All People are Random

[shunt the frupup]

When you think about life and the universe in the lager perspective constantly as i can only presume most other INTP's do too it comes to a stage where all the people in your life are just random, I dont just mean the group you met in college, from the group you met in school, but even your family, close friends and current lovers. Its kind of a hard one to take, I view my girlfriend more like a random person then ever now, funny thing is she agreed - at the end of the day it is all a bit of a random lottery.

How do you feel about this? Has anyone reached similar conclusions?
It has to be true ofcourse but really letting it soak in is a bit depressing really.

 

[LucasM]

Depressing? I think not.

 

[Ermine]

random as in randomly chosen or you don't know why you chose them?

 

[Madoness]

If you'd don't want people be random, please fill the world with rules, for every action, for every emotion, and soon you'd see robots bassing by, and other you as well and noone acts random any more. Would that be a victory?

I won't call it "randomness" , people want to change, try new things, therefore sometimes act a bit different and the act seems random. That does not tell that people are random, as if being random is a rule we unknowingly follow.

 

[Luzian]

Being unaware of a pattern, does not make anything random. There will never be anything random, ever. There's no such thing as random.

I think quantum mechanics is premature.

 

[shunt the frupup]

random as in randomly chosen or you don't know why you chose them?

Not so much chosen as is everything is random, I take the point earlier about noticing patterns in randomness, which is science really, fractals and so forth - things might come about by necessity or by culture or by reproductive systems, but these systems are just as randomly occurring as what they create, yet there are only so many elements in the universe when your dealing with the physical dimention, the others we know no next to nothing about.

Take people as I made it case in point as random, one born into a certain family could have been born in another over the other side of the world, the same soul for example therefore his or her country and family is completley random, and everything that happens from the day we are born to the day we die. Wont actually make any difference as far as we know in this dimension.

what i meant about The hard thing to take is considering the closest people to you as just random people and in all truth they pretty much mean as much to you as any other person in the world.

To take that a little bit further into a spiritual realm I think maybe thats why so many people might be broken hearted because maybe thats what we need to learn to love everyone just as much as we love our own.

Hope that made sense. Its not easy to put it into words what i mean. If you could go inside my head youd get it..lol

 

[Madoness]

Take people as I made it case in point as random, one born into a certain family could have been born in another over the other side of the world, the same soul for example therefore his or her country and family is completley random, and everything that happens from the day we are born to the day we die. Wont actually make any difference as far as we know in this dimension.

Are you serious??? Have you ever heard of genetics? Randomness would be if, lets say, caucasian parents and their parents etc. going way back centuries with caucasion characteristics have a baby with pure asian characteristics.

 

[Dissident]

...or five legs and a weird thing that comes out of his chest

I think the missunderstanding comes from one believing is a soul and not the other. If you believe that what you consider to be "you" is "something that inhabits your body" then what he is saying makes sense, if you believe that you ARE your body, then it doesnt.

 

[loveofreason]

Maybe you mean to say all relationships with people are senseless (or meaningful) to an equal degree?

Or that the relationship positions, ie. our states, are not unique? That relative to one another we could be anything?

Is this the phenomena referred to as being 'atomised'? Equally disconnected from everything, so that no specific attribute can be accorded greater or lesser weight than any other?

I might not be interpreting what you're trying to say correctly, but I have my own experience of looking at family members etc and just being lost in the realisation that they're strangers, no more or less meaningful to me than any other person, not connected in a sense, because no one can be truly connected. Or of looking at a lover and seeing them entirely free of associations and attachments... seeing them just as any other person.

(Except, on another level we are all connected - this is just one of those circumstances where one has to hold a multitude of apparently conflicting layers of interpretation...)

It's a state of mind. A complete and disorienting (and liberating!) loss of contextualisation. As Luzian said, nothing is truly random, there are just parameters within which we cannot discern the pattern.

Hmmm...perhaps this is a peril of the doctrine of equality?

On a metaphysical level we could hold the argument that all beings, being equivalent, are reducible to the same value and are hence the same, but here in the flesh and blood world we make choices based on preferences and the capacity to discriminate based on discernable attributes. Much is done subconsciously (hence the difficulty in perceiving any pattern). If we couldn't discriminate, that is define the differences between things, we couldn't survive.

And being unable to locate the reason behind a choice or circumstance is not proof of no reason.

hmmm....


edit: and yeah... what Dissident said too.

 

[sagewolf]

Take people as I made it case in point as random, one born into a certain family could have been born in another over the other side of the world, the same soul for example therefore his or her country and family is completley random, and everything that happens from the day we are born to the day we die. Wont actually make any difference as far as we know in this dimension.

Are you serious??? Have you ever heard of genetics? Randomness would be if, lets say, caucasian parents and their parents etc. going way back centuries with caucasion characteristics have a baby with pure asian characteristics.

That and the fact that our personalities are, in certain ways, born of our circumstances and our physical forms. The name my parents gave me, the characteristics that I inherited from them both, the places I have lived, the things I know and the people that I have interacted with all combine with my essence/soul to form my mind and personality. If my soul were in a different part of the world, I would still be me, in a sense, but I would not be me, the person who is sitting here and typing this now. There is a vague kind of order to the world, I suppose, even if the scale and complexity of the order makes it hard to grasp. (I have hold of the crumbling tip of one tiny corner. )

 

[Ermine]

Not so much chosen as is everything is random, I take the point earlier about noticing patterns in randomness, which is science really, fractals and so forth - things might come about by necessity or by culture or by reproductive systems, but these systems are just as randomly occurring as what they create, yet there are only so many elements in the universe when your dealing with the physical dimention, the others we know no next to nothing about.

I wouldn't say that everything is random. There are just so many factors and variables in the patterns. I think a lot of things in nature appear random simply because we as humans can't see the bigger picture. For example, before fractals were accepted as part of math, most of nature was considered random, in a mathematical sense.

Take people as I made it case in point as random, one born into a certain family could have been born in another over the other side of the world, the same soul for example therefore his or her country and family is completley random, and everything that happens from the day we are born to the day we die. Wont actually make any difference as far as we know in this dimension.

Again, I don't think it's random. We just can't see the big picture. And I think it can and does make a difference where certain people are born.

 

[Da Blob]

Not so much chosen as is everything is random, I take the point earlier about noticing patterns in randomness, which is science really, fractals and so forth - things might come about by necessity or by culture or by reproductive systems, but these systems are just as randomly occurring as what they create, yet there are only so many elements in the universe when your dealing with the physical dimention, the others we know no next to nothing about.

Take people as I made it case in point as random, one born into a certain family could have been born in another over the other side of the world, the same soul for example therefore his or her country and family is completley random, and everything that happens from the day we are born to the day we die. Wont actually make any difference as far as we know in this dimension.

what i meant about The hard thing to take is considering the closest people to you as just random people and in all truth they pretty much mean as much to you as any other person in the world.

To take that a little bit further into a spiritual realm I think maybe thats why so many people might be broken hearted because maybe thats what we need to learn to love everyone just as much as we love our own.

Hope that made sense. Its not easy to put it into words what i mean. If you could go inside my head youd get it..lol

There does not seem to be much justice in the selection of those I have Loved. I have loved the relatively unlovable and shunned the company of angels. I do not seem to be able to choose who I love. I mean logic dictates that the candidates for receiving my 'precious' love should be my neighbors, selected from the ranks of the perfect: beautiful, young, healthy, RICH.... So how come I get stuck loving this misbegotten pack of the halt, the lame and the blind?

Speaking of which, (in a reverse manner) have you ever know anyone who, like, would take all kinds of criticism directed at them personally, but try to Criticize one of their loved ones .... It is akin to an act of self-destruction. My poor sister has raised a couple of demon-spawn as her own and simply refuses to see them as anything but angels-in-the-making....?

"Hope that made sense. Its not easy to put it into words what i mean. If you could go inside my head youd get it..lol"

 

[Zezon Vice]

Im not sure i believe in "everything happens for a reason". I more hold to the believe that there is simply cause and effect. Over time there is a series of events that will cause a certain person to be in ones path and have the characteristics that they do because of the life they led. How another person develops isnt all there fault because who they live around factors in aswell. So many things are included in the chain of cause and effect that it becomes unfathomable. And as i think others pointed out this creates the illusion of randomness as to who we end up meeting throughout life.

 

[Da Blob]

Im not sure i believe in "everything happens for a reason". I more hold to the believe that there is simply cause and effect. Over time there is a series of events that will cause a certain person to be in ones path and have the characteristics that they do because of the life they led. How another person develops isnt all there fault because who they live around factors in aswell. So many things are included in the chain of cause and effect that it becomes unfathomable. And as i think others pointed out this creates the illusion of randomness as to who we end up meeting throughout life.

I believe you made a very good point. I once did a little multi-variate statistical analysis, and even utilizing the computers anything with over a dozen independent variables just could not be studied, too many factors, but no randomness, no chaos, just too complicated. I t seems that it is an easy way out to say things are 'random' when they are patterns too complex for analysis...

 

[shunt the frupup]

Maybe you mean to say all relationships with people are senseless (or meaningful) to an equal degree?

Or that the relationship positions, ie. our states, are not unique? That relative to one another we could be anything?

Is this the phenomena referred to as being 'atomised'? Equally disconnected from everything, so that no specific attribute can be accorded greater or lesser weight than any other?

I might not be interpreting what you're trying to say correctly, but I have my own experience of looking at family members etc and just being lost in the realisation that they're strangers, no more or less meaningful to me than any other person, not connected in a sense, because no one can be truly connected. Or of looking at a lover and seeing them entirely free of associations and attachments... seeing them just as any other person.

(Except, on another level we are all connected - this is just one of those circumstances where one has to hold a multitude of apparently conflicting layers of interpretation...)

It's a state of mind. A complete and disorienting (and liberating!) loss of contextualisation. As Luzian said, nothing is truly random, there are just parameters within which we cannot discern the pattern.

Hmmm...perhaps this is a peril of the doctrine of equality?

On a metaphysical level we could hold the argument that all beings, being equivalent, are reducible to the same value and are hence the same, but here in the flesh and blood world we make choices based on preferences and the capacity to discriminate based on discernable attributes. Much is done subconsciously (hence the difficulty in perceiving any pattern). If we couldn't discriminate, that is define the differences between things, we couldn't survive.

And being unable to locate the reason behind a choice or circumstance is not proof of no reason.

hmmm....


edit: and yeah... what Dissident said too.

I think you just put it better then I did, thats exactly what I meant. Especially the meaningless thing I mean no matter whose in your life or whoever they are or whatever way your family culture and country may "shape" you. Well your just gonna die anyway....lol So then yeah it dosnt matter. Sorry for the lack of sophistication but its not really needed for that point

 

[sagewolf]

Especially the meaningless thing I mean no matter whose in your life or whoever they are or whatever way your family culture and country may "shape" you. Well your just gonna die anyway....lol So then yeah it dosnt matter.

Weeeell... yeeeeesssss... but it's not only things that have an effect on us; we have effects on other things and people too. So the people we influence, especially kids, but others as well, change because of our presence, and after we're gone, at least some of them are left. They go on affecting their surroundings and those they influence continue in turn... it doesn't end. Even when you factor in our inevitable deaths, we still have an ever-increasing effect on the world for years after the worms that ate us have themselves become dirt.

Until, of course, the sun blows up or we're all sucked into a black hole.

 

[wadlez]

When you think about life and the universe in the lager perspective constantly as i can only presume most other INTP's do too it comes to a stage where all the people in your life are just random, I dont just mean the group you met in college, from the group you met in school, but even your family, close friends and current lovers. Its kind of a hard one to take, I view my girlfriend more like a random person then ever now, funny thing is she agreed - at the end of the day it is all a bit of a random lottery.

How do you feel about this? Has anyone reached similar conclusions?
It has to be true ofcourse but really letting it soak in is a bit depressing really

ya'll crazy, people are not random, study some psychology.

 

[Melkor]

Psychologists tend to see evryone as case studies.

I fins it more fascinating to assume evryone is entirely their own person, and then work on form that.

Of course, there will be certain methods one can use to help classify that peson, but fully classifying never works.

See everyone as their own case study say I.

 

[Gorgrim]

too much effort, gotta take some human factors in people that are similar and make 'boxes' for ppl with similar traits, so you have something to go on.... as that will explain why ppl do certain thigns based on what data you have, i cant help doing it though. because as much as thats helpful, its the unique characteristics that are interesting and fun. especially to figure out what the reason is for these rather unique characteristics ( for example that not every ESTJ is the same )

anyway, theres a perfectly fine reason for me beeing born and becoming what i am, why should i 'randomly' have been selected to grow up with a single parent with little money for example? the only reason i was 'selected' was because my single parent had a child and i grew up enough to wonder how i ended up as a thinking human.

 

[sagewolf]

I agree, Gorgrim: there are concrete reasons why I am the person I am today. They may be, in a sense, random reasons with no intent or planning behind them, but I am the person I am because of certain factors in my environment making an impression upon my personality and my values and my opinions. Even if I don't know exactly which factors led to the development of which parts of my personality.

When you think about life and the universe in the lager perspective constantly as i can only presume most other INTP's do too it comes to a stage where all the people in your life are just random, I dont just mean the group you met in college, from the group you met in school, but even your family, close friends and current lovers. Its kind of a hard one to take, I view my girlfriend more like a random person then ever now, funny thing is she agreed - at the end of the day it is all a bit of a random lottery.

No, the people I meet aren't random either: I meet people in places, and I chose to go to those places for a reason and so did they. Therefore, there are reasons, born of our personalities, that we came to these places at the same time, that we begin talking to each other, that we decide that we like each other and begin to build a friendship. There being no pattern that we can discern does not make something random: there is a structure underlying our choices and the events in our lives.

i grew up enough to wonder how i ended up as a thinking human.

Haaahhhh... *sits Gorgrim down* Now, when a man and a woman have certain feelings for each other...

 

[wadlez]

Yeah this theory of everyone being random is strange to encounter in an MBTI forum. I hope you know what intp's are

 

[chocolate]

Not so much chosen as is everything is random, I take the point earlier about noticing patterns in randomness, which is science really, fractals and so forth - things might come about by necessity or by culture or by reproductive systems, but these systems are just as randomly occurring as what they create, yet there are only so many elements in the universe when your dealing with the physical dimention, the others we know no next to nothing about.

Take people as I made it case in point as random, one born into a certain family could have been born in another over the other side of the world, the same soul for example therefore his or her country and family is completley random, and everything that happens from the day we are born to the day we die. Wont actually make any difference as far as we know in this dimension.

what i meant about The hard thing to take is considering the closest people to you as just random people and in all truth they pretty much mean as much to you as any other person in the world.

To take that a little bit further into a spiritual realm I think maybe thats why so many people might be broken hearted because maybe thats what we need to learn to love everyone just as much as we love our own.

Hope that made sense. Its not easy to put it into words what i mean. If you could go inside my head youd get it..lol

shuntup, I have a sense of what you mean, but can`t put it into words, this is actually been on my mind the past few days...weird...but I took it further and actually feel like I am random. I mean, besides the fact that I know I am me, what is the difference between me and you for example? You have your life and friends and things of importance, as do I, and does it really matter that I am me and you are you? What if I died and another person lived on? What`s the difference really?

It`s kind of depressing but I also find kind of liberating as dying loses its edge. Without loss of generality, we may as well all be the same person so what does it matter whose `turn` it is ?

On the other hand, we have to create our own relationships and things of importance and that is simply a decision. We decide what means something to us, and we can make that decision on a basis of feeling and logic too, and stick to it (what other choice do we have really?). We have to create a basis for our life, even though in the grand scheme of things, it doesn`t really matter.

I really don`t know if what I said makes any sense or not...

 

[mainiac]

Far from it! I believe that when you are on the other side you plan your life out in detail with the help of those that are going to make the journey with you. You choose who will be your father who will be your closest friends, what lessons you will learn. Who will travel with you to the end of this earthly life.

I think there is some randomness in life but not nearly what people think. Everyone you meet and care for you know on the other side and have journed together more than once, helpinng each other to acheive the goal of your soul becoming who you realy are. Randomness to me is gambling or finding a dollar in the street, realitivly unimportant things. All of the major events in your life you planned with others.

You will find this teaching in ancient texts that are all too often dismised because after all, they were only ancient peoples and jsut did not underatnd the world like we do. the truth is they understood it far better and many things that most refuse to beleive in.

There are ancient writings that tell you the real history of this planet, not the current one that states that civilization only goes back about 8,000 years. This is valadated by distant cultures saying the same thing or showing similiar glyphs or other desighns.

The nazga plain was found that a whole mountain top was removed and leveled. a gargantuan task even for today. But do you think this was done by primitive man scraping away the dirt with crude picks and shovels? Now they are looking where all the material that was excavated went to. It is nowhere near by. So it was hauled off a considerable distance, how? with what? certainly not with woven sacks. Sophisticated machinery must have ben used. So some one started to look for the evidence of these machines. I think he found an imprint of some kind but I think the search is still on. Did they take everything with them when they were done? is it buried somewhere?

So again all this points to sophiosticated technology surpassing our own used thousands of years ago. I do not think our own toys and machines will be around for others to discover thousands of years from now, if there is anybody left that is. We are not at that level of tech. perhaps some one will find one of our carvings on a mountainside and wonder how this was done. How much more eveidence will be needed to shake the blindness off put their by the scholarly community. it is startting to slide away. Their favorite tool..ridiculing their peers and any one else who points these things out is not functioning like it was. Now you have (respected) scientists taking a serious look at what before was considered unworthy of study because it did not fit anywhere into the ridgid unyielding religion of science.

You can imagine that the christian community is none to pleased with this themselfs. Loosing control is never any fun for this sort I am sure. Now they must explain this that does not fit anywhere in thier religion. What will they say? Will they admit that they never had all the answers? Unlikely! They will work around it and manipulate until people are comforted and a explanation that leaves their beliefe intact is thought of. Forget about thinking for yourself, let others do it for you. But millions will now know new and exciting chapters about this planet.

Unfortunatly if christian religion told the masses that demons placed them their to test their faith, all would fall in line. The very ones saying it would be the height of hypocracy not beleiving their own words. So no matter how good the evidence is, nno mmatter how grand it stands on its own there will always be millions who will not accept the truth when ever it comes close to contradicting anything that the church tells them is true.

Its amazing how much knowledge was destroyed and surpressed by religion. Some gone for ever. To think that it works so well today is frightning. To think at one time amny had faith in the government that they realy did know what was best for you and beleived in such utter foolishness such as reefer madness. why? because the government said so. However after many heinious acts and a chasm of treachery and betrayel such a thing would be laughed at. Their credibility is long gone and will never be recovered. No more will it be so easy to control the masses simply by putting out moronic statements. Now they have to threaten to take away what you hold most dear to bend you to thier will, like your children your house ect.

 

[SkyWalker]

If you apply no selection criteria for (the ideas of) the people in your life, your life will be a useless mess.

A man that stands for nothing, falls for everything

 

[Jesse]

I've always hated that saying Skywalker. I don't know of any people that stand for nothing.

 

[nanook]

i have not read the thread, but my meme-detector tells me, that there is a statistical probability that people miss out on one detail of life, which is that a physical person does not equal their internal life. so you can mix physical people anyway you want, but you are not controlling psychological life itself, by doing so. internally, we are co-created by the situations we are in. if the government assigns one girlfriend to me, i will become one person, if they assign another girlfriend, i will in part become another person. not because we mix like chemicals, albeit such a mixture might occur but that's only a tiny part of what is happening. humans are not matter. we are probabilities and possibilities. only part of us is conditioned. live can bring creativity into the most strict control and it can bring it's meaningful rules (or meaning-creating rules) into the greatest external chaos. so you can study the rules of external life, but what does it really mean to you? in the worst case, your believe in external rules will limit your life. you could be the poor guy who believes that he can never have a girlfriend because he is poor and there are more men than women and statistically women appear to have a preference for wealthy men. this guy will never have a girlfriend. but you don't have to be that guy, or if you really have to, it's not because of any external rule, but because you are too much a slave of the conditioned aspects of your mind.

 

[alrai]

All people suggest I'm also random. okay.

lets define random people; lets say people who make random assumptions and label their surroundings with them.

The affect is, all the data they collect, research if random would be mostly irrelevant contributions, as real as they seem to the subject, they have shaped their perceptive around those random, sometimes laughable assumptions. They do not only build on the assumptions, but they act on them, following the string all the way to where it ends, now this could be an advantage if only the end object actually ever existed.

 

[rattymat]

I don't see why it matters if its random or not. And for that matter, do not see the whole romanticism of fate. Meant to be, or completely random, its there now, and you care about it and has become part of you life, so what if its random?

 

[xbox]

Your mom is random.