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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.
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Apr 3, 2021 20:29
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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.
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Apr 3, 2021 20:33
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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.
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Apr 3, 2021 20:42
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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?
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Apr 3, 2021 21:06
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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.
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Apr 3, 2021 21:14
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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.
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Apr 3, 2021 21:28
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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.
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Apr 3, 2021 21:37
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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.
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Apr 3, 2021 21:49
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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. 
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Apr 3, 2021 22:02
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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".
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Apr 3, 2021 22:08
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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?
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Apr 3, 2021 22:22
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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.
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Apr 3, 2021 22:29
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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.
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Apr 3, 2021 22:47
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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.
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Apr 3, 2021 22:51
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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.
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Apr 3, 2021 23:09
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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. Which neatly lands us back at the Thanos gambit, namely is it a moral good to extinguish life from existing (the "blip" was somewhat painless, after all) by all means available, since the null situation of no life is preferable to life which entails bad feelings?
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Apr 4, 2021 17:45
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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 life somehow desires to see more of itself is considered a falsehood in this thought experiment however, whereas in the thought experiment where experience is completely destroyed and yet should hold meaning was not. I'm not sure what to make of the cosmos therein, but it seems like one designed for maximally bad outcomes for everybody involved.
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Apr 4, 2021 17:48
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