I saw that video clip; remarkable, especially given it's provenance.

Tardigrades arguably arrived via interstellar spores. There's some thought that the octopus family might have as well. — Wayfarer

The octopus is an alien? What about the squids, cuttlefish and nautiloids (mollusks) they are related to? Also alien? Cuttle fish, for instance, have complex brains -- it takes a lot of brain power to operate their expert pattern and texture matching facilities. They are as intelligent as some other smarter creatures, and are far, far smarter than even your brilliant clam, to which they are related. irrelevant to present discussion...

As for tardigrades... Why would we think they are from elsewhere in the galaxy? Yes, they are remarkable creatures, for sure--very tough--but they are not extremophiles--that is, they don't thrive in extreme settings even if they can survive +300 degrees F to -200, terrific pressure, vacuum, and radiation -- but not indefinitely. They aren't indestructible.

While they have been retrieved alive from a module exposed to radiation and the vacuum of space, they weren't floating in space for months, years, decades, or centuries. They can go into something very close to stasis, at about .01 percent of their normal metabolism, In stasis they have low moisture content, antifreeze, antioxidants, and other chemical defenses.

Panspermia may be true, but picking out a couple of oddball species (Octopi and tardigrades) and identifying them as cosmic travelers doesn't wash.

Gabriel Marcel — Mitchell

Sounds like a French philosophy quote to me. Marcel probably needs bouts of metaphysical disquiet to de-paralyze his superior spirit.

My "Why do you want to know" was just a silly quip.

I like Kant's formulation:

According to Kant:
1. What can we know?
2. What ought we to do?
3. For what can we hope? — Mitchell

Also good.

What you're not seeing is the broader cultural issue. — Wayfarer

Damn! When I try to see the whole broader cultural issue, nothing happens.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York, Free Press, 1973), xvii

Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden.

So, given the average reading age and intelligence, and the inability to devote time to pondering such questions, which do you think might be the more likely to give rise to 'nihilism and anti-natalism'? — Wayfarer

You cite many interesting books and articles. I add them to my reading list, which I will (I hope) eventually get through.

On the one hand, there are depression and allied psychological conditions which darken the individual's reality, whatever their preferred intellectual positions. On the other hand, there are philosophical positions which individuals construct over time, drawing on preferences, experience, maybe predisposing genes, and those broader cultural issues. Depression happens to us, nihilism and antinatalism are our creations.

I'm not all that worried about antinatalists. There are more children being born than the world can reasonably support, so antinatalism makes sense from that angle. I know people who have opted to not have children for philosophical reasons, who aren't quite antinatalists. It's an entirely supportable position, at least from some angles. Being a gay guy, I never intended to have children. Not fathering a brood hasn't felt like a loss to me.

I have a larger concern about nihilism. I have no objection to assertions that we live in an essentially meaningless universe. I don't think the universe has built in meaning, either. We, on the other hand, are meaning givers, and if the universe has a meaning, it comes from us, for better or worse. Of greater concern is that nihilism can become a "universal negator", rejecting meaning willy nilly. It can be a pernicious influence. Entertaining the absence of meaning, morals, values, and so forth leads one into "If God is dead, everything is permissible" territory, which is in general not a good place to be.

Your OP is basically 'ain't life grand? — Wayfarer

No, life isn't "just grand" it's "just good". I hear a distinct difference between "grand" and "good". The antinatalists are right about suffering: Obviously there is suffering. Life is still "good", not grand. Death is grievous, and comes to us all--quite often in very unpleasant form. Despite that, life is still good, not grand. There are pleasure and joys in life, as well as suffering and death, and if our pleasures and joys are more limited than our miseries, life is still good.

"Life is good" is a starting point. Every philosophical position begins somewhere. "Ain't life grand" is more the starting point of Auntie Mame (a 1950s movie/broadway musical), where "Life is a banquet and these poor suckers are starving".

This never stopped Kirk. — Cavacava

Because Kirk & Company had series continuity, a powerful feature of televised life forms. He HAD TO SURVIVE all aliens, or it would have been the premature end of the show, and that in turn would have violated a contract. Our first visitors to an alien planet will not, nor will our first alien visitors here have the powerful protection of series continuity.

They'll take a deep breath, croak, and that will be that.

Or not.

Or those rovers running around on Mars.

so the initial leap from nothing to something may have been inevitable

Yeah, well... I'm waiting for several nothings to become something and so far, nothing has happened.

everything I've said has very clearly been about how guns do not cause people to be violent or commit crime, they only make the crimes more lethal. — JustSomeGuy

I really hate to acknowledge this bit: The number of guns--all types--in the possession of Americans is somewhere between 100 million and 200 million. Clearly, the vast majority of those guns are not being used to perform violent acts. For which we can be very grateful. On the other hand, as they say in the advertising business "the product is a message". Shall we say, "Guns help people kill people"? In violent areas, it's safe to say that "Guns give people good reasons to kill people".

On the other hand, the number of guns is very large, and the number of deaths by guns (manslaughter and suicide) is also large. Let's not forget the damage caused by non-fatal gun shot wounds.

It's always important to look at how national averages are composed. Some places in the United States [mostly the northern-most tier of states) have rates of violence similar to northern Europe--quite low-- while other areas [the former states of the Confederacy] have very high rates of gun violence. Some cities, like New Orleans, are remarkably violent. Parts of Chicago too.

Stephen Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, laid the high rate of violence in the south to 3 cultural features:

1. A strong sense of personal honor (which must be defended)
2. A suspicion of central government -- not just the federal government, but the state and local government as well.
3. A tradition of "do it yourself justice".

People who wear their honor on their sleeves, are suspicious of any encroachments by peace-enforcing government agents like police, sheriffs... are going to have more conflict than most other people, and because they prefer to carry out justice themselves, there are going to be more violent deaths.

Much the same thing prevails in Mexico where the drug industry personnel tend to kill each other, and anyone who gets in their way, quite regularly. Mexico will have something like 25,000 murders this year, with a population of roughly 40% of the US--126,000,000.

Why do you want to know?

But what makes us different to animals, is not only a matter of a biological difference. — Wayfarer

"Biologically" there is no significant difference among mammals, and we have very strong similarity to the biology of fish, for instance. Not that cold blooded fish and warm blooded mammals are likely to swap parts, but the basic design and operation of fish (many millions of years back) affected our design and operation.

Certainly, the human brain has no equal among all other animals. Our capacities exceed all others. But the operation of our capacities is not fundamentally different than that of a chimpanzee or bonobo, or even your cat or dog. The way neurons perform their functions was worked out a long time ago. A fruit fly neuron and a human neuron are doing many of the same things.

Even a rat brain is very complex, and our brain is much, much larger than a rat's brain and many orders more complex, particularly in the pre-frontal cortex.

... humans are able to reflect on the nature of existence in a way that animals simply cannot. — Wayfarer

Right, and it's a good thing, too. If our pets and domestic animals could reflect on the nature of their existences, it is quite possible they would become bitter and resentful, and god only knows what they might do while we were asleep. A lot of people would probably have never (literally) woken up.

But the influence of evolutionary biology on philosophy, ethics, psychology, and culture in general is often regrettable, in my view. It’s something I have only begun to notice because of the culture wars over evolution. — Wayfarer

How could the theory of evolution not affect philosophy, ethics, psychology, and culture? Before Darwin there were discoveries in geology (really, the invention of geology) in the late 18th, early 19th centuries, that undermined the received biblical view of history and our place in it. The unseating of the earth as the center of the cosmos was very disruptive. The advances in computers challenges some assumptions (depending how much credit one is willing to extend to one's CPUs).

The whole business of fundamentalism was more than a reaction to just Darwin -- it was also a reaction against scholarship which impugned the authorship and formation of the biblical texts.

The culture wars are tiresome, tedious, and interminable. Stupid too, and I don't blame Darwin for their ill effects. All that is required for a culture war to get going is a significant change in the people's prospects. Since Darwin a lot of coincidental changes in people's prospects have been visited on us: electricity and electronic media; the automobile; world wars; atomic weapons; ICBMs; antibiotics; Black Power; "bra-burning" feminists; militant homosexuals, and so on.

That's a lot, plus there have been pleasant economic booms followed by some really horrible busts; deep changes in manufacturing and trade (globalization) caused, and are causing upheaval across the working class and middle classes too. The baby boom rode an economic wave which peaked by 1970, and they, and their children have been on the economic skids (declining income and deteriorating purchasing power) ever since.

So, a once nice comprehensible model of the world went KABOOM and here we are picking up the pieces.

I'm pro-evolution; I assume you are too, in as much as Darwin explains the differentiation of species. You know, we all have our inner fish.*** One can be a 'evolutionary enthusiast' without wanting to depersonalize, alienate, instrumentalize, impose crude determinism, et al.

Yeah but it is actually. Western culture seized on evolutionary theory as a way to bring human beings within scope for science. That is why the 'new atheists' - Dennett, Dawkins, and others - are all 'Darwinian fundamentalists'. There is only one possible 'creation myth' and that is the one that (surprise!) happens to provide an exact analogy for capitalist free-market economic — Wayfarer

Isn't it the case that capitalist free-market economics proceeded Darwin's book? It seems more like the prevailing zeitgeist more seized on Darwin than had Darwin imposed on it.

Evolution should not lead us to think of ourselves as soulless creatures of deterministic processes.
— Bitter Crank

Well, that’s my only beef with it. Insofar as it doesn’t do that, I don’t have any issue with it. — Wayfarer

There are people who do think of other humans "as soulless creatures of deterministic processes" (which of course doesn't include themselves). They may employ evolution, but Darwin isn't their source book.

Very large scale centralized, bureaucratic organizations such as GM, [the old AT&T--Bell Telephone], General Electric, military organizations, authoritarian political regimes (like the CP-USSR), Google, Apple, and such like, tend to reduce populations to objects, because dehumanization suits their goals and methodology. The very large scale centralized bureaucratic organizations that we are most familiar with are focused on extracting value from their employees, profits from their customers, projected power as directed (the military), and so on. The high level (and maybe not-so-high managers) tend to instrumentalize people, and manage or manipulate them as objects, not as persons.

Advertisers play this game too. For instance, "the market" to which advertisers address their messages, is as segmented as an ear of corn. Each kernel represents a unique group, sub-group, or sub-sub group which can be targeted (by one means or another). For instance, Midwesternern heterosexual couples between the age of 55 and 75, who live in a affluent, minimally integrated suburban census tracts, own a second home on a lake surrounded by forest, have adult children, and who travel frequently, form a kernel on the cob.

Young single white women who opt for motherhood without a partner (live in or married), reside in a particular kind of urban census tract, are college educated, and employed, are another kernel on the cob. Young college educated gay men who are professionally employed, live in certain urban census tracts, read any of 5 national gay magazines, and buy up-market products are yet another kernel on the cob.

The market doesn't consist of human individuals, it consists of collections of traits with a certain amount of purchasing power...

These various managers, directors, manipulators, and so on are, I think, the most likely to be interested in evolutionary psychology, influence of genes in behavior, and using data mining to identify persons of interest.

I think Darwin (like Nietzsche) is vastly over-rated in today's culture. His theory is a scientific one, accounting for the origin of species, but nowadays it occupies the vacuum left by the collapse of traditional culture.
...
So where the Biblical tradition was traditionally the rationale for beliefs about the nature of the human, now evolutionary biology fills that space. — Wayfarer

IF the collapse of traditional culture created a vacuum that sucked in evolution to fill the god-shaped empty space, questions should be asked about why traditional culture failed rather than blaming evolution for getting sucked in.

And evolution certainly accounts for a big hunk of what we can be and what we are. True enough, though, evolution does facilitate the manufacture of sometimes bogus theories. Someone will note that some disorders (or 'features') are inherited and they will explain it by claiming [whatever it was] gave people an evolutionary advantage. It might, or it might not. Genes get inherited all the time which have zero value in reproductive success, like genes that cause familial alzheimer disease or a high susceptibility to breast cancer. Claiming these had survival value is kind of stupid.

Darwin didn't know anything about genetics. Gregory Mendel's research into feature inheritance in plants wasn't available to Darwin (or hardly anyone else at the time), and many deeper discoveries about genetics were a century into the future.

Evolution should not lead us to think of ourselves as soulless creatures of deterministic processes. Our most human features were created and fielded in simpler form in other animals, from which we evolved, or with whom we evolved in tandem, over a long period of time. So we find in dogs, for example, a crude sense of justice. In laboratory situations (where several dogs can see each other during the experiments), it has been found that a dog will stop cooperating, if it sees that the other dogs have received a reward and it has not. INTOLERABLE. The dogs don't care about the quality of the reward, just that they receive something.

Primates, on the other hand, judge rewards by quality. Primates will stop cooperating with researchers if they see that other apes are receiving apple and orange pieces for rewards while it is receiving pieces of cucumber and turnip. NOT FAIR.

The capacity to make judgements of this sort was evolved before we came along. I think of this as expanding what makes us unique, rather than shrinking what makes us unique. Similarly, many animals bond with their offspring in exactly the same way we do. Hormones are released during labor that are calming and pain reducing, while at the same time oxytocin is released to help the bonding occur. When the mother finally pops out the newborn, she is physically ready to respond to the baby/babies.

That we employ animalistic mechanisms at various stages of life doesn't take anything away from our finer features, like debating philosophical questions on line.

Marx did not propose rigid egalitarianism: He said, "From each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs." Some people are capable of producing more than others, and some people can produce less. Some people need more material goods than other people. (for instance, parents with three children need more than parents with 1 child or people with no children.)

Perfect egalitarianism is very utopian, Humans did not evolve to produce utopias, and are especially not enthusiastic about living in most other people's utopias. Perfect equality, perfect happiness, perfect contentment, etc. lead to hells of rigid control. How can you have perfect equality without perfect control of what people do? I don't want to be that tightly controlled.

You might be interested to know that conservative economists (like Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago) once proposed a minimum guaranteed income, whether you did anything to earn it or not. It was free money given to people on a silver platter. (The guaranteed income was a good deal lower than $40,000 a year.)

Why would anyone, especially a conservative economist, propose such a thing?

1. It would be cheaper to administer than the various benefit programs like welfare or unemployment insurance.
2. It would facilitate social and vocational mobility. People could afford to quit a job they disliked and search for a better job, without fear of starvation and homelessness.
3. It would be good for the economy, because people receiving a minimum income would probably spend all of it on basic goods and services.
4. It would result in greater equality of income (the rich would probably have to be taken more heavily than they were at the time to pay for the program.
5. It would be easier for people to return to school for more training.

and so on.

I'm of mixed and conflicting mind about God. On the one hand, theism (in it's American/Mainline Protestant form) is very familiar to me, is a belief system I was immersed in, and is also a belief system that has been troublesome. Catholicism wouldn't have been that much different, had I been raised Catholic instead of Methodist.

I am also a "thin ice atheist" -- that is, I don't feel a lot of security in not believing in God. I've taken that position and haven't broken through the ice yet, so... we'll see what happens.

The compromise I have tried is more like Unitarianism: drop the trinity (maybe keep God the Father); keep Jesus and skip Paul; avoid thinking in literal terms about God; keep the Crucifixion, drop the Resurrection; keep the Bible; drop large chunks of theology. But then, that isn't quite enough. God the Father is still something of a problem. So, I end up with something in-between wishy-washy Unitarianism (which is kind of lukewarm to start with) and thin-ice atheism.

My moral compass still works pretty well -- or maybe more accurately, as well as it ever did, for what that is worth. I behave about the same as an Atheist and as a Christian, for better or worse.

One thing I do believe in is the value/goodness/utility/benefit/etc. of belief. It seems to do most people much more good than harm, unless, of course, it is one of several "off the deep-end" belief that one should go on crusades or jihads to square up the world with one's peculiar beliefs. Bad practice. Fundamentalism, regardless of which religion it appears in, is nothing but trouble.

As a Christian I didn't find any problem with the Big Bang, Darwin, or technology.

Yes, I absolutely believe that, you can see reactions to injustice even in other primates, see the work of Frans de Waal. All tribes have taboos against most of the stuff we think of as immoral and ostracise those who don't share and support the community. No culture in the world condones murder or theft, all consider generosity a virtue, I could go on, but in summary I consider the evidence that morality is innate to be overwhelming. — Inter Alia

Amazing.

Even dogs dislike it when they are not rewarded for effort and they can see that other dogs are rewarded.*** Canine through Primate morality is rather limited. It may be the basis of cultural elaboration by us primates, but I think you'll have a hard time proving that connection.

You bring in culture: "No culture in the world condones murder or theft..." Is culture innate too? OR, do we develop cultural features and pass them on to the next generation through instruction and example? Language (in which so much culture is encapsulated) isn't innate either. The capacity and urge to learn language seems to be innate, but there is nothing innate about any particular language.

*** The difference between canines and primates on this point is this: In laboratory situations, where dogs in experiments can see each other, dogs object to not being rewarded for effort. It doesn't make any difference what they are rewarded with, as long as they receive something. Primates in laboratory situations object when they do not receive equal quality rewards. Dogs stop cooperating if they are unrewarded. Primates stop cooperating if they are rewarded with inferior tidbits, like a slice of cucumber instead of a slice of apple, or a piece of turnip instead of a piece of orange.

As for innateness, sure: evolution has developed innate capabilities in many species. But in humans, it seems to require the medium of culture to develop innate qualities -- because it takes so long for humans to reach maturity.

Religious people are obviously not more at peace with themselves, I'm mystified as to why anyone would think that. Religious people abuse children, they then cover-up that abuse, they torture people, murder those who don't agree with them, start wars over a stupid building/wall/relic, subjugate women, ostracise homosexuals, stone adulterers, cut people's hands off for stealing, close their church doors to the homeless because 'god made them poor', jail people for touching another man, blow themselves up in public places, murder innocent children because they went to a pop concert. What on earth makes you think religious people are at peace with themselves? — Inter Alia

Why can't I pick the best parts of all God-beliefs and put them together in a way that makes sense to me. — TheMadFool

Inter Alia, aren't you doing the same thing (only in reverse) that TheMadFood proposes? You are picking the worst parts of various religious groups and packaging it as "This Is What Religious People Do"? Had you ranged wider, outside of the Abrahamic religions, you could find even worse things that religious people do.

People--all 100 billion of us that have ever existed--tend to behave badly, and nothing we have thought of so far is able to make angels out of us. That's one thing.

The other thing is that studies have found that religious people, on average, tend to be more at peace, happier, well adjusted--or something--than people without religious beliefs. This good effect of religion might come from regular association with other people. Social isolates usually are fairly unhappy, die at an earlier age than socially involved people, are healthier, and so on.

Religion (for better or for worse) supplies regular social activity and a basket of organizing principles which can be used to make sense of frequently unpleasant realities. Familiar rituals tend to feel good. Doing them with other people is even better.

Religion, as Karl Marx noted, "... is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions."

God comes back again in his usual guise, some really kind and protective bloke with a big beard, mysteriously like the dad we all wanted but never quite had... — Inter Alia

This bearded fellow is lodged in billions of minds, mine too. It's the children's Sunday school story that doesn't grow up with us. Some enduring effort is needed to learn, unlearn, and relearn. The cliché god, big daddy in the sky, is too small, too simple, too literal -- and altogether too familiar. Big daddy god is not suitable for mature adult audiences.

One place (there are others) to look for direction on how to get a grown-up god is (surprise!) the Bible: Like Isaiah:

8 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord.
9 “As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.

or in Job:

4 “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. 5 Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? 6 On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone— 7 while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy? 8 “Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb, 9 when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness, 10 when I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place, 11 when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt’? 12 “Have you ever given orders to the morning, or shown the dawn its place, 13 that it might take the earth by the edges and shake the wicked out of it?

More metaphors, yes. It is very hard to think or speak of an immortal, immaterial, immanent God, permanently pervading and sustaining the universe. "All that" is just way out of our ordinary reckoning. So, we use metaphors like "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundations?"

It's a discipline to stop thinking about God in material terms, to get it through our thick skulls that God is not like us. (Such as, God didn't evolve; God doesn't have a body; God doesn't have senses, emotions, ideas... All that is our stuff. God isn't located "somewhere" -- like heaven. God isn't "seated on a throne" because God doesn't sit, stand, lay down, or hover.)

I'm offering this as intellectual advice, not pastoral advice.

I don't know if it's true or not but lately I've begun to realize that to be good we need to give up reasoning. — TheMadFool

Please don't give up reasoning. Like Jesus said, we must be as harmless as doves and as wise as serpents.

To tell you the truth I'm in a bit of a fix. I have two options before me. One is religion and the other atheism. My present situation is, let's say, ''inconvenient'' both ways. In a nutshell, God seems bloodthirsty and the nihilism of atheism is depressing. — TheMadFool

You are in a fix because the two categories -- atheist nihilism and bloodthirsty God belief, are, indeed, dismal alternatives. But you don't have to look at atheism or god in those ways. God is too much a mystery to nail highly specific adjectives onto.

One can be an atheist nihilist, but atheism doesn't necessarily lead to nihilism. Loosen up your categories. They are to small, too rigid.

I didn't know, still don't know, how to find "work I love". I stumbled into three or four jobs that I liked reasonably well (lets not go overboard with the love bit) for a while (1, 2, 3 years...) but which then turned to the usual soul-deadening thing that they have to pay people to do, because nobody would do it for free.

Good jobs are hard to find, and jobs that are good tend not to stay that way for long, because most jobs exist within organizations, bureaucracies, institutions, and so on, which by their nature, tend to control what their employees are are doing. Not only what they are doing, but how they are doing it, and the sort of experience they are having while doing it. Control is what ruins most jobs that might be good and makes most jobs that might be barely tolerable into experiences one wants to escape.

I've always worked in the non-profit sector, and small organizations aren't all that different than large organizations. Work can be good (once in a while) in a big as well as a small organization.

For me, a very good job would be one where I am hired to create something new, kind of edgy, and am left alone to find a way to do it. Creating is interesting. Carrying out the task gets to be a drag fairly quickly.

Charles Ives, 1874/1954 an American pioneer in selling insurance (estate planning products) was also a composer. This piece is interesting, or the sound track of a headache, depending how you feel.

I hope there is at least one 3 star Michelin restaurant left that really is very good. Or would you rather go slumming?

Are you getting to France on your own dime, or do I have to pay for that?

It is wrong to spend $50,000 on a wedding, I can even go so far as to call that unethical... it is not justifiable ethically when there are thousands of children in need — TimeLine

Never mind thousands of children in need! They could put their $50,000 of cash in my hands so that I could complete my education before I drop dead of old age. I haven't been to Paris, have not seen the Mona Lisa, haven't been to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg (Russia, not Florida), haven't toured the 50 (50? maybe 25) Great Cities of Europe, haven't been to Machu Picchu, Brasilia, can't afford a decent high powered microscope, haven't taken my favorite TPF posters out to lunch--for 50K, TimeLine, I'll pick up the tab at whatever fine dining establishment you want, just us two. Well, maybe several others -- depending. We might run out of conversational common ground before the Maitre'd decides at which preferred table to put us.

Life is good, see, and $50,000 in my hands would make it even better.

I might even take Schopenhauer1 along to see if I can't arrange experiences which will be so thrilling he'll change his mind about the downside of nativity. Though, $50,000 isn't all that much when you get down to it. In order to change Schopenhauer1's mind, I might have to also have the $50,000 from the in vitro fertilization operation. Get me $100,000, TimeLine, and I'll throw in a second lunch and several movies. Maybe we could pick up a few philosophers and go bar hopping, or something.

The reaction was not as bad as when I said the same to someone who spent that much on a wedding. — TimeLine

Juicy details, please. Did the bride punch you out?

For a wedding, I would tend to agree. Many weddings seem to be less a celebration of an important event and more an occasion for extremely conspicuous consumption.

I openly told a woman at work who said that she spent $50,000 on IVF treatment that she was an idiot. — TimeLine

No doubt she found your assessment quite helpful and refreshingly frank.

There is a philosophically technical term for this used in all British universities. It is called bollocks.

Some might say that Ben & Jerry's Ice cream is good in itself and they would be wrong too.

It only take one dissenting voice to prove my case, which is true regardless of that voice. — charleton

You may think that the assertion 'life in itself is good' is bollocks or bullshit or whatever term you like. There are many who, for various reasons, don't agree that life is good. I can't tell whether your objection is that "life is not good' or that 'life in itself is good' is poorly stated.

If you would, please clarify your view.

I currently take a small 'maintenance' dose of generic Effexor. I feel normal and function well. I've taken it for quite a few years. When I try to wean myself off it, I feel ill after a couple of days--not mentally ill, just physically ill, with odd, vague, but definitely unpleasant symptoms. I've made it for four days, then resumed.

I was able to wean myself off benzodiazepines and tri-cyclic antidepressants without much difficulty, but that was...30 years ago, and I had not been on them very long. And how many pounds of antidepressant since then?

I'm not against taking medications. I've taken drugs for glaucoma for some 30 years too. They have worked well--keeping pressure under control, preserving vision, preventing pain. But, as luck would have it, they stopped working in one eye. (Odd how a drug can work in one eye and stop working in the other one.)

I am grateful that these drugs have been found to control various acute and chronic conditions. Without the pharmacopeia we have, life would be nastier and shorter. Most people don't mind that they receive background doses of fluoride, but there are some who are militantly opposed. Likewise for the lunatic anti-vaxers.

Even if some drugs have toxicities, even if they fail sometimes, many lives have been better with them than without them. I think most of the people who have severe epilepsy, for example, find that drugs are better than frequent seizures, even though the difference between the therapeutic and toxic dose of some of the drugs is very small.

Predictably, some people are opposed to the anti-Herpes Zoster vaccine (prevents or reduces the severity of shingles). Don't know why; it's against nature, god, or something. Anyone who has had or knows someone who has had a bad case of shingles will opt for this godless unnatural vaccination without thinking a second about it.

Not a problem. I was joking. And I'm not always consistent, for worse or better.

suffering — schopenhauer1

Speaking of which, it's time to leave for a dental appointment. More later.

To say "Ben & Jerry's ice cream is good" is "a judgement relationship between an observer and a thing" -- definitely.

To assert that "life is good" -- not just my life, your life, or a millipede's life but Life--which has made this discussion and many others possible in the first place--is good seems like a statement which has to stand on its own without proof. People also say that the universe is meaningless. Asserting that the universe is meaningless (and doesn't provide us with any meaning) is another statement that just has to stand on it's own. Life, or the universe, is different than a package of Ben & Jerry's ice cream. Saying a statement has to stand on its own doesn't make it true, it's an assertion one can agree with or not.

There may be reasons why one would assert that life is good, or that the universe is meaningless, and that can be analyzed. There is a difference between asserting the universe is meaningless and finding this freedom, and asserting that the universe is meaningless and blowing one's brains out.

I find that "life is good" is a more serviceable POV than the view "life is a living nightmare".

I haven't finishing reading your post, but if you hadn't shown up pretty quick, I would have sent you a telegraph alerting you to the topic's bright, sunny, breezy existence needing your special seasoning insight.

Saw that you posted this on another thread and found that interesting and applicable to this conversation. Quite odd, that you would say that, given what you have discussed here:

"Our existence makes us biased in assessing the significance of our existence." — Intrigued

Oh no, people are double checking my posts and comparing them.

Starting with such a bold claim does not endear readers to take you seriously. — charleton

Why is "Life is good in itself" a bold claim? Or is it "in itself" that is problematic?

Pessimists and Optimists may find this page interesting, The World In Data website has a page on optimism and pessimism.

StreetlightX made a good suggestion. I'll add to it with this: Concentration is improved when you "work with the text" by underlining what look like important statements, writing questions about what you don't understand in the margins, and by taking notes (not too many, just a few).

If you are reading books that you own, feel free to write in them. If you are using digital texts, then use highlights, and keep your notes and comments in a simple text document that you can keep handy.

If you have a book from the library, copy a few pages at a time, and underline those, add comments, etc.

But the main thing is to "get into" the text as you read it.

I don't know how old you are: some people (like, young college students) seem to be able to concentrate just fine with lots of noise in the background. It might even help them concentrate. Now in my 70s, I pretty much have to have it quiet to concentrate on anything. Totally uninteresting, lackluster music is OK for me, as long as there's nothing interesting about it. Otherwise, off with it.

StreetlightX is right, though, concentration is a learnable skill, usually, and so is focussed attention. I am sure there is stuff that you can get right into if it interests you a lot. Let's face it, some philosophy is pretty boring and dense, even opaque. Stick with interesting philosophy.

Another approach, it's worth doing, there' nothing wrong with it, is "Philosophy for Idiots" type books. Or study guides, or condensations. These can be helpful.