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Mata posted:We may not consent to being born, but staying alive is fully voluntary (barring a few hosed up exceptions like Tony Nicklinson) If someone decides to end their life because they can't handle the world they're in, wouldn't it have been preferable that they not be born at all? Yeah I can think of some specific cases where an individual might decide to end their life but for the most part had a worthwhile life - terminal cancer, the sudden development of a crippling disability. That's besides the point though. If your answer to "the world is about to become extremely hostile to new people, so maybe we shouldn't have them" is "well they can always kill themselves", that's an unacceptable answer for me. That's a dark joke. Mind you I agree with the rest of the post except for this point. Maybe I'm misreading you.
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Apr 4, 2021 00:39
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OwlFancier posted: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. This is not true. quote:A new study suggests that we recall bad memories more easily and in greater detail than good ones for perhaps evolutionary reasons. Evolution may not want us to kill ourselves but it also wants us to not get killed, so being able to recall threatening or bad situations and avoid them is useful. E: jesus do I not understand the English language
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Apr 4, 2021 01:11
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DrSunshine posted:6) "We should act to maximize total positive experiences experienced by conscious beings". I think you're running into the repugnant conclusion here. Let's say you could quantity happiness in "Happiness Units" (HU). Let's say you have a million people each with 10 HU and a thousand people with 1,000 HU each. Which is better? If we judge only by total happiness, then clearly the first is better with 10^7 HU vs 10^6 HU. But the first one is clearly worse for individuals. Which would you prefer to live in? E: and almost certainly, even if having other people makes the world more hospitable, there is a threshold of diminishing returns at some point. No one wants to live in Kowloon Walled City America Inc. fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Apr 4, 2021 |
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Apr 4, 2021 02:17
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Mulva posted:The end of this conversation is always someone saying "These things are bad because I say so" and someone else going "Naw". Depending on which person you side with the entire conversation is either logical, or a defense of suicidal ideation. I suppose happiness is just such a subjective, unquantifiable, fuzzy thing that we can't really come up with deductive answers to questions like "is life worth living?" if the metric for "worth" is happiness. Perhaps the actual foolish part of evolution is that it motivates us to continue existing by the balance of chemicals in our brains and not by more logical factors. Perhaps there are intelligent lifeforms out there that don't care about happiness or pleasure and they're better off in terms of furthering their existence. E: and that isn't a joke, it's perfectly possible that the singular focus on pleasure could lead to outcomes that don't propagate intelligent life in the universe. I've always thought that one of the possible solutions to the Fermi Paradox is that intelligent life gets so caught up in creating simulations and AI for its own pleasure that it gives up on exploring the cosmos, and prefers to stay in simulations instead. The "hikikomori" or "matrix" solution if you will. Even worse, imagine a form of life that decides that it will simply convert all matter it finds to feed increasingly complex simulations, killing off other life to feed its neverending desire for pleasure. Or imagine the Affront from the Culture series. How do we know that what we require for pleasure won't be in opposition with other alien lifeforms? If the goal is "propagate life" would we simply be propagating human-like life? Is that chauvinist? America Inc. fucked around with this message at 09:03 on Apr 4, 2021 |
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Apr 4, 2021 07:38
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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. Then you'll just have Japan and capital will focus on automation. There are other ways to rebel, like joining a local socialist group or union. It's a small collective effort, but so is not having children.
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Apr 5, 2021 01:46
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Owlspiracy posted:also related, why do you think propensity to commit violence is a heritable trait. Antisocial Personality Disorder https://www.health.harvard.edu/a_to_z/antisocial-personality-disorder-a-to-z 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. Dark Triad (Narcissism, Psychopathy, Machiavellianism) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad#:~:text=In%20psychology%2C%20the%20dark%20triad,because%20of%20their%20malevolent%20qualities. 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] I can understand why someone with these problems (albeit I don't know if these are the specific problems they're dealing with) might want to avoid having children. Before you get worked up, no this is not an endorsement of eugenics and having these problems does not guarantee you can't be treated. E: I should also note that these disorders are a minority among mental illnesses, and most disorders no not lead to a propensity for violence against others. America Inc. fucked around with this message at 04:03 on Apr 5, 2021 |
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Apr 5, 2021 03:55
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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' This is also an anti-natalist position, literally anti-natalism just means seeing the birth of new humans as morally wrong for one reason or another. I'm not sure why you came up with this arbitrary classification between "normal" and "strange" ideas, as if the average person wouldn't find antinatalist positions to be bizarre or offensive. Unsurprisingly a place where unorthodox ideas can be seen as "normal" will attract people with unorthodox ideas. I might dare to say you're a fellow W E I R D P E R S O N. Puppy Galaxy posted:I thought a dark triad was a threesome with two guys and one girl? Only on Tuesdays America Inc. fucked around with this message at 05:25 on Apr 5, 2021 |
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Apr 5, 2021 05:16
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some plague rats posted:I don't know about morally or ethically but anyone in this thread reproducing is logistically wrong Aw man, I was just finishing up my clone factory
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Apr 6, 2021 22:18
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