OwlFancier posted:

I don't think there is any extra value in a hundred happy, existing people than in five happy, existing people, as long as in neither case there are any unhappy existing people.

Or, for that matter, and this is important, any existing people at all over no existing people at all.

quote:

That assumes there is some special value in life existing, which again I do not think there is. Once life does exist I would prefer it to exist in a manner it is happy with, but there is no obligation to make it exist. That is just something you believe apparently axiomatically.

OwlFancier posted:

Life only values existence if it exists if it doesn't exist then it doesn't care because there isn't anything to care.

If life didn't exist then then it wouldn't matter because there would be nothing around to have the concept of mattering.

That's like, the null hypothesis or whatever. It's up to you to prove there is some objective value to the contrary.

OwlFancier posted:

Life only values existence if it exists if it doesn't exist then it doesn't care because there isn't anything to care.

OwlFancier posted:

That assumes there is some special value in life existing, which again I do not think there is.

DrSunshine posted:

That doesn't disagree with me at all. Of course this is tautologically true. But life does exist, and most living things do care about continuing to exist, and care very much about propagating themselves and avoiding pain. Even if all we care about is "allowing life in the universe to continue to exist", by its very nature, we are compelled by the self-replicating nature of life to accept that its number will continue to increase over time. And if we care about "allowing life in the universe to continue to exist" then we are compelled to act to sustain it as long as possible.

DrSunshine posted:

That doesn't disagree with me at all. Of course this is tautologically true. But life does exist, and most living things do care about continuing to exist, and care very much about propagating themselves and avoiding pain. Even if all we care about is "allowing life in the universe to continue to exist", by its very nature, we are compelled by the self-replicating nature of life to accept that its number will continue to increase over time. And if we care about "allowing life in the universe to continue to exist" then we are compelled to act to sustain it as long as possible.

I think you're misunderstanding me. You seem to think that I think that there's some kind of objective "elsewhere-thing" that values life existing above it not existing (like God or something). I do not.

DeeplyConcerned posted:

Strawberry Pyramid posted:

When you think about it, abstaining from childrearing is the only real form of rebellion against capitalism we truly have: breaking the chain of Number Go Up by not willingly adding another person to the great meat grinder.

Witness all the breathless thinkpieces fretting about the replacement rate across the political spectrum.

Strawberry Pyramid posted:

When you think about it, abstaining from childrearing is the only real form of rebellion against capitalism we truly have: breaking the chain of Number Go Up by not willingly adding another person to the great meat grinder.

Witness all the breathless thinkpieces fretting about the replacement rate across the political spectrum.

DeeplyConcerned posted:

I thought I’d give my own take because it’s idiosyncratic.

I thought about this quite a bit because I tend to go back-and-forth. Let’s just say I place a value on having kids at or about zero so it’s neither a net negative or positive for me personally.

The question then turns to what about the effect on everyone else including the hypothetical child. My main concern is that I have some aggression which is genetic. I enjoy the hell out of my life but I know it’s there and it’s obviously a source of potential problems. I’ve never did down to genetic factors in combination with environmental stuff but I know the genetic load is there. So my child could be fine or more or less violent than me or conflicted. I cant know in advance because of the stochastic nature of genetics.. I’m not very violent but I can be.

Taking all this together I decided for myself: probably no. My main concern is having a child that’s more violent than me or conflicted and getting them to a situation where they can’t solve it. Then they ask me why they were created when I knew this could’ve happened and could’ve prevented it. Basically I don’t wanna be put in the position where I’m having to tell the kid yeah I knew your life could be hosed up because this but I decided hey what the hell it might be great. To put myself in the kids situation I would look like kind of an idiot for not anticipating the harm that could’ve caused and foregoing.

Basically my nightmare situation is a kid that says dad I feel like I have to kill a bunch of people I can’t kill myself and I know it’s hosed up but do it anyway. Then I would say well son you know I had an inkling that this might happen but gosh I just hoped to the stars that we’d be lucky enough to avoid it but here we are. Essentially I have an egotistical concern not to look like an idiot in that situation.

I know this is an unusual take but I felt it might help illustrate how this is a very three-dimensional moral problem here where intersecting with a person‘s perspective and experience gives you wildly different results to the moral question. I guess I see it as less a question of suffering and more a question of taking personal responsibility for the risk you take. I don’t reproduce for the same reason I don’t keep highly enriched uranium locked up in my carport shed with a zip tie. I sort of take the equation apart from suffering because I can’t estimate the true value of suffering for different situations but I can estimate risk.

Even if I get lucky on the genetic side and my kids normal what if I don’t love them? Creating a sensitive sentient life form that goes I love you daddy and then just....not feeling anything in return. I can’t imagine how devastating that would be.

some plague rats posted:

I didn't think we'd advance beyond the guy who got his mind blown by the Avengers movies but "what if my kid does a columbine and it reflects badly on me as a parent???" is an incredible twist

Puppy Galaxy posted:

Your greatest fear is not that you have a kid who kills a bunch of people, but that you have a kid who kills a bunch of people and you look like an idiot?

DeeplyConcerned posted:

No I would say it’s the same fear basically.

Puppy Galaxy posted:

Your greatest fear is not that you have a kid who kills a bunch of people, but that you have a kid who kills a bunch of people and you look like an idiot?

Owlspiracy posted:

also related, why do you think propensity to commit violence is a heritable trait.

quote:

By definition, people with antisocial personality disorder don't follow society's norms, are deceitful and intimidating in relationships, and are inconsiderate of the rights of others. People with this type of personality may take part in criminal activity. But if they do, they are not sorry for their hurtful deeds. They can be impulsive, reckless and sometimes violent. This disorder is far more common and more apparent in men than women.

quote:

Genetic (inherited) or biological factors. Antisocial personality traits do appear to be highly heritable.

quote:

All three traits of the dark triad have been found to have substantial genetic components.[27] It has also been found that the observed relationships among the dark triad, and among the dark triad and the Big Five, are strongly driven by individual differences in genes.[22] However, while psychopathy (h2 = 0.64) and narcissism (h2 = 0.59) both have a relatively large heritable component, Machiavellianism (h2 = 0.31) while also moderately influenced by genetics, has been found to be less heritable than the other two traits.[22][23]

Owlspiracy posted:

'i don't think anyone should have kids because humanity as a whole is a net negative on the rest of the world so perpetuating the existence of humanity is perpetuating that negative'

Puppy Galaxy posted:

I thought a dark triad was a threesome with two guys and one girl?

Puppy Galaxy posted:

I thought a dark triad was a threesome with two guys and one girl?

OwlFancier posted:

Because we are proposing creating more lives, and I think perhaps creating lives that might reasonably want to die but which are also terrified of dying, seems bad!

That sort of thing is also why I suspect there is a cognitive bias towards existing, your instinctive mind doesn't care about the quality of your life, it just screams at you not to die, which is quite consistent with an evolution that does not select for quality of life, only quantity.

quote:

The ability to anticipate is a hallmark of cognition. Inferences about what will occur in the future are critical to decision making, enabling us to prepare our actions so as to avoid harm and gain reward. Given the importance of these future projections, one might expect the brain to possess accurate, unbiased foresight. Humans, however, exhibit a pervasive and surprising bias: when it comes to predicting what will happen to us tomorrow, next week, or fifty years from now, we overestimate the likelihood of positive events, and underestimate the likelihood of negative events. For example, we underrate our chances of getting divorced, being in a car accident, or suffering from cancer. We also expect to live longer than objective measures would warrant, overestimate our success in the job market, and believe that our children will be especially talented. This phenomenon is known as the optimism bias, and it is one of the most consistent, prevalent, and robust biases documented in psychology and behavioral economics.

quote:

It is at this point that the biological side to Schopenhauer's argument becomes relevant. From the biological point of view, Schopenhauer reminds us, the human brain is simply "the one great tool" (WR II p .280) by means of which a relatively weak and defenceless animal has managed to survive in a competitive environment (ibid., d. WN pp.272-3, WR II pp. 204-6).What follows from this is that at least the everyday representation of the world generated by the human brain will be one that is calculated to promote survival rather than truth: the intellect, says Schopenhauer, is "thoroughly practical in tendency", a "medium of motives" designed for comprehending those ends on the attainment of which depends individual life and its propagation" but ''by no means intended to present the true absolutely real inner nature of these things in the consciousness of the knower" (WR IIpp .284-6).

But surely, it might be said, comprehending the "true nature" of things is the way to survive. Creatures who habitually get things wrong about the character of their environment have, in W.V. Quine's words, a pathetic but praiseworthy habit of dying out before reproducing their kind. Truth is a survival-promoting attribute.

Initially, at least, Schopenhauer's point seems to be the denial, not that truth is survival-promoting, but that all of it is. In practical life, he points out (d. also Chapter VII § 2), consciousness is schematised, etiolated. To the traveller in a hurry, for example, a bridge over the Rhine appears as little more than a dash intersecting with a stroke (WR II p.381). We tend, he continues, to categorise objects in terms of roles determined by human needs and purposes and hence notice only as much of their intrinsic character as is necessary to fitting them into those categories. The chess-player, for example, does not have the time to see in the chess-piece anything save what is necessary to knowing its role in the game (PP II p.69).

Schopenhauer's point here is absolutely correct. Truth is not, invariably, a survival-promoting attribute. Many truths are irrelevant to our practical concerns and need to be discarded from a manageable representation of the world. If they are not it becomes too cumbersome, too demanding in the time and energy required for its operation.

Harold Fjord posted:

What about ai? Is it ethical to invent a creature which can suffer?

Harold Fjord posted:

What about ai? Is it ethical to invent a creature which can suffer?

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

What about a creature that can't suffer? What if someone made an AI that sensed pleasure a trillion times more than humans and the utility function dictated we had to give all our food to it because it eating it caused more joy per bite than the whole human race combined eating it would have. Thus making humans eating food always immoral.

NikkolasKing posted:

So I don't think it's immoral to have children but you need to have the correct perspective on life to actually ensure you and your children can do the best for yourselves and the world that you can. Understanding the intrinsic suffering of existence should make you more emphatic and altruistic, I think.

Beelzebufo posted:

Why doesn't the perverse conclusion apply to suffering though? Should killing people, thereby preventing all the future suffering they and their theoretically infinite offspring could have endured, be the most moral action then? This has always been my problem with the David Benatar school of thought, it posits a categorical imperative in terms of creating life, but doesn't follow it through to its logical conclusion, if it took itself seriously. Instead, it's just more mealymouthed nihilism that allows the argument that not having kids is somehow a principled moral action, instead of a personal choice.


Optimism bias isn't what he Owlfancier said, in fact people have shown that his theory, that you remember things better than they were and lessen pain and suffering, is the opposite of true. He then, twisting himself into pretzels, goes against his original premise to state that "well that just adds extra suffering doesn't it", even though his original premise is that suffering exists seperate and indepedent from recollection of it by an organism, that it has an inherent value that should be minimized. But only by personally not having kids, not by mass murder.

Now, this is not to say there are plenty of good reasosn to not have kids, including the state of the world and your own genetics! But, if the core argument, which this thread seems to have started with, is that reproducing is ethically wrong intrinsically, then it all becomes suspect. There's also no room in any of these discussions for the idea of continuity of culture. Yes, no one is sad over potential people who could have been born but were never conceived, but people mourn the loss of their culture and the continuity of their traditions and ideas. That is, in a sense, a mourning of the potential offspring that could have been. But, with a hyperfocus on individual suffering, there's not way to even argue for that, because it doesn't come into the reductive moral calculus being posited as the premise. That's why this entire debate, every time it comes up, is stupid, because it lures in people with a nihilistic outlook/untreated depression and have them rehash the same stupid arguments over and over again.

NikkolasKing posted:

So I agree with this. Most antinatalists I know, at least the philosophically trained ones, are Kantians. Kantian fixations on individuals, autonomy and inviolable rules are all wrongheaded ways of understanding people.

I don' t intend to ever have children because I just wouldn't be a good parent and I don't think I'll ever find a partner who wants a child. But I agree wholeheartedly that folks do value things more than pleasure and pain. In an odd way, antinatalism is sort of hedonistic, just in the opposite way most people think. It's so fixated on the eradication of pain it ignores the higher values most people abide by; that a lot of people would gladly endure pain to continue their culture or whatnot.

Harold Fjord posted:

What about ai? Is it ethical to invent a creature which can suffer?

Konomex posted:

But is suffering wrong? Pain is an important tool to avoid harm. Creating a creature, biological or mechanical that can't suffer means it will harm itself, and rather quickly. Look at children who are genetically incapable of feeling pain, they come pretty close to killing themselves accidentally unless constantly watched. Suffering is a tool through which we can extend our lives.

From a philosophical point, it is also something that can give greater meaning to joy. Endless paradise and orgasms probably suck. With no reference point, it's just existing, and you can get used to pretty much anything. I'd argue suffering is an integral and important point of existence. Creating a creature incapable of suffering would be foolish.

Strawberry Pyramid posted:

What is the point of creating

Harold Fjord posted:

It's kinda just what we do, regardless of what you put after this (including children, to circle back to the origin topic)