|
Might be a weird brain worms issue of mine, but I've always thought that reproducing seems wrong/bad in general, either for the children or for yourself. Life is pretty bad in general imo, some of us get lucky but even then the baseline is not great, and the pain and suffering people feel seem to far outweigh the positives. For example, is the best thing that's ever happened in your life worth a disease like cancer or mental illness? If most of life is suffering or if there's more bad then good, then are parents not morally/ethically/logically wrong? From a religious standpoint, I think Buddhism is probably the one that would make the most sense with this view probably? (I'm probably super very wrong about this, but it would be interesting to know about some of the religious views on non-birth) First time making a post on D&D, not sure if this is apropos please don't murder me.
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 19:56
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 28, 2024 01:30 |
|
|
On an individual level, it's as you say: it largely depends on whether you think life is on the balance more good than bad, or vice versa; or if you think life in the future will be better or worse. I'm agnostic on this point. What I would focus on, pragmatically, is what do the animals known as Homo sapiens sapiens actually do. Practically speaking, there's no way to get 100% of all humans to just voluntarily accept to never reproduce or commit suicide. Like all other animals, some number of humans will reproduce, even if many do not. Morally one should focus on what happens to those humans that do get born - ergo, what we should all make efforts to do, what we should all strive for, is to ensure that the humans that are going to come into existence, no matter our personal feelings on reproducing ourselves, will face a better world than the one that we faced in the past. The moral thing is not to pass judgment on those who do or do not reproduce the species, but to act in the best utilitarian interest of all the humans who are already destined to come into existence.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 20:18
|
|
|
The obvious counter-question would be, if reproducing is a clear ethical wrong, is destruction of life a moral good? You postulate that existence, as a net whole taken over the aggregate, has a negative sign affixed to it, so would it not be a blessing to release the masses suffering from their condition? Existence necessarily has pain, sorrow, and other negative feelings associated with it, we cannot escape the laws of physics which dictate, among other things, that we must all die, witness others dying, and feast on the remains of other life forms in order to perpetuate our own existence. It's probably not ideal, that's presumably a part of why some religions contain various after-lives with those unsavory components missing. But if we must pin on the parents all the emotional turmoil of their offspring, shouldn't the same apply to the positives? You argue that as an integral over time most human life winds up with more misery than joy, and maybe that is true, but are the joys not worth experiencing? Even if we posit that all existence is meaningless in the end, since we're destined for various cosmological calamities in the very far future, can meaning not be found in the mundane? If a hypothetical child of someone were to become a passionate violinist, or a chemist, or whatever, who found profound fulfillment in their vocation or hobby, would that out-weigh the fact that they had to suffer heart-break, disappointment? And even if one's child is absolutely, completely mediocre, can they not too experience their own joys, as well as sadnesses? It is true that living as a cognizant being has inherent and painful contradictions to it, especially in a world governed by the laws of nature as we know them, but I'm not convinced it's a moral absolute to declare life itself as inherently wrong to propagate. The corollaries to that are horrifying, and admittedly would serve your point about misery being an over-whelming part of our brief existence.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 20:29
|
|
|
You can take the position that the removal of life is wrong but the failure to create it is not, and in fact you take this position all the time or else you would be constantly procreating all the time. An idea related to this that I particularly enjoy is that it makes sense that you would evolve to believe life is worth living, but the easiest way to achieve that is simply to have a cognitive bias towards minimizing suffering, rather than actually not suffering. So it seems highly likely to me that the day to day existence of life is much worse than we remember it being, so that we constantly experience suffering but we just don't really think about it afterwards, because if we did we would stop living. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 20:34 on Apr 3, 2021 |
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 20:31
|
|
|
My problem is that I think while social issues will slowly get better in the future, things like climate change are going to really gently caress everything up and make life unpleasant. I don't believe humans are going to get a solid handle on actually stopping catastrophic climate change. Deforestation and climate change are going to cause animals which shouldn't live together to live together and make it easier for diseases to spiral out of control. Pandemics are going to become more common. Imagine a disease worse than Covid-19 and how lovely that would be considering what we've had to deal with over the past year. Natural disasters are going to get worse as well, parts of the world are going to become uninhabitable. You get the idea. I worry about dealing with this stuff in the time I have left, let alone someone starting life right now. On the other hand, I've heard people say "my children will be the ones to fix all this" and maybe that's true.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 20:32
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:You can take the position that the removal of life is wrong but the failure to create it is not, and in fact you take this position all the time or else you would be constantly procreating all the time. Sure, but the OP stated that the creation of life is (a moral) wrong because life is, on average, terrible, so it's not a stretch to imagine that releasing beings from that misery would be a moral good. I'm not saying that was their argument, I'm just exploring the logic of the thought experiment.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 20:33
|
|
|
Rappaport posted:Sure, but the OP stated that the creation of life is (a moral) wrong because life is, on average, terrible, so it's not a stretch to imagine that releasing beings from that misery would be a moral good. I'm not saying that was their argument, I'm just exploring the logic of the thought experiment. You can also take the position that killing people doesn't really put much of a dent in life on aggregate. It stops a specific life but it doesn't stop people from making more of it, and taking any particular life increases the suffering of the surrounding lives because most people exist in a network of attachments and when those break people get unhappy. So it is also entirely possible to think that if you could snap your fingers and switch every human off that would be good, but that just killing people normally is bad.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 20:36
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:You can also take the position that killing people doesn't really put much of a dent in life on aggregate. It stops a specific life but it doesn't stop people from making more of it, and taking any particular life increases the suffering of the surrounding lives because most people exist in a network of attachments and when those break people get unhappy. That's true, generally speaking genocides are awful business, as I think I alluded to earlier. Even a "Thanos snap" event would have horrifying emotional, ecological etc. consequences, no matter how "peacefully" the thing happens. And it's less emotionally harrowing to just not have kids. But either way, the question seems to boil down to whether existence in general is "good" or not, are parents inflicting a horrible thing upon their children? Technically, most people have a way out of this Hell that is human existence, but that again has compounding effects as you point out, and it's not a satisfying answer to the OP's question. I'm trying to picture the alternative, least-painful option here. A global movement of non-reproduction? Humanity would cease to breed out of a sense of altruism, and we would die out as a species because the Cosmos just plain sucks? I'm not sure you'd get wide-spread support for that, though admittedly that's not a statement on the moral validity of the position.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 20:42
|
|
|
Another question to consider is: Is human life wrong? Or is life for all creatures worse than non-life? Why or why not? Should human beings specifically not exist, or is conscious life existing at all inherently worse just because conscious living beings can experience negative stimuli? You can easily take these arguments to the extent and conclude that life at all shouldn't exist.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 20:47
|
|
|
Most people are generally happy or atleast content most of the time. There is some work to be done here - a billionaire isn't much happier than a millionaire, and a millionaire isn't much happier than a middle-class person who has their needs met and a meaningful job/purpose, but that last person does seem to be considerably happier than someone living in poverty and doesn't have their needs met. But even they typically choose life over oblivion, even if they have cancer or mental illnesss, because life is precious, and death is not. Considering this, we need to keep working to adopt aspects of socialism and reduce class stratification worldwide in order to raise the average wellbeing. We've come quite far already though, and the hard work of thousands of generations of humans who have come before us and progressively improved the world, which would be wasted if we don't continue their work until all needless suffering is eliminated, not just for you and your family, not just for humans, but for all our sapient brothers and sisters  I don't really think reproducing has either a positive or negative ethical value. The limited resource argument is not particularly compelling to me, and even if the climate doomers are right, what's there to be afraid of? We may not consent to being born, but staying alive is fully voluntary (barring a few hosed up exceptions like Tony Nicklinson) What's actually troubling you, that makes you feel like your life is largely a negative thing? Mata fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Apr 3, 2021 |
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 20:52
|
|
|
Rappaport posted:That's true, generally speaking genocides are awful business, as I think I alluded to earlier. Even a "Thanos snap" event would have horrifying emotional, ecological etc. consequences, no matter how "peacefully" the thing happens. And it's less emotionally harrowing to just not have kids. But either way, the question seems to boil down to whether existence in general is "good" or not, are parents inflicting a horrible thing upon their children? Technically, most people have a way out of this Hell that is human existence, but that again has compounding effects as you point out, and it's not a satisfying answer to the OP's question. If you instantly just zapped everyone out of existence there would be nobody to experience harm from that because we would all be dead. That's the point. It would certainly cause a major ecological disruption but so does human civilization. The VHEMT is a thing, though obviously yes it has no major support because if we, as a species, were easily capable of belieiving that we should not exist, then we already wouldn't. Life does not select for a deliberate extinction drive, it is literally the thing it selects against under all circumstances in a very dumb sort of way. DrSunshine posted:Another question to consider is: Is human life wrong? Or is life for all creatures worse than non-life? Why or why not? It seems reasonable to imagine that the same evolutionary pressures that cause humans to reproduce regardless of whether we actually enjoy the result would also apply to other forms of life. People like to imagine that nature is some sort of beautiful state but mostly it appears to consist of things killing each other and/or starving to death because populations trend towards the point where all the members have just barely enough to live on. Reproduction is sort of fire and forget, it feels good to do it and we have built in drives to make us want to do it, but they are clearly tuned to make us want to simply create as much life as possible without any thought to the quality of experience of that life, it takes the application of reason or environmental factors to limit that, and animals don't seem to have that capability. Of course we can't know other minds but I think a lot of the idea that nature is good is more to do with the fact that we are wired to have positive associations with its shapes and much of our image of it is curated, we see more pictures of stags standing at serene lakesides than we do pictures of animals starving to death due to catching a disease and then being eaten alive by scavengers. The idea that life is good seems, broadly, to be just assumed, but I would struggle to actually construct it from first principles. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Apr 3, 2021 |
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 20:56
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:If you instantly just zapped everyone out of existence there would be nobody to experience harm from that because we would all be dead. That's the point. It would certainly cause a major ecological disruption but so does human civilization. That's part of the tragedy that the OP is describing, we exist in a world where inter faeces et urinam nascimur, and yet it seems desirable because of our hard-wiring. As sentient beings, it's not our fault that certain molecules wish to propagate themselves, and we are but their agents, and the underlying question here is whether our passing through the cosmos is a net negative, for us, or not? OwlFancier posted:It seems reasonable to imagine that the same evolutionary pressures that cause humans to reproduce regardless of whether we actually enjoy the result would also apply to other forms of life. People like to imagine that nature is some sort of beautiful state but mostly it appears to consist of things killing each other and/or starving to death because populations trend towards the point where all the members have just barely enough to live on. I wouldn't think there's any first principle that says life is good, or meaningful. But, as the Yanks would say, the poo poo has already hit the fan, and we are here, and have to deal with the consequences. Human existence contains many profound, awful sadnesses, miseries, pains, diseases, deaths. It also contains the inverse, joys and merriment with family, with friends, with lovers. The OP's question seems to posit that, taken over time, the former over-takes the latter, and hence existence as we know it is a misery that should be extinguished, or at the least not propagated. Is that so? After all, we don't have the Thanos glove to un-do all of humanity in a snap, so the recourses seem lacking. Unless, as you say, we consider making the passage of this burden more bearable within this mortal coil, with socialism and generally trying to make sure no one has to wind up a sex slave. If we assume that people will want to keep breeding, on the whole, then it seems slightly more useful to focus on making existing lives better than trying to extinguish potential new ones. But I concede that's not very philosophically fulfilling, yet life is misery anyway, so there we go?
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 21:06
|
|
|
The two positions are not at odds, you can believe that life is bad and creating more of it is bad, and that it is entirely probable that it is beyond human capability to make it not bad on aggregate. But that at the same time it is also outside your, and possibly human, capability to end it decisively, so you are left with damage mitigation. But the latter does not negate the former, you can believe that improving conditions for living people is better than not doing so, while also telling anybody who will listen to please for the love of god stop making more people you're just creating more minds to suffer for absolutely no good reason.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 21:10
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:The two positions are not at odds, you can believe that life is bad and creating more of it is bad, and that it is entirely probable that it is beyond human capability to make it not bad on aggregate. But that at the same time it is also outside your, and possibly human, capability to end it decisively, so you are left with damage mitigation. Right, it's a life-raft situation, "we're all already here and we're drowning, keep the rest out", where "the rest" are unborn children. This seems sort of like the Arthur Clarke novel about how humanity ends, or moves on, in Childhood's End, though in that one it's presented as coming from the outside and a tragedy of sorts.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 21:14
|
|
|
Rappaport posted:That's part of the tragedy that the OP is describing, we exist in a world where inter faeces et urinam nascimur, and yet it seems desirable because of our hard-wiring. As sentient beings, it's not our fault that certain molecules wish to propagate themselves, and we are but their agents, and the underlying question here is whether our passing through the cosmos is a net negative, for us, or not? To hone specifically on this, imagine a thought experiment. Imagine you live in a prison, every weekday I wake you up and torture you, which is horrible for you, but on the weekend I give you drug that wipes your memory of the weekdays, so on saturday you wake up and you feel fine. When you think back on your life, all you really remember are a series of weekends where everything seemed more or less alright. If I ask you how you feel about your life, you would probably say you feel pretty good. But the thing is, 5/7ths of your life is unbearable torture, just because you don't remember that doesn't mean that you don't experience it. If you had the ability to accurately perceive your life, would you say the same thing about it, do you think? The experience is not undone by your lack of ability to recall it to memory. Now obviously this is an extreme example but it is sort of what I am getting at with the idea of a cognitive bias towards positive experiences. Of course when we look at our lives we think they are more good than bad, because the state of not doing that is called "being suicidal" and we have a whole bunch of mechanisms in society and in our collective idea space for rejecting that outlook. But just because we are capable of maintaining a positive outlook does not mean that our experiences are actually positive, on the whole, it could as easily mean that we have a well developed and evolutionarily advantageous cognitive bias towards existing. And there isn't really a way to know for sure which it is. You can't analyse the integrity of your memory with the same brain that stores it. But personally I find it difficult to trust that I do not have any such bias that helps to minimize all the unpleasantness in my life, and that I actually do have an accurate memory of how good my life is or isn't. Especially as I am entirely aware that that overall perspective changes drastically from day to day depending on how I am feeling. It might be tempting to imagine that how I feel when I am in a good mood is the "accurate" self assessment, but I don't think there is any good evidence to support it.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 21:21
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:To hone specifically on this, imagine a thought experiment. I hope I'm not the one upholding Omelas, but if we turn this thought experiment on its head, isn't it an anti-thesis to the OP's question of whether life is necessarily needless agony? In your hypothetical I have no recollection of the torture, so life seems okay to me. If we take this thought experiment on a wider scale, if we're wired to think life is good (this might need some sourcing other than fiction novels!), and we experience life that way, is the end result in aggregate bad? In other words, does it matter what the "objectively honest" view of life is, if I'm living in an Aldous Huxley dystopia without realizing it? So long as life seems fine, well, isn't it? If Kodos and that other green guy from the Simpsons are looking at me being tortured and forgetting it the next day, does it matter that they laugh, since I'm not actually meaningfully experiencing the torture other than in the moment? I get what you're saying, but the obvious counter is that we as thinking/counting machines can only act upon information we (believe to) possess, and any negation of memory makes those experiences not genuinely exist. Other than the physical trauma from the torture, but I'm assuming in your thought experiment the torturer is cleverer than the dude from Game of Thrones.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 21:28
|
|
|
I don't think that not remembering an experience makes it not have happened... It still happened, you still experienced it, and the experience was still good or bad. You will go on to have experiences tomorrow that will be good or bad regardless of how you subsequently remember them. I don't think you accept that either because otherwise when someone dies it doesn't matter how bad their life was because they are now dead and it didn't happen.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 21:31
|
|
|
Having reproduced I definitely feel like I now owe my kids an apology but outside of it becoming necessary to ‘kill all humans’ I don’t think the category of reproduction can be amoral. Reproduction is part of the definition of life. Any specific scenario might be moral or not but the idea in general is a necessity.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 21:35
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:I don't think that not remembering an experience makes it not have happened... It still happened, you still experienced it, and the experience was still good or bad. You will go on to have experiences tomorrow that will be good or bad regardless of how you subsequently remember them. You specifically argued that a thinking being's perception of their existence may be / is skewed due to their inherent biases and thinking processes. I'm not a doctor of psychology, but I think it's a thing that people block out extremely bad experiences sometimes? That doesn't mean the bad things didn't happen, but it keeps their thinking parts from, well, thinking about them too much. If the argument is that we can only experience what our limited machinery allows us to experience, then the role of memory is paramount. I've taken hundreds of exams as a student, and probably fretted about them at the time, but I couldn't tell you this day a single thing that was asked of me. Was I tortured then? Does it matter today? A person's whole sum of experiences does extinguish upon their death, that is the sole mercy we have in this life. Without that, the world would be awash in screaming agony. Yet, to bring this back to children, many mothers do not mostly recall the pain of childbirth, but other parts of their children's childhood.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 21:37
|
|
|
Rappaport posted:You specifically argued that a thinking being's perception of their existence may be / is skewed due to their inherent biases and thinking processes. I'm not a doctor of psychology, but I think it's a thing that people block out extremely bad experiences sometimes? That doesn't mean the bad things didn't happen, but it keeps their thinking parts from, well, thinking about them too much. That's exactly my point, though. You are literally just describing a cognitive bias against remembering traumatic events and then saying "this is actually the only thing that matters" Yes, if you spent your childhood agonizing about exams and hating it and being anxious, then yes you were loving robbed of a childhood! That is bad, you had bad experiences, and that presumably means that we are bringing more people into the world and putting them through similar horrible experiences and then going "ah well you will be dead one day so it doesn't matter" like what the gently caress that is incredibly hosed up?? That's incredibly relevant to the OP's question, you're talking about a world that brings people into existence to suffer and then says it's fine because they don't remember it afterwards, but that is not the same as not suffering. It is not "without that the world would be awash in screaming agony" but rather that if that is happening then it is awash in screaming agony and will continue to be because everyone just goes "eh it doesn't matter if I don't remember it. The lack of memory afterwards has no bearing on what the experience is, what is being experienced around you constantly this very minute. Experiences are real regardless of whether they are remembered. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:45 on Apr 3, 2021 |
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 21:42
|
|
|
No I do not.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 21:43
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:That's exactly my point, though. You are literally just describing a cognitive bias against remembering traumatic events and then saying "this is actually the only thing that matters" Right, but if the suffering ends up not mattering (let's assume for the sake of this thread that I'm not suffering currently for my undergraduate exams), then is life on the aggregate suffering? That is to say, if there are self-correcting measures wired into a thinking being to focus on the good rather than the bad, doesn't that undermind the thesis of the OP? Kados and that other green dude from the Simpsons will know we all suffer horrifically as they watch us on their space alien teevee, but if the beings living do not experience that suffering in the long term, is existence suffering? "Objectively", from the POV of the space aliens, sure, but the question posited by the OP is whether or not a parent is amoral for placing a child in this world. If the child is somewhat inoculated to seeing the also posited net negative integral of human existence, is there an existential harm being committed? Obviously someone who has their bones broken on a daily basis will have a horrible, awful life and no one should experience that, even if they forget. But the general Western experience of life isn't an episode of SVU. No one (outside of fringe cases) is bringing people into the world to suffer, but we also cannot avoid the fact that pretty much everyone suffers at some point or another in their lives. Is that cause enough for declaring life morally abhorrent? I'm not convinced, the OP is.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 21:49
|
|
|
Rappaport posted:Right, but if the suffering ends up not mattering (let's assume for the sake of this thread that I'm not suffering currently for my undergraduate exams), then is life on the aggregate suffering? Rappaport posted:That is to say, if there are self-correcting measures wired into a thinking being to focus on the good rather than the bad, doesn't that undermind the thesis of the OP? No, not even remotely? They were still experienced, the suffering was real, it was realer than your memory is. If I torture and kill somebody and nobody finds out about it, that was still wrong, I still caused someone to suffer, that suffering was still real for heaven's sake, the idea that things aren't real if you don't remember them is absolutely insane. Rappaport posted:Kados and that other green dude from the Simpsons will know we all suffer horrifically as they watch us on their space alien teevee, but if the beings living do not experience that suffering in the long term, is existence suffering? "Objectively", from the POV of the space aliens, sure, but the question posited by the OP is whether or not a parent is amoral for placing a child in this world. If the child is somewhat inoculated to seeing the also posited net negative integral of human existence, is there an existential harm being committed? You do experience it in the long term If the sum of your life is a bunch of painful experiences then regardless of whether you are able to conceive of the full breadth of the pain of your life at any given moment your life is still made of painful experiences. Each experiential moment of that pain is real and you experienced it and will experience it in the future, to say "well yes but if I don't remember it or think about the possibility of it happening tomorrow at the moment then it isn't real" is absolutely insane to me, completely mad. Rappaport posted:Obviously someone who has their bones broken on a daily basis will have a horrible, awful life and no one should experience that, even if they forget. But the general Western experience of life isn't an episode of SVU. Why you intend to create life is irrelevant, if you bring someone into the world and they suffer that is what happens to them, whatever the intent might have been the reality is that they have been brought into existence to experience suffering.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 21:57
|
|
|
Reproducing is morally neutral because the theoretical child probably won't grow up to ask this question
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 21:57
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:You do experience it in the long term If the sum of your life is a bunch of painful experiences then regardless of whether you are able to conceive of the full breadth of the pain of your life at any given moment your life is still made of painful experiences. Each experiential moment of that pain is real and you experienced it and will experience it in the future, to say "well yes but if I don't remember it or think about the possibility of it happening tomorrow at the moment then it isn't real" is absolutely insane to me, completely mad. Friend, I am only responding to your own thought experiment. You stated, and I quote, quote:every weekday I wake you up and torture you, which is horrible for you, but on the weekend I give you drug that wipes your memory of the weekdays, so on saturday you wake up and you feel fine. You are now contradicting your own experiment by stating that there will be long-term consequences when previously you stated there were none. I obviously agree that if someone is born into a life of abject misery, that is horrendous, but you are quite deliberately moving the goal posts here to posit that life, as a rule, is horrendous, and that isn't a shared experience. You already provided "my side" with a back-door with the "not remembering" part, only now to insist that even if it has no bearing on someone on Saturdays, their existence of pure misery outside Saturday must dominate their thinking life, when in your original thought experiment you insisted it would do no such thing. 
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 22:02
|
|
|
Rappaport posted:You are now contradicting your own experiment by stating that there will be long-term consequences when previously you stated there were none. I obviously agree that if someone is born into a life of abject misery, that is horrendous, but you are quite deliberately moving the goal posts here to posit that life, as a rule, is horrendous, and that isn't a shared experience. You already provided "my side" with a back-door with the "not remembering" part, only now to insist that even if it has no bearing on someone on Saturdays, their existence of pure misery outside Saturday must dominate their thinking life, when in your original thought experiment you insisted it would do no such thing. Are you capable of understanding that what they think on saturday and sunday is not what they think the other five days of the week and that the other five days are not somehow made unreal by the existence of the first two...
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 22:05
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:Are you capable of understanding that what they think on saturday and sunday is not what they think the other five days of the week and that the other five days are not somehow made unreal by the existence of the first two... I am, but in your original thought experiment it was stated that by Saturday the previous days would not matter. If I cannot recall something, or if there isn't a physical injury to deal with, as far as my thinking mechanism is concerned, it did not really happen. That was your original point, wasn't it, that we're flawed observers? If the question posited is "is life misery in general", it seems like a counter-point to point at memory being flawed in the reverse direction, and then taking umbrage when it's pointed out that life is an experience of the mind, not what is an "objective time-line".
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 22:08
|
|
|
It's probably fine op. Turning reproduction into a moral judgement is lame though, that might be morally wrong.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 22:14
|
|
|
Rappaport posted:I am, but in your original thought experiment it was stated that by Saturday the previous days would not matter. If I cannot recall something, or if there isn't a physical injury to deal with, as far as my thinking mechanism is concerned, it did not really happen. That was your original point, wasn't it, that we're flawed observers? If the question posited is "is life misery in general", it seems like a counter-point to point at memory being flawed in the reverse direction, and then taking umbrage when it's pointed out that life is an experience of the mind, not what is an "objective time-line". It doesn't matter to you at the time you are thinking. But the point is to illustrate that you are perfectly capable of thinking that but being, to the perspective of your actual experience, and critically your subjective experience most of the time, completely wrong. It is intended to illustrate that just because you think life is good does not mean that it is. It is intended to suggest that the error is in your ability to accurately perceive the nature of your life, I did not expect somebody to instead say that the error was in reality because it does not conform to your ideas because that seemed patently insane.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 22:17
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:It doesn't matter to you at the time you are thinking. But the point is to illustrate that you are perfectly capable of thinking that but being, to the perspective of your actual experience, and critically your subjective experience most of the time, completely wrong. I'm not arguing that the error is with reality, it is what it is. But if sapient life, slash human life, "self-corrects" as per your thought experiment to simply negate experiences that are dreadful, then doesn't that mean existence is better on the whole for those living? Again, the original question was about how miserable life is, and if "life" seems to negate, as per the thought experiment, negative experiences, can we proclaim it truly bad? In your torture thought experiment, if you happened to release me on a Saturday, I wouldn't think worse of you, even if horrifying things had transpired, since I had no experience of them, and no agency with which to engage them. That was the purpose of the experiment, wasn't it? To show that there is a potential infinite well of misery, and therefore (presumably) the OP is correct and all life is awful?
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 22:22
|
|
|
To illustrate that I think it is likely that our lives are worse day to day than we perceive them to be because we have a variety of social and psychological mechanisms designed to prevent us from thinking that our lives are bad regardless of whether they are. But I have no idea why you think this somehow makes things not bad. Again unless you are arguing that not remembering things clearly makes them not happen which is ludicrous.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 22:25
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:To illustrate that I think it is likely that our lives are worse day to day than we perceive them to be because we have a variety of social and psychological mechanisms designed to prevent us from thinking that our lives are bad regardless of whether they are. The OP questioned whether existence as a whole is a net negative. If there are psychological mechanisms akin to your torture thought experiment, it would appear that life is less bad than it "actually is", since we as cognizant beings only recognize parts of it. You insist on discussing about how "bad" it is outside experienced reality, which seems a bit baffling and counter to what the OP was asking.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 22:29
|
|
|
Oh my god no it isn't, it is saying that you, right now, are not necessarily capable of understanding the totality of the experience of you, yesterday, you, a year ago, and you, tomorrow, and that you, right now, asserting that life is good, is more likely to be a reflection of your inability to comprehend the totality of your experience than it is to be a result of an accurate understanding of your experience...
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 22:45
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:Oh my god no it isn't, it is saying that you, right now, are not necessarily capable of understanding the totality of the experience of you, yesterday, you, a year ago, and you, tomorrow, and that you, right now, asserting that life is good, is more likely to be a reflection of your inability to comprehend the totality of your experience than it is to be a result of an accurate understanding of your experience... Right, but as a being experiencing existence, what else is there but my flawed understanding of existence? The OP's question is, whether or not life is unbearable due to misery, suffering, and so forth. If actual lived experience mitigates that, as per your example, then that is a point against the OP's original point.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 22:47
|
|
|
Rappaport posted:Right, but as a being experiencing existence, what else is there but my flawed understanding of existence? The OP's question is, whether or not life is unbearable due to misery, suffering, and so forth. If actual lived experience mitigates that, as per your example, then that is a point against the OP's original point. The actual experience you undergo over the course of your life. Not your lovely after the fact recollection or apprehension of it... Christ alive I thought I was a solipsist.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 22:49
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:The actual experience you undergo over the course of your life. Not your lovely after the fact recollection or apprehension of it... Look, I've said this a few times now, it was you, not I, who placed constraints on what a living being could experience, in your thought experiment. It's not my fault your thought experiment may not have reflected what you originally wished, or how the world works on account of accumulative psychological stress and all, but getting upset at me about it doesn't really help anything.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 22:51
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:To illustrate that I think it is likely that our lives are worse day to day than we perceive them to be because we have a variety of social and psychological mechanisms designed to prevent us from thinking that our lives are bad regardless of whether they are.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 23:00
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:The actual experience you undergo over the course of your life. Not your lovely after the fact recollection or apprehension of it... What’s so special about the actual event? I mean the theoretical torture sucked for whatever entity experienced but if I don’t have that experience... not sure why I care beyond caring that people should never be tortured in general.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 23:03
|
|
|
Bel Shazar posted:What’s so special about the actual event? I mean the theoretical torture sucked for whatever entity experienced but if I don’t have that experience... not sure why I care beyond caring that people should never be tortured in general. Because the entire point of the OP's question necessitates that you care what happens to other people, i.e your children. If you do not care what happens to other people at all then the question is entirely moot to begin with, as indeed is the entire concept of "morality" for the most part.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 23:06
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 28, 2024 01:30 |
|
|
OwlFancier posted:Because the entire point of the OP's question necessitates that you care what happens to other people, i.e your children. If you do not care what happens to other people at all then the question is entirely moot to begin with. And what happens to them, meaningfully, is at the crux of the question. If I'm living in Dan Simmons's Hyperion where every time I go take a poop my mind is used by AI's outside my comprehension, but I have no recollection of that, sure it's bad, but as a person living in that reality, I can't know that happens by definition, so it can't calculate into my siring offspring or not. The premise here is that existence as a human is an unbearably cruel punishment that shouldn't be meted out on anyone, and it doesn't seem to pass muster, even in your torture thought experiment.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2021 23:09
|
|