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Hearts and Minds

Who would you choose to spend your time with?

  • Mr Mynde

    Votes: 10 38.5%

  • Mr Hart

    Votes: 5 19.2%

  • Ooooh, Plumjam. You've gored me on the horns of a bit of a hypothetical dilemma. I shall have to ret

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • On Planet X Law 3686.43.29 specifically prohibits all bloomin' quandaries

    Votes: 11 42.3%
  • Total voters
    26
Not voting. It seems Mr. Mynde isn't allowed to act as though he is intelligent because he's forced to betray me without good reason. If he betrays me only with good reason then betrayal would be rare and I could vote for him.
 
Mr Mynde,

I think it'd be endlessly entertaining to see if I could stick it to him before he got me! :)

If my conscience was bothering me, I may just wait until I caught him in some malicious act, then enact my sweet revenge!
 
How much one-on-one time?

If it's a small amount (i.e. a few days or less) I'd choose based on my mood. If I felt like a challenge, I'd go with Mynde, if I felt like doing some work on my own, I'd go with Hart (and let him help).
If it's a large amount (i.e. years) I'd choose Mynde since he's more likely to help me make something which I could then use to kill myself.

In the middle, it depends on what resources are surrounding us, what will happen after this one-on-one time ends, et cetera.

Now why did I answer this question?
 
plumjam said:
Here's the scenario:

You are forced to spend some one-on-one time with one of two people: Mr Hart or Mr Mynde (or Mrs/Miss/Ms if you prefer - but the scenario prohibits any influence from sexual attraction).

Mr Hart is a morally perfect individual. He is unfailingly loyal, honest, compassionate, loving, forgiving, warm, caring, self-sacrificing...etc..
Unfortunately he's also as dumb as a brick. His conversation is mind-numbing. He has never said anything of intellectual or academic interest to anyone, and never will. Neither is he so dumb that you can find him in any way amusing.. he's just idiotic in a way which gets right up your nose.

Mr Mynde, by contrast, has an absolutely brilliant intellect. He is well read in all areas of inquiry. He is your dream conversationalist; ever intriguing, enlightening, and thought provoking. There is nothing you could ask him which would fail to result in the most fascinating response.
Sadly he is, morally speaking, an absolute nightmare. Without qualm or quandary he would betray you, slander you, present you with barefaced lies. He is utterly selfish and self-serving.
In short, he would do anything within his quite considerable power, to go behind your back and give you the bum's rush.

The question is:

Who would you choose to spend your one-on-one time with? Mr Hart or Mr Mynde?

I recognise that there could be a strong situational influence on your replies.. but that might make the thread more interesting.. so I'm leaving that open.

Happy pondering.
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I never do forced choice items like this since - fortunately - they do not tend to come up in real life and are usually actually forced to get a rigged point of view
 
plumjam said:
Mobyseven, I've been reading some of your posts over yuletide. It seems you must have had a rather incompetent priest.
If you examine it for 20 seconds longer than you've examined religion you'd realise that the point of this hypothetical situation is for you to examine, in your own heart and mind, which human qualities you value as most important (if any)
Keep going though, and thanks for responding. :D
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Seeing as how I was a practising reform Jew for all but the last few couple of years, I'd say priests don't enter into it, and I don't have nearly as much time to spend on this nonsense as I did for my Bar Mitzvah.

Personally, and your body may be different, my heart is a muscular blood pumping organ that gets oxygen to various parts of my body. This includes my brain, which is the organ responsible both for the emotions you associate with 'heart' and for my critical reasoning faculties which you seem to have labelled 'mind'. Not only that but for some reason you have chosen not to make the 'mind' simply unemotional, but actively immoral - which does not logically follow from the initial setup.

The question is nonsense, let's not pretend otherwise.
 
I vote for whatever option screws up plumjam's "gotcha" game.
 
plumjam said:
Mobyseven, I've been reading some of your posts over yuletide. It seems you must have had a rather incompetent priest.
If you examine it for 20 seconds longer than you've examined religion you'd realise that the point of this hypothetical situation is for you to examine, in your own heart and mind, which human qualities you value as most important (if any)
Keep going though, and thanks for responding. :D
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This would be true if stupidity and untrustworthiness were somehow comparable....

You've created a completely loaded hypothetical situation.

Would you rather be on deserted island with someone you can trust completely or with someone you are certain you can't trust.

Since I know I will have to get sleep, and sooner or later I might be the only food source left, I can't choose the person that isn't to be trusted, regardless of all his other qualities.
 
I'd kill and eat them both. I'm quite content with my own company.

ETA: And by "eat" I mean of course "use to chum the fish traps with". Human tastes nasty.
 
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"Perfectly moral?"

Since when is morality objective and subject to a rubric?
 
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You would be the "Mr. Mynde" to the dumb Mr. Hart, so if you picked him, you could abuse him the way you were afeared the real Mynde would do to you.

See? These ethics questions are real easy.
 
Kochanski said:
Why would you eat them when you have a perfectly good corndog?
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The corndog will be my Wilson. And my god. And if the fish run out, perhaps my lover?

[Why would you eat them] since they seem to be cardboard cutouts.
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Fiber.

Beerina said:
You would be the "Mr. Mynde" to the dumb Mr. Hart, so if you picked him, you could abuse him the way you were afeared the real Mynde would do to you.
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If you can figure out how to make a gimp suit out of coconuts you might have something there.
 
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What constitutes being forced to spend one's one on one time? An end of world scenario? A prison cell? Mr. Mynde would be the obvious choice in almost every possible scenario, sionce there would be nobody else for him to betray or slander me to. If there were, then we would not be forced to be alone together, would we? He''s presumed to be intelligent, after all, so unless my existence is contrary to his self interest, we'd manage to get along. Mr Hart might make a better sidekick or henchman, but if he's that dumb, and thoughtlessly honest, it could be more trouble than it's worth. Mr. Hart is the obvious choice if there's any benefit to only one of us surviving, since obviously I'd prefer to be the survivor.

But since neither character actually makes sense as a human being, and the situation under which we'd be cast together is undefined and makes little sense either, I cannot make a meaningful vote.

Ultimately this question is not about which characteristics you value the most, because these characteristics do not generally stand alone without a whole person to contain them. The question implicitly degenerates into the lesser, and essentially uninteresting question of which qualities you would find most useful or least fatal in some hypothetical situation. It's just a human version of what you'd put in your survival kit, or which books you'd take to a desert island.
 
Neither...I'd kill them both and hook up with their sister, Ms. Reality.
 
If Mr Mynde were as intelligent as you make him out to be then he would understand that betraying me is not in his best interests. But seeing as you have forced him to be merely a different sort of moron than the alternative, I choose Planet X.
 
I picked Mr. Hart, only because Mr. Mynde would be a threat to my survival, and Hart wouldn't be. An even slightly more reasonable definition of Mr. Mynde would have led me to select him.

And Pisci, I won't even ask how you know about the taste of humans... maybe you were referring to their taste in art???
 
Tanstaafl said:
I picked Mr. Hart, only because Mr. Mynde would be a threat to my survival, and Hart wouldn't be.
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That would depend on the situation. I can think of a great many scenarios in which a well-meaning idiot would be a greater threat to my survival.
 
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