THE FOLLOWING IS A WELL WRITTEN RESPONSE TO A POORLY WRITTEN RESPONSE TO A SEMI-WELL ARTICULATED VIDEO.

Irrationality is the human condition. But it is not irrational to believe emotions or feelings are important or NECESSARY if you are a human being. Emotions motivate us to keep living, so I would say, as a human, it is rational to want to feel.

To separate emotionality from rationality (read: thoughts, intellect) is to thoroughly miss the point of what makes human emotions unique from the emotions of our brothers and sisters in animalia. Our emotions themselves are as primitive as the emotions of our nearest living cousins on this planet—the chimps and the bonobos. Consider the practical motives that emotions provide to us through the lens of evolutionary psychology.

STIMULUS: A snake.
EMOTIONAL RESPONSE: Fear.
REACTION: Panic; the need to escape.
RESULT: We avoid the snake.
CONSEQUENCE: We are not killed by snake venom and continue to exist and have opportunities to reproduce.
CONCLUSION: Fear alerts us to threats and makes us cautious. Fear can therefore be said to have survival value.

STIMULUS: A competitor.
EMOTIONAL RESPONSE: Anger.
REACTION: Open displays of aggression on one end of the spectrum, backstabbing and gossip on the other.
RESULT: We diminish the competitor’s position and, hopefully, surpass him/her in the pecking order.
CONSEQUENCE: We establish a crucial social hierarchy that will decide who is fit to make decisions and reap rewards.
CONCLUSION: Anger motivates us to be aggressive against competition and to climb the social ladder. Anger can therefore be said to have survival value.

STIMULUS: An attractive potential mate.
EMOTIONAL RESPONSE: Lust, perhaps love.
REACTION: The need to fuck.
RESULT: If we are sufficiently positioned in the pecking order (see anger), then we can successfully court our mate.
CONSEQUENCE: We get some ass and possibly reproduce.
CONCLUSION: Lust serves to get us fucking, and love serves to keep us around to protect our loved ones or assist in the child-rearing is the relationship produces offspring. Lust and love can therefore be said to have survival value.

All of our emotions can be reduced to this. We can show how everything from envy to ennui serves the machinations of natural selection. But as human beings we all know that emotions are more than this to us. They are not just basic colors that bully us into certain behaviors with overpowering torrents. They have shades and hues and tones. We don’t just have the Crayola marker set of emotions that nature gave our animal friends on lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder, we’ve got swatches.

And why is that? What sets us apart? The answer is obvious. The answer is intellect. We can look at a dangerous snake and feel the same fear that or ancestors did—but we might then think: “Ah, but if I have a long enough stick, I could kill that snake and not worry about him in the future. And I could take the poison from his fangs and use it against my enemies.” The fear of the snake, measured against the confidence that the snake can be overcome and the need to destroy ones competitors with the exciting implementation of a new weapon— we’re not functioning on a stimulus and reaction basis anymore. We’ve got a database of emotions and desires and we can access them, compare and contrast them and combine them in new and interesting ways.

Dil Demonique’s simplistic grasp of this subject matter and its implications is stunning in its deficiency and sickening in its erroneous conclusions. To suggest that emotions and rationality as human beings think of them could be separated or considered separately is pure foolishness on a level that I rarely encounter from even the dumbest of my nemeses.

When you CEASE to be human, you CEASE to need the emotions. Of course, there's always a trade off. You say you wouldn't want to be a robot if you could not feel elated like you did that one day. That is one day, what about all those other times when you wish you could not feel suffering at all?

This is the line of logic that says, A will not miss being A by the time it is B because B is incapable of missing being A. It makes a cold, clinical breed of sense, but let’s start applying it across the board and see what sort of conclusions we can derive from it.

• It is okay to murder a man, because once he is dead, he will be incapable of desiring to be alive.
• It is okay to deface a priceless work of art, because by the time it is defaced, it will no longer be priceless.
• It is okay to brainwash a person into believing something other than the what they already believe, because when they are brainwashed, their past beliefs will seem foreign to them.

The logic that any action is morally permissible because the result of that action will render the assailed party either incapable of dissenting to (or agreeable to) the action itself is a preposterous contortion of consent-based morality, wherein consent can be gained or inferred retrospectively.

Now, the smarter among you are going to immediately jump on me for providing examples of A being acted on by an external force to become B, when what we were discussing originally was A becoming B of A’s own volition. I agree whole-heartedly that A can consent to become B.

It was my stated assertion that I would not make that choice personally. In my opinion, to continue on as something which does not possess my core characteristics is to not continue on at all. If A becomes B then B is no longer A, so A has failed to continue. Augmentation, in my opinion, is when one adds to A to become AB.

So, why did I bring up these A acted upon by C to become B scenarios in the first place? The answer lies in Dil’s assertion that once A became B, it would no longer be capable of missing being A. The fact that she views this as anything but a gross design flaw of B speaks mountains about her character—or lack thereof.

I'm a raving transhumanism. Sometimes I rave to people randomly about how awesome it would be to be a fused mass of information and intelligence. TJ happened to be a person I was raving to the other night. He agreed with the argument justifying infanticide because it makes sense.

Dil Demonique

1. mislabels herself as a transhumanist and then

2. proceeds to lie about my position on her argument for infanticide.

In the instance of item one, I would argue that she does not qualify as a transhumanist since the stated objective of Transhumanism is to elevate humankind. I would argue that since she seeks to make herself into something as inhuman as a “fused mass of information and intelligence” that she does not qualify as a transhumanist. This, however, is a matter of semantics and has little place here as anything but a brief aside.

In the instance of the second item, I commented to her, upon and in reference to her presentation of a third-part argument, that it seemed to be logically sound and that I agreed with the majority of the rationale. I then went on to state that I felt that the arguments author had left out quite a few important factors. I will not get into what those factors are here because it would make this already bloated blog entry roughly three times the size that it already is—but rest assured, dear reader, that my position on this matter will be made clear in the very near future.

Then again, it's irrationality that keeps many people alive. Most people are more miserable than happy yet they still continue to live. This isn't that rational. Why is it great to be able to feel when there are more losses than gains?

She continues on like this with her false assumption that choosing to survive is irrational because our emotional complexity has formed within us a world-weariness that would make it more sensible to die and be done with the suffering of mortal existence for good. Just like our hypothetical man earlier weighed his fear of the snake against his ambitions, so Dil weighs the miseries of life against its joys and comes to the conclusion that life is not logically worth living.

My question then becomes, “So, why are you still here, bitch?”

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