That still does not mean that two objects occupying the same space share all their properties with each other. By that, I mean that it does not mean the objects are the same weight, the same color, or have the same history. — elucid

Are you sure? Let's put history aside for a moment. Physically understood, what is weight? What is color? Aren't they both reducible to shape in space and time?

Consider the addition of waves. Drop a pebble into a pond. Drop another in a different spot. Watch the ripples produce an interference pattern. Can you understand the wave magnitude at any one spot on the water's surface to be two separate values? Are there really two different bits of wave there, moving in different directions?

Fundamental particles can occupy the same space at the same time. See identical particles. — Andrew M

I looked at the link. As far as I can tell with a cursory skim, it doesn't talk about two identical particles being in the same place at the same time while remaining two separate particles. But I don't understand all the physics and math there. Correct me if I am wrong.

What about the Pauli Exclusion Principle? According to Wikipedia:

The Pauli exclusion principle is the quantum mechanical principle which states that two or more identical fermions (particles with half-integer spin) cannot occupy the same quantum state within a quantum system simultaneously.

Two things being in the same place at the same time does not mean that all their properties are the same. It does not mean that those two things are the same shape, size, were created at the same time or had the same history. — elucid

You mention differences of shape. Let's focus on that for a moment. Suppose we have a 2D world and in this 2D world, we have a square and a triangle "in the same place". Are they truly in the same place? Do they occupy exactly the same space? They don't, do they? I don't care how you size them, there will be places where one is that the other isn't. One point of a triangle, for example, might be beyond the boundary of the square. If two shapes were to perfectly occupy all the same spaces, they'd necessarily have the same shape. You'd have to turn the triangle into a square to get it to perfectly overlap the square. So then you'd have two squares of exactly the same shape in the same place at the same time. Still two different things?

We might have to get into mereology here though. Maybe anything with a shape isn't truly a thing, but rather an arrangement of smaller things. And the smallest things, the true things of which all composites are composed are shapeless. Pick one point that the square and triangle share. This point is just one point. There aren't two points in the same place. If there were, they'd be indiscernible.

Consider a digital image in Photoshop. Superimpose a triangle over a square. Suppose the background is black and the the objects are pure white. 0 and 1. All the pixels where they overlap have a value of 1. All the pixels where just one of them is have a value of 1. All the pixels where neither is have a value of 0. You can't tell the difference between a pixel that belongs to both or to just one. Really, you just have a new shape, possibly no longer a regular polygon.

Suppose instead, we have a range of grey values, representing something like a magnitude of presence for objects. If the triangle has a brightness of 10 and the square 10, where they overlap, we have pixels with a value of 20. We don't have two pixels, each with a value of 10. Rather, we have one pixel with a value of 20. In order to have two pixels, each with a separate value of 10, each with the same coordinates, you'd necessarily need two different images, one for each. The two shapes wouldn't occupy the same spaces. And they wouldn't interact.

That last sentence is key. If two things could overlap and remain perfectly separate like that, they wouldn't be interacting. If they are two completely independent, completely non-interacting systems, how can they be said to be in the same space? What would that even mean?

This is a very interesting question! Coincidentally, I was just thinking about it a few hours ago.

It seems to me that two things in the same place at the same time might be a contradiction. Let me explain. The principle of the identity of indiscernibles given us by Leibniz says that if two things have all the same properties, they can't really be two separate things. They must be the same thing. If two things are in exactly the same place at the same time, aren't they then just one thing? To say that there are two things that are one thing seems a contradiction.

Everything we can say about physical things amounts to some combination of where and when, right?

Some physicists think that everything that can be said about the contents of a region of space can be written on a gridded 2D surface of a sphere of a certain size bounding that region, with each square of the grid having a size of one Planck area. There is a maximum information density for a certain volume of space. And the fundamental unit is the bit, a 0 or a 1. See Bekenstein Bound and Holographic Principle.

Imagine that you are recording information in a grid, and each square can be a 1 or a 0. One square cannot be both a 1 and a 0, can it? Consider Conway's Game of Life, for example. At any given time, a square has only one unique state.

Maybe a way to think about it is that if two things enter into the same region of space at the same time, what you actually have is the sum. It is like adding waves. When two sound waves enter the same space at the same time, they add. They don't remain separate.

Life involves a highly integrated sort of complexity. It is highly structured, but has many degrees of freedom. It requires a balance of freedom and necessity. Notice that we find life mostly on the surface of the planet, at the interface between a solid interior and open space.

Think of open, empty space as pure freedom, and solidity as pure necessity. A joint in your skeleton is a place of freedom, and it is a space. In order for a wheel to turn on a shaft, you need a space. For movement, you need space. But pure freedom is no good. To have any structure at all, you need constraints. Think of the advantages of having solid pieces of bone, of having strong, limiting, connective tissues. How would you ever develop a sense organ that can focus light like an eye without some constraints and stability?

Imagine a game with no pieces and no rules, no constraints at all. It isn't anything, is it? Now imagine a game with no freedom in it, one where nothing changes. Not a game either! Neither of these extremes is interesting.

Living things, useful machines, and so on, all involve a nice balance of freedom and constraint.

Gas involves too much freedom. It is too loose. Too much space. You can't form stable structures in it. It is too dominated by entropy. There is no mechanism for replication, no heritability of form, so natural selection has little to work with. There is little opportunity for causal patterns to develop.

In order to have evolution, you need a balance of strict inheritance and mutation or some other source of variation. If you have perfect cloning, with no possibility of variation, there is no evolution, and you never get beyond the most basic replicator. If you have no inheritance whatsoever, if the next generation is randomized completely, you'll just have mush, and there's no possibility of any adaptation, any maintenance of strategies that work, in other words, no "learning from experience". You could think of a perfect solid as something that transmits its form into the future with no change at all. This is perfect inheritance. Pure space, on the other hand, has no form and transmits no information to the future.

You won't find intelligent or even interestingly structured gas. Neither will you find intelligent pure solids. And by pure solids, I mean some object in which no change can take place.

Our bodies are not solids. Neither are they liquids or gases. They are combinations of all of these. There are lots of intricately structured systems of constraint as well as lots of spaces for movement.


Why is water so important for life? Lots of complex chemistry can happen in it. Things are close, so lots of interactions can happen. But things are able to move a lot, so there's room for lots of change. This isn't really the case in gases or solids. In gases, contact is much more rare. In solids, it is too consistent. Also, water mediates a lot of chemistry, donating protons, and all sorts of other useful stuff.

War, is a state of lawlessness — a disregard to the law. Therefore, there is no murder, and technically every other immoral action, in the duration of the war. — SethRy

Are you suggesting that morality is dependent on the law? If there is no law against torturing small children, is it then not immoral?

We should draw a distinction between telling an untruth and telling a lie. — Relativist

This ^^^^

There is a difference between lying that you are seeing a cat and it being true that you are in fact seeing a cat. Only if you wrongly equivocate here, thinking these are the same, do you seem to have a contradiction.

Truth and lie are actually a bit different from true and false. The first has to do with whether or not you intend to deceive. Does what you say correspond to what you believe? The second has to do with what actually is the case. Does the claim correspond with reality?

Tell us the truth, Jimmy!


It is true that the earth is round.

There is a relation though, as to tell the truth is to tell what you believe is actually true. You could be mistaken in that belief while being truthful (not intending to deceive).

If we say that it is a lie that the earth is round, this has a different meaning from saying that it is false that it is round. To say that it is a lie implies that someone deliberately intended to deceive us when they made the claim. To say that it is false is to say that the belief that the earth is round simply fails to correspond to reality. Lying implies dishonesty on the part of a moral agent, while the making of false statements doesn't necessarily.

Other sentient beings don't belong to us to do with as we please, plain and simple. Just treating them as property and a resource to be used is a problem.

I'll preface this by saying that I am sceptical of God, the afterlife, and all the rest. But supposing there is a God and an afterlife, all the horrible things that happen in this world might be redeemed ultimately. It might be all for the betterment and education of our souls, especially moral education.

Consider the following scenario. You live your life. You make mistakes. You hurt people. Maybe you molest children. Maybe you drop nuclear bombs on cities. Suppose God allows all this to happen. Then you die. Upon dying, God, an infinitely loving being, shows you your life, every moment, not as you experienced it, but through the perspectives of all those your actions affected. You feel all the pain you inflicted. And all of this is experienced while God at the same time is showing you his perfect love, is loving and forgiving you for all of it. You are seeing the nature of your actions in comparison to God's perfect goodness, in the very revealing light of God's goodness. You feel the perfect love you are being bathed in. You see how good it is. And at the same time, you see your own failures to love.

Maybe you even come to see that it was you who were always the very experiencer of all this pain you were causing. You were torturing yourself. You were all of the people who ever lived. You occupied all the perspectives, all the abusers and all the victims. You collect all your fragmentary memories and integrate all the experiences. You know what it is like from every angle, giving you the ultimate education in compassion. You've felt all the pain.

Maybe, at this point, your soul is properly formed and you are fit to join the next world. Maybe this world we live in is like a sandbox, a simulator of sorts, where we are allowed to make mistakes, to struggle, and so on, where we practice for the "real world", so that we might rise to be capable of a higher sort of life, one that is so good it makes all of this worthwhile, making our woes here seem insignificant in the same way that we look back on our childhoods and see that many of our complaints and grievances were over small things that make us chuckle to think of how upset we were over them. Maybe it's all skinned knees as we learn to navigate the world we inhabit.

Maybe these experiences are necessary for us to develop real moral consciousness, to become truly awake and freely good beings, beings full of real love freely given. And maybe such ends justify the means of getting there.

It seems to me that to grow into a morally conscious person, you need to feel pain and to cause some pain and to see the pain you've caused and to come to identify with those you've injured. You need to see things from their perspectives.

Compared to a limitless higher life in Heaven or some such, the short sufferings of this life might seem insignificant. It might well be that when we see the sort of life all of this makes possible, we will see all this "evil" as a good, since it is an enabling condition for our moral consciousness, for us to become able to love as God loves.

In this case, it could be that the universe in which all our evil is allowed to run rampant is the one that is a necessary part of the best of all possible worlds.

This explores a similar idea:

The Egg, by Andy Weir

To focus on an interesting point, suppose we build a robot that we program to do "nice" things, one that helps old ladies across the street, one that builds shelters for the homeless, one that feeds the poor, and so on. Can this robot actually be said to be "good", in the moral sense? Is the robot a moral agent? Does it have compassion? Does it care? I think such questions are highly suggestive, as it seems that many of the characteristics we take to be possible for human being seem possibly to require that we first have free will. It is a strange thing that you wouldn't immediately think would require free will, but is it possible to program a robot to be genuinely curious, to have real wonder? If I program a robot to ask what it is, is it really asking? Does it really want to know?

Yeah, "not a robot" is better, but wouldn't you rather have both (a) not a robot, and (b) a guarantee that the not-a-robot won't murder me in my sleep? — Terrapin Station

I was making an analogy. My point was that God might deem it better that when we do good, it is because we choose it, not because we are programmed to do it.

In the case of our relation to God or to The Good, maybe there is no risk of us doing serious harm there. One obvious objection is that we harm one another.

To actually address some of the issues you wanted to get into, I'll say that for us to have free will and the capacity to choose evil would perhaps be something God would want. Imagine that you are creating a companion that you'd like to have a relationship with. Would you rather have a robot, or a real person with real agency, one whose affections actually mean something? If you program your companion to show you affection, won't it feel empty when you receive that affection? Really, can it even be said to be affection if it is just automatic, if the thing can't do otherwise? In that case, it is not so different from you hugging yourself via an external object.

It seems possible that God would want us to become truly conscious and to become moral beings who can actually choose goodness, who might love goodness for its own sake. Beings with such a capacity seem to me to be more awake, more real somehow, and to have something about them that makes their existence and their action meaningful.

A clockwork universe where everything in it just does your will seems dead and not worth creating.

As regards eusociality and what you said about fertility, consider the problem of homosexual behavior in both humans and bonobos. How to explain it? It is non-reproductive. Some have argued for eusocial explanations. In humans, such things as celibacy for certain members of the group also might have a eusocial explanation.

But how do you figure that our human touchiness in relation to sexual intimacy relates to our closest living evolutionary kin? Well at least one of the two: bonobos. — javra

I'd have to give it some further thought, but at the moment, it occurs to me that sexual engagement can serve multiple purposes. And since bonding hormones are involved, social bonds might be solidified.

I don't know much about bonobos, but I'd suspect that with such prolific sexual behavior, there must be other reasons to expect that offspring will be well cared for and will have a good chance of reaching sexual maturity. Most likely, this reason is that the whole group is tightly bound together, and adults not ancestral to a young bonobo might well participate in caring for it. So maybe it isn't such a huge deal if the male who fathered the child isn't devoted to the mother.

In the instance of sexual jealousy, if it is absent in bonobos, it might be because a female doesn't need the unfakable indication of devotion from the male as Rosenberg describes in the quote I gave earlier. Perhaps the tight social bonds of the group serve the purpose just as well, as perhaps the members of the group share child-raising duties. And probably, bonobo babies don't need extended raising to anywhere near the degree that human babies do. Human babies are unusually helpless and needy, and for a long time!

Speaking of amplification of quantum effects, quantum cosmology is an interesting area to look into!

No, bonobos are quite fertile animals. — javra

Did I suggest otherwise?

Anyway, I think what you say about bonobos fits into the basic picture I am trying to paint here, which is simply that our taboos reflect our evolutionary interests.

As a good example of the evolutionary argument as regards sexual taboos (what some call morality), consider the incest taboo, which is one of the first taboos. Why is incest bad? Could the genetic problems it causes have anything to do with it?

This is interesting:
link

There is a lot about bonobos I would need to learn before it would be clear to me how their instincts mostly align wih their evolutionary interests, which they surely do. There are probably eusocial factors at work there for one thing.

Not all animals are monogamous, or polygynous, or asexual, and so on. There are different strategies. In humans, female parental investment and the need for male help was especially high. With our long gestation times, large brains, long developmental period after birth before survival is possible, and so on, our situation is somewhat different than that of many other animals, including primates.

Here is a quote from Alexander Rosenberg's book where he talks about jealousy:

Let’s start with love and the design problem it solves for males. A male won’t get sexual access to a female unless the male can convince her that he’ll be around to share some of his resources with her and the kids he is going to produce. Since females have been selected for not being fooled by mere expressions of fidelity, they demand stronger assurances before they will allow males to have their way with them. As the Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn noted, a verbal contract is not worth the paper it is written on. A male’s promise is unenforceable. Females can’t rely on it because for a male it would be irrational to keep. With millions of sperm, the male’s best strategy is to promise, get sexual access, and renege. The mammalian female has only a few hundred eggs and a limited number of ovulatory cycles. She can’t afford to guess wrong about a reliable mate. What will reliably guarantee unenforceable promises about the future when it would be irrational for any male to keep them? One thing that would do it is a sign of irrational commitment to the female and to her interests that could not be faked.

Why must the sign signal irrational commitment? Because females recognize that it’s irrational of males to commit resources to one female. So the sign the male sends the female really has to be one of irrational commitment. Why must the sign be unfakable? Because a fakable sign of commitment is just that, fakable, and therefore not credible. Love is irrational and unfakable, by males at any rate. In nature’s search through design space for a strategy that will secure males’ sexual access, the emotion of love looks like it will just do the trick.

Irrational love does not fully solve the male’s design problems. After pairing up, the male faces another issue: the uncertainty of paternity. To convey resources to his mate’s offspring, he needs assurance that the kids are really his. This is an uncertainty problem females don’t have (unless kids get switched after birth). The male needs to reduce the uncertainty as much as possible. One way to do this is to pose a credible threat to anyone suspected of taking advantage of any absence from his partner’s bed. To make this threat credible, the male must be motivated to carry it out even when it is crazy to do so. And often it is crazy, since it’s the strong, the powerful, and the rich who usually try to take advantage of the weaker. The emotion of uncontrollable jealousy fits the bill perfectly. Revenge must be a credible threat; males must convince everyone that they will take measures to punish cheating wives and/or their lovers no matter how great the cost to themselves. Overpowering jealousy does the job, though it makes the occasional male actually sacrifice his own short-term and long-term interests. In the overall scheme, the fact that every male is prone to feel such emotions maintains a norm among men and women that effectively reduces the uncertainty of paternity and so enhances most males’ fitness. (Of course, female jealousy isn’t selected for reducing the uncertainty of maternity. There is little to reduce. But the emotion’s unfakable and irrational force deters other females from shifting her partner’s resources to their offspring.)

Emotions are hardwired by genes we share and presumably share with other primates and indeed other mammals, as Darwin himself noticed. In us, of course, they get harnessed together with our highly developed theory-of-mind ability and with norms adaptive in our environments. They motivate enforcement of the norms they get paired up with, on others and on ourselves. Some of these norms solve design problems common to humans in all the environments we inhabit. These are parts of the moral core we all share. Others will not be part of core morality but will be locally restricted to the different ecologies that different groups inhabit. Some examples will illustrate how this works.

Yes, well, bonobos are horny and kinky little monkeys (great apes, to be exact). They'll have sex in exchange for a banana with no hard feelings on anyone's part, — javra

It isn't clear to me that bonobo behavior is at odds with the general thrust of what I am saying.

Our reason is our source of insight into what it is ethical for us to do. — Bartricks

I disagree. For one thing, there is the is/ought problem, which was so cleanly laid out by Hume. "'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger." Pure reason can't prefer one state of affairs over another. There is no state of affairs that is provably "better" than another.

Such and such will hurt lots of people! Can you rationally show that people should not be hurt? Try it. You'll find that you are just appealing to feelings at some point. It makes us feel bad.

Most of our objections to things in the world, including behavior in other people, really come down to feelings, and can be neatly explained in evolutionary terms. Why are we repulsed by maggots, for instance? And sex involves the most important matter of all from an evolutionary standpoint. Even if your body is healthy and you have all the skills to survive in your environment, if you fail to reproduce, from the standpoint of your genes, it is all for nothing (I am ignoring eusociality here)! Selection will favor an organism that reproduces and dies soon after over one that lives long and never reproduces. The reason is simple. If you don't reproduce, your genes simply don't pass into the future. What we find existing is what got passed on. All your ancestors successfully reproduced, without exception, and were strongly inclined to do so.

If you observe animals, you see plenty of examples of them protecting their opportunities to pass on their genes, and strong feelings are obviously involved. And rational justifications for that behavior are obviously lacking on their part.

I'd suggest that much of our "reasoning" about morality is a lot of post hoc rationalization of our feelings, which have an evolutionary origin.

Sometimes, moral reasoning can lead us to imperatives that most of us generally find a bit repugnant, anti-natalism for example.

Notice that sex and death are the big issues to us, the ones with the most charge feeling-wise. And notice that successful reproduction (which involves extended care of children in the case of humans) and not dying are the primary imperatives from an evolutionary standpoint. Survive and multiply! So things that threaten to damage the body, to kill or maim, and things that otherwise threaten our reproduction, are things we feel strongly about. They often involve literal pain. And what causes us pain evolved. A perfect example is how painful it is to get hit in the testicles! Why? Think about it!


In evolutionary terms, why is rape a problem for a female? He won't be there to help make sure the child matures into a sexually successful adult. Regardless, she'll be forced to devote a lot of resources, including precious time during which she can't gestate other children. Her parental investment is huge, much larger than a man's. A woman's feelings about a potential mate and her willingness to mate with him have everything to do with how she was wired by evolutionary forces. Naturally, in the case of rape, her favorable feelings and her bonding hormones didn't coincide with the conceptive event.j One would expect that she'd feel strong negative feelings toward him. She hasn't accepted him. Nevertheless, he invades and potentially plants his seed anyway. This is far worse than being punched! She might survive and reproduce anyway if punched. If raped, her precious time and other resources might be used up, especially in the tough circumstances of primitive or animal life.

Notice that men complaining of being raped by women is rare. The opposite is true for women. And there is the double standard for men and women regarding sexual selectiveness. Women need to be choosy. Their parental investment is large. Men, not so much. Evolution explains this. For one thing, we come from polygynous ancestors.

The parental investment matter you describe is exactly on the mark. Thank you.

I once read an interesting account of why extreme sexual jealousy probably evolved in Alexander Rosenberg's An Atheist's Guide to Reality. Maybe I'll try to come up with an extended quote.

what I am talking about is the moral significance of sex (not its biological significance). — Bartricks

I'm inclined to think the biological significance is exactly what gives rise to the large "moral" significance here. In part, our morals here are what they are because of how we feel about these things, and how we feel about them is a matter of biological instinct evolved by selection pressures.

As for large objects, they mostly effectively behave like classical physics would predict because the De Broglie wavelength is very small, but effectively is important here.

A single subatomic particle has a fair amount of uncertainty associated with its position and momentum. Put it in a box, look to see where it is, and more than likely, it'll still be in the box. But there is still a significant chance you'll find it outside, which is quite counterintuitive. But take a basketball, and matters are different, but not because it is fundamentally different. If you put a basketball in a box, you'll never come back to find it outside. This is not because there is nothing random here, but rather because it is composed of so many particles. To find all of them, at the same time, suddenly one foot to the left would be astronomically unlikely. If you roll one six-sided die there is a 1 in 6 chance you'll roll a 6. But roll a trillion dice. What are the odds you'll roll sixes on all of them at the same time?

But this isn't the end of the story. There are many ways in which the large uncertainties associated with single small particles can be amplified in such a way that they have large effects on macroscopic objects. You could, for example, measure the spin of a particle and use the result to determine the state of a switch on a train track, such that if the particle is spin up, the train goes to Chicago, and if spin down, it goes to New York. This makes a very large event random.

In fact, when we do measurements and make the results visible to ourselves, we are doing just this. We are amplifying quantum effects.

It isn't inconceivable that such amplifications could happen in such things as biological systems. After all, we have signaling mechanisms operating at very small scales, where in some cases, quantum uncertainties could be large enough to have effects on the behavior of the system. Such sufficienty small mechanisms have not yet been shown to be important in large scale brain behavior, but this isn't completely off the table just yet.

All that said, it is hard to see how randomness is compatible with what we think of as free will. If it is random, it isn't willed. If it is determined, it isn't free. Regardless, I think it is premature for us to rule out free will, as consciousness, time, matter, causality, and so on, are still very mysterious, very poorly understood. Personally, my intuition that I act freely and willfully is so strong that I distrust the ways in which these matters have been presented and understood in human history thus far.

Can you show me why? Thanks — TheMadFool

Sure!

link

link

Do you know that without quantum indeterminacy, the sun wouldn't shine?

Randomness probably applies to sub-atomic phenomena and not at the atomic level. — TheMadFool

Not so. It applies at all levels.

I'm not a scientist but Newtonian physics applies at the quantum level. If I'm correct that means particles, their position and velocity, are deterministic in behavior.

Knowledge of initial states of particles can be used to predict their properties at some other time in the future. — TheMadFool

There are things that happen all the time at small scales (with real and obvious effects at large scales) that seem to be truly random. Some interpretations try to restore a deterministic picture, but usually at the cost of some other intuition that we tend to hold, like realism, locality, or counterfactual definiteness.

Even such things as whether a single photon will reflect from or pass through a glass surface appear to involve real randomness.

We can't verify the existence of the experiential by any non-introspective means. Objective empirical and rational methods of investigation are utterly blind to the interiority of the world. Can we say that we know we are conscious and have such things as pains? Isn't it through a kind of introspection that we know this? You have to have access to the inside, to be something, in order to know "what it is like".

Animals are perfectly capable of rational thought. They wouldn't survive if they were NOT rational. — TheMadFool

What do you understand rational to mean? The understanding I have of the word makes me surprised that you would say this. Clams survive, and they are certainly not rational in any sense that I understand the word. They don't even have a central nervous system! Could their behavior be said to be rational? In other words, would a rational agent in their circumstances act as they do? Perhaps! But evolutionary forces may simply have selected for behavior that serves their survival interests. It likely has nothing to do with rationality on the part of the clam itself.

What I am saying is that having children is, initially, only about two people and what they do with their bodies — Echarmion

But where conception is a good possibility, it just never is only about two people and what they want to do with their bodies. Many people do fail to think about the possible consequences. But there's no excuse. Unlike lower animals, people know how babies are made. Too many unthinking people have this attitude, they just want to fuck and to hell with the consequences! Such people are acting like animals.

This seems like a very weird argument to me. The world, or the universe, are not human beings. To talk about the "overall suffering of the world/universe" sounds like nonsense to me. — Echarmion

Ah, but humans beings are part of the world. We are the very self-experiencing of the universe. What else experiences being humans? Something outside the universe? What are we, at bottom? There is ultimately just one experiencing subject, and it is that which is everything. There are no truly distinct things. Many, from Spinoza to Schopenhauer to Schrodinger to the mystics from various religious traditions have come to this conclusion. This thread isn't the place to argue it, but I have strongly come to this conclusion.

You may not buy it, but for the moment, just humor me and entertain the possibility that there is but one universal subject experiencing all perspectives simultaneously, one that is the whole universe at once. Would that change how you see this matter we are discussing now? Does it matter what position we take on the question of personal identity and consciousness? It seems that it might change the way we see these arguments about people not yet existing. Only if people are seen to have truly existing and truly discrete selves, something not unlike a soul created at the moment the person begins to exist, does it make sense to say that they don't yet exist. Otherwise we are really just talking about changing the form of something already existing.

I think you're mixing two things here, responsibility and intent. — Echarmion

I don't think the two can be entirely separated. In order for you to be held morally responsible for something, the intent to reach that outcome must be there, or at least the knowledge that such an outcome was a good possibility. If you truly and completely accidentally cause an event to happen, you might be said to be in some sense responsible, but not morally. It would be absurd to hold you morally responsible for something you never intended or knew could happen, such as if you poured poison into someone's coffee thinking it was sugar.

I personally think only action and intent matter, not the outcome. — Echarmion

But consideration of outcome is always part of intent. I'm not talking necessarily about the actual eventual outcome, but about perceived possibility of outcome at the time of the action. To say you intend to kill someone means you anticipate a certain possible outcome, and you do the action knowing that this outcome is possible or likely. In the case of unprotected heterosexual sex between fertile adults, there is a known possibility of a new child being the result, one who must now face all the problems of life and must deal with the circumstances you give to it.

Let's put aside for the moment the question of whether or not iife is worth living, and of whether or not we should ever have kids at all. Personally, I am unsure on these two questions anyway. If we put these questions aside and look at more specific conditions, would you ever think it correct for people having sex with the possibility of conception to give consideration to potential children? Suppose the two people have no means of providing the child health care and maybe no reliable means of feeding it. Suppose they are in an active and intense war zone. What then? Should they consider the conditions that the potential child might encounter? Suppose they have contraceptives and they are deciding whether or not to use them. Should the likely future experience of the child influence their decision? Or should they only consider the here and now and their bodies and what they themselves want?

What if, instead of being constrained by logic or creating logic, God is identical in some sense with it, being Truth itself, or some such?

life with children is so fundamentally different from life without children that no-one should decide for them whether to do one or the other. — Echarmion

I don't see how deep differences in the life of the parent in one case versus the other justifies dismissing all concern about the interests of the child. Your life would be fundamentally different if you were to choose to do any number of things, say become a serial killer. That isn't what gives you a right.

Right, but notably the intervention is for the benefit of the child. Anti-natalism cannot go that route because it wants to eliminate children, not improve the lives of children. — Echarmion

I take your point. This highlights an important difference I think. Let's be careful though. To phrase it as "eliminate children" sounds as if we are destroying an already existing child, when we are simply talking about not having one. Let's instead call it "preventing human experience." So we'd be preventing human experience rather than improving it. And let's not forget that by not reproducing, we aren't concerned only with a child, but a human at all stages of life, cradle to grave, as well as all the impacts they'll have on others.

One might respond to your point though by saying that we might indeed be improving the overall experience of the universe as a whole, as we might be reducing its overall suffering. If we don't reproduce, there isn't a person whose experience can be said to be better by virtue of their non-existence. But I'd argue that a human experience is just part of the overall experiential condition of the world at large. One could say that there is less suffering in the world, so we are improving the experiential condition of the world by reducing the total suffering that happens in it.

Temporal separation is special because when we engage in moral considerations, we have to treat the universe as non-deterministic with regard to our actions. There is no other way to make decisions. So, in moral terms, the future is not determined, but consists of an arbitrary number of parallel timelines. A single causal chain exists only for past events. That's also the reason that responsibility only travels backwards. — Echarmion

Interesting. Do we really need to treat it as non-deterministic? Or do we just need to treat it as probabilistic from a merely epistemic standpoint, where we are simply dealing with our knowledge uncertainty? I am not sure this would make a difference though.

Responsibility is only ever ascertained after the fact though. There is no need to establish responsibility for effects that don't yet exist because they might ultimately not come to pass. If you attempt to kill someone, but your victim is still alive at the time of the trial, no matter how tenously, you will not be tried for murder, but attempted murder. — Echarmion

But you'll still be held responsible for trying to kill the person, for intending their death, even if the death doesn't come to pass. It isn't as if there is no responsibility. It isn't purely consequentialist. It is a bit of both. Consider the case of a person who pours what they think is sugar into someone's coffee, and that person ends up dead, the "sugar" having actually been poison. Do we hold them responsible? We don't because we know they didn't have any malicious intent. We treat it as a pure accident. If, on the other hand, we can prove that someone put something in someone's coffee that they expected to kill them, when it was just sugar after all, we'll charge them with attempted murder. If there is a case where there was some uncertainty as to contents, and someone poured it into the coffee anyway, risking poisoning them, we'd hold them accountable for that too.

Are you saying that pointing a gun at a person and pulling the trigger in itself is not wrong until harm has actually resulted? There is no responsibility in the very moment of deciding to kill someone? There is no wrong in the intent?

What if someone regularly just risks serious harm to everyone around by just going outside and shooting in random directions, without specifically intending to shooting particular people. Even if they haven't yet hurt anyone, wouldn't we agree that such a person should be locked up and prevented from accessing firearms, simply because of the risks they are taking of harm to others?

This is an interesting question, and one which makes me dislike the implications of my own position. But, for the record, I find it difficult to establish, without doubt, that we have a responsibility towards future generations living on this planet. I would like to have an ironclad argument to that extent, but I am not currently able to think of one. — Echarmion

I applaud you! It is so rare for anyone in discussions like these to make such acknowledgements! Refreshing! We should all take it as an example to emulate. I believe, as Socrates suggested, that we should see dialogue as a way for us to both move closer to truth, not as a contest with a winner and loser. If both parties grow in understanding, we both win. If you help me see a fault in my thinking, I should thank you. You haven't injured me. Quite the reverse!

The real solution to puzzles of why you find yourself as the kind of entity you are is to arrive at the realization that there is only one subject and that this subject occupies all perspectives simultaneously. So you inevitably find yourself in all existing circumstances. You don't, in fact, find yourself being a human and not a mouse. You find yourself being both. You aren't lucky to find yourself in a universe fine-tuned for life either. You occupy them all, even the ones without biology, if such exist. That's why you find yourself here. You are everywhere.

The reason you don't know that you occupy all perspectives is simply a matter of information integration, of access. There is no information in this particular brain about being a rat. So naturally, I never talk about what it's like to be the rat using this mouth. It is similar to amnesia. An amnesiac, though they are the same subject at T1 and T2, simply doesn't have access in a brainstate at T2 to information about experiences had at T1.

This understanding solves all the puzzles about the anthropic principle, fine-tuning, identity, and so on, in one fell swoop. It is hard for people to accept though, because it is so contrary to the intuition that you are a discrete individual subject separate from all other subjects. But make no mistake. You are everyone.

Epicurus:

"Why should I fear death?
If I am, then death is not.
If Death is, then I am not."


In other words, you never experience being dead.

But, as Heidegger pointed out, we are aware of our inevitable deaths. Our possibility of not-being is always present. I suspect Epicurus and Wittgenstein are both just trying to hard to comfort themselves. Their comments surely are motivated by death anxiety.

And arguably, if you are justified in doing it then you have a right to do it. — Echarmion

That seems possibly tautological. Justification and entitlement. Are they separate? If so, does one depend on the other? And if one is prior to the other, does the one always entail the other? I am not sure.

If a person normally is considered to have a right to privacy, I suppose you could argue that violating someone's privacy is justified if that person is seriously violating the rights of others, as for example in the case of a child pornographer. But here it is the rights of the other party that justify the violation or reduction of this person's rights. But to say that others are justified in invading this person's privacy might just be another way of saying that they have a right in this case to invade.

I think this is a false equivalence. Creating something is not the same as owning something. — Echarmion

I agree that creating something is not the same as owning. But that doesn't quite capture what I was saying.

Rights exist where something is thought to be properly owned. I suggest that the reason people feel that they have a right to have children is that they have a sense that their children are theirs, that they belong to them and not to the larger community, and so it is theirs to decide the fate of these children. But, this is in conflict with the idea that the child is another agent with interests, one with rights, that the children in some sense belong to themselves. Children are not things. This isn't a matter of property rights.

I'd say that the old idea that children are property is in conflict with the new idea that children have full status as people. In the old way of thinking, there was no real concept of child abuse. This has changed. "Your" children are not yours to do with as you please. The community will intervene and we mostly all agree that this is sometimes justified.

only things that exist can have rights. — Echarmion

I see this argument made often and I find it questionable. The children you create do end up existing. And once they exist, they have rights and interests. Take a step back and look at it more objectively in spacetime. There is simply a relation here between two existing beings, regardless of the fact that they are temporally separated. What makes that temporal separation such that it eliminates responsibility and consideration of rights?

Something you do has a causal relationship to their condition and impacts on their interests. Sure, the child doesn't exist at the time of your conceiving them, but your action does ultimately have an impact on an existing being. Once the child exists, it can easily be said that you are responsible for their existence. When you release the string on a bow, aren't you responsible for the eventual arrival of the arrow at its target? You are responsible for the child's eventual existence even at the time of the conceiving act.

After all, aren't all consequences separated in time from their causes? If you deny that a cause is responsible for its effect because the effect doesn't yet exist, you end up denying all forms of responsibility.

We could get into all sorts of interesting territory here by arguing that I am not the same person now that I was in the past and that my responsibility to my future self involves a relation to a person with rights who does not yet exist. All future states of any sentient being could be said to involve consideration of someone not yet existing.

This idea that not-yet-existing beings have no rights would seem to prevent us from considering the state of the planet as we are leaving it for future generations. Are we wrong to give their interests some consideration by not ruining everything for them?

However this singularity is achieved it paves the way for omniscience, omnipotence and omnibenevolence - God. — TheMadFool

Entropy is going to put a damper on that hope.

As long as your God is a physical being, he is going to have serious limitations that run contrary to most definitions of God. He'll of course be subject to the laws of physics. And he'll be a contingent being.

And consider the problems involved in having a very, very large brain. It would seem that processing power increases as a function of the number of nodes in the neural network. But notice how slowly light travels from one end of a galaxy to another. Information cannot move around in this brain very quickly. 53,000 years for a signal to travel just from one end of our galaxy to the other. Not to mention that very large objects with lots of matter packed in a small space tend to suffer the effects of gravity.

Vast intelligences might be able to develop in the universe. But God? No.

God is thought by many not to be a being among beings at all.

God, to be God, has to be that which ultimately grounds the physical universe, and cannot be a mere temporary and limited something emerging in time within it.

Speaking of Plato, he was pretty chill with death... — StreetlightX

One might be tempted to point out that what he was cool with isn't really death. It isn't personal annihilation. If he didn't believe in a soul of some sort, with his subjectivity situated safely there, surviving the death of the body, would he still have been so chill with death?

Can anyone think of a right that doesn't somehow involve a sense of self and of rightful ownership of something? At the moment, I can't.

It seems to me that claims of rights, especially those having to do with freedom, are rooted in this sense of "mine", of self-possession and rightful possession of other things belonging to that self. And where something is thought to belong to someone else, we have no rights. I don't have a right, for example, to eat your dinner, control your thoughts, use your body for my ends, pollute your drinking water, invade your privacy, silence your ideas, do experiments on you, and so on. Any disagreement?

Suppose we don't challenge this basic sense of mineness and we grant that your body is yours and nobody else's and is therefore yours alone to decide what to do with. You have rights with respect to your body, for example to decide whether or not you'll receive a medical treatment.

What's wrong with saying that I have a right to own my slaves and to do with them as I wish? What's wrong with saying that I have a right to kill my children? Isn't it that there are interests here other than my own? Isn't it that my assertion of rights has crossed into the territory of what properly belongs to someone else? The exercise of my freedom has crossed beyond the boundary of another's nose, no? Some in the past defended such claims by saying that slaves, children, and women do not have rights because in some sense, they aren't properly self-possessed, conscious, soul-endowed, rational beings. Like animals, they are just things and so can rightly be considered property.

But we now recognize that people of dark skin, of the female sex, and of young age, are all real people with their own interests, just like us, and so we recognize their claim to certain rights.

But notice that in the case of a claim that we are entitled to have children, we seem to have an echo of the old view of children and family in general. My kids are mine! None of your business! But we consider it to be the business of the community to intervene to protect the rights of children in the case of child sexual abuse. This is because we see that there is another party here with their own interests. It isn't just the interests of the person claiming to have the right in question. We don't object to someone doing perverse things with sex dolls, but we do object to someone doing such things to unwilling, conscious subjects. And that is the essential difference that makes the moral difference, that my actions cross into the domain of the interests of another sentient being. Right?

If the children I cause to exist are not actually mine in the sense that I rightfully possess them and can therefore decide what happens to them, how can we consistently claim to have the right to reproduce? Don't the interests of the other party, namely, the children, need to be considered? What if the person is totally ill-equipped to raise the child? What if the person is likely a danger to that child? What if the person has a serious, heritable malady that is likely to cause the child a lifetime of suffering? Does a person really have a right to impose that on another human being?

Sure, the state can take away a child being abused. But now the person who reproduced has subjected another human being to orphanage, to the nightmare that being a foster child often amounts to. And the larger community now has to bear the burden of caring for this child. Did that person really have a right to do all that?

I had an unfortunate encounter just the other day with a relative who recently had a child and who provides a perfect example, in my opinion, of someone who should not have children. That poor baby! It almost makes me ill thinking about what it would be like to be him and to have to go through the experience of being helpless and under her power!

Put aside for the moment the objection that enforcing any limitation on reproduction would be problematic. It is fallacious to claim that because it would be hard to enforce restrictions on reproduction, that it follows that people therefore have a right to reproduce.

I question the entitlement to "have" children. They aren't yours. They aren't dolls. They aren't pets. They are people. They don't exist to serve your interests. They have interests of their own.

But it's the only possible justification. What's the supposed alternative? — S

Perhaps there's just no good justification for claims of rights at all. Maybe it's just something we pulled out of our collective asses. So far, I haven't seen any convincing arguments for entitlements. Even if we assume the existence of God, assertions of "God-given" rights make me wonder where people get the idea that such things as God-given rights are self-evident.