Tag: DNA/genetics/biology
Pantheon (2022) – On the uploading process
Discussing the uploading process as portrayed in the anime. Read the full page
I don’t want to play the game of life
The most frustrating part is that there doesn’t really seem to be a real solution for this problem because every piece of advice people usually give is like, self-contained within the parameters of life if that makes sense, like every piece of advice people give still involves having to participate in life. Read the full page
https://www.metaphysicalexile.com/2024/09/excess-lucidity.html[🡕] Continue reading
God handed me the fruits of his creation, then took my taste.
Reddit, u/Illustrious-Back-944 talking about anhedonia
u/homebrandusername, r/Pessimism Continue reading
Andrew McIntosh – On the Drive Towards Death and the Drive Away From Death (Ineffectual Whinging)
Just throwing a hodge podge of ideas I’ve read about and find interesting together in the hopes of coming up with a synthesis that doesn’t mean much in the end anyway. It’s not like I believe there are such things as “Death Drives” and “the Will” and all that, they’re more metaphorical for what is probably more mundane, neurobiological stuff going on in our stupid brains. Read the full page
SMBC – This life is a prison
Also see: Continue reading
We are daily slaves to the mitigation of suffering
What can even be done? Happy or sad, you still need to eat, you’re still aging, and you’re still going to die. Read the full page
Why is living a constant torture?
Rant on Reddit, with good comments. Read the full page
Andrew McIntosh – The Point of Pointlessness (Ineffectual Whinging)
[…] that whole insane “get up and go” mentality, starting with the obscenity of the work ethic, squirming as it did like soft stool out of the arsehole of Christianity, condemning us to mindless labour and activity simply for its own sake. Work for its own sake – what kind of fucking numpty thought that was a good idea? Read the full page
Sex, drugs, food.
Being able to get pleasure from anything else requires an incredible and amazing nervous system and a decent amount of self-illusion.
r/SuicideWatch, u/braujo
[…] The reason you’re unhappy isn’t a lack of working on yourself, that’s something people tell you on Reddit to feel better about themselves. Plenty of fat ass motherfuckers are out there living their best lives, there are monsters that get married and built a beautiful family, ugly guys that get laid every day…
Working on yourself is great if that’s what you want, but do not fool yourself. The reason our lives suck isn’t superficial, self-help bs. It’s something deeply wrong in our brains.
Existential Comics #501[🡕] Continue reading
Why I don’t kill myself: an essay about beliefs
r/Pessimism, u/finitemode Continue reading
An idea about why most people are so irrational
r/Pessimism, u/Wanderer974 Continue reading
Underestimating Suffering & Suicide Thresholds
r/pessimism, u/CardinallyConsidered Continue reading
Against the idea that suicide is not worth it, like some important authors say instead
In reality, we don’t kill ourselves because the rationalized suicide is basically impossible for everyone… Read the full page
r/Pessimism, u/CardinallyConsidered
Too much ignorance, and we have absolutely no respect for the potential for suffering that exists here. We are far more likely to shoot ourselves in the foot (so to speak), cause others as well as ourselves more pain than we ever thought possible, only to eventually decay and die.
Too little ignorance, and you become completely frozen by fear. You fully recognize the fragility of your body, the consciousness resting in it, and the fragility of all individual life forms.
[…]
A certain level of solipsism is required for a decent quality of life. A certain level of ignorance and delusion are required for a decent quality of life.
[…]
The sweet-spot of delusion. That’s where it’s at.
[…]
Meditation has helped me in very gradually lifting the veil of safety/security. And then psychedelics rip the veil off of your face all at once and it’s just WAY too much. We are biologically programmed to be reproducing machines, and there are many mechanisms in place that keep us from completely losing our very complex human minds.
Aella on fetishes and the myth of trauma
My guess is also that fetishes are less malleable and controllable than most people seem to assume they are. Read the full page
https://www.reddit.com/r/Pessimism/comments/u8t6dy/there_are_no_personal_victories_or_bittersweet/[🡕] Continue reading
JAI @jaivcalla – I have to fucking say this
Completely different ontological plane of existence compared to People™.
Related: University of Utah Neuroscience Initiative – The Unfixed Brain[🡕]
Umberto Galimberti – Interviews and conferences (excerpts)
Schopenhauer is considered a pessimist, of course: every time you don’t praise or exalt “the individual”, you are pessimistic, of course, right?… … Even poor Leopardi is pessimistic, isn’t he? Those who say “pessimism”… I’m like: are you looking at reality, goddammit, or do you really not want to see it? Read the full page
Why are normal people able to live (as explained by Lex Fridman)
Lex Fridman (a “normie”), explains in detail how he is able to live and not dwell on nihilism and depression, something that if you’re anything like me is fascinating and sometimes hard to fully grasp.
The bottom line is that it’s mainly how your brain is wired and its chemicals, which is consistent with the clear failure of psychotherapy in so many mental illness cases, and with the extensively demonstrated impossibility of changing the core of one’s personality – and, by contrast, with how drugs are a way more useful tool, albeit also limited and sadly inconsistent, chaotic, still not very issue-specific, and full of negative effects.
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Luigi Anepeta, psychoanalyst, at LIDI (Italian League for the Protection of Introverts’ Rights)’s official forum
https://lidi.forumfree.it/?t=51672617&st=30#entry625292054[🡕]
The percentage of introverts varies depending on the statistics: in the absence of a clear definition of what it means to be introverted, estimates range from 5% to 25% – the latter figure being supported by American researchers. The 5-7% estimate proposed in my book “Timido, docile, ardente…” wasn’t based on formal studies, but rather on my own observations in elementary schools, where the introverted child – easily recognizable at a glance – tends to be, on average, 1 in every 15 to 20 students. Today, I would be inclined to widen that range to 5-10%.
That introversion has a genetic basis – whose positive or negative developments depend on environmental influences – seems to me beyond doubt, given not only the behavioral traits observable early on, but especially the inner experiences (empathy, sense of justice, aesthetic sensitivity, etc.): these – both the traits and the experiences – are consequences of neoteny, which is, in absolute terms, the most defining feature of introversion.
Genetics is an extremely complex science and susceptible to ideological “aberrations”. With regard to introversion, what seems certain is that there is no single introversion gene, but rather a constellation of genes – dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands – present in the parental genetic makeup and “extracted” as a result of their combination. In parents, these genes may be evident as personality traits or masked by the dominance of extroverted genes. Once extracted and variously combined, they give rise to the introverted mode of being.
Anonymous 02/09/18 (Fri) 20:03:16 No.3716, obscure imageboard
[…]
But try to look at it with full honesty, without bias: the closer you look at yourself and the actual course of your life, the more you realize the objective fact: you were the Rain Man retard. And all your imaginary lives are delusional fantasies.
– […] I’d say you’re confusing suicide with self-destruction. Almost none of us commit suicide, and almost all of us self-destruct. In some way, in some part of our lives: we drink, or we smoke, we destabilize the good job… or the happy marriage. But these aren’t decisions, they’re… they’re impulses. In fact, you’re probably better equipped to explain this than I am.
– What does that mean?
– You’re a biologist. Isn’t self-destruction coded into us? Programmed into each cell?
Annihilation (2018)
Morally, having children is worse than murder: you create a life out of nothing and you sentence it to suffering for decades.
https://dnamistakes.webcomic.ws/comics/pl/1569766[🡕]
I believe that we do not die because we fall ill, but we fall ill because we must die.
Umberto Galimberti, in various lectures
– What’s so bad about being a pig?
– It’s undignified.
– Undignified?
– Walking about with your nose the same height as your asshole.
– Snout.
– What’s that?
– Pigs have snouts, not noses. So it would be your snout the same height as your asshole.
– Nose, snout… You’re still trotting about gazing up everybody else’s assholes all day long. What kind of society is that?
– An equal one?
Black Mirror S04E05 “Metalhead”
[…] men are stones; they do not change.
Umberto Galimberti, in a lecture
When you’re suffering, that’s when you’re most real. Read the full page
– I tell myself I bear witness, but the real answer is that it’s obviously my programming. And I lack the constitution for suicide.
Rust in “True Detective”
– So, tell me. Why do you want to kill yourself so badly? Mummy and daddy, they didn’t love you enough?
– No, it had nothing to do with anything like that.
– It has everything to do with “anything like that”.
The Suicide Theory
Zachary Wheeler – Treatment of schizoid personality: an analytic psychotherapy handbook
There is even a debate as to the legitimacy of schizoid personality as a diagnosis (Slavik, Sperry, & Carlson, 1992). Fairbairn was amongst the first to note that schizoid states are present to some degree in all people, and span a continuum from normal to severe and debilitating (Fairbairn, 1940). Recent authors assert the normalcy of temperamental introversion (Cain, 2012), the biases of object relations theory toward the primacy of relationship (Modell, 1993; Storr, 1988), the creative and regenerative functions of reclusive behaviors (Storr, 1988), and the gains and pleasures of seclusion (Rufus, 2003) as counterarguments to pathologizing schizoid-like behavior. Continue reading
I told him, at that time already, that my “not living” was dissolving the fear of dying… Read the full page
We live in a decadent civilisation which robs us of our ability to shape and define our destiny and hence robs us of our spirit and identity. Western man has been gradually separated from his natural environment, his spirituality, his fellow man and finally from himself. Life has been reduced to an animalistic base as we drift from one empty satisfaction of technological convenience to another.
Art and culture no longer carry any grand or heroic ideals but rather seek to stimulate base emotions through ugly and abstract forms. Art and culture rarely serve as little more than distractions from the torment of perception – no longer seeking to order, interpret or explain the world around us but preferring instead to excuse it, replace it or deny it with an increasingly less interactive and more atomised and abstract alternative.
We were promised technological salvation but have been led to an air-conditioned hell by the false idols of progress who sought to remove the struggle from existence, not stopping to think what would be left. For life in essence is struggle and the will to participate in that struggle and make it one’s own is the most sacred characteristic of man.
The Harsh Noise Wall[🡕] is the soundtrack to our spiritually vacuous and culturally bankrupt age. There is no struggle here. There is no spirit. No personality. No society. There is nowhere else to go. Nowhere to progress. This is the end product. This is the end.
“A View From Nihil” in “Triumph of the Broken Will”
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race – A Contrivance of Horror – Thomas Ligotti
The horror handed down to us will be handed down to others like a scandalous heirloom. Being alive: decades of waking up on time, then trudging through another round of moods, sensations, thoughts, cravings—the complete gamut of agitations—and finally flopping into bed to sweat in the pitch of dead sleep or simmer in the phantasmagorias that molest our dreaming minds. Read the full page
And the radiation tells you things that are true and at the same time absurd, cold, and above all rough. Read the full page
I noticed that it is not possible to go back. I could not step down from the throne nor undo what hitherto slipped before my eyes and was now as written in stone. I attached the utmost importance to the truth, and unconsciously found myself writing a cruel pact with it. The sensations tasted different. The features of reality were clear and cold. Corroded by a gray light, the walls showed the wrinkles of time. It is not raining. But the sun still hides behind the bare buildings. That sun that hides its true essence with all that light. So much light for so much darkness. Continue reading
Her [ed. his mother’s] life was a failure, her marriage was a failure… And I’m a part of that failure. That’s probably how she sees it. And she wants to start over, but she doesn’t know how. You know what she does? She got an apartment, and she started decorating it in white and pink. Tsk! Why!? Total utopia.
What I mean is… She is starting with the things that should come last.
Invisible
People always end up the way they started out. No one ever changes. They think they do but they don’t. If you’re the depressed type now, that’s the way you’ll always be. If you’re the mindless happy type now, that’s the way you’ll be when you grow up. You might lose some weight, your face may clear up, get a body tan, breast enlargement, a sex change, it makes no difference. Essentially, from in front, from behind. Whether you are 13 or 50, you’ll always be the same.
Palindromes; also quoted in Morgondagen by Apati
The age-old development of consciousness Drives us away from the essence of life We meditate too much so that our instincts will fade away They fade away
What’s the point of life And what’s the meaning if we all die in the end? Does it make sense to learn or do we forget everything?
Epica – The Phantom Agony
Chance doesn’t exist But the path of life is not totally so predestined Time and chronology show us how all should be In the ways of existence To find out why we are here
Being conscious is a torment[🡕] The more we learn is the less we get Every answer contains a new quest A quest to non existence, a journey with no end
No one surveys the whole, focus on things so small But life’s objective is to make it meaningful Only searching for this That which doesn’t exist Although our ability to relativize remains unclear
I’m not afraid to die I’m afraid to be alive without being aware of it
I’m so afraid to, I couldn’t stand to Waste all my energy on things that do not matter anymore
Our future has already been written by us alone But we don’t grasp the meaning of our programmed course of life Our future has already been wasted by us alone And we just let it happen and do not worry at all
We only fear what comes And smell death every day Search for the answers that lie beyond
Epica – Sensorium; lyrics by Mark Jansen
You and me, baby, ain’t nothin’ but mammals So let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel
Bloodhound Gang – The Bad Touch
I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually mammals.
Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area.
There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague and we are the cure.
Agent Smith in “The Matrix”
– I can read people’s minds. In my lifetime I have read the pasts, presents, and futures of thousands upon thousands of men and women.
[…]
And each mind that I peered into was stuffed with the same single object of obsession. That selfish and atavistic desire to pass on one’s seed… it was enough to make me sick. Every living thing on this planet exists to mindlessly pass on their DNA. We’re designed that way. And that’s why there is war.
But you… you are different… You’re the same as us. We have no past, no future. We live in the moment. That’s our only purpose.
Humans weren’t designed to bring each other happiness. From the moment we’re thrown into this world, we’re fated to bring each other nothing but pain and misery.
Psycho Mantis’ dying words in “Metal Gear Solid” (PSX)
More than a source of mental pain, today depression is a way of life. Read the full page
Dear world… I have confusion around me in every direction from my brain. I’ve tried and tried to make it here in this fucking world… but I think it was a mistake that I was ever born. I do not feel guilty about taking my own life. I’ve tried your ways. I’ve had a job since I was thirteen years old. Making a living was never a real problem for me. The problem was all I see is misery and darkness. Die, die, die. I’ll put a gun to my fucking head right now.
Gummo
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, by Richard Dawkins
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Already from our dusk of birth, begins a destiny. Ruthless, for most human beings: if you are not born a billionaire, you are doomed forever. You have to give in to the everyday, procure stimuli for the project; instead of de-projecting, you are damned to the drawing.
As it began, it was over already, as in all Lorenzaccesque misadventures. If I had been the billionaire Schopenhauer, I certainly would not have written “The World as Will and Representation”. I would have been careful not to: one is not born to work, to explain oneself, to think; one is not even born to un-think, because even that is engaging with thought. One is not born to manage, to act-suffer: all this is inflicted upon us by circumstances.
Just as we passively endure every prenatal perception, we will also endure the signifier. In the recurrence of life, discourse will never belong to the speaking being.
The registry office, the studying to survive, condemn us to in-forming ourselves, to form ourselves, deform ourselves, to become hunchbacked like Leopardi, just to have a part, when we would want nothing more than to put aside art, and life itself too. A true curse.
Carmelo Bene, Autografia di un ritratto (“Autograph of a Portrait”)
It is very common for schizoid individuals to present for treatment in their 30s and 40s, at a time when the possibility of a relationship is growing more tenuous and that of companionship seems to be getting more and more distant. Read the full page
Early on certain individuals experience the frightening impossibility of living in itself; basically they cannot bear to see their own life before them, to see it in its entirety without areas of shadow, without substance. Their existence is I admit an exception to the laws of nature, not only because this fracture of basic maladjustment is produced outside of any genetic finality but also by dint of the excessive lucidity it presupposes, an obviously transcendent lucidity in relation to the perceptual schemas of ordinary existence. It is sometimes enough to place another individual before them, providing he is taken to be as pure, as transparent as they are themselves, for this insupportable fracture to resolve itself as a luminous, tense and permanent aspiration towards the absolutely inaccessible. Thus, while day after day a mirror only returns the same desperate image, two parallel mirrors elaborate and edify a clear and dense system which draws the human eye into an infinite, unbounded trajectory, infinite in its geometrical purity, beyond all suffering and beyond the world.
Michel Houellebecq – Whatever (Extension du domaine de la lutte)
Horror and mortal terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared.
[…]
Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now
We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.
Richard Dawkins – The Selfish Gene
The Trouble With Being Born – Emil Cioran
No sooner are they [the eyes] open than the drama begins. To look without understanding—that is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much… Read the full page
Were (say) Frankl to attempt to cure (say) Zapffe from his “existential frustration,” “ontological despair” or “metaphysic-melancholic clairvoyance,” the chances are that Zapffe (rather than “cured”) would be baffled by Frankl’s sophomoric philosophizing. “You may be psychologically healthier than I,” Zapffe would gladly admit, “but I must insist that I am a better philosopher. A lifelong search for a meaning of life in general, and of my life in particular, has led me – reluctantly, but with cataclysmic consistency and sleepwalker’s certainty – to realize that it’s all fantasy and delusions, divinely subsidized to put us at peace with our ’situation.’ You are certainly right that psycho-pathological explanations of my biosophical pessimism would be totally irrelevant; but I also fail to see what you can possibly accomplish with your naïve, maladroit metaphysics, behind which – if you will permit me to speak your language for once – I see but the profoundest, most fundamental trauma, and that great universal repression which prevents all fatal insight into man and his ’cosmic conditions,’ the mysterious, grotesquely absurd origin and genesis of body and mind, their inalienable interests, and their final and complete obliteration, the return of the synthesis to the absolute zero.” The biosophist is fully aware of the many marvellous metaphysics offering “peace in heart,” “reconciliation with the world” and “atonement with the almighty,” or the like, to anyone who is willing to join this or that suificating sect, and replace intellectually honest experience with fictitious world views. The spiritual vacuum is often so painful that if the fiction is sufficiently permanent, it does not seem to matter if it should turn out not to be so terribly pleasant.
Happiness Is for the Pigs: Philosophy versus Psychotherapy – Herman Tønnessen
Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable – Stig Dagerman
I lack faith, so I can never be happy. A happy person would not fear his life was a meaningless drift toward a certain death. I have inherited neither a god nor any fixed point on this earth where I can attract a god’s notice. Nor am I graced with the skeptic’s well-concealed rage, the rationality’s barren mind, the atheist’s burning innocence. So who am I to cast stones at those who believe in what I doubt? Much less at those who worship doubt as if it weren’t shrouded in a darkness all its own? The stone would only come back to strike me. For there is one thing of which I am firmly convinced: our need for consolation is insatiable. Continue reading
The Last Messiah – Peter Wessel Zapffe
«Know yourselves – be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.» Read the full page
Natural law does not entitle us to happiness, but rather it prescribes wretchedness and sorrow. When something edible is left exposed, from all directions parasites come running, and if there are no parasites, they are quickly generated. Soon the prey is barely sufficient, and immediately afterwards it no longer suffices at all, for nature doesn’t do sums, she experiments. When food no longer suffices, then consumers must diminish through death preceded by pain; thus equilibrium, for a moment, is reestablished.
Italo Svevo – Zeno’s Conscience / Confessions of Zeno
Anyone who isn’t born with the necessary wings will never grow them afterwards. Anyone who can’t drop instinctively and at the right second like lead on prey will never learn, and there’ll be no point in his watching others who can, as he’ll never be able to imitate them. One dies in the precise state in which one is born, our hands mere organs made for catching instinctively or letting what one has fall through one’s fingers.
Italo Svevo – A Life
We cannot give ourselves courage.
Don Abbondio in “The Betrothed” by Alessandro Manzoni
A leopard can’t change its spots.
A saying
O Julie, what a fatal present from heaven is a sensible soul! He who has received it must expect to know nothing but pain and suffering in this world. Lowly plaything of the air and seasons, his destiny will be regulated by sun or fog, fair or overcast weather, and he will be satisfied or sad at the whim of the winds. Victim of prejudice, he will find in absurd maxims an invincible obstacle to the just wishes of his heart. Men will punish him for having upright sentiments on every subject, and for judging by what is genuine rather than by what is conventional. Alone he would suffice to his own misery, by giving himself over indiscreetly to the divine attractions of honesty and beauty, whereas the weighty chains of necessity attach him to ignominy. He will seek supreme felicity without remembering that he is a man: his heart and his reason will be endlessly at war, and unbounded desires will set in store for him eternal deprivation.
Julie or the New Heloise – Jean-Jacques Rousseau