Sociopath Community

I knew this would be brought up, like all things these are not absolute terms but rather nuanced. In order for it to serve a purpose in this discussion we have to distinguish between the two using some for of piratical yardstick. 

Some things are solely personal, other phenomenon can be generalized, modeled and understood as a collective accurately. Now of course everything is 100% personal, but for practicality when a high degree of accuracy is reached generalizations can be made.

Facts are beliefs, aren't they?

I don't either believe in cell division and mutation. Yay for us! Is it like an american thing to think you are entitled to your own facts not just beliefs?

I want to know what you guys think about the bigger picture in life...and this is pretty simple. It boils down to two sides, you either believe in a higher deity or you don't. Now, that isn't to say that you're religious as I'm not, yet i don't believe we crawled out of a stew billions of years ago. A statement like that is in it's own ignorance because it uses "believe" or belief which comes from something that is not a "fact" but an absolution in ones self... As i said it boils down to two sides, you're either blinded by your eyes or your heart.

So I'm curious what a group of "sociopaths" think about this subject. So lets hear it. When answering try to have some conviction in your words...this changes nothing about you because you already are convinced, so why not share?

I'll go first. 

I don't believe in evolution because human beings are in every way perfect for this planet...too perfect, despite not being here the longest. No other creature is like the human in all it's complexity and form and why is that? Because we got lucky? I don't think so.

I think nothing really means anything, and that the notion of meaning itself is a delusion hardwired into how we function to keep us pushing forward instead of staying still. Us being "better" than other species has me skeptical when we're the ones defining what it means to be the best. We're effectively hardwired to think we're the center of everything, so go figure we'd use ourselves as the basis of comparison to say why we're better than other things. The reasoning strikes me as an exercise in circular logic, rendering it a logical fallacy by my eyes. We're the best because we say so, and because we say so we're the best. By my views we really aren't so great, simply hype shrouded with distractions that we've told ourselves make us better through terms we ourselves defined to make it appear as such. The notion of our being better or worse is itself a human construct that, while perhaps similar in nature to some other animals, manifests uniquely enough that it's a view we can't objectively look at outside of our own species' lens.

To answer what I believe? I believe none if it really matters, so who cares beyond it being something worth reading about for entertainment's sake? Being made by deities, crawling out of some ooze, being the remains of a dying world's species that migrated here so long ago that it's no longer a part of recorded history, being the genetic modification of some alien race's tempering, being the crossbreed result of a distant being raping apes, none of this changes my life beyond giving something to think about for the time it's being read. I enjoy the perspectives purely for looking at the people who wrote/follow it's behaviors.

"yet i don't believe we crawled out of a stew billions of years ago. A statement like that is in it's own ignorance because it uses "believe" or belief which comes from something that is not a "fact" but an absolution in ones self"

You can believe anything you want to, and that doesn't make it true or false. We take "factuality" for granted. To repeat a quote by Descartes that I frequently bring up: "I think, therefor I am." Many people are familiar with the quote, but few know the significance it holds.

Descartes wondered to himself if it were possible that his whole life and all of his experiences could possibly be illusions or distortions of reality. He wondered if he lived in a reality where where 2+2 equalled 5, but his perception whether (by virtue of being human or tricked by a demon) led him to believe 2+2 actually equals four. In the end, he realized there was nothing he could prove, except that he had perceptions. Ergo, "I think, therefor I am."

Now you are free to believe whatever you would like to believe the causation of your experience is. You can take a religious approach as the hard-line Muslims do, and attribute all actions to "God's will." You can believe that reality is a grand deception in which you are the only actual conscious being (a philosophy called solipsism). You can even believe that external reality is an illusion with an underlying framework we cannot perceive, and possibly may never.

You can also walk into a chemistry lab...and with the correct knowledge, you can produce a chemical that could radically alter your state of consciousness, or perhaps fuel a vehicle. Of all possible explanations of reality there are, the deterministic and reductionistic (under which the universe obeys strict laws) appear the most sensible. After all, good deductive and inductive reasoning have made this very conversation possible through the "electronics revolution." It is by deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning that we've been able to design things such as cars, which through complex and orchestrated chemical reactions, scientists have been able to propel by combusting fossil fuels.

Nor is it difficult to believe we "crawled out of a stew" (a hideous simplification of billions of years of evolution) if you've ever heard of the Miller-Urey experiment.

"I don't believe in evolution because human beings are in every way perfect for this planet...too perfect, despite not being here the longest. No other creature is like the human in all it's complexity and form and why is that? Because we got lucky? I don't think so."

"Too perfect?" That ignores a thickening of the cortex demonstrable by skulls of our ancestors spanning eons apart (unless you think carbon dating and DNA samples are a load of shit). It looks more like we've simply adapted well over time.

If humanity appears in any way "perfectly designed" for this planet, it is solely because the average human possess approximately 100 billion neurons in their skulls. If you look at fossil evidence, homo sapiens grew from much bulkier animals into smaller ones, because fats in the brain do much more good than fats in the lower body once you reach a certain point, from a Darwinian standpoint.

The most convincing ones of all!