No, your position was specific to animals you said had no consciousness/self-awareness.

Right, and to that I hold. Without consciousness, all existence is rocks banging on rocks

Then I find your recent declarations about vegetarianism empty rhetoric.

What recent declarations? The benefits? Those have been the opposite of empty rhetoric; they have been the physical result of my experience.

Your declarations about the environment and the suffering/screaming of animals. Those can't be taken seriously.

It's all just rocks to you.

@Thucydides Maybe if your own consciousness wasn't being eroded by your Vitamin B12 deficiency, you'd be more attuned to how much the rocks themselves are screaming.

You completely misunderstand me. Id like to explain better when I have a proper connection. But in short right now, it is our consciousness of screaming animals that makes their screaming bloodcurdling, even as our own consciousness of our own suffering is what makes it a harm. The universe with no observer doesn't exist. An observer with no universe doesn't exist. The two depend inexorable on each other to have any meaning. It is precisely because of consciousness that it is not just rocks. No rock is just a rock as long as I or other beings live.

"The universe with no observer doesn't exist."

Well this is certainly untrue.

For real. Who was observing a million years ago?

I think he means that no one was there to label it as the universe, ergo it didn't exist as the universe but as an unnamed mass of space. Typical philosophy bullshit.

I respond by asking you to define what "existence" is.

And I'll respond by asking you where the fuck my oranges are.

For example, abgemacht, what makes you think you exist? What makes you think the universe exists? Incidentally both impressions arise from the same source, which is Being itself. By in a hypothetical place with no beings, no observers, I ask, whence Being?

Also, the fact of there being no observer in the past is irrelevant, all that matters is that there was an observer at any point in time in the universe, and I, as well as you, can attest that there now is. Time is as arbitrary as space.

I honestly didn't understand any of the above.

Are you saying that a universe in which there were never any observers from start to finish wouldn't exist? In that case, I guess the question would be moot.

Imagine a universe like ours that during its whole history was unconscious. I ask: in what sense did that universe exist? What makes it any different from a void of nothingness? I ask that you respond not in terms if particulars, of mass and gravitation and chemistry, but in more substantive terms than that: what, in that universe, existed at all?

Exactly, the question would be moot. Such a universe does not exist in any meaningful way. It is the same as a void of nothingness, it is nothingness itself.

Thucy, how are the mushrooms?

OK, sure, but so what?

They have them in Negril for the tourists, but I'm in the eastern parishes and haven't made it over that way, thanks for asking.

I mean, what is to be gained by discussing a closed system which, by definition, has no impact on us?

The so what is that now you understand why your own personal consciousness is at least as important as the environment that contains you. The two are one and the same, and for this reason the environment is not just dust, pigs are not just dust, moon rocks are not just rocks - they would be if you weren't there, but there you are, and they are there with you, they are in fact a part of you.

I know the things I'm saying may sound a bit high-flying, but I ask you to think about them straight-forwardly. This is something I believe is true at face value.

Re: the closed system, to demonstrate what it is that makes our own system different, and meaningful.

Thucydides please don't stop looking! Literally everything depends on it.

No man pigs is dust though.

But the universe just depends up on *one* observer across all spacetime. My impact is statistically meaningless.

I think, when you come to the end of your own lookings, tendmote, that you will find by experience that this is indeed the case. Or, rather, you won't, since no one will be there to look and see.

@abgemacht

The "number" of observers is arbitrary and unimportant. It's an error to think that what is small is unimportant. The large is, of course, constituted by the small, and nothing can be called large without something called small.

In other words, abge, you are that one. You are more meaningful than anything, or rather, as meaningful as everything. Do you pretend that there is a world for you outside of your own existence? I say your existence is statistically 100% meaningful. What statistic could there be without it?