
Why life is absurd - esauer91
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/why-life-is-absurd
======
zaroth
I couldn't agree more that our humanity places truly absurd limits on our
existence. You get, if you're lucky 30-40 years of solid productivity after
20-30 years of training. Maybe enough time to create one or two solid
accomplishments before your capacity for thought, and soon enough your
capacity for life is extinguished.

Also consider the economic argument. On the one hand, the level of investment
experts make in becoming so is squandered by death. And yet, this also levels
the playing field for newborns, since you don't have to compete against the
guy with 8,000 years of experience.

I think human intelligence hits an asymptote due to mortality. There's only so
deep an individual can go, and a limit on how much you can replace depth with
breadth.

We enter and exit this world as babes. 100 years is in many ways a pathetic
excuse for an existence. Obviously extending that would have to focus on
quality not quantity, and has supremely disruptive economic effects (on par
with strong AI) but I do not doubt there are great leaps we will take toward
this end over the next 500 years.

One nice side-effect of a millennial-scale existence would hopefully be a more
macro and less cyclical approach to "current affairs".

~~~
pron
But why do you think productivity is any less absurd than non-productivity?
And why is intelligence relevant to absurdity? Is a butterfly's life any more
absurd than a human's?

Humans and humanity don't have goals. The universe is indifferent to us being
around or extinct. And it is certainly not our goal to be creative,
productive, efficient. We make up goals for ourselves to give subjective
meaning to our lives, and that can be plenty. The hard part of anyone's life
is to find the existence that gives their life meaning in their eyes. You
think extending our lifespan or making society more efficient are worthy
goals? So dedicate your life to those goals. But make sure that's really
meaningful to you, because, frankly, the universe doesn't give a damn.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>The universe is indifferent to us being around or extinct.

So what? I fail to understand how this supposedly renders our lives more or
less meaningful.

~~~
pron
It makes the meaning of "meaning" self-referential. Usually, when we say that
something has meaning, we mean it is significant to something external to it.
If the most external thing at all does not consider our existence significant,
then "meaning" becomes entirely subjective: something is defined to have
meaning if we convince ourselves it does. Some may think that's not much.
Others think that if that's as far as we can go, then that is everything.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Nothing can be infinitely recursive, every chain of reference must bottom out
somewhere. So why not in us?

~~~
pron
I am not sure I understand what it is you're saying, but sure, for many people
something is meaningful if it is significant to other people, or even
themselves. Others find that less satisfying, requiring a more absolute
meaning.

------
AnimalMuppet
We long for permanence, but death comes anyway.

We long for a real basis for morals, but if all we are is matter obeying the
laws of physics, morals cannot be anything more than arbitrarily-made-up
rules.

We long for meaning, but that's hard to come by too. It usually comes down to
randomly picking something and assigning meaning to it, and claiming that now
you have meaning. But if all you are is a machine made of atoms that is headed
for death, what kind of real meaning is possible?

Here is a deeper level of absurdity. Humans have randomly evolved to have
these aspirations (immortality, morals, meaning), but those aspirations can't
be fulfilled because all we are is collections of atoms randomly evolved by an
uncaring universe. This is a sick cosmic joke. If the materialist starting
point is correct, then our persistent aspirations cannot be fulfilled in the
universe that exists.

Or else the materialist view of the universe is incorrect. Then our
aspirations are not a sick cosmic joke - they are _evidence_ that we are more
than the materialist view says we are.

~~~
aikah
> morals cannot be anything more than arbitrarily-made-up rules.

One could argue morals should be based on the survival of mankind. Because
that's the only positive goal of it, to survive as long as possible,though,
ultimately mankind will come to an end,that's inevitable. On the other hand,
as long as there is energy,artificial intelligence could outlast us.It would
be mankind's testament and ultimate legacy. I always thought that, if we were
to find another alien civilization,it would be through the AI they designed or
in form of pure data. And it's probable that it would be available as binary
data too.

~~~
keane
No, AnimalMuppet is correct. We are unable to value the survival of mankind as
objectively good, as we have no empirical evidence to do so (more accurately:
we cannot infer an Ought from an Is).

See this for more on why: [http://liamk.org/is-love-
real/](http://liamk.org/is-love-real/)

Our options are Nihilism/Zen/Absurdity or Theism. And if the former is true,
it doesn't matter if we hold the latter. As CS Lewis put it, if the Theists
are wrong after all they would have merely paid the universe a compliment it
would not have deserved.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Our options are Nihilism/Zen/Absurdity or Theism.

Utilitarianism -- and many others -- are equally possible. You can assume any
set of moral axioms (including those of utilitarianism) without assuming God
(the defining assumption of Theism) -- and, in fact, Theism in and of itself
gets you nothing, except that it usually is coupled with assumptions about
what God wills and the moral axiom that what God wills is what we ought to
seek.

~~~
keane
> Utilitarianism -- and many others -- are equally possible.

You misunderstand the dichotomy. This is not about what we can do, humans can
delude themselves all the time. The question is about what is logically
consistent.

"That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without
evidence" applies in a purely natural universe, which means that if there is
no God, we can dismiss Utilitarianism (and all the others) as there is no
evidence for it. Only if the universe is supernatural (if God exists) do
things change.

------
cdahmedeh
Life is absurd because of our imminent death. For some reason, we have the
greatest troubles in accepting that everything is transient. After pleasure
comes eventually pain, after relaxation comes work, after life comes death...
We live here as if our lives on Earth are eternal, while all evidence has
shown that it is not.

Even more absurd is the unfairness of the whole joke of life. I'm lucky with
an education and a good job giving me a chance to focus on experiencing
nuanced pleasures instead of fighting to survive. Being mentally ill does give
me share of anguish, but mine is nothing compare to the poor, unfed and
terminally sick. Their life is even more absurd: a passage through a brief but
painful passage through anguish, suffering and hopelessness.

As an ex-Muslim, I have trouble adjusting to this: meaning is just a human
construct. Things don't have meaning on their own, we assign them a purpose
ourselves. Religion gave me re-assurance of eternal afterlife where I get a
second chance to live a life without the evil and suffering of this existence.
However, it did have a fatal flaw: it was false hope.

Now, life went from a short journey into another realm to a serious emergency.
Now, I have to make of what I was lucky to own; but it can all go away in a
single accident. After being a pattern-seeking religionist, everything is just
starting to seem so random...

------
fan
The logic behind the author's central thesis seems to be:

1\. Humans live about 100 years. 2\. The highest human ambitions, like writing
a great novel, can only be reasonably accomplished in a well-balanced life if
that life lasts more than 1000 years. 3\. By definition, our life is absurd
because we don't have enough time to reasonably accomplish our highest
ambitions.

She concludes that human life could be made less absurd by extending life to
1000 years -- this I disagree with.

The problem I have with this thesis is that I think the phrase "highest human
ambitions" is really a shifting goal. It's a goal that is set by the
accomplishment of a person of extraordinary talent who dedicates her entire
life to that one pursuit.

We think today that a brilliant novel on the order of Tolstoy is a high human
ambition, only because it's the limit of what a human can do. Instead,
consider if humans lived much shorter lives, reaching their cognitive peak at
age 15. In such a world, few people would have time to learn calculus, and so
solving a differential equation might be within the highest order of a human's
mathematical ambitions.

Conversely, let me suggest that if the average person were to live to 1000
years, the definition of human ambition would scale accordingly. Imagine the
absolute masterpiece symphony that Beethoven could write if he were alive
today. He would have hundreds of years of experience. He would have seen the
evolution of music and integrate all these advances in his repertoire. He
could afford to spend 50 years writing his mater symphony. This level of music
will be now our new target of ambition.

The central problem reduces down to this fact. The high water mark for an
ambitious goal is always defined by people in that field who are unreasonably
talented and dedicates an unreasonable fraction of their lives to the field.
If these experts lives the same number of years as I do, since I'm a
generalist of average talent dabbling in their field, I will never be able to
accomplish anywhere near their level.

The absurdity here then seems to stem from the intrinsic human desire to
always compare ourselves to the best, even when we realize we don't want to
commit to the field (with good reason) as the best do.

------
xlm1717
The absurdity of life is the absurdity of existence: that there is anything at
all is completely absurd and it's doubtful that this will ever be explained
satisfactorily.

~~~
neuronic
You can even split that into steps and levels. Absurdity progresses from the
entire universe right down into details like the existence of coffee or oil.
Two black liquids that just happen to exist and fuel the world. Can you
imagine modern society without them?

But what bugs me most is that a universe without an entity to perceive and
observe it is just such a waste of ... energy? It's almost like the existence
of the universe implies the existence of an observer. That the formation of
intelligent life is an expected result of the universe existing.

~~~
bemmu
In a universe without an observer there would be no-one to note how absurd
that is.

~~~
lozf
... yet here we are managing that much quite nicely. Others, meanwhile, seem
to be taking it all a little too seriously.

------
nazgulnarsil
In [The Fable of the Dragon
Tyrant]([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLecJrXpOEU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLecJrXpOEU)),
Nick Bostrom explores the fact that we refuse to see the massive crime being
perpetuated against every human being simply because of the enormity of it.
That we have our health ripped from us without consent is monstrous. Yes, yes,
[Calico]([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico_(company)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico_\(company\)))
exists. 100 million in the face of death is a joke. A single sports stadium
can cost more than that. Why are our priorities so badly misplaced?

~~~
jeffreyrogers
Richard Hamming has a talk titled "You and Your Research", in which he
discusses what sorts of things you should be working on. The summary is that
you should be working on important problems. He then lists three of the most
important problems that no one should actually work on, time travel,
teleportation, and something else that I can't remember off the top of my
head.

The thing Hamming understood, but which Bostrom, et al. don't is that
sometimes even if something is extremely important or significant the lack of
any reasonable approach to it makes it an unattractive thing to expend effort
on. At least until a solution is more tractable.

Further, the idea that everyone dying is some great tragedy is only true in
the philosophy Bostrom and others have adopted. It is one of massive egoism
and human-centrism that I think is misplaced. These same people then reject
any philosophies that lessen the devastation of death on the grounds that they
are the fictions of lesser minds attempting to placate themselves over their
impending death. But there is no objectively true philosophy. The whole point
of philosophy is to invent a fiction that lets you cope with reality in a
productive way.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
> The whole point of philosophy is to invent a fiction that lets you cope with
> reality in a productive way.

I think that if there's one thing that philosophers agree on, after arguing
with each other for a couple of millennia, it's that the point of philosophy
is _not_ to find a clever way to lie to ourselves - it's to find out something
_true_.

~~~
jeffreyrogers
I think people are getting a bit hung up on my (admittedly poor) phrasing and
less on the substance of my comment. Yes, philosophy wants to find out
something "true", but reality as a whole is to complex to think about head on.
Any philosophy with the goal of being completely factually true has to deal
with a lot of information that isn't really relevant, e.g. physical (meaning
atoms, etc.) interactions.

Since that is too much information to deal with you have to selectively ignore
parts of it. A useful philosophy lets you get rid of essentially all the
irrelevant information while keeping and fitting into a mental framework what
is relevant. So in a sense it is a lie, but it is one that hopefully preserves
the important parts. My argument was that Bostrom's philosophy ignores too
many of the important parts by dismissing his critics' viewpoints as
unfounded. Hopefully that clears things up a bit.

------
hbt
the assumption the author makes is that longevity will only bring us more time
and that pretty much everything about the human condition will remain the
same.

It is tedious to be human. The amount of time dedicated to maintaining one's
body even when young and healthy can feel tiresome.

Longevity is not about extending our misery but about finding a way out of
these limited meat bags.

Perhaps there is a meaning and the universe is not absurd, maybe our minds are
simply too stupid to figure it out. Maybe if we extended our brains, increased
our intelligence...

Only time will tell. That's why we need more of it. That's why it's worth
putting up with the daily bullshit called living until it reaches the breaking
point.

~~~
oliv__
What makes life so interesting and great in my opinion, are the limitations
--and the boundaries of those limitations that people push further and
further-- of these meat bags we carry eveywhere with us.

~~~
chc
I feel like this is just "best of all worlds" thinking rather than an actual
love of physical limitation. If it were the latter, why wouldn't we just start
cutting off limbs and _really_ get some interesting limitations?

------
ctdonath
Humans have had about 10,000 years of interesting & productive history. At
best, a human lifespan is about 100 years. That's one hundred 100-year lives
back-to-back. That's...not much at all.

~~~
nly
An average generation was probably about 40 years for most of that. So I'd say
about 200-300 generations. It's not much, but I still kind of feel that as a
species we haven't done very much at all in that time. Personally I prefer to
think we're in our teenage years as a species.

------
ZeroFries
Life is meaningless if you live a finite life because no matter what you do it
will be washed out in time. Life is meaningless if you live an infinite life
because any finite portion of time in your life approaches 0% of your total
life time and by definition has no value. And yet, meaning can only be defined
by life, because there is no such thing as inherent meaning.

If I created life I would almost certainly make it finite but endow it with a
sense of hope that life goes beyond a single life span.

~~~
sigmaml
> ... a sense of hope that life goes beyond a single life span.

That is one of the conjectures propounded by the Upanishads.

------
chuhnk
As someone who believes in Islam this is an extremely thought provoking piece
and I love it. It makes you think and question existence. It makes you wonder
about what we're doing here and how life would be different if we existing at
a different point in time and space. Just such interesting topics for
conversation. Life and the universe.

~~~
discreteevent
Maybe one can see religion as simply a rational response to the absurdity of
life as described in the article. Life is patently absurd and yet we are
rational. Why is that? We don't need to be. The answer for many is that there
must be something more. For others the something more is itself absurd. But it
doesn't mean that it is an irrational response. Its quite the opposite. It's
an attempt to make sense of something that, from a broad perspective, is an
assault to our rationality

~~~
aikah
> Maybe one can see religion as simply a rational response to the absurdity of
> life

The problem is that religion doesn't answer anything(or gives absurd
answers,backed by nothing but faith and fishy philosophy),isn't rational
because it is not fasifiable.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability)

What is clearly absurd is religion.

~~~
vlucas
There are _tons_ of things that are falsifiable about the Bible and
Christianity in particular. The Bible - unlike most other religious texts -
gives many historic accounts of events, cities, places, timelines, people,
kingdoms, lineages, etc. that are all quite easily verifiable.

[http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2013/07/christianity-t...](http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2013/07/christianity-
the-worlds-most-falsifiable-religion/)

~~~
aikah
You misunderstand the concept of Falsifiability. It.It isn't about whether
something is verifiable or not. But what it would take for a fact to be
dismissed or not. It's not about whether a fact is true or not. For instance,
the "fact" that Mohammed talked to angel Gabriel,which would imply angels
therefore god exists according to Mohammed isn't falsifiable. You can't test
that, or experience that.

It isn't about the holy books being full of inaccuracies, historians know they
totally are full of shit already,from an historical point of view.

~~~
vlucas
This is not unique to religion. We can't test or falsify the multiverse
theory, time paradoxes, any naturalistic explanation of the origin of life, or
any number of other scientific theories either.

~~~
aikah
Sure,that's why they are not scientific facts. But merely philosophy IE pure
reasoning which doesn't produce any useful result.

------
heurist
She doesn't seem to discuss the cause I see, which is that life emerges from
the random set of deterministic rules that define the universe. There's no
crucial reason life as we know it looks one way over any other - if some
portion of the universe had developed different emergent patterns then life
could easily be defined according to those patterns instead of the ones we use
in our portion, and it would still be absurd. Humans didn't have to evolve
from apes; they may have been in the right position to develop more advanced
intellects but had giraffes been in the right position then giraffe-ancestors
would be arguing about life's absurdity right now instead. Each moment's state
depends entirely on the previous moment, and states are not globally optimized
at each moment, so they build up into complicated weird-looking systems over
time. There's not much we can do about that.

~~~
amelius
Still it's kind of absurd that we are humans, and not, say, mosquitos, for the
a-priori probability of finding yourself in the body of a mosquito is quite a
bit higher.

~~~
heurist
If you developed as a mosquito you wouldn't have your mind, you would have the
mosquito's mind - you would _be_ the mosquito, not a human as a mosquito. You
can't be and cannot have been anything other than what you are, which is a
liberating thought. Alternatively, you are everything because if you had
developed from the exact same initial conditions as something else you would
have developed into that thing as it is exactly.

------
hyperliner
I don't think that life is absurd. There are, however, some absurd aspects to
it:

\- why would anybody waste their time, given that life is so short? The
problem I guess is that "waste" is relative. Who wasted their time? Me in
school, or my buddies partying?

\- it's absurd that your luck is pretty much determined by where and when you
were born. It's absurd that some people think they are so accomplished and
scored many runs but without realizing they were born on third base

\- it's absurd that the probability is high there is no God. why would
something so mathematically amazing as the universe generate something so
brutally absurd as conscious life?

\- I think it is absurd that I just wasted 5 minutes of my life thinking about
this instead of tucking my kids to bed or reading them a story for bed time.

Well, I guess life is in fact absurd. My original premise is invalid.

------
Red_Tarsius
Is it really any more absurd than _not living_? The whole article – an
enjoyable read – seems written with the assumption that there exists a
universal constant: human life. Everything that does not match our needs and
ever changing desires is absurd. I say that a perfect world would be even more
absurd!

Let's not forget that _meaning_ – or the lack of thereof – may as well be a
human construct. Life is not meaningful nor meaningless. It only _is_.

~~~
sparaker
If we didn't had this absurdity we might just have a more absurd life than we
have currently.

------
guelo
This is a western individualistic philosophy that ignores the amazing
accomplishments of the human species. In other more collective cultures
bringing shame to your tribe is a moral reason to kill yourself because the
individual is not the end all be all. We are ants in a giant, unimaginably
successful ant colony. Focusing on the life of an individual ant is what is
absurd.

------
pbsk
Absurdism [1] is one of three philosophical doctrines (along with
existentialism [2] and nihilism [3]) that try to reconcile the fact that we
live in a meaningless universe when our human tendency is to seek value and
meaning in life.

Existentialism argues that we create our own meaning by living life and
exercising our free will. Nihilism counters that there is no meaning and so
nothing matters. Absurdism is the acceptance that life is ridiculous and by
defiantly laughing at it we can live authentically.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism)
[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism)
[3]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism)

------
agentultra
If the poets taught us anything it's that you cannot quantify that which you
cannot count and you can't rationalize that which is irrational. We are wholly
absurd in this regard; able and enfeebled at the same time. Perfectly capable
of realizing that we're trapped in these meat-bags sailing through time to an
inescapable doom.

And what do we do about it? Science and engineering life-extending
technologies. Write about our memories and discoveries. Make music and art.
It's absurd and it seems to work for us.

------
keslag
The only absurd thing about life, is that through the process, something was
created that understood the absurdity of it all.

~~~
kristofferR
We only understand the absurdity of it because absurdity is a concept created
by humanity - which if you think about it is quite absurd in itself.

------
q845712
i think she's wrong that time is the only absurd thing:

i've often wished i could hibernate; there's a ton of victorian art that shows
a clear obsession with humans flying like birds; i spent many childhood
afternoons trying to hold my breath longer (so i could stay underwater);
there's been tons of fiction, philosophy, science and engineering put into
talking to animals...

however, most of all, i agree with all the comments above suggesting that the
notion of permanence itself is absurd, our insistence on a hard-nosed
materialist viewpoint is absurd, our insistence that we're smart enough to
understand the universe is absurd (we're little smarter than our dogs and
cats, who we're sure can't possibly understand the universe)

------
bilalasif1
The explanation of this and the question contradicts each other. Life is
absurd, but if you really believe that then you should also know that you
can't tell WHY!

Every human must experience and keep on experiencing or otherwise taking your
life might be more less painful than living it.

------
zan2434
TL;DR: In the context of our existence, only the brevity of our lives strikes
us as absurd.

------
bitwize
"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it feels like an hour. Sit next
to a pretty girl for an hour and it feels like a minute. _That 's_
relativity." \--Einstein, attributed

------
noobermin
The thing that people often over extrapolate based on Special Relativity (SR)
and other things like Quantum Mechanics (QM) is they think that "relative" (or
for QM, "probabilistic") means arbitrary. No, in fact while time is not
"absolute", certain things about time for all observers are constrained. For
example, the time between events depends on the observer, but use that time
separation multiplied by the speed of light--the distance a light ray travels
in that time--and take the square of that distance and subtract the square of
the distance between said events' locations, this quantity is the same for all
observers. This IS a constraint on the "distance" between events in SR.

This really isn't the relativity that the author alludes to, but I have
something to say about this too. As physicists, we term this "relativity" the
author deals with as "dealing with units." Having a concept of time is
meaningless without a given scale. For example, for the ultraintense-plasma
interactions that I am discussing in the paper I'm writing today, a picosecond
is a long time given that the electro-magnetic dynamics I care about happen on
the femtosecond scale. For the hydrodynamic simulations my groupmate will work
on, picoseconds are the timescales of significance. Of course, when heating
the coffee in the cup next to me, the barista measures timescales much larger
than this, of the order of seconds, exponentially longer than both of the
former scales.

Life is a complicated phenomenon which captures dynamics at many scales.
Thinking about life can be just as complicated, if you let it. An issue I
often see is equating parts of life with other parts and thus, using the same
scales for both. This often leads us into trouble. Why does it take my friend
an hour to shower while it only takes me ten minutes? If I can write a python
script in one day, why the hell does it take this junior dev two weeks to make
his? Of course, the same issue here is a novice physicist comparing the fs
physics I deal with to the ps my friend does, the comparison isn't valid just
because they are both "times."

This is why even though life seems short for some people it can seem long for
others. Just because 80 years is a year and people are people, any given
individual has their own experiences and opinions that shapes their vantage
point, and it can be hard to really compare the two. Of course, just like the
"real" relativity SR, there are certain constraints we can make on time in
this context, many people might prefer longer lives even if we lived 1000
years if millennial* olds are as selfish as us 80-year-ers are. But the
diversity in context must be taken into account as it should be for me when I
model ultra-intense laser plasma interactions. Context always matters.

Thinking about the context for each person's scales makes our look on life a
little less absurd. I think that more often than not, people's motivations
(for desiring longevity, for instance) have good reasoning in them, especially
when you consider their context.

[*] It's funny that millennial here means people who are 1000 years old as
opposed to people in their late teens to early twenties.

------
rasz_pl
Looks like author just watched newest Adam Sandler movie.

------
jqm
Absurdity is a relative state. When philosophy starts trying to bullshit with
semantics, I completely loose interest. That's this article.

~~~
padolsey
Yes, but the author explicitly explores the semantics she pushes in regard to
other limitations: our size relative to the universe, our inability to fly,
etc. With everything taken into account, it is indeed odd that the thing that
seems uniquely absurd is our longevity. Why aren't we perturbed by our lack of
gills or our inability to walk to the moon? The point of the article is to
explore this absurdity. You knew the game before you clicked the link
('absurd' is right there, in the title). So you can hardly be surprised that
you were dealt a relativistic sludge.

~~~
arnarbi
I was surprised, because this was on the HN front page.

> The point of the article is to explore this absurdity.

I think the point of the article was just to sound smart. It doesn't really
explore anything, nor provoke thoughts or insights.

------
rquantz
Life's too short to read this comment thread.

------
time4hn
Did a ctrl+f for "Jerry" and no results were found. Not sure ift his article
should be trusted.

------
gear54rus
Life is perfectly balanced in this regard, I would say.

Only those without a clear focus on their goal may ask a question 'why am I
here?'. If you've ever achieved something in your life that others will admire
or build upon - it was not in vain. That's why we are here: being its members,
to advance humanity as a whole.

That's also exactly why we should never achieve immortality (so that we have
motivation to do something in out limited time) and if we do so, it would be
one of the worst events humanity has ever encountered.

Sadly, this day most people look at this world through prism of financial
wealth, but trading things (often completely useless things, I might) back and
forth can hardly be considered an achievement future generations can benefit
from. All in all, in the modern world, realization of one's potential has
stepped back to give way to greed and that cannot be called progress in any
way.

EDIT: Well isn't that a knee-jerk reaction. People always reject this argument
for some reason and always fail to come up with the solid reason for this. Is
this what we've come to as a humanity?

