. . . Ha! YOU'RE GOING DOWN, BEEM0R!

Consciously - a word that my opponent has somehow forgotten. Included in his resolution as an attempt to ward off one of my possible arguments, he now abandons the term when the tables have turned. My opponent first explains that a dead man and a rock both act. Even if this is based on a very shaky definition of the word 'act,' it simply does nt matter. We are not debating whether or not it is possible not to act without self interest, we are debating whether or not it is possible for them not to _consciously_ act. Depending on our definition of consciously, it can mean either willfully or with awareness. A dead man and a rock both possess no will, and no awareness - it is impossible for them to consciously act. In fact, whatever they are doing or not doing, they are necessarily NOT consciously acting, something my opponent claims is impossible. Next, my opponent claims that all actions involve self-interest. To support this claim, my opponent claims that he himself has interest in all of existence. Once again, he has left out a very important qualifier - we are not talking about interest in general, we are talking about SELF-interest, interest in oneself. A nebula swirling does so with no self-interest involved. It is not consciously acting, without self interest being involved - something my opponent claims to be impossible. Further, even if self-interest did include anyone's interest in a thing, my opponent is not qualified to testify in this debate. He has clear motive to lie, and he has given us no reason to believe him, besides the fact that he is claiming it. ==Unrelated matters, the debate my opponent intended My opponent says that consciously acting means willful acting, but the definitions do not bear him out on that. Rather, it means _knowingly_ acting. To be conscious is to be aware, to be able to perceive the world around you. The definition from Merriam-webster that most closely resembles my opponent's definition is: "capable of or marked by thought, will, design, or perception" - the "or" used means that something is conscious if it fulfills just ONE of those traits - in this case, marked by perception. A person bleeding to death is doing so consciously as long as they perceive that they are bleeding to death - in other words, as long as they are knowingly bleeding to death, as long as they are conscious of the fact that they are bleeding to death, they are consciously doing so. But anyway, that is all for R3. Let me recap my counterpoints. 1. My opponent claims that even inanimate objects act, but he does not show that everything _consciously_ acts. Thus, he as not shown that it is impossible not to consciously act period [which would affirm the resolution]. Indeed, I have shown that many things are capable of not consciously acting - combined with #2, this negates the resolution. 2. My opponent claims that self-interest is involved in every instance of acting [using my opponent's shaky definition of 'acting,']. This is incorrect - self-interest means interest in oneself; thus, for a rock's act of 'existing' to involve self-interest, the only entity whose interest would be called 'self-interest' is the rock itself, which is incapable of having interest. Thus, for every object that is incapable of consciousness and incapable of interest, it is true that it is not consciously acting without self-interest, which my opponent claims is impossible. Thus, I negate the resolution by providing examples of such objects - rocks, nebulae, stars, droplets of water, Pringles, chairs, etc.