call anybody a "person" because you're implying all people are identical. I mean, what?
Doing so hardly means that one considers all such systems equivalent or indeed that one doesn't think of a reductionist view as just the most reified (though pretty damned vague) possible view of the system.
If you're thinking about, say, crowd reactions, then you don't want the "meatbag" model. Instead, you need a higher-level psychological model. However, if your problem is "what kind of injuries result from a bomb", then the "meatbag" model is right on.
Thinking of the body as a loose confederation of fundamental particles is fairly useless when trying to decide how much to charge for a product, but it's an excellent model when e.g. figuring out how much radiation a person will absorb from a source.
No layer denies the usefulness or reality of any of the others.
It was your use of the word "ultimately" that I objected to.
| why not bags of water
Silly nerd thinking. Your "meat bag" and "meat space" thinking is ridiculous.
Does not follow, and I disagree strongly. Specifics matter, but that doesn't make the "meat bag" thing untrue.
If everything is true then nothing is. If you want to compare a person to a meat bag, then you also have to compare them to a block of wood, and the sun, and everything else. i.e. you've actually done nothing whatsoever.
matter
/ | \
meat wood ...
/ \ \
human cow ...
As far as I can tell, the point of describing humans as meat is not to make an assessment of worth, but rather to drive home the fragile and temporary nature of humans. I don't know why anyone would object to that.
The fragility angle was obvious in his post, but people clearly just needed to be butthurt over something.
Nobody's suggesting what you're saying but you. If you're incapable of comprehending written English then you probably shouldn't be reading these comments.
I simultaneously believe that humans are made of meat and that the loss of a human is tragic. You are in absolutely no place to tell me that I don't think the second because I think the first.
Edit: Also, "meatspace" generally is just shorthand for "life away from the computer. not 'cyberspace'" The term "real life" could be used, though many find the implication of that to be very silly for obvious reasons.
"We are all just meat bags ..."
If you told someone that their son was "just a meat bag," or if you were speaking on your behalf in court and stated you were "making an appearance in meat space," you would be naturally considered a sociopath.
So get real.
It's the nerd group-think reductionist tendency on the internet. They wouldn't get away with it in real life for long if they valued having friends.
You can choose to sound like the atheistic Colombine murderers and their ilk, but don't expect the less numbed to not call you out on it.
Holy shit. Nice troll.
I should have guessed a real conversation wasn't your goal when you started out with insults. My fault really.