rp gallery

44dd83 Sorry for the yap sesh, I just love figuring out why humans do things the way they do, and how we could improve on our mindsets and resulting actions to allow for better personal and societal livelihood overall.

44dd83 Even religion has some faults tho. Most of them promote you to do good and avoid bad by saying "either do good and have eternal pleasure, or do bad and have eternal suffering" with things like lots of food and comfort for the good side, and fire and torture and endless pain for the bad side. Why is this a problem? Well it results in most people following religion simply out of desire for paradise or fear of punishment, and their actions become rooted in their animalistic side. If you boil your belief down to wanting pleasure or fearing pain, you aren't really believing. You're following out of good/bad stimuli, just like with sin. A wonderful quote I like to think about in reference to this is from Rābiʻah al-ʻAdawīyah where they say "I carry a torch in one hand And a bucket of water in the other: With these things I am going to set fire to Heaven And put out the flames of Hell So that voyagers to God can believe not out of desire or fear, but out of love."

44dd83 When you actively go against these actions, you may lose that pleasure you get from your animalistic good/bad system, but you gain the trust of those around you, the support of those around you, their cooperation, and so on. Think of some virtues: deep honesty, moral courage, moral vision, compassion and care, fairness, intellectual excellence, creative thinking, aesthetic sensitivity, good timing, and deep selflessness. These are all actions that seem to go completely against the "fend for yourself" notion that is the basic functionality for survival, but due to the nature of how good for survival working together is, they end up being much more beneficial than short term animalistic action based thinking.

44dd83 It seems out of nowhere but this connects to religion really well, specifically sin and virtue. List some common sins for me; pride, greed, lust, gluttony, wrath, sloth, and everyday sins like lying and stealing. All of these are self-interested behaviors. They harm those around you, and are your primal good/bad system taking full control of your actions.

44dd83 Thats why trustoworthy people, kind people, humble people, sober people, and so on, are so well revered. They're able to mentally bypass first their primal good/bad system, then suppress the urge to be selfish, and even grow past the want to help others simply for your own benefit. They act completely (almost, you'll allways act out of self interest no matter what, its just how our brains work) out of selflessness. They care about YOU, and not themselves. Which is really really weird, since the entire point of all of those systems is to care for yourself. But stepping back you see that its just the final, most advanced layer to your own survival: full teamwork and cooperation with others means a fully cohesive species that operates as one unit, no taking for yourself or hurting those around you. Survival rate is literally maximized. A fully altruistic (as in selfless) species is the one that, in the context of high cognition, will have the highest survival rate.

9ce148 (*even the smartest breed of dog, the poodle, is still kinda retarded ngl)

9ce148 (*Humans are very intelligent, and this makes them unpredictable. a dog is kinda retarded and he gets sad when you leave for several hours)

44dd83 I think that has to do with moreso the logical side of our brains scott. People can be cruel. We maximize our own pleasure, and sometimes people come to the conclusion that the way to do that is to hurt others. Selfishness, greediness. Sure it helps yourself but it doesn't help your social image. Alot of people find dogs and other less intelligent creatures to be more trustworthy because of that. Hence the common association with Dogs and Loyalty.

9ce148 (*i've seen some people have bears as pets. they are unaware the bear can rip them apart in seconds)

44dd83 For goodness sake people bond with plants. Potted plants. It doesn't even give you any sort of stimuli at all, but since "caring for another" is a big part of getting other humans to like us, we really really like doing it, so we do it to literally everything, and we feel "bad" when we can't do it (like a plant dying) because normally not helping someone means less survival chance for yourself.

9ce148 (*dopamine min-maxing)

9ce148 (*is this why some women trust their dogs with their problems more than they trust their own boyfriend who is literally there for them whenever)

44dd83 It's the same exact thing as seasoning your meat; theres no real survival benefit to it, but because we have these systems in our brains that give us rewards when we encounter certain basic stimuli that are related to survival, we have learned to maximize good feelings for ourselves even if it doesn't help with survival.

44dd83 How does a dog even benefit a human? Think about it, not a guard dog, not a hunting dog, just a companion dog. There really isn't anything it gives to the human survival wise. The only reason we benefit from having companions like dogs is because of our good/bad system being faulty. Working with humans helps survival > being with other organisms feels good > even if it doesn't help with survival, being with a dog feels good

44dd83 Symbiotic relationships with other species is a whole nother thing, cuz now you're talking about two creatures with drastically (though not too drastically) different logical systems working together because it benefits both of them in some way.

44dd83 The really horrifying part? Our logical faculties never fully override the primal systems. We like to think of ourselves as rational beings, but in reality, logic is a thin layer on top of ancient chemical-based instincts. Even the smartest people in the world still make decisions based on feeling more often than not—logic is more of a justification tool rather than a guiding force. So when you step back and look at the whole picture, it’s kind of unsettling: we're just highly sophisticated, semi-rational creatures running on hacked-together survival algorithms, trying to make sense of a world that’s far more complex than what our brains originally evolved to handle.

9ce148 (*one day a human saw a wolf and their want to work together overrided their 'holy shit, strange thing, attack it', and thats how we got domesticated dogs)

44dd83 Bad morality emerges because morality is developed through your interactions with others, rather than your own logic. As a child, your logical skills are biologically shit. So like an AI, you "train" yourself by watching those around you and copying their behaviors. Its as you grow up that you start developing a logical viewpoint. But if your enviornment is garbage growing up, your logic is going to be garbage too. And you end up with a bad person, who makes bad decisions, and who causes harm to those around them.

44dd83 And that teamwork has spread out until literally our entire species works together in the present day. This means that logically, caring for everyone else and wanting to make them care for you is the best choice of action. But, we also developed an aversion towards other organisms WAYYYY before we developed morality. Imagine you're an animal walking around, and you spot another animal. What do animals do? They eat other animals. So, evolutionarily, it makes sense to see other animals as danger and therefor do things like attack or stay away from them. So we have this weird and very very tiring mix of primal mindsets: on one hand, other organisms bad, especially ones we arent close with (like family and friends), but on the other hand, teamwork good, leads to better success rate for yourself overall.

9ce148 (*our brains got so advanced, that the concept of 'trauma' came into existence. literally we're so complicated that if something breaks, it breaks a LOT, and it takes a LONG TIME to repair)

9ce148 (*by that logic, a person with very bad morals is only that way because they were never properly exposed to what should be the norm. either that, or something fucked them up)

44dd83 Morality is really interesting because its, again, a cheat. Just like eating other animals for an easier way of getting compounds, morality emerged with higher cognitive power because somewhere along the evolutionary line, human brain structure began shifting towards more teamwork oriented thinking. Working with other organisms of your species instead of just fending for yourself allowed you to have better survival chances: you could kill bigger prey, share food, have a higher rate of defense, have a less chance of being picked off by a predator. That good/bad chemical system realized this, and so doing actions that make others WANT to work with you makes you literally feel good, while doing actions that makes others NOT want to work with you makes you feel bad.

44dd83 Think about it like this: that good/bad chemical system is really good for a relatively stable enviornment. But if your environment becomes unpredictable, harsh, and chaotic, you can't develop chemical dependencies towards certain actions. Like my animalistic brain doesn't understand that a man with a gun will kill me; my logical side TELLS it that thats bad. So the brain ended up developing a more comprehensive approach to making decisions; it stored more information from the past, remembered that information more, grew more awareness to its surroundings, overall gained more cognitive power.

9ce148 (*chemical 'good/bad' system is one thing. but consciousness introduces morality, and the possibility of people who are completely wired differently)

44dd83 Also the fact that the basic unit of logic in the brain is a hormonal "good/bad" system is really creepy. Like, is something good for survival? Make the brain literally want more of it. Everytime you do that action, you get certain sensory input (nerve stimulation, good chemical sensory information, etc) and that makes your brain release hormones that literally hardwire your circuitry to want to do more of that. Eating? Without it you would die really quickly, so its very pleasurable to eat. Sex? without it your species dies out, so its also very pleasurable. The issue is we've evolved something horrifying, something more complex than that good/bad system could ever live up to; consciousness

9ce148 (*me looking at bro as bro turns green and bubbly)

9ce148 ("i close a demon core, and then i absorb it. i NEVER have to eat again.")

44dd83 Instead of going outside for a couple hours i just irradiate my skin with gamma rays for like 2 seconds, same amount of energy just quicker

9ce148 (*do you think Bmo has a gigantic skin tarp somewhere so he can soak up Vitamin D. or does he not need it)

9ce148 (*vitamin D is crucial for bone strength. if you dont go outside, you become paper-mache. have fun with that)

44dd83 wdym thats lame, they don't need to end another lifeform to steal the hardwork of that lifeform to use for themselves because they can't make their own compounds. You know what's cool about humans? The fact that we don't need to eat vitamin D to have it in our bodies, our skin makes it using sunlight as a power source.

9ce148 (*boom, farming. FOR FREE?????)

9ce148 (*on the other hand, holy shit, plants ONLY need water and sunlight to produce food. thats extremely convenient)

44dd83 Dont even get me started on houses. Trees make their bodies out of cellulose so that they can grow gigantic and live for a long time, and we decided that because the biology of a tree is sturdy, we can kill them and cut them up to use their corpses as crude structural material for our homes and other buildings.

9ce148 (*one could argue that since all plants need to produce energy is sunlight and water, that they're not as advanced. it's like if people could get energy from the air just by breathing. thats like really lame and basic)

44dd83 Humans take it to another level though. Sometimes i'll be watching a video of a person preparing some meat, and i'll think to myself: this thing was once a living creature, we want to eat it for the compounds it can give our body, but because our brains have developed a chemical reception sense so that we can tell what things are poisinous and what things are good to eat, we purposefully put compounds that our brain likes into the nutritional matter. Seasoning meat is completely useless on a biological standpoint. We only do it because as a byproduct of being able to tell what is good and bad to eat, we can purposfully put "good" tasting compounds into our food.

44dd83 Every other lifeform literally consumes other lifeforms or products of other lifeforms for their energy. Like plants produce proteins and fats and amino acids from elemental compounds, and other animals just eat the plant cuz it allready has the proteins and fats and amino acids that it produced inside of it. Its like cheating.

44dd83 does anyone else find it weird how plants and other photosynthesizing/chemosynthesizing lifeforms are basically the only "normal" lifeforms, as in they take in pure substances and process them to live

35dc76 me omw to trip papyrus (he fell (for that shit))

9ce148 (*HE'S NOT FALLING FOR THAT SHIT)

35dc76 papyrus gone too far