Later, yes, some humans anyway may decide they don't like life and then they have the option to end it. — Bylaw

That’s also the point. There is no better version of the game of life (inter-worldly affairs) and so all you can do is kill yourself if you don’t like it(or die from a mishap from playing the game itself but that’s still affirming the game).

they are life that wants life — Bylaw

No, a parent wanted a life. A decision was had based on a reason. We are a species with reasons. I had a whole thread on this which poster @Banno and @Ciceronianus didn’t seem to get the import of.

No complaining, please. — Ciceronianus

Request denied. Imagine having the possibility for no choice though. I mean I could have complied :wink:. Not in the case of life. Comply or die. And you or I can move on to something else (infra-worldly affairs). Not so in the life treadmill game. You’re on it and if you want off, you are out.

like all life it strives for life — Bylaw

Really? If humans live in society and people don’t like the workings of society, isn’t that rejecting life? All the people who reject society refute that idea we strive for life. We are existential beings because we are self-aware. We could do other than instinct. So I fully disagree with this. The problem is, once a life is started, that person MUST go through the gauntlet or die. Since there is no alternative, starting a life on behalf of someone else is problematic. Human life becomes problematic because of its lack of options outside the premises of life. We humans can IMAGINE better scenarios or games, but we KNOW we can only play this one.

‘I won’t play any more,’ you too, when things seem that way to you, say, ‘I won’t play any more,’ and leave, but if you remain, don’t complain.” — Ciceronianus

Tread or die.. Don't tread on me.

Resigning and moving on is not really resigning though is it as you’ve merely transformed or exchanged your game for another (easier/harder)

Euthanasia says otherwise regarding your second point. — Deus

But that's the point. Intra-worldly, you exchange games. The treadmill continues or you die. There is no reprieve from the treadmill.. There is no time out.. A Platonic land of rest. Once you are thrown into the world, you must keep treading along.

I just wanted to add that I think this title would look great on the NYT best seller list: Series in Pessimism, by Schopenhaur1.

But you can exit life. Just don't let the hospital get a hold of your half dead body, they'll resuscitate it. — frank

You might not be far off. I believe Schopenhauer's best selling books were his essays and aphorisms that are found under the title Studies in Pessimism.

Really though, nobody understands the entirety of a complex modern machine (including social machines like governments). They may understand how to use it, or understand a single component by itself (which is useless by itself), or the may have a vague high-level understanding of how all the components work together, but no single person can possibly understand a machine in its entirety, let alone all of the machines that are now used in our lives; nor can the average person have any real say on anything either.

Gone are the days where tool-making went alongside tool-using, with every step of the process being understood by everyone. Now we have experts, specialization, technological giantism, etc. — _db

Wasn't Edison's lab the model for the modern groups of engineers/technicians who create the patented technology? Also the Fords and early chemical manufacturers. The knowledge was specialized, but these groups are brought together and then the worker simply fabricates and fixes it. The consumer consumes it.

It all leads back to forces much greater than us that are the backdrop of our throwness. Those who get to put together these groups of creators and manufacturers being more embedded in the vast ocean for which we consume and are bandied about as laborers upon the waves of.

How should we prepare our young for citizenship? — Athena

Why should we create people that must be united in the first place. What right do we have to create new people? Legitimate question. Go back to the root. First principles. Why we make others work, go through the treadmill of life. What right we have to make others do this. All people have in this forum as a response to these questions is snark and sarcasm..the refuge of those without a rational response.

We are put into a treadmill on top of a thresher. If we actually try to get off the treadmill, we only get torn in the thresher. The low level annoyance of existing varies from mild to extreme and everything in between. This existence is thus morally disqualifying.

Tying in my thread on technology..it doesn’t matter finance as much as who holds and distributes the knowledge and understanding.

Your phone, computer, cars, and electrical grid is controlled by those who know how these are made and can bring the resources together to get these produced and distributed. You can’t. You couldn’t alone anyways. These are forces bigger than you and that makes all the difference.

A cog in the great machine we call the universe! Work, work, work, die! We're replaceable parts; momma nature doesn't care about us because she can always create another human being just like/better than us. Si? — Agent Smith

@Srap Tasmaner

I'd like to go back to this because I think I got lost in my own message. Yes, there is some aspect of what I call "minutia-mongering" going on. That is to say, as technology increases exponentially, the amount of minutia the human needs to know to produce the technology increases, thus making us very much a cog-like entity of minutia-miners. We mine minutia (and we have to "mind" minutia).

This actually ties in to an earlier thread here about what the monolith was in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. What it can mean is that the tools have made humans estranged from their workings (HAL goes off the deep end and barely a programmer knows how/why) AND we have become changed to mintia-mongering bores.. (look at the soulless Discovery ship, with Dave and Frank just sitting idly, checking stats, running in place, staring, not saying much.. HAL has more personality than they do!). Minutia is all they are minding because they are mining minutia!

I'm not saying it's "imposing shit on the helpless plebs". That's just what it becomes. It's not necessarily designed that way, that is simply the nature of the hierarchy of technology of those who create it and use it.

As I said earlier:

One side--- Estrangement of the minutia of the tools themselves
Other side--- Estrangement from the minutia of the tools themselves. — schopenhauer1

I guess subjective isn't quite an opposite to objective. So I guess I mean objective that doesn't have emotional connotation or anything that isn't pure information, and a version of objective that refers to objects and objective ideas, but allows emotions and other non pure data to leak in. And have there be a spectrum between them? — TiredThinker

I think anything that is "objective" has a subjective component due to the fact that it is the subject deciding why the object is important in the first place. So, even the most data-laden scientific concept or the most purified theoretical scientific problem has to have humans that "cared" about an answer and a result. They had to focus their intention on it and attention on it. That, to me, is all subjective.

Why did Galileo, Newton, and Einstein discover the "objective" world of nature and science? Because they cared about it.

@apokrisis@Tzeentch@_db

Any further thoughts?

Well, it is about control to some extent. There are those who understand and create the technology, and those that can only use it. There are those who set the protocols and standards of the technology, and those who haplessly must review the literature already set in place by the first group and to some degree work backwards to figure out what they (the big dogs) did if they need to fix it.

https://blog.robertelder.org/how-to-make-a-cpu/

I meant more we are a passive consumer of technology rather than its creator. You can support it, buy it, service it. But you probably didn’t design or invent it. Nor can you really understand all the technology that went into it. Hence my example of the internet and all its innumerable parts.

You are a part I meant as a consumer of the technology. Not sure how you took that literally.

In a way.. Think of it this way..

The internet is a behemoth of complex technology.. It started with Arpanet, and the technology behind that.. TCP/IP... But also relates to purified silicon (doped with boron, phosphorus, and other elements), the ability to conduct electricity directionally, voltage, current, copper alloy ionic structures.. magnetism, chemical reactions, logic gates, and the rest.. It's immense. You are but a spec in this technology (made by human efforts) but yet you have almost no real agency in its production.. Then multiply all the technology involved in that complex process exponentially through the years with hundreds of thousands more things that are involved in modern electrical and electronic technologies. There are protocols and standards, etc. etc.. It's all set out from by some other nebulous groups of peoples in corporations and agencies involved in their development.

So it's not just that we are a spec in the universe. We are a spec in our own forms of sustenance to keep our daily lives.

Different. You are a bit player to the guy(s) who figured out principles of harnessing and distributing electricity.

You can say that baseball isn't baseball without the people who invented the official "bat". It's not even the bat producer.

The consumers allow the producers to keep producing, but I am saying that is secondary to the people who invented the stuff and/or can reproduce the stuff and improve it.

Because it becomes a hierarchy where you become a secondary character in your own life. You just support those who matter to the creation of the tools.

Clearly a human understood and can create those things. But that was not you. You’re just a supporting cast. You’re ignorant and far removed of the very tools you use.

I couldn't find them. — Hanover

It's kind of in there briefly but basically whereas natural processes are not in our control, human-made processes are the outcome of other people's decisions. Where natural processes could not have been different in this universe, human decisions can. Right now it is the case that some get to create technology and others simply support or use it.

You’ve seemed to ignore other posts I wrote about natural vs human processes so I’ll invite you to read some of those if you want.

Besides consumer and laborer, how close do you get to the understanding and actual resources that create the technology? Who has more agency and less agency? Hint, it isn't just the ones with the most money. Holding the money and spending it, isn't quite it. You have to have access to the finance but also the technology itself.. to some understanding and to groups of those who have understanding. To the mining, the manufacturing, the resources, the formulas, the engineering principles, etc.

You have to mine minutia.. It's minutia all the way down... to the sub-atomic level. It's so very tedious.. Don't let the romantics full you. In that, apokrisis is right, but in so replacing the tedium of the scientific formulas, he replaces it with the principle of triadic meta-formulas. — schopenhauer1

I'll look into that. But 100% agree about the gatekeeping. I am even more terrified of the malaise of minutia that comes out of the science.. These people can accept and deal with enormous amounts of minutia. The tedium of the practical and necessary. But yet "Life is good".

The paradox is that we are alienated from that which sustains us, but if we are not alienated we simply become mired in the minutia of 100110101, materials, equations, and the like..

One major con is giving a romantic vision to science and technology. The Edisons/Teslas, Einsteins/Heidenbergs, etc. Monger the minutia is more the gist of science of the daily.. Your computer screen, your processor, your electronics, your plastics.. :yawn:

You become a 01001100101 to make 0010100110.. So alienation or minutia mongerer? It all doesn't lead anywhere good.

But at the same time, there is an "innovative" / inventive element that is there for a very small amount of time. The "breakthroughs" of a few that get pulled apart and mongered to become more minutia. — schopenhauer1

I'm not following why having survival mechanisms that go beyond my understanding entail pessimism. — Hanover

Because you are simply a passive user who does not get to be involved in that which you use for various utility.

So it's a bit different even than that. Rather, it's not the pretty common trope of using modern technology which causes alienation, but not being able to be "really" apart of the core members who actually created and fully understand the technology. That can be said on two levels:

1) Those who understand a very specialized field of technology really well (like someone on R&D for X chemicals, circuit board design, machine code, materials science, electronic engineering, etc. Not everyone gets to be a part of this.. only a select few and their entrepreneurial/financial backers. Everyone else just uses the final products passively, or labors in some auxilliary fields tangential to the true inventors and creators.

OR

2) Even the specialized experts only know their technology well and thus can't know ALL the technology that is used, and so even they are passive users who can never really know that which creates the technology they rely on.

it is an obfuscation.. Others were alluding to a more fundamental estrangement from existence, but this one is interesting because there are degrees where at least a few people get a bit closer to some of the core technology that "sustains" our (modern) existence.. and since we only live out modern existences in 90% of the world (I'll argue even third world countries), that is indeed what matters.

The engineers at places like IBM, Samsung, Apple, Huawei, Intel, Dow Chemicals, General Electric, Texas Instruments, Canon, and so on. — schopenhauer1

It's about being excluded.. In the cave.. But it's also about even once you find the Forms (technological understanding) you realize it's just tedium all the way down. Perhaps it's hard to explain.. That's why I am fleshing this out and seeing how others can contribute perhaps. A dialectic.

The optimist invents the airplane the pessimist the parachute.

Both ways of thinking are necessary. — Deus

Cool observation, but still not quite what I'm getting at. Both the airplane and parachute creator are involved in the technology. The ones just using it are not.

So you are in the confused camp? So it is pessimistic in that unless you are of the elite who have these positions, you simply are a passive user of the technology.. The very thing used to maintain your lifestyle.

As far as pessimism in general, I do think there is some therapy to be had.. But I don't see that as "a-philosophical". Stoicism, Buddhism, and a whole host of philosophical systems are a kind of therapy. Philosophy itself can be seen as therapy of a self-aware creature thrown into a world where there are no certainties or (seemingly) inherent reasons for anything at all.

In fact, I see an interesting dichotomy between human-centered philosophical interests (ethics, aesthetics, values, etc.) and logic/math. It is the same thing.. The logic/math/science of the universe exist, but why should we care? Once you answer that, you get to human-centered reasons, so they are intertwined.

I already made the (human-centered) reason that technology/scientific understanding sustains us (our very physical existence in a modern social setting). Now I provide what this means when played out.. The elite who are involved in technology creation and the others that are not.

Not quite but cool imagery.
Rather the graduate student got to do what was primary/essential/Forms (technology creation) and everything from the transportation, marketers, finance, tradesman servicing it are secondary, and not a actually getting to participate in the technology creation (essential/primary/the actual technology creation itself).

At what point does a human being rationalise it’s consumption ? — Deus

Similar to antinatalism, if you don't have to cause other animals pain unnecessarily, why do so? It would be a naturalistic fallacy to point to evolution of our big brains through meat consumption or the idea that other animals eat meat. We know we can survive without eating meat. We also have the capacity for choice, and thus ethics in the first place.

My argument is that Antinatalism has two lines of attack (1) An ’ethical’ one (2) a ’moral’ one. Both opposing each other, which is why there is an issue when it comes to unravelling an Anitnatalists points/evidence for their cause. — I like sushi

Since you have not provided how ethical and moral are defined in context of antinatalism, you are missing pieces that would even lead to a conclusion that can be debated. You need to flesh out (but very succinctly) what moral vs. ethics is.. and how moral and ethics are being equivocated, but with very precise understandings of where one is the moral claim and one is the ethical claim and how one is contradicting the other.

If antinatalists maintain that we should exercise reasonable judgment in determining whether to have children, who could object to that? But that's not what they maintain, by my understanding (if I'm wrong, please let me know). — Ciceronianus

Rather, they maintain that a reasonable judgement would come to the conclusion that starting another's life, is ALWAYS problematic/wrong. Just like a little bit of slavery is not right either.

Really insightful contribution, thanks!

But I would contest a point here:

A disconnect is of itself not a problem. As long as one can turn the lights on, potholes are filled in in the roads, the buses run on time and the citizen's life is angst-free, and where each citizen plays their part in the smooth running of the public services, then such a disconnect is not to be feared. — RussellA

I am not necessarily looking at it from a pragmatic/effect.. I realize that we can carry on pretty well not knowing how much of any technology works. Rather, I see the position of R&D in sciences/technologies/programming/manufacturing/mining/electric/electronic/engineering in general the whole system of symbiosis of all of them in STEM fields as being at the core of the understanding of the (modern) tools we use. They are usually placed in larger industries, though small and medium startups sometimes get in there too. Either way, it is what these people get to be a part of and the others passively just use, that I am referring to. Not everyone can be a part of this, but passively use and service the tools that the science/engineering/R&D get to invent/create/understand/are an integral part of..

You can argue that everyone has their place for the system to work, but this is not quite what I am getting at. The other laboring jobs are all in service to the tools that these people get to be a part of. There is a natural hierarchy going on.. where most people are cut off from the factors of industry/knowledge that they use.. but there are a small number of people who are at this position/level to understand.

To make an analogy (hear me out).. It's like the cave. The scientists/R&D/engineers at these strategic companies (many times used from previous governmental research) are sort of sitting with the forms, and we simply glean at it from a "use" side of it. And no, buying a book of "How stuff works" doesn't solve this disconnect of gnosis of the forms/tools/understanding as it is enacted in real life.

And oddly, at the same time, "knowing" the forms can be oh so tedious. My point with the post with all the images of the ways of the tedious complexities. We need to "mine" minutia.. It's like if the forms instead of being beautiful Platonic understanding, is just really a mining of complexities. It creates jobs, but it creates tedious monotony, minutia, etc.. Once you get to the forms, you realize it's just more tedium, all the way down to a sub-atomic level of understanding.

Whether or not to have children is a question, also involving consideration of morality and other things. Only those who crave for certainty would claim the answer to either question is certain. Others are doomed to think. — Ciceronianus

But that's the point of the debate.. At one point some people thought slavery was moral and ethical system as well as medieval cruel and unusual punishment, and inquisitions, and total conquest of a peoples, etc. etc. Doesn't mean it's right!

You are saying humans are NOT human made??? — god must be atheist

As opposed to the chemical and biological processes of the human body you mentioned that we don't understand, yes.

We have no control over them. — god must be atheist

But in the case of technology, it is human made, so paradoxically..it sustains us, some are involved in specialists aspects of it, but most are not and are only involved in a secondary way far removed from its creation or any real understanding of the processes and principles involved.

We are estranged, but not everyone.

Good exegesis of our predicament: specialization (in technology) is a vulnerability, an Achilles' heel. Technologies are interdependent and if only one group of specialists is eliminated, civilization will collapse. — Agent Smith

This may be..but I am looking at it from a core and auxiliary, where the core needs the auxiliary in a secondary sense (to sell, market, account for, service, etc. the stuff), the auxiliary needs the core people absolutely in a primary sense for the technology itself.

The point of (3) which, on a charitably nuanced reading, seems to be that our sense of aliveness may be eroded by technology in various ways through the alienation it can contribute to is something I agree with. It's true that technology has disconnected many people from the sources of the food and water that sustain them. — Janus

@RussellA @Agent Smith @Real Gone Cat

So it's a bit different even than that. Rather, it's not the pretty common trope of using modern technology which causes alienation, but not being able to be "really" apart of the core members who actually created and fully understand the technology. That can be said on two levels:

1) Those who understand a very specialized field of technology really well (like someone on R&D for X chemicals, circuit board design, machine code, materials science, electronic engineering, etc. Not everyone gets to be a part of this.. only a select few and their entrepreneurial/financial backers. Everyone else just uses the final products passively, or labors in some auxilliary fields tangential to the true inventors and creators.

OR

2) Even the specialized experts only know their technology well and thus can't know ALL the technology that is used, and so even they are passive users who can never really know that which creates the technology they rely on.

it is an obfuscation.. Others were alluding to a more fundamental estrangement from existence, but this one is interesting because there are degrees where at least a few people get a bit closer to some of the core technology that "sustains" our (modern) existence.. and since we only live out modern existences in 90% of the world (I'll argue even third world countries), that is indeed what matters.

The engineers at places like IBM, Samsung, Apple, Huawei, Intel, Dow Chemicals, General Electric, Texas Instruments, Canon, and so on.

So yeah I pretty much had the definition correct- personal vs social.

But not sure how it applies here. Ethics if used I this way is about institutions. The ethics of business or doctors or maybe even train conductors. But morals is what one holds individually despite institutions.

Nice analysis. The OP was referencing 3.

Debate over the exact differences are argued about in meta ethics. Generally speaking though the manner in which I used them is not some concocted definition, it is the general and widely accepted uses of these terms today in academia. — I like sushi

It would still be useful to summarize this distinction or provide a reference.

My main conclusion in any discussion on Antinatalism is that an Antinatalist position cannot be moral and ethical, and to argue against some perceived ‘ethic’ when the position espoused is ‘moral’ is in error too. The confusion can be tackled in meta ethics too if necessary. — I like sushi

If this is central then it really should be explained in your words what this distinction is. It’s not so clear cut and the words have been used interchangeably in the past.

I think what lies at the heart of the major disagreements we have seen on this subject on this forum relate to both those arguing for and against Antinatalism ending up arguing whilst being oblivious to the difference between ‘ethics’ and ‘morals’ - or simply dropping the ball long enough to cause confusion. — I like sushi

Ibid

The argument for antinatalism surely has to be an ethical or moral one? — I like sushi

Yes very much so. Don’t bring a person who experiences more inescapable, non-trivial, non consented suffering into the world. Don’t paternalistically assume what is good enough and allowable amounts of suffering for others to endure.