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Or perhaps there is a pessimistic bias and your mind is actually causing you to believe you're more miserable than you think you are because avoiding negative stimuli is how you survive and adapt as an organism, and your mind makes you believe you're suffering more than you actually are to goad you into taking actions that enhance your prospects for survival. Perhaps humanity is a perpetual engine of happiness and satisfaction, and life is full of ups and down but is overall a pleasing and worthwhile experience that should be treasured during it's brief duration. Perhaps the tendency for internet dwelling misanthropes to believe otherwise is the real pathology.
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Mar 31, 2017 21:32
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| # ¿ May 5, 2024 20:55 |
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If happiness is actually possible and in fact achievable for most humans then the private miseries of the average goon would be robbed of their significance. I wonder if people like OwlFancier recognize the self-flattery they are engaging in when they insist that life is constitutionally miserable for everyone and that they just happen to be part of the select few who are sharp-eyed enough to recognize it.
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Mar 31, 2017 22:08
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TomViolence posted:This isn't just a matter for miserable, self-centred goons. Check this out. Utilitarianism is a superficial form of moral philosophy and besides, anyone who tries to argue that life isn't worth living through a syllogism is an honourary goon in my estimation. Happiness and suffering are not discrete objects that can be reliably abstracted from the moments in which they are experienced, laid against each other along some common scale and then weighed to see which occurs with greater frequency or intensity.
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Mar 31, 2017 22:39
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twodot posted:If I offer a choice between "Nothing happens", "I will give you $1 and you will stub your toe", "I will give you $1.75 and you will stub your toe twice", are you able to choose between those? If you can choose between them how did you do it without making a determination on the relative value of toe-stubbing against dollars? "Superficial" doesn't mean literally useless it just means that it only glances upon the surface of things and breaks down once you try to move beyond relatively simple problems. My ability to anticipate physical discomfort in the immediate future doesn't have much bearing on the kind of question the OP wants to investigate.
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Mar 31, 2017 23:01
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OwlFancier posted:Utilitarianism being difficult to apply to hard-to-quantify questions doesn't legitimize stupider ethical systems' attempts at doing so. It's not difficult so much as it's literally impossible and the true stupidity here is to mistake the words that we provisionally use to refer to our irreducible mental or emotional states for the things they describe. Just because you can invent a word called "utility" doesn't mean it actually measures anything meaningful or that it represents a common standard for human flourishing that can be abstracted away from individual experience and compared in a meaningful way.
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Mar 31, 2017 23:12
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twodot posted:Why not? I get that predicting the future is hard, but I don't see an alternative besides killing yourself or making purely random choices. A process sometimes being wrong doesn't mean it's not the best process. Because once you move beyond relatively trivial examples you run into the inescapable fact that you're relying on words that don't precisely correspond to any specific and discrete object within the human mind. The idea that all forms of happiness in all human beings can be reliably reported on, let alone subjected to some universal scale, is patently silly. The real nature of our minds is mysterious to us and while we can certainly navigate our day to day lives through anticipations of how our actions will make us feel in the short term there's no reason to expect that this same capacity would scale up to a grand question like whether life is worth living. quote:edit: Nobody is denying that you can do this, there's just no reason to think your conclusion will be accurate once you move past very simple thought experiments and toward grandly existential ones.
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Mar 31, 2017 23:37
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Mulva stop being a weirdo. OwlFancier posted:The issue with that line of thinking is that it makes all ethics meaningless because everyone is going to die. Unfortunately you're rejecting the one insight that sounds like it might help you make peace with yourself and your brief time on earth.
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Mar 31, 2017 23:59
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| # ¿ May 5, 2024 20:55 |
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That's not nihilism. What you currently believe is essentially nihilism but with a thin veil of self aggrandizement on top of it.
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Apr 1, 2017 00:03
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