As I’ve gotten older, I’ve lost all respect for bullshit. I don’t put up with it anymore. I’ve got more important things to do. Nowhere is this more true than in discussions online, where people will just throw crap at the wall and hope it sticks and when it doesn’t, they just make excuses.

I’ve got no interest in your excuses. I care about your evidence. Put up or shut up. I’m not going to try to educate you. If you’re that dumb, go away. I have zero interest in engaging with idiots.

This came up again today with someone who insisted that consciousness was a magical thing. No evidence or anything, he just really wanted to  believe it. When I said that consciousness was an emergent property of the brain, he freaked out and told me that I had no evidence for that.

It’s ALL WE HAVE EVIDENCE FOR! If you damage the physical brain, you damage consciousness. If you destroy the physical brain, then consciousness ends. It’s as simple as that. We have never seen a single example of consciousness existing sans a physical brain.

Of course, he didn’t like that. He tried a terrible analogy because he has no clue what he’s arguing for. “If you turn off your computer, the Internet doesn’t go away!” Sorry, but we know that the Internet exists as a series of connections on millions of computers worldwide. No computer actually contains “the Internet”. You are just accessing it over electrical connections. If all the power on the planet went out entirely and all computers worldwide ceased to function, the Internet would cease to exist  because it has no existence outside of the computers it is running on.

Just like consciousness.

It’s like these people don’t understand the basic concepts they’re talking about, mostly  because they don’t. Of course, he’s pissed now, but so what? I proved him to be the idiot he actually is and he doesn’t like that.

If I ever went back to it, which who knows right now, I’d have to ask for his demonstrable evidence that consciousness can exist absent a physical brain. Prove it. He won’t be able to, he’ll just run around with the goalposts and pretend he has no burden of proof because that’s how these people operate. “It seems to me!” means nothing. It never has and never will. How you feel is entirely irrelevant. Nobody cares but you. You complain I have no evidence, when I have all the evidence that exists, yet he has no evidence for anything he claims. It’s just projection, nothing more.

This is, unfortunately, nothing unusual these days. It’s not just the religious, it happens in philosophy… A LOT. It happens in politics. It happens in social issues. Lots of people who believe lots of things for entirely emotional reasons and they don’t understand how empty that all is. It doesn’t matter what you want to be true. It matters only what demonstrably is.

They have no demonstration whatsoever. They can just whine about it. Whining is stupid. Come back when you have evidence. Nothing less will do. That’s why these conversations are so short and stupid. These people are morons through and through.

I have absolutely no patience for that anymore.