Dudebrochill

Basic context for the writing of this email: 1.A student in class mentioned that he thought an egoist could sacrifice himself for the sake of his values and it would be rational because death is better than life that had to be led at the cost of his moral value. 2.I said that was crap because life is the supreme value for an egoist. 3.Prof said "what about the man who no longer wants to live because of immense physical pain, or inability to "truly live", which i took to mean total paralysis. Essentially proposing that life may not always be the "supreme value." 4. I don't think quickly on my feet and walk out thinking "hmmm... stumped" While I was boxing today I got to thinking that they were both still wrong and I couldn't exactly figure out why. Then it hit me, so I constructed the following email. I thought it might be along the way some of you think, I'm open to criticism (obviously, I wouldn't post if I weren't) and any support you might give me. Uh, also please consider that I wrote this quickly without checking grammar, so don't taze me over it, bro. EMAIL AS FOLLOWS: I've been thinking... You mentioned a man who is old, decrepit, physically destroyed or otherwise hyperbole ridden as an analog to JD's conception of the man who cannot face life after "compromising his values". This was brought up when I said man's (as an egoist, though I think it may apply to everyone regardless) highest value should be that of living. You said this is surely a man who would rather die than face life, his soul-fire's extinguished because his body is defeated... whatever. I took that in class. I let you have it, Farrell, but I wish I hadn't. Just as the man who gives up life for a value--the product of which he will never see (for that matter the value he gives his life for may not even be achieved by his death. Incidentally, which is worse, that it might not happen or that he'd never know?) the man who exchanges a "worthless life" is acting irrationally. He is working toward the zero, trading life for the negation of it. Or to put it more succinctly, life is the highest order value, because it lets all other values operate within it, we experience value because of life, to trade it away is to trade away any value we may be able to hold. Further, I revoke my acceptance of your analogy as sound. A man's destroyed body will never heal. Time is the eternal destroyer, the great eroder &c. It doesn't flow backwards for physical entities. You may say "Ah, well the mind is a physical entity, sacrificing your values for the sake of life and having to live with the consequences, you can't make that go away by turning back the hands of time either! OH THE PAIN! OH THE UNSPEAKABLE MENTAL PAIN!" This is true, but our mind has the power to extract information from events that occur, to rationalize our actions, to reassure ourselves of what we have done and in this way to remedy our mental wounds. WE CANNOT DO THE SAME WITH OUR BODIES. The man who is physically destroyed such that he cannot willingly sustain life is then different from the man who has undergone mental trauma. The man with mental trauma has potential to grow from his pain, to rationally approach it and move beyond it (or at least move away from it) The man who is physically destroyed cannot do this. Hence your analog seems faulty. Hence I return to my point that it would be irrational to wish to die rather than deal with mental anguish. A darkly glib side question to consider: How often have we told this to suicidal teenagers? Sorry for the grammatical errors, and I hope this doesn't come across as snarky if its clear at all. It should be read in the context of a child's excited discovery rather than the academic "Ha! Proved you wrong!" Get back to me before class if you have time

You're saying a few things here that are throwing me, they don't seem to make much sense. So I'll only try to answer what I think you're trying to say... If you are suggesting that all conspiracy theories are false but then wondering about those shown to be true you're already committing a big time logical fallacy, something cannot be both P and -P. We can safely assume that any inductive reasoning suggesting all conspiracy theories are false is FALSE because of what the other users like d'kian have already beaten into the ground; a conspiracy could be anything. I used to conspire with my friends how best to shop-lift cigarettes. If the premise that all conspiracy theories are false is shown to be false than it was not "natural to be wrong" about the logical validity of the conspiracy. Thus you were not "being wrong" but you had slipped into an inductive fallacy: the fallacy of really weak induction. Hope this helps.