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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 |
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Apr 3, 2021 20:31
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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.
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Apr 3, 2021 20:36
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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 |
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Apr 3, 2021 20:56
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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.
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Apr 3, 2021 21:10
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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.
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Apr 3, 2021 21:21
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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.
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Apr 3, 2021 21:31
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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 |
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Apr 3, 2021 21:42
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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.
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Apr 3, 2021 21:57
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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...
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Apr 3, 2021 22:05
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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.
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Apr 3, 2021 22:17
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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.
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Apr 3, 2021 22:25
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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...
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Apr 3, 2021 22:45
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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.
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Apr 3, 2021 22:49
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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.
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Apr 3, 2021 23:06
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Beelzebufo posted:E: I'm saying this because the argument is that the experience of suffering itself, not the memory of it, not the negative effects on the organism in question, is what we are calculating things off of. But why? because when I experience suffering I don't like it and if it happens a lot it makes me want to die, op. Now granted that might just be a false memory but sometimes I write it down too and then when I read it back I think "hmm yes this person seems like they want to die that's wild" OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:19 on Apr 4, 2021 |
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Apr 4, 2021 00:16
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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.
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Apr 4, 2021 00:24
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Because again, insofar as I can determine that anything is right or wrong, something that just encourages you to exist with no thought as to whether it makes you happy, something that interferes with an accurate assessment of the state of your being for the sole purpose of fulfilling the selection bias of a blind and uncaring nature, seems like it might be as "wrong" as anything can be. If a human was giving that advice I would say it was bad advice.
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Apr 4, 2021 00:27
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Well I don't have a thing that I can just shoot at people to make them die of happiness. And again, doing that would make other people pretty unhappy. Whereas somebody not existing in the first place is something I 1. can control quite a lot, I can not reproduce every second of the day. and 2. nobody is sad about people who never existed. So that's why I focus more on the not reproducing thing than the magic "make people die of happiness" gun.
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Apr 4, 2021 00:35
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I think I missed that part because I absolutely would not suggest at all that staying alive is entirely voluntary, you have some extremely difficult to overcome instinctive biases towards staying alive whatever the cost, to suggest that those are simply things you can just choose to ignore sounds like you have never tried.The Puppy Bowl posted:Holy poo poo guy, this is obviously false. People get really sad about not being able to have children all the time. Have you ever met a person? Then substitute "less" sad, then. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:46 on Apr 4, 2021 |
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Apr 4, 2021 00:42
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some plague rats posted:Wow that must be a real struggle for you The point of that sentence may have been to illustrate that it is, in fact, quite easy not to do it, and that most people spend most of their time not doing it, in fact. Which is a good thing, IMO. It is nice when good things are also easy. If you want a positive thing to think about, think about how every moment you are not reproducing there are future potential generations of your progeny who are... looking up at you from anti-heaven or wherever you come from before you are born presumably going "hell yeah don't incarnate me into that horrible human body you go dude don't gently caress wooo" there could be thousands of them down there cheering you on. Or perhaps you are flipping the bird at all your probably horrible ancestors by doing something none of them did. Eat poo poo ancestors. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Apr 4, 2021 |
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Apr 4, 2021 00:53
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It is slightly funny to me to phrase it as "divergent opinions on this topic must be corrected with therapy and drugs until they are no longer held, because it is absurd to suggest that there could be any other valid opinion on the matter" Like, perhaps that is one of the social mechanisms I mentioned by which a positive view of life is maintained? Because either you die from lacking it or you are medicated and influenced until you affirm it again. Which is an excellent example of a selection bias but it doesn't really prove that it is morally good, only that it is persistent and self reinforcing. Which can be said about a lot of ideas in our society. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:11 on Apr 4, 2021 |
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Apr 4, 2021 01:08
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I mean to be honest saying the brain fixates on trauma in order to increase the probability of future survival just seems like your brain wants to you live as long as possible as traumatized as possible. Which also seems bad? Like I don't think it's that weird to suggest people can fixate on the specifics of horrible events to the point that it continues to make them unhappy while also minimizing it just enough to stave off suicidality. Your brain running you right on the edge of mental collapse would be very on brand. Certainly it is very relatable.
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Apr 4, 2021 01:17
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Barring some quibbles about the deterministic nature of the universe I agree with the most of the first four paragraphs but there is a bit of a jump between that and "therefore we need more of this" and especially the idea that conscious life can, in the face of the complexity of the universe, actually make the world more preferable to itself on a macro scale. I think it more likely that we do not posess the organizational capacity to do that and will probably end up stuck in a sort of loop of growth and collapse like all other forms of life. Also as good and bad are purely fictions in our minds it seems weird to ascribe any sort of cosmic importance to it. Sounds a bit woo woo to me. Applying them to other fictions of our minds seems fine but further than that seems weird. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:42 on Apr 4, 2021 |
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Apr 4, 2021 01:40
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DrSunshine posted:Let me explain the logic there, then. So I think I get lost about around point 6. As this assumes that positive experiences necessarily outweigh any negatives. If you have one posiitve experience and a shitload of bad ones then it was still "worth it" (by whose measure?) because you had more positive experiences than if you didn't exist. DrSunshine posted:A disagreement over how practically feasible a goal is is a different point than a disagreement over what something is in abstract. As soon as an ant places a grain of sand that was lying at point x on its hill at point y, it has made the universe more preferable to itself. Aggregated over all conscious beings, any universe that has the capability of supporting more conscious beings is preferable to one that isn't, no matter how small the contribution. And here I think that feasability is critical because if somehow ants all acting according to their own preference ended up making a world where all the ants were very unhappy (imagine that ants can be happy and unhappy for the purposes of the argument) then that would be a problem. That a creature judges a thing to be in its own best interest doesn't mean very much, because in so doing it may not be considering the interests of other creatures which in this framework are also real things, no? To say nothing of its ability to determine its own best interest in the face of, again, a complex universe. Basically this seems to assume that there cannot be bad outcomes as long as everyone acts in their own interest which... uh... have you looked outside recently? I don't think that is true. Also just generally the phrasing is odd, like why is the objective just "maximise conscious being count" like why is that better? Who is deciding that it is better? Is there some sort of god playing the universe and maximum consciousness is the win condition? E: DrSunshine posted:They are not. Subjective experiences exist, because they are manifestations of the arrangements of matter that form conscious beings. "Good and bad" insofar as they are defined as "states of affairs that are more or less preferable to conscious beings" exist objectively as long as there are living things to act as though they prefer or avoid them. Completely lost me here. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 02:09 on Apr 4, 2021 |
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Apr 4, 2021 02:00
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You could not because you are not proposing creating more people in order to give them passable healthcare. That question deals with distribution, not the size of the possible pool to distribute to.
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Apr 4, 2021 17:09
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DrSunshine posted:What's to stop us from creating more people and giving them all excellent healthcare? Like, your argument somehow boils down to "we can maximize good outcomes by eliminating all conscious life, because consciousness necessarily entails the capability of experiencing negative outcomes". But that's just denying the entire argument. Reducing all possible utility to zero is not the same as maximizing utility. 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. 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. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 17:27 on Apr 4, 2021 |
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Apr 4, 2021 17:25
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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.
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Apr 4, 2021 17:39
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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. That's just appeal to nature, you're trying to make a moral argument by saying "it's natural" which is daft. That life generally is self perpetuating has absolutely zero bearing on the morality of that tendency. Just going "it does, therefore it should" is silly.
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Apr 4, 2021 17:50
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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. This is a better argument against creating life at all than it is against creating life with the intent of making it happy all the time. If it doesn't exist it doesn't need a preservation mechanism, if it doesn't exist it doesn't need a reference point.
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Apr 6, 2021 17:45
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If you believe life must be full of bad things in order to have a hope of being "good" overall then it seems smarter to simply not create it in the first place.
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Apr 6, 2021 18:32
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I doubt your ability to ensure that bad experiences are doled out "fairly", the world is full of bad experiences and they just happen to people without thought as to whether they "deserve" it, if anything our society encourages stratification into groups that have all the bad experiences and groups of people who have none and are apparently also miserable about that fact. The idea of a society where everyone just gets a mere soupçon of bad experiences to add a dash of vivacity to their lives seems so hypothetical as to be just as much in the realm of fiction as everyone volunteering to go extinct. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Apr 6, 2021 |
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Apr 6, 2021 20:09
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I was talking about actual humans that live on earth right now.
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Apr 6, 2021 20:18
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I have no idea, I haven't sat down and done a bunch of testing with some method of objectively measuring the experiences of others to determine whether or not the externally induced suffering/internally created suffering dichotomy can ever average out to a point that is "good". But I find the idea that humans need to suffer and that if they don't they create their own unhappiness through a lack of reference points, to be a pretty good argument that life is maybe not a great thing, if you try to look at it without the constant screaming instinct of "DO NOT DIE, CREATE MORE LIFE" that all life forms appear to have (that being almost the definition of what a living thing is) I would need some sort of compelling counterargument to not simply err on the side of life maybe just being an unhappy accident that would be better off not having happened. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Apr 6, 2021 |
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Apr 6, 2021 20:29
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Beelzebufo posted:Unhappiness and suffering are as chemically induced as happiness is. You are just as programmed to view negative qualia as "bad" as you are to desire to reproduce. They all come from the same place. Evolution determined that you would not like getting burned, or that you would mourn loved ones who die. The reasons why are to optimize for particular survival strategies. So what makes the existence of suffering inherently a reason to reject the good things in life? I personally don't think a hedonistic-utilitarian calculus of a life is a good way to determine it's value or worth, but that's basically the only way you can do it if you take as a premise that the very existence of suffering is something that should not exist. We can work to minimize suffering in humans (and other lifeforms) while not accepting the idea that a total absence of suffering is the end goal. We can also not start from the axiomatic assumption that life has a purpose for existing or that its existence is an unquestionable good or necessity, and if I do that I struggle to construct a justification for why it should exist, the fact that it does exist doesn't signify one way or the other, I can entirely acknowledge that life does exist and the reason it exists is because it is programmed to continue to exist, but that it has no inherent concern for its own actual experiential wellbeing. It is not designed by a loving creator that wants it to be happy, it just is. That life exists does not necessitate a higher purpose or that it should be happy, life existing only suggests a mechanism by which it continues to exist, and I don't see why higher concepts of happiness or wellbeing should have anything to do with that. Perhaps it is easier to imagine that as we evolve the capability for abstract thought, we could reasonably deduce that life itself is a flawed thing, that we are mostly a collection of instinctive habits, selected for only because of their ability to further propagate us within our environment, and that many, or even the majority of these habits are not conducive to the happiness of our conscious minds, and that lacking an ability to remove these habits, the best thing we can achieve as a thinking species may be to break out of the vicious cycle that is life? OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Apr 6, 2021 |
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Apr 6, 2021 20:46
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Most of that is obviously impossible to answer because you're just asking how I know anything maaaaan, but specifically the argument that "existence is its own end" appears to just be a restatement of the, again, seemingly axiomatic belief that existence is necessary and/or good, which I already said does not appear to me to be a thing derived from observation, I can't argue with something that you take as the premise of all subsequent arguments.
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Apr 6, 2021 20:53
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Beelzebufo posted:There's always an emotional core to these ideas that sits unexamined, because that inherently entails subjectivity and it means you can't make universal pronouncements anymore. All it takes to refute the argument then is saying that I value existence. That's why there's this reach for "logic" and "objectivity", but the conclusions are built on the same emotional sand that they are trying desperately to pretend they have superseeded. Any argument about the nature of life is necessarily going to involve emotional and experiential influences, the point I would make is that this is no less true for any other viewpoint on life. I don't claim to be "above" that because obviously what I am discussing is inherently tied up with the emotions and experiences of humans, living and potential. In fact the main thing I would hope to achieve is for people to see their more life-positive philosophies as being equally grounded in their emotional and experiential predispositions and that critically, those predispositions may well not extend to any life they might elect to create. If it creates enough doubt in someone that they wonder whether it is a good idea to create more people, then I have succeded as well as I could ever expect to. Because that's really the core of my position, doubt. I have so many doubts that creating life is a good thing that simply not creating it seems the better option. Beelzebufo posted:I'm saying that all you have to go on is your own experience of existence, which means that if someone else tells you that they think their life is worth living, you can't argue that "well actually, you're just deluding yourself because your meatbrain has programmed you to value living". Your arguments assume that you are a neutral observer, and that your conclusions have general applicability, but I'm arguing that they don't, and that your assessment is just as rooted in the flawed biological programming you claim to have "deduced" your way out of. I mean, yes, obviously? But that isn't an argument against my position, it's an argument against thinking full stop, but if we're going to have an argument I don't think that pointing out that necessarily all of our thinking is limited by the physical limitations of our brains is very helpful. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Apr 6, 2021 |
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Apr 6, 2021 21:00
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If my point of view is that it is wrong to create life I clearly cannot achieve any moral imperative that stems from that belief that by having children so I can tell them to stop having children... The idea that we should have children so we can make them propagate our ideas is absolutely abhorrent as they are thinking agents in their own right, not mere vessels for our desires. Konomex posted:A child is made up of 50% of each parent, each parent consenting to have a child creates a thing that really isn't conscious of its own existence for 1-2 years. I think bringing arguments of consent into this is just going to muddy the water and lead nowhere. Initially, a child is incapable of consenting to anything, but as it was part of me, the consent was mine to give. And we can go around in circles on that forever. Also this is nonsense, you know what you are intending to achieve and what is likely to happen if you create a life, it is going to become a living, thinking being that only exists because you made it exist, and you also know full well that it can't choose to end its own existence without going through absolutely agonizing emotional pain because it is hardwired to not do that. It exists because you chose to create it, you are responsible for the consequences of that. This is extremely clear and suggesting you are "muddying the waters" by pointing that out is profoundly objectionable. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Apr 7, 2021 |
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Apr 7, 2021 04:33
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Children are sapient, chairs are not... If it helps you to comprehend it, consider not drawing the line of "creation" at the point of conception or childbirth, consider that creation is a process that extends further into a person's life. At some point, you have created a sapient being.
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Apr 7, 2021 06:49
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I did already point out that killing individual, or even quite a lot of people, doesn't really impact the preponderance of life in general, whereas technology and social atttitudes seemingly can, quite effectively.
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Apr 8, 2021 21:33
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You aren't ending it on a small scale, I already said that killing people is bad because it just creates more suffering and does not appear to actually change the number of humans in the long run. If all human lives are of more or less equal value, which I think they are, then you achieve nothing by killing people, and killing people en masse usually leads to, and requires, extra lovely societies that people will be born into so I think you're actually just making things worse. I can fairly easily object to your suggestion without surrendring my core belief.
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Apr 8, 2021 21:45
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