I'm not so sure about the worth of pessimism. Whenever I think about all this stuff, especially how suffering greatly outweighs pleasure, and pleasure itself seems mostly just a reduction or cessation of some pain/suffering experience or another, I feel like I should just kill myself. I mean if life really is how the pessimist describes, why live? — dukkha

Why indeed? I would argue that life does not give us any reason to continue to live - any reason must come from the individual themselves. This is why Nietzsche said that those who continue to live (not just survive) have a purpose or a sense of meaning.

I think you're probably better off not being aware of any of this, like a child, or a cat. Being aware that you suffer is itself a type of suffering. — dukkha

Unfortunately, being unaware and ignorant often causes more suffering than not. At the very least it is irresponsible.

So if I whipped out a hammer and brained your baby to death in front of you, you would have serious difficulty saying my actions were morally wrong?

Seriously? — dukkha

Well first of all I wouldn't have children to begin with. Second, it is immoral from the perspective of those who have children. But infanticide cannot harm the infant, only those who have infants.

No, it's not. It's objective for all subjectivities. If I am upset, for example, then it's true I'm upset for any subjectivity, not just my own. For everyone, it's true I'm upset, whether they recognise it or not. I don;t suddenly bemuse not up set merely becasue a subjectivity doesn't think or thinks the opposite. Even with respect to the rock, I am upset Willow. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I don't think this is the correct way to use subjectivity. If you are upset, then it is an objective fact that you are upset, i.e. anyone theoretically can go out and discover that you are upset. "From the point of view of the universe", you are upset.

But to say that "for everyone" it is true that you are upset is incorrect because some people might not know you are upset.

It's not a question of observation. The issue is feeling, experience or knowledge. People may feel someone else's pain without observing them at all. All it takes is for them to have the experience: "My friend is in pain." It can even take the form of the same pain within themselves (i.e. knowledge as).

There is always an isolation, my experiences are never yours, but that has no impact on what may be known of other's experiences. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Correct, but this is what I had been saying earlier. That subjective experiences can be known but only through duplication (or inference), not through the sharing of a numerically identical thing.

That's doesn't go far enough though, for each subjective states is also universal. No matter what what anyone thinks, my experiences are mine, for example. Similarly, a rock remains a rock, in all the ways it may appear, no matter what anyone thinks. Effectively, the subjective state is, the sense usually used, is the objective. — TheWillowOfDarkness

It is only objective and universal for the subjective itself. So it is an objective fact that there are subjective systems spread universally across the world.

Minds are no exception. Just as we know rocks without becoming "the subjective of the rock," we may know minds without becoming the "subjective of the mind." — TheWillowOfDarkness

We can only observe a shadow of the subjective. There is an inherent isolation at play here. So we may know that someone is experiencing pain if we understand the common behavior indicating that they are experiencing pain, but this is merely knowledge of, not knowledge as.

As an aside, in a secular context, killing infants tend to be considered atrocious, and is free from such reasoning. Of course. Any ordinary person would think so, I hope. — jorndoe

I lean towards the views of Peter Singer. Infanticide, despite its scary-sounding verbage, is probably not morally problematic because infants aren't even capable of futural thoughts or even are conscious. To say that it is morally wrong to take the life of a young infant is, in my opinion, probably unfounded equivocation.

Feeling are material objects. Such experiences are no less an existing state of the world than a rock or bookshelf we might see. All experiences are owned, are private, including those of empirical observation. If we are looking at the same mountain, we only see or understand the same thing (mountain). We never are the same thing. My experience of the mountain is not yours and visa versa, even if what we see is identical. Observation of empirical objects must be "cloned" to be shared too. In the passing of knowledge and understanding, there is only replication. "To be shared" means for someone else to have their own experience of a particular thought or feeling, a replication of what someone else knows, thinks of feels. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Yes, this is what I was getting at. Replication, copies. Objectivity (particular universality) can only be shared via subjectivity (universal particularity). Thus subjectivity, or private "closed" states, is a very real part of reality. The relations between things are objective, but the things themselves are subjective. It's not just this way with minds. There is literally a subjective "what is it like to be a rock". Thus the world itself is an array of impossibly deep objects, signaling to each other. This is a very, very rough sketch of the object-oriented ontology presented by Graham Harman.

Even feelings can be replicated. (that's how empathy or "lived" awareness of other people's feelings work). — TheWillowOfDarkness

I wonder what consequences this has for personal identity theories. If I die, and then the brain states that my brain was in, in the past, are observed beforehand and then replicated, I essentially could come back to life. It's not "me", though there actually isn't any "me" at all. There's only the phenomenon of appearing to have a "me", i.e. there are multiple specimens all believing themselves to be special in their own little way, that are in fact the exact same little way. Do I have two arms and two legs? Yes, and so does my clone. Do I have green eyes? Yes, and so does my clone. Do I believe myself to be an autonomous self with a sense of personality and uniqueness? Yes, and so does my clone in the exact same way.

In this sense, ownership becomes reproducible.

But what I think Schop1 find problematic (as do I) with some accounts is how they try to get around the fact that feelings can only be replicated, they cannot be shared. The mind is a private world in itself. The external world is public. Feelings are a totally different thing than material objects; whereas an everyday object can be shared between many different observers and still be the same thing, a mental event must be cloned in order to be "shared".

Science can only report observations, but can never assume to know anything about when, what, where, and why. — taylordonbarrett

This is patently false. Science is not just observation, otherwise it would never have gotten off the ground. Science is a systematic method of obtaining data and forming a model or theory that best represents this data, which includes these circumstantial questions.

Interesting.. can you explain further? The self-validating pessimist.. Isn't it a bit strong to say though that being wrong on a theory proves the pessimistic point? Or is it rather that being wrong about pessimism is bad because, even if pessimism is wrong, the mere fact that others can feel this way proves that a world exists that has people that feel this way and thus shows the non-idealty of the world to allow people that can feel this way about the world. The pragmatist would just chortle that this is simply thefault of the pessimist, not the universe. — schopenhauer1

Yes, I made a blog post on this a while back (shameless self-promotion). Basically, pessimists argue that harmful illusions exist. And you have Stoicism and Buddhism both arguing that ignorance (or the illusion of knowledge) is the cause of all suffering. But I would put it one step further, and claim that, from a more Heideggerian perspective, we are part of the world, not merely "bystanders". The universe produced us. And thus it is capable of producing such harmful ignorance. And like you said, more pragmatic visions essentially boil down to victim blaming. Even the victims themselves are willing to blame themselves, as a method of maintaining order and stability.

I guess you can suffer from knowing about other people's pain but surely painful experiences can be had by everyone. True, some people have more of them than others, but that just goes to show you earlier my point about harms being unequally distributed. — schopenhauer1

To be quite honest with you, it is other sentient's suffering that bothers me more than my own, and is the main source for my pessimism. I haven't had it super easy either but my own suffering pales in comparison to what others are going through. And the fact that others, like yourself, are pessimistic is definitely an argument for pessimism in general. Only in an unfortunate world would someone like the pessimist exist and actually be wrong about their pessimism. By its very existence, pessimism validates itself.

Like I said before: The feeling you get when you start to doubt if you're even suffering, and you start suffering even more (i.e. Tolstoy). Am I myself suffering, or do I simply suffer because I know others are suffering? Am I pessimistic because I myself experience these things, or because I hear about other people experiencing these things?

Also:

Tinnitus (the tune of pessimism)
Tedium
Wild organism attacks
Sexual failings
Sudden catastrophes
Disfigurement, dismemberment, paralysis, etc
Allergic reactions
Academic failures
Ostracized from the tribe
Political disappointments and failures
Economic catastrophes
The experience of dread once you realize that all of this is possible and even likely

What's your goal here, Schop?

That makes it the worst harm of all in my book. At least the others are honest harms. Pleasure is positively malicious. And without pleasure, how could we truly suffer?

Damn you to Hell happiness. — apokrisis

Pleasure is only a proxy bad when viewed in a certain way. When seen as a reason to continue, pleasure is a manipulative force. When seen as a something good without manipulative/intoxicative properties, then there's nothing wrong with it. I'm not a masochist.

Actually, I see the ethical issues relating to pleasure as more important than how it feels phenomenologically. Pleasure is partly responsible for a billion(s)-year-old-and-counting systematic process of instrumentality. Sentients value their own pleasure more than the pain of other sentients.

I would appreciate it if you didn't treat me like a child. What exactly is the mechanical notion of time, and how does your pansemiotic view somehow escape eternal existence?

Had symmetry always existed before it broke?

Hence the third category of vagueness - the land of no brute fact which can give rise to the yin and yang of mutually co-arising brute facts such as stasis and change. — apokrisis

Is it a brute fact that the third category of vagueness is the land of no brute fact?

But surely if something must be stopped, it must have begun before. Unless it is just a brute fact that something is the case, which sounds suspiciously like a first cause.

Yet Aristotle posited the Prime Mover...

But where did all this material self-organization originally come from? Do you accept the necessity of a first cause?

Unpleasant experiences with varying levels of obnoxiousness, I suspect.

Correct. Pleasure has a twisted way of tricking us into existential continuation.

Yep. If God exists, my metaphysics is utterly screwed. — apokrisis

Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but how does the existence of God disqualify your system? If anything, God is meant to act as a unifying role, bringing all the pieces of a metaphysical system together.

This is one of the things that tends to bother me about theology and philosophical cosmology: I don't see how we're supposed to be able to know something like this. How on earth (literally) are we to know where the universe came from, or what the nature of the First Cause is (if there is one)?

While other metaphysical debates feel closer to home, so to speak, philosophical cosmology is quite the opposite. I can see how the problem of universals, for example, would be close to home (we encounter similarity every moment of our lives), but what remains to be shown is that the causality that seems to be apparent on the billiards table is identical to that billions of years ago.

It doesn't matter if we're Humeans are Aristotelians or Kantians or whatever: all we have access to is the causality that is apparent right now. This is why the more comfortable debates, like the problem of universals, are perfectly acceptable, since we are talking about something that is immediately perceived. But the origins of the cosmos is not apparent, and this especially becomes problematic when we start to consider more anti-realist conceptions of reality, like transcendental idealism or its realist offshoot, speculative realism. Did everything that happened billions of years before consciousness emerged actually happen? This is what Meillassoux claims to be the correlationist dilemma, and also the correlationist's responsibility to tell the scientists that they are studying something that never actually happened.

And so philosophical cosmological debates become suspect because they tend to implement a metaphysical framework of the here-and-now for the then-and-there, when there doesn't seem to be any real justification for the claim that the metaphysical structure of the here-and-now has been and always will be the same. It may be the case that the metaphysical structure of reality evolves, and that is all we can know: that is evolves, and what was the case before is lost.

Instead of armchair theorizing, the only method capable of producing anything of substance in this debate would be actual, pure empirical observations.

The feeling you get when you start to doubt if you're even suffering, and you start suffering even more (i.e. Tolstoy). Am I myself suffering, or do I simply suffer because I know others are suffering? Am I pessimistic because I myself experience these things, or because I hear about other people experiencing these things?

Human languages, across the board, have significantly more adjectives related to harms than to benefits. The English language, for example, has around three times as many adjectives of harm than of benefit. So it won't be surprising when we can make such a large list of harms. This is due not only because we tend to experience more harm than benefit but also, if not primarily because, we subconsciously focus more on the bad than the good. Bad is, in most cases, psychologically stronger than good - it is an extremely well-founded psychological fact. However I will say that since we experience more bad than good, and yet find ourselves still alive, this means that the human specimen is, all things considered, a rather durable specimen. The sun will rise tomorrow one way or another.

Follow this through to a more speculative destination, and we find ourselves agreeing with Dostoevsky: suffering is the root of consciousness.

Something that struck me lately, is Seneca's recommendation that we choose someone who we admire (presumably someone dead, lol) and imagine them watching over our lives, and think about whether or not that someone would approve of our actions. — anonymous66

I find myself thinking about this all the time, and it has come to my attention that perhaps I hold beliefs not only because I myself agree with the content of the belief but also because I am afraid of what others will think if I don't believe in what they themselves believe in.

I suppose this is why the internet is generally a poor place for serious philosophical discussion. It is much to easy to form a cult surrounding a belief, with aggressive tendencies. You see this a lot in third way feminist movements, for example.

Again I wasn't making an ontological claim, just pointing out the fact that the the reality of causality is not altogether obvious or straightforward.

You seem to be claiming that causality fails in some generic sense. I ask where are the facts that suggest that? — apokrisis

I am saying that what we experience is all we ever actually know, and that causality may or may not be needed in order to understand the world. I consider it to be likely that causality is indeed real (as is the outside world) but it's not straightforward either.

Indeed, it still works, but it might not be an accurate picture of reality. Hume tried to ground all metaphysics in experience. And Russell thought causality was the common man's myth, as did some of the logical positivists.

I'm not saying I agree with them. Causality isn't my best topic. But in any case, just because something works does not mean it actually is the case. A convenient explanation need not always be the correct explanation.

But the problem here is that you have just destroyed causality, and causality is something we would expect to be able to extract from "a better model of time". Causality is what we observe in the world - it is why we believe it to be "time-like" - and so at the very least, an arrow of time ought to be the emergent feature of any good model of time.

That was the problem of Newtonian time, and the reason for recent thermal models. Newtonian time could not build in a direction. As a result you can get insane metaphysical notions like "the block universe", or "eternal recurrence". — apokrisis

Right, again, it was just supposed to be a musing idea. In any case, though, the notion of causality has been attacked, many times. So this muse accordingly would destroy the illusory concepts of causality and persistence. Which does seem implausible, as our minds seem to pick up on these sorts of things.

Interesting argument, I like it. I'll stick around to see what the others have to say on this. However I suspect it is not solid. It seems to depend on the idea that time moves forward in one direction; an intuition that is theoretically refuted from deduction of scientific observation (I can't remember the specificities, perhaps someone like apo will).

Also, can it not be the case that all of time is already set out? It would go as follows:

1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 4 -> 1 -> ... -> infinite loops. Thus all moments of time are already set in stone, and we just keep looping, like a temporal mobius strip. There was no first cause, because the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously, independent of any sort of tense intra-worldly beings place on them, so there is no progress in the actual sense (only the phenomenal sense). So when we progress forward in time, we are actually just another wakened form of existing. The past self that thinks about the future five seconds ago still exists and is still thinking about the future. And the self existing right "now" will always be thinking of the past self. The feeling that we persist is wholly an illusion, then, but nevertheless an experience that will always be the case in this "moment", and all the other moments of experience. "You" are not "you" five seconds ago - they are separate things entirely, existing in a wholly different temporal (yet static) frame, in no way more or less existing than you are now.

Why a temporal mobius strip would be the way it is, I have no idea. It's just a funny idea I've been toying with.

Interesting ideas. My own working definition of metaphysics comes from A. W. Moore (who is influenced by Deleuze and Wittgenstein): metaphysics is the most general attempt to make sense of things. I will take issue with your definition of ontology, if only because it contradicts what is basically the established norm. Ontology is like an "inventory" of sorts, and is used outside of metaphysics (often in science) in a similar manner as agnosticism is used outside of the philosophy of religion. It's a philosophical term that is not exclusive to philosophy.

But yes, I would agree that much of metaphysics is simply selecting what exists, I would just call this ontology. Meta-analysis of metaphysics, like metaontology, occurs during and outside of the ontology room.

Show me some data, then.

I think people like to think about living like a Stoic sage (or similar) rather than actually living as a Stoic sage. Thinking is one thing, actually implementing this through action is another.

There is certainly an aesthetic element to systems. Having a system helps you believe you have power over reality. That you have understood the essence of existence, or how the world works, or whatever. Systems are sophisticated, complex, and can sometimes be even esoteric - the pop-science you read in the magazines is not the same thing as what actual scientists study. It's a condensed, exoteric generalization of something that happens within a certain framework of rules, regulations, customs and beliefs.

System-thinking is generally good. In fact it's probably better to think in terms of systems instead of hodge-podge conceptual mish-mash. But the downside to system thinking is that it tends to lead to dogmatism, because of the aesthetic component. Believers in a system actually become attached to the system, and go beyond using the system as an explanation to wanting the system to be correct. A system that was good for one scenario gets shoe-horned into other scenarios that it doesn't belong. An entire culture evolves around the system: you see this in medieval Scholasticism, for example.

So the key is to work with systems in an open-ended manner, keeping them open for change or rejection. That is, after all, the final destination for any inquiry related project: it is either changed or entirely thrown out. The "truth" from the eyes of the observers is never static, it is always dynamic and changing.

But the reality is that your hyper-individuation is not reflective of reality. You can visualize someone being happy when they are starving, yet this patently does not happen.

If you want to individuate phenomenal experience that much, then sure, someone "could" be starving but yet still be "happy".

At that level of individuation, though, phenomenology and psychology in general fails, because no system can be made out of a radical presupposition of the uniqueness of an individual.

I'm glad to see that darth has quoted that famous Sartre saying about other people. I quite like Sartre but that is one of the stupidest, most ignorant and dishonest things I have ever known a philosopher to say. I can only hope that, like many sayings attributed to famous people, he never really said it. — andrewk

I think Sartre was focused on how the expectations of others and the need to conform to the group makes acquaintanceship with other people hellish, not that other people literally are devils from Hell.

Hell is other people. - Sartre

As I just explained above (a couple posts back), wants and needs (needs hinge on wants in my view) have nothing to do with happiness. — Terrapin Station

I don't understand how this is possible. Surely if you are starving, or dehydrated, or overheating, or lonely, or fearful, you can't honestly consider yourself "happy". It's not sustainable nor is it even possible to instantiate while these needs are not met.