Ironbound

You are correct, sir! Your prize is...absolutely nothing! Huzzah! Micky?

Ah, colourblindness, my old enemy... I'm partially colourblind, having trouble distinguishing between blues, purples and magentas, as well as between some neon hues of maroon and dark olive. So these two might not look the same to me as they would to another. I'd prefer cerulean simply because it's lighter and less intense a blue than azure. Intense colours have their place, like on the petals of a brilliant flower or the wings of a butterfly, but the quieter, more subtle shades are more pleasing to the eye in general. Sky-blue is one of the most serene and understated of the lot, and has its own simple elegance. Do you prefer to dress in quiet colours? Or do you go with very bright or very dark ones? [Not technically a yes/no but whatever]

Do I look like I'd be in a romantic relationship, ever?

Yes. As an accountant and a student of financial management, I strongly advocate that the underpinnings of the taxation system, at least direct and personal taxes (like Income and Property taxes, or whatever equivalent in specific countries) be taught to everyone in high school. The importance of financial awareness and education cannot be stressed enough. [Solves half our problems as well if people in general are not clueless about finance] Also Another person who has sealed their fate. Do you rely on or believe in luck, chance, etc?

Aaaugh, I'm here, I'm here! And now I'm not. Spine?

Yes. I specialize in DPPt, or Gen4 metagame across tiers, but I'm also generally aware of what's going on in other generations. I had participated in Smogon tours and laddered in the past, though I enjoy building teams and strategies more than actual battling itself. And you didn't actually answer me, but eh, I'm not much concerned anyway Do you enjoy competition in general?

>:[ Reserving this post for a soon-to-follow demonstration of @Xiri's ass being kicked! EDIT: HA! An eye for an eye, and also another eye for good measure. With all the hax I could muster! http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen7hackmonscup-565427642 http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen7hackmonscup-565434285 >:]

Stop wasting time @Xiri >:[ 1

No, I like a placid life. [Though I don't consider a decent hike or trek in nature to be an 'extreme activity'; but then again, anything can be taken to an extreme if one wants to.] Do I have any reason to continue taking an interest in the opinions of someone who is of such incurably unsound mind as to prefer cats to dogs? If you imagine so, pray tell, what could such reason possibly be?

Yes, because dogs are infinitely superior. The removal of cat videos and gifs would mean their replacement with doggy ones, and that would only ever be a positive impact on society. More dogs means kinder humans and less crimes. Praise puppies Do you have a dog or plan to? If not, whence did thou spawn from, ye creation of Satan!? why not?

No, there's always plenty to do no matter where you are. And the opposite is also true: one can live in the busiest places and still do absolutely nothing. It's your choice what you make of your time, and where one is doesn't matter to me. Do you like attending parties with a large number of people?

I already nominated commander himself, but i now also second the nomination of ICSW. And I'll nominate Xiri too, if he hasn't been nominated earlier.

Rip Speaking of studying for exams, what am I doing here? Temp?

Seeing as I'm an accountant and a student of financial law, quid pro quos, in practice and in theory, are kinda my job. Also, hell no. For the simple reason that the world isn't candy-coated, and manipulation is a thing. Compurgation might work in a society where there is no threat, coercion, false witnessing, out-of-court intimidation and all manner of other ways to bend and break people and the law, but as laws must be based on the presumption of zero faith in civic mentality, and with every safeguard against expected malpractice or manipulation, compurgation (which means, acquitting a person on account of having a certain number of witnesses swear to his innocence) is as naive as it seems. It belongs to an outdated period when a person's word was worth more than the written record or evidential fact. It may be somewhat useful as a character reference (and even there you can manipulate what people say about you), but you can't base justice off if just what people say. Do you think that people ought to be treated as innocent until proven guilty?

It seems that you're confusing objectivity with some other concepts. Objectivity is not the same as things such as certainty, which is what you're going for. True, there are facts. Water does boil at a certain temperature in certain conditions, people do die if they don't eat, only so much can be obtained from such and such, etc. These are certainties, that is to say, events or consequences tied to causes that are likely to happen with no normal chance of non occurance. These facts are certain but not objective, in the sense that they are all relative in nature, being tied to an established cause and resulting in a normally established consequence. People will die, and 1+1 = 2, are certain statements, but we cannot say that these facts are absolutely true or absolutely false in the universe. The theory if relativity itself says that there's no definable absolute, and that all modes of human thought are relative to our understanding of the world. It may seem absurd to say that 1+1=2 is not an objective fact, but it truly isn't. The statement assumes, that there is a thing such as 1, and that there is a thing such as 2, and that the two are separate entities that have a relationship. This is all a theory, a method of human thought. There's no way to say that 1 and 2 'really' exist. (IF they exist, then yes, they add up and have a relationship, but it hinges heavily on that IF.) Likewise, "people die" is a statement that assumes that there are things called people, and that there is a state called life, and an opposite state called death, and causes and modes for each, and that IF people are alive then they will eventually die, and so on. It is a statement that hinges on our understanding of the terms, our constructions. There's no way we can say objectively that life and death, time and space are 'real' things and not just a mode of our thought, a method.of our perception and a tool of our association with our relative world. They are certainties of our perception, yes, but not an objectivity. That's the point I'm driving at: there's no such thing as a 'true objectivity', because our assumption of an objective itself is giving a form to the formless, this also making it a collective subjective. By calling a thing 'formless', we are giving it form, by stating that there is nothing, we are defining 'nothing'. There's no such thing as 'nothing', except of our own making, and there's no way to think otherwise for us humans. The best we can arrive at is an awareness of this fact, which is again a collective subjectivity. Hence the concept of Maya.

I remember having a conversation with a friend earlier about whether or not it is justifiable for people to imagine the existence of a higher moral code or power to determine the morality of their fellow men's actions. I believe that it's not only justifiable but natural. The gist of the conversation was that there's no such thing as true objectivity, and that the best the human mind can come to is 'collective subjectivity'. We attribute a hypothetical sense of objectivity to an external code by which we can compare our own various subjective ideas or actions and harmonize them into a standard, by which we judge any deviation as proper or improper. Morality is the same concept, a socio-psychological one, which is relative to the society that creates such a code. The interesting part of that conversation was about whether or not there were any common, objective, underlying laws that govern the subtle workings of the universe, and whether or not we can at some point understand them. It converted into a discussion about whether there is a state of objectivity in anything or not. I'm of the view, as stated, that the best we can do is a collective subjectivity, and that there cannot be any singular objectivity that is common to all aspects of the universe (and even if such a thing exists, it is only as a hypothecation of our minds, a mode by which we centralise and harmonize our thoughts, and not an actual thing. A 'true objectivity', call it what you will is something we imagine to make sense of the world.) Therefore, I say, it's impossible to make any generalisation about the universe, or discover any underlying common laws, because there's no such thing in an infinite universe. It might seem contrary to claim that in an infinite universe there is no.l objectivity, when the fact that the universe is infinite should indicate that there is such a thing. For example, we could argue that the indication of an existence and lack of existence, a binary code, would be an objectivity: "there is either heat, or there is lack of heat, either a 1 or a 0, either a yes or a no". But in my view, that thought is just that: a thought, a modest by which we base our other thoughts, an assumption that we make. There is no "yes or no" that is common to the universe, there may be many "may bes" that are quote beyond our conception to decipher, since by definition we must objectivise a concept to understand it by. The concept of duality, of "yes or no", to put it simply, is also a concept, a mode of our thought. We can't say definitely that "there IS such a thing as duality or difference, there IS a 1 and a 0", we can only assume such a concept, since it is the building block of our structured thought, and as a consequence a building block of societal interaction. The concept of objectivity is therefore a figment of our imagination. It's like understanding the nature of nothing: nothing is nothing but something which we think is not anything else, and yet, by saying so, we're saying that 'nothing' is also a thing, because it is the absence of anything else. Zero is also a number, an empty set is also a set, and our ideas of objectivity is also collective subjectivity. A bit mind-warpy if you think about it, because we're trying to analyse the laws by which we analyse things, and it leads us to the conclusion that all such laws are only modes of our thought: they're OUR understanding of reality, not reality 'itself'; there's no such thing as 'reality tself', because that implies an objective 'truer' or 'higher' nature of reality, something that we imagine to exist, but which we also imagine to be beyond our imagination, all to facilitate making comparisons with, but which we ultimately cannot theorise upon by nature. And this, by the way, is the concept of Maya (not the mesoamerican tribe). 'Maya' (māyā) in Sanksrit and other Indic languages means 'illusion' or 'that which is not real'. In Indic philosophy, the concept of Maya is just what I have attempted to explain: that what we perceive as objective reality is in fact only collective subjectivity, and that there is no such thing as a 'higher' or objective' reality, save as a mode of thought by which life functions. To put it a bit dramatically, 'life is an illusion'. And so it is, and so is everything else that we think by: our concepts of life, death, time, love, and anything else you care to name, even our concept of ourselves and our thoughts, it's all just that: a concept by which we think and nothing more. Realising this is of profound importance in Indic philosophy, because it stresses the understanding that duality and difference is a purely psychological concept, and that the one conclusion we can draw from this introspection is that everything that we think to be "right and wrong", "this and that", "yes and no", are only of our own imagination. It's a humbling thought, and I believe that humanity would have far fewer feuds and conflicts if they realised, in the light of this understanding, how petty all differences are, and how fundamental our thought processes can be.

In the interests of everyone, and since I notice that there's a resurgence of interest in philosophical topics of discussion (both in the Onyx Arcade and as individual threads elsewhere) I have decided to shake some dust off this place and bring it back to the front page of discussion, in our own quiet fashion. I believe it is better for such interesting conversations to be held here rather than piecemeal across different subfora, being a centralisation of good conversation that is easy for everyone to be aware of and follow up on. Newer participants can gain the gist of this place from The Rules on page1, but in short, any and all kind of discussion is welcome here, personal or not, which you feel invokes and invites thought. Multiple topics can be discussed in parallel, so long as we quote or refer to which tangent we are on. As long as conversation remains civil and respectful of inevitable disagreement, it's laissez-faire. I hope to see renewed enthusiasm and participation from everyone, though my own contributions may be limited in the immediate future, owing to my other obligations.

I'm going to take the liberty of redirecting you to this thread, because it pretty much serves the same purpose and already exists as an established place for discussing all manner of philosophical topics, including the things you've listed. Moreover, these questions deserve a dedicated and meaningful reply, so in my opinion it is better to use an existing area which is devoted to such things than to spiral into derivatives. Your contributions would be more than welcome there.

Nope Micky

People don't die when their bodies perish. People die when they are forgotten. Many people are there who merely exist, one among a mass of forgotten people. Those are the living dead. Life matters more due to the quality than the duration. I'd prefer a short span which allows me to experience and achieve my ambitions, and make a mark for myself in posterity by consequence, rather than to live on for a long while, doing nothing worth remembrance. That, to me, is a cursed life, devoid of self respect, to live unfulfilled. Do you fear death?

The plain? Do you mean, grasslands or open spaces? Or do you mean, the ordinary or nondescript? In either case, I'll say no. I'm not afraid of grasslands, and I don't see why one would be intimidated by ordinariness or normalcy. Unless this is a quote or reference from something that I'm obviously missing. Have you ever been aboard a battleship?

Coffee first. ±∞ Yes, I eat cornflakes with coffee and oatmeal with coffee. I don't mean, with a cup of coffee; I add coffee instead of milk to the cereal itself. Have I outraged all your sensibilities yet? maniacal laughter

How dare you summon me Micky shall suffer my wrath

Not particularly, no. I like places that are as much out of doors as in; wide balconies, verandahs, pillared halls or high galleries with open french windows that give out onto the world but also are not totally exposed to the elements. Do you like living in a large, rambling space or a small, cozy one?