We agree nothing can't come from nothing. Which is why I support metaphysical positions which argue existence arises via the constraint of pure potentiality, called variously apeiron, tao, vagueness, firstness, indeterminacy, quantum foam, etc, depending on whose metaphysical system it is. And chaotic everythingness is another attempt at a descriptive term for the same idea. — apokrisis

But you're being inconsistent with your use of "existence". You said that nothing can't come from nothing, and yet say that a constraint of pure potentially is where existence comes from, but pure potentiality obviously exists for us to predicate it, so are there different kinds of existence to you, or are you just talking about the particularization of the general, i.e. a transformation of something that already exists? If the latter, then the apeiron is not where existence comes from, it's where particulars come from.

If you had a strong argument, it would be able to deal with the everyday mundanity of existence. You wouldn't need to pile disaster upon disaster. — apokrisis

So the disaster, catastrophe, tragedy, etc are material arguments. You're sweeping them away as if they're unimportant yet they still are an astute observation, something that cannot easily be denied or justified, as if the seriousness of them isn't implied in the definitions. In fact, they're what I see to be the pessimist's trump card - if nothing else convinces someone, the idea of horrible pain and terror might, not in a threatening way but in an illuminating way. The realization that one is a ticking time bomb. It's not a crutch as you seem to believe it to be, it's an observable and real fact. There cannot be poetry after Auschwitz.

it would be able to deal with the everyday mundanity of existence. — apokrisis

So you accept that everyday existence is mundane (i.e. dull, unoriginal, repetitive, boring, tedious, annoying...everything I have been saying for the past week or so). A direct contradiction to what you had previously said regarding the "richness" of everyday experience.

Now who's going on circles? Cause I sure as hell am being as consistent as I can.

umm

And what is this everythingness other than pure possibility, what you just denied was the case? What is everythingness?

To claim that such an outcome is inevitable is nuts. Being lost in the woods for a night doesn't even sound traumatic, just embarrassing. — apokrisis

Being lost in the woods when it's negative ten degrees out and snowing and you have no tent or warm clothes because you barely survived a plane crash in the Siberian tundra. Not a walk in the park, in fact probably a death sentence (just look at Stalingrad - and they even had resources).

Isn't that what they say about quantum mechanics? You can't conjure up reality out of pure possibility? — apokrisis

I never said that. I said that there has to be some sort of hypostasis, the Aristotelian Being of Pure Actuality, for something to appear. "Nothing" is incoherent.

Glad to know you have such a loose definition of objects. The vaguer your position, the less it can be challenged. — apokrisis

Or, I had a very general definition of objects. Remember that I never made any ontological realist claims about objects. I'm actually in favor of mereological nihilism.

And you could say the universe must be full of entities with higher IQs. But we can say if they are in the vicinity, they're not waving back. (Just picking up the occasional country hick for a good probe.) — apokrisis

Probably cause other planets are really freaking far away and it's highly unlikely we'll ever be able to differentiate between natural stellar radiation and intelligent communication.

How can I argue against your monotheistic Pessimism without pointing out that there is the second thing of optimism, and then beyond that, the third thing which is a neutral balance? — apokrisis

Because you're not espousing a neutral balanced position. You're implicitly favoring life - only a nihilist could actually argue that life is neither good nor bad, neither right nor wrong, neither worthy of continuation nor worthy of ending. Valueless. Any other kind of value tips the balance in one way, either life-affirming or life-denying.

Life just is rich and varied in that way. — apokrisis

Confusing, more like. Awkward.

That is why I object to your habit of monotonic exaggeration. I could focus on just one part of my total umwelt at the moment - like a slight achiness in my back - at the expense of others, like a slight sense of satisfaction in my stomach. I could make my back the center of my world (and ouch, now I'm really starting to notice it). Or instead I could be more honest about my phenomenal state and say in fact it is quite naturally mixed at all times. It is neither up, down or even neutral, in any simplistic fashion. — apokrisis

Right, but that's not the pessimistic claim. Again, the claim is that pain is intrinsic to existence. Sure, you might experience pleasures as well as pains, nobody is denying that. But what we do deny are that these pleasures are guaranteed, long-lasting, and satisfying. Schopenhauer's entire philosophy revolves largely around the idea that the Will (an ever-striving presence) coerces us to do things. We need things, we want things, we're never quite satisfied. Dissatisfaction and death are structurally-guaranteed to living systems.

It's a mixed bag, like you said. But nevertheless the painful ingredients are always there, while we have to consciously add pleasurable experiences. The Will, the dissatisfaction, the fear of death, is an ever-present rumbling underneath the rest of our experiences, like a drum beat or rhythm. The large majority of Buddhist eschatology is focused on removing this problem and achieving nirvana - Buddhists realize that life just is suffering. That's what it is, minimally, minus an extra additional accidental or contingent features. You cannot live without pain of some sort, while you can live without pleasure, and indeed many people unfortunately do. Pain is guaranteed.

So that's the aesthetic argument, and also a material argument because the constant hum gets annoying and burdensome to deal with. Life is a pain in the ass, and I can say this because I'm not currently worried about starving to death. I'm lucky enough to have a relatively untraumatic experience to be able to reflect upon the overall human condition and come to the conclusion I have.

Of course I accept that if I were currently being crushed in a car crash, or I was out of neurobiological equilibrium and in a depressive fugue, then that internal variety might be a lot more one-dimensional. — apokrisis

Then why do you ignore this? Is this not a facet of instrumentality? We exists because other organisms suffered horrible pain. Our ancestors ate animals alive. The realization that your life is not justification for the plight of these innocents is what instrumentality is.

But if we are talking about typical mental state, then it is better characterised as vague - an awful lot of nothing much in particular. — apokrisis

I disagree substantially. Schopenhauer argued that if you introspect you will find the presence of the Will. You will find yourself dissatisfied, anxious, stressed. You will find yourself pressured to do something, which is instrumentality as well. The use of another thing.

Is there no evidence in the world of emergence? — apokrisis

I don't see what you're saying here. I agree there are emergent phenomenon, but these nevertheless are dependent upon a more basic ontological level. They supervene on it. You can't drive to work without a car, you can't have an object without brute facts behind it. Somewhere along the line is the primitive that does all the metaphysical work.

On what exactly - their lack of predicates? — apokrisis

Well, yes. An object isn't just something that we can hold in our hands. Black holes, parasites, staplers and armies are all objects. They all act as a subject of a predicative statement. Had they had no properties then we wouldn't be able to predicate them. This is the fun little "hole" problem all over again - do holes exists or are they just the lack of something else?

Neuroscience when it comes to measuring information density. Economics when it comes to measuring ecological footprint. — apokrisis

But surely you're not going to limit yourself to the immediately-accessible (Earth). That's just bad science. Unless there's a good reason to believe that humans are as good as information processing can get - in which case the AI dream is a pipe dream.

I'm just saying that a rather more sophisticated analysis is needed than "life sucks". — apokrisis

Okay: life sucks for the majority of sentient organisms that aren't lucky enough to get out relatively scar-free.

That's how things go - polarisation. Pessimism must frame itself in terms of what it is not - optimism. It has to construct this "other" as a mafia to justify its own desire to become a mafia too.

This is what I criticise. You have to exaggerate the strength of your opposition so as to legitimate yourself as its counter. You want to leave bystanders no option but to declare for either Team Optimist ir Team Pessimist. Philosophy then becomes the loser because your slippery-slopism admits to no shades of grey. — apokrisis

Actually my position is realism, but I call myself a pessimist because other people see my views as "pessimistic".

Nominalism has to frame itself in terms of what it is not - universalism. Atheism has to frame itself in terms of what it is not - theism. What's the problem here?

And no, we're not the mafia, because we're not forcing people to conform. If optimism was a true philosophical position then it wouldn't feel the need to smack people on the head every other day to remind them of its correctness.

But of course what I am "exactly arguing" is something else. I am arguing that optimism and pessimism - to the degree they are natural - would exist as the bounding limits which then make possible the variety of all the feelings that lie in-between. So now I would focus on the nature of that balance, that hopefully fruitful balance, that lies in-between.

If you can point out a flaw in this logic, go ahead. — apokrisis

The flaw is that you're explicitly favoring (affirming) this "in-between" between optimism and pessimism, thus making it a quasi-optimism. While if you were completely honest with your assessment it would be utterly neutral. If it's indeed neutral and not worthy of being called "good" or "bad" then there would be no way of evaluating it at all.

You are not really listening. My point has been that feeling bad, feeling good, feeling neutral, are all part of life's rich and varied experience. — apokrisis

There we have the optimism-in-disguise. "Life's rich and varied experience." as if there's some other-worldly aesthetics to it all.

So the very idea of "eliminating unhappiness" is nonsensical on its own. The question is really would you want to eliminate "feeling" in some generalised sense? Can you offer a strong philosophical argument at this deeper ontological level? — apokrisis

Because happiness, bliss, joy, etc are simply the lack of suffering. Think about it: if you're not suffering, what are feeling (assuming you're conscious). Are you happy? Are you joyful? If you're not happy and not joyful, then you must have something keeping you from feeling this way - thus you are stressed, anxious, panic-ing, suffering, etc.

People are severely deficient in their self-evaluations. It's a psychological fact.

It answers the question in terms of the emergence of a dynamical symmetry state, an equilibrium balance. An equilibrium has emergent stability because it is a state where continuing (microstate)change no longer makes a (macrostate)change.

There is an entire science of (thermo)dynamics now. — apokrisis

Emergence from what? poof! existence, ta-da!

So if the universe has the possibility to be clumpy and object like, this requires in matching fashion that it has the possibility for empty spaces. Each possibility necessitates the other. And then if this dichotomy is freely expressed over all scales, then you will have objects and voids of every possible size. — apokrisis

Objects need not be "clumpy" to be objects. Again this depends on what you consider to be objects. Voids can be objects, since we can predicate them.

And humans are measurably the most concentrated forms of intelligence. — apokrisis

How do you know this?

(So if we ask what the subject matter of philosophy essentially is - even if it is only now becoming apparent - then it is thermodynamics. :) ) — apokrisis

I mean I know this was more tongue-in-cheek than anything but if that's the case then everything is thermodynamics which makes it an empty term.

You can talk about such dynamical balances as "mediocre" or "imperfect". But that just shows your metaphysics is fundamentally unrealistic. You are not even understanding the message that metaphysics wants to deliver when it comes to the (self)organisation of nature. — apokrisis

I don't think you understand how not all axiology or aesthetics is realist in nature. Any value is going to be subjective, depending on the existence of a mind. This changes nothing.

For anything to exist - phenomenologically - there must be the extremes which together allow the spectrum of what then actually is. — apokrisis

And yet there is distinct shift between pleasure and pain, a shift from what we like and what we dislike, what we want and what we don't want. There is no gray area that isn't accompanied by some sort of anxiety.

Perhaps you're thinking more about moods than brute sensory experience. But this changes very little. Indeed suffering seems to be an emotional experience that is almost always accompanied by physical pain. We cannot be happy when we experience great and unrequested pain. Yet curiously we can feel great pleasure and yet still feel empty and cold inside. The more generalized principle then would be that we have two pressing concerns: avoid painful stimuli and cultivate pleasurable stimuli, and neither are guaranteed.

I can't help but wonder that if you got lost in the woods one day and faced a cold winter's night, if you wouldn't reconsider the duality of what I'm saying here. Your metaphysics, no matter what it's validity is, would have very little importance. Again people like to think they are complex, in control of who they are, and powerful, but when faced with the aforementioned scenario they inevitably fall into mania or depression. "Where is you God metaphysics now?"

Sadly, it just is juvenile. — apokrisis

Patronizing other people doesn't help. For some reason these kinds of debates always end up with everyone getting so butthurt.

If there were some evidence that this "philosophical" tendency is instead the troubled path to a more positive outcome, then fine. Let's hear more about that then. — apokrisis

Coming from the opposite vein, pessimists are fed up with the system. As Schop1 said elsewhere, there is a kind of "optimistic mafia" installed in society: you WILL be happy!, you WILL love life!, you WILL support your country!, you WILL smile at death!, you WILL suck up your internal struggles, etc. Although the optimistic mafia analogy works well I'd rather just use the words "affirmative" and "negative". Any affirmative lifestyle "affirms" life - it takes life as a good thing to be produced and maintained. And any "negative" lifestyle calls this assumption into question in various degrees. From the negative perspective, social optimism is rather similar to fascism - make the perfect happy bubble and get everyone to conform to it, because everyone secretly knows just how fragile happiness is. You can't have unconformers. Which is exactly what you seem to be arguing here.

But if people are going to make general claims about futility, instrumentality and self-delusion - seek to impose their "truths" on my existence - then they better be prepared for a robust argument. They are making it personal. — apokrisis

The pessimist isn't personally attacking you. They're pointing out flaws in the system. Your argument is akin to the theist claiming that any atheist who tries to make general claims about the creation of the cosmos is going to have to meet them in battle. Like...no...they're not attacking the theist personally, they're attacking the worldview and/or presenting new data.

And even if they were, would it matter? Does your own self-esteem take priority over truth?

You're also claiming that the phenomenological experiences of pessimists are somehow invalid because they're socially constructed, without explaining how this actually changes anything (sweetness is just a chemical reaction on the tongue that yield spike trains in the brain: that doesn't change anything about what it's like to taste something sweet. The scientific image does not immediately, or perhaps ever, replace the manifest image).

If you don't feel any of the ways pessimists describe us as feeling, please tell us all why and how you are able to accomplish such a great feat. We'd love to know, as would everyone else.

-

Since we're talking about Sartre's Nausea, here is a quite illuminating quote from it which I was trying to allude to in the other discussion when I brought up extreme pain:

“What if something were to happen? What if something suddenly started throbbing? Then they would notice it was there and they'd think their hearts were going to burst. Then what good would their dykes, bulwarks, power houses, furnaces and pile drivers be to them? It can happen any time, perhaps right now: the omens are present."

And indeed they are, otherwise we wouldn't have to consistently distract ourselves on a daily basis.

Our transcendent concepts are empirically argued using examples. They arise as the inductive limits of what seems immanently to be the case. — apokrisis

Yes, this, very much. This is a big part of what I was getting at: while the rest of science can easily point to what they study, the metaphysician has to use analogies and examples, because what they study is not the particular. I can't just open my desk drawer and pull out a natural kind by-itself, or a property by-itself, or causation by-itself. I can't study the nature of tropes under a microscope, only infer their existence. This is one of the reasons I'm skeptical of particular-favoring nominalism, for particulars are only understandable within a broader general context.

Where metaphysics goes further is in apply dialectical or dichotomistic reasoning to generality itself. It derives polar pairs of limits to frame its talk about possibility. — apokrisis

I don't know what this means. Do you have any examples?

We can argue - with logical rigour - that either flux or stasis, either chance or necessity, are the limits of possibility. And in being able to name the bounds of possibility, we are talking about the reality of the transcendent - that is, the limits where reality in fact has gone as far as it can possibly go. — apokrisis

But this begs the question as to why reality is constrained as it is. Which leads us to the conclusion that there is something keeping it all in line, something fundamentally static, that acts as the joints or structure of reality. A television screen can only produce certain colors on its display - but there is a structure behind this television that we never get to see that doesn't change, isn't constrained in the way the screen is. And so we can disassemble the television and see what's going on, however in the case of metaphysics we can't do this because we are fundamentally part of the world, which would requires a disassembly of the disassembler, which conceptually and dare I say logically is impossible.

Then science has another trick up its sleeve. It turns the empirical into a matter of measurement. It now turns the world into a play of numbers. Transcendence is brought down to the level of the confirming particulars. — apokrisis

Platonism?

And so generally we are stuck in an immanent reality. But we manufacture a transcendental point of view by establishing bounding limits both "looking upwards" and also "looking downwards". Looking upwards, we see metaphysical generality. Looking downwards, we then turn the micro view into patterns of numbers - digits read off measuring instruments. — apokrisis

I would argue that objects exists everywhere, at any scale, micro to massive. The objects have parts, sure, but they are nevertheless objects, whatever you take objects to be. Certainly a human being is not a transcendent component of existence unless you're an idealists, and certainly we aren't "just" numbers that magically turn into matter. We ourselves exist in our own level, dependent but not identical to these other hierarchies.

One of the easiest and yet also one of the most difficult, imo, thought experiments relates to "totalist" consequentialism: adding happy people to the universe's population does not initially seem to be important, pressing, or perhaps even good. It seems like there's literally no difference between there being a happy person and no persons at all.

And yet, sometimes it can seem as though there is. Say you can press two buttons. The left button generates a universe with 3 happy people. The right button generates a universe with 4 happy people. Which do you pick? Does it matter which you pick? Perhaps the small number of people makes it seem unimportant. But what if the first universe has a million happy people, and the second universe has a trillion happy people? Now it actually seems like there's something substantial here. That's a lot of happy people.

The fact that two universes, both with happy people, can nevertheless be compared to each other in terms of value makes it seem as though population of happy people is indeed important.

A related idea here is that it is difficult to feel empathy towards people who are already happy, unless you're celebrating some accomplishment, if you're not yourself currently happy. Happiness does not seem important. And yet I think the next time you consider yourself in a happy state of mind and consider the totalist's population theory, you will agree that it would indeed be a good thing to maximize the amount of people who are experiencing what you are, because what you are experiencing is good and what is good is what ought to be maximized.

Now of course this seems to theoretically open the door to forced childbirth. But I think this is easily avoided when we consider our inherent prioritization of suffering over happiness. Forcing a person to have a child will cause them to feel bad, and a sufferer is more important than a happy person for reasons that I still have yet to completely figure out but still find it to be practically unrefutably intuitive.

Indeed that was the view of Zapffe, that the Universe is incapable of delivering enough for us. This kind of thought can also be seen in the Gnostics and even Plato.

I and I are, yes. (Which doesn't mean I'm Jamaican. Rather I at T1 and I and T2.) — Terrapin Station

How do you account for similarity and difference if not by universals. i.e. what if your flavor of nominalism?

Yes, that makes it sound more alive. We are all metaphysicians, even the illiterate, as soon as we can speak, if not before. We have "software" that can contemplate and edit itself --and can apparently contemplate this ability to contemplate and edit itself. We are self-consciously self-conscious. We can think about "unknown unknowns" in the abstract. — Hoo

Another interesting part of Moore's book is the emphasis on the tension between self-consciousness and self-confidence. If we're too self-confident, we might step beyond the limits of intelligibility and into the realm of obscurantism and bullshit. If we're too self-conscious, we submerge into a quasi-masturbatory skepticism feigning as wisdom. There has to be a balance between the two extremes of rationalism and empiricism. Which I suspect would label as pragmatism.

I'm a phenomenologist, I don't know where that puts me on that spectrum. *drop mic*

In any case I'm a realist about philosophical questions but am uncertain as to how to approach them. I have a certain amount of skepticism regarding intuitions, unless we're talking about something that is straight up dependent on intuitions, like ethics. Your mind does not constrain reality, reality constrains your mind.

Hey now. — Terrapin Station

I mean, you aren't really a nominalist, are you? ;)

ust like anything else, it is temporary goals or actions taken at a certain time, the only difference being that they are done in the awareness of the situation. Meditation and the ascetic life becomes a proxy for achieving the lofty goal of nonexistence or a transcendental existence. It is only coping with the situation but never truly resolving it. — schopenhauer1

However, if asceticism is what floats your boat, then go for it. The unattainable is still worthy of striving for, I'd say. In the end of the day, what matters is whether or not you managed to cope well enough with your situation. If you treat meditation more as an exercise and less of a lifestyle then you'll get my meaning here: people lift weights to get buff, people meditate to relax the mind. Nihilists will say any action is equal in value to another, and this I think is absurd. There are more appropriate responses to certain situations than others, depending on one's beliefs.

It's true that asceticism and meditation and whatnot cannot "resolve" the problem, like you said. It's a pipe dream to think we can achieve anything like nirvana on a long-term basis. But that's the rub of pessimism, that this problem cannot be resolved. It can only be mitigated, repressed. Which is as good as it's going to get.

Here is the idea of instrumentality- the absurd feeling that can be experienced from apprehension of the constant need to put forth energy to pursue goals and actions in waking life. — schopenhauer1

I think your definition is too specific in my opinion. I'd broaden the scope of instrumentality to outside sentient minds. Instrumentality becomes any manipulation of another thing by some form of domination (power). A larger planet coalesces the smaller planets into its gravitational maw because it has more mass. A leopard takes down the antelope because it was stronger, faster, and more agile. A tsunami destroys a Somalian village because of its massive force. An object inhabits a certain sector of space: no other object can persist in this sector unless it somehow manipulates it out of its position.

Being is expansionist and absorbent, and it fundamentally needs space. The entire history of the universe can be narrated as a conflict for space, the need to persist, the need to inhabit an ever-growing area.

This of course is a bit poetic but it gets the point across.

What does it mean that we live in an eternal moment? Eternity assumes that there is some kind of relative time definer. Are you thinking of presentism? How does this account for change?

Are you really so sure that there are no such things as necessary evils? — Barry Etheridge

This is part of the Asymmetry: there doesn't seem to be any need to make happy people. But there does seem to be a need in making people happy. The difference is in terms of assistance - in the latter, we are helping those who are suffering become happy. In the former, we are making happy people. The former is concerned with welfare, the latter is concerned with the value of a state of affairs.

And it seems to me that the act of creation should only occur if we want and can be reasonably certain that the result is going to be perfect, i.e. up-to-standards. And it's clear from a cursory look at the human condition that the results fall awfully short most of the time.

That's what I'm saying.

More importantly: if abstracta do exist (and I think they do), what does this mean for us? What does it mean that they exist? — Pneumenon

Good, you're not a nominalist, phew.

Transcendental or immanent, though?

Paging , he knows a lot about Heidegger.

What dilemma? Asymmetry, at least as you've summed it up, is not at all compelling or intuitive for me. But symmetry is. Who is it that finds it so? Has there been a survey or something? — Sapientia

I'm surprised you don't find it at least somewhat compelling. The idea that we have an obligation to bring happy people into existence seems to be a bit too strong.

But don't you routinely extrapolate from the personal to the general in this fashion? It is not the suffering within your own experience that is the issue for you but the impersonal fact that suffering exists. So yes, this is "convoluted". Which is what I thought I had argued. — apokrisis

We do extrapolate from the personal to the impersonal, but only by recognizing that the impersonal value exists in virtue of the fact that personal value exist. We reduce suffering because we care about an abstract cosmic notion but because we care about the individuals themselves who are suffering. The abstract notion becomes a tool to evaluate large states of affairs.

I talked of their right to a choice in the matter. So equally they could decide to make their existence as miserable as they like. — apokrisis

Somehow I doubt that people consciously make their lives as miserable as possible without good reason.

But clearly, if it is admitted that suffering exists due to things that can be changed, then the fact we seem to be doing a poor job - your claim, not mine necessarily - doesn't give us the right to take away that opportunity from future generations. — apokrisis

But this leads to the rather absurd claim that masturbating or abstaining from sex is morally wrong because you are taking the opportunity away from possible future generations to exist. So once again we approach a slippery slope - you want birth to be permissible, but you likely don't want an obligation to bring children into existence. Yet that's exactly what is being debated here - the relative value between misery and joy and our obligations related to them. Antinatalism is not the primary focus here, the Asymmetry is, and antinatalism is just but one possible way of approaching the situation (by removing the situation).

But it could only be a personal choice not to have kids. And should your partner and family, or even society, have no say at all here? It is not clear you automatically would have this right. And indeed, a society in which its population ceased to breed might be within its right to take a more coercive stance. Or if the cult of antinatalism got to widespread, again a society might want to protect itself against such an antisocial threat. — apokrisis

I don't understand what you're getting at here. Nor do I understand why you called antinatalism a cult. But anyway this is getting off topic.

No amount of pleasure could justify even a paper cut or the risk of a horrible death in a fiery car crash, remember? — apokrisis

Correction: no amount of pleasure can justify the pain of another person, and no amount of pleasure can compensate for terminal pains regardless of who is experiencing them. Paper cuts are a strawman.

OK, it gets weird when you talk about personhood as if it could be disembodied. All natural logic breaks down here. — apokrisis

How so? How is it illogical to think that I am somewhat enslaved to my own body, when I am hungry, thirsty, need to use the toilet, or age? Basic Buddhist concept: we are not in control of our own bodies. For if we were, we would be able to stop aging, or stop feeling hungry. Instead we are leashed up by the body and forced to do things regardless of how we feel about it.

But now we are into a position where suicide is taken to be the right choice and so all sufferers should be assisted off the top of the nearest high rise if they can't do it for themselves. — apokrisis

...where did you get that from?

It is eugenics because it shows a fascist intolerance of imperfection. The goal is to eliminate unwanted population traits. And the solution is as final as it gets. — apokrisis

I mean, you can slap the label "fascist" on whatever you like, that doesn't make it fascist. Are you intolerant of illogical arguments? Are you intolerant of cancer, one of the most useless and traumatic biological problems? Are you intolerant of ISIS blowing up children? All of these are imperfections, yet you're not a fascist by opposing them.

In any case I have to wonder why you would be opposed to perfection. Indeed Plato, Aristotle, and others all thought that there were the Forms, or the Telos, or whatnot that we ought to strive to instantiate. They wouldn't have looked too kindly on imperfection. And yet here you are being apologetic for the inherent imperfection of nature...why? Why is imperfection acceptable? Why is mediocrity acceptable? Seems to me that tolerating imperfection is a form of apathy, a weakness of the will. An inherent unjustified affirmation of the normal.

Not to kill off the miserable while producing as great a population of the happy as possible would be a positive crime, if we take this kind of calculation at its face value. — apokrisis

Which is exactly why I said that we have inherent negative-utilitarian dispositions. No amount of pleasure can justify a torture, or a murder, i.e. instrumentality.

Who is this "we"? Personally it strikes me as a PC version of fascist eugenics. Humans are against nature and therefore should be extinguished. Give the planet back to the bugs and fungi. — apokrisis

.....what? Where did you get that from? Also many bugs are speculated to be able to feel pain, in particular the arthropods.

So yes, we can take a compassionate view about the suffering of others. We can wish for a better world. And feeling inadequate to the task of making it a better world, we can then decide the final solution is to remove the problem by removing the sufferers - antinatalism merely seeming to be the kindest approach to this holocaust against folk having a freedom to choose and act on their own accord. — apokrisis

Yes! (without the murder part). Your rights do not extend to the manipulation of other people against their will. This includes birth as well as murder. Typically I'd say we value personal value over impersonal value anyway so the idea that we ought to kill miserable people for the sake of some abstract impersonal value is a bit convoluted. But this is of course another issue that needs to be addressed. Which is why I had previously said this entire problem as a whole tends to keep me up at night: it's a twisting and confusing rabbit hole. One solution brings up other problems and other issues that hadn't been noticed before. Coherentism ftw.

Do you really believe you have the right to deny a future generation to fix what your generation seems to be failing to fix (and I say "seeming" as the evidence being given is so slight that it is routinely talked up to the skies)? — apokrisis

To be quite honest with you I don't understand how you actually can see this as a legitimate view. Do you really believe you have the right to force a future generation to fix what our generation is failing to fix? i.e. instrumentalizing future generations without their consent? All because you think that the culture you live in is somehow more important than the individual liberty of other people?

This is where metaphysical issues of possible people, counterfactuals, rights, and obligations start to take precedence.

This is also where antinatalism can be a potential gamechanger in this debate. We don't need a procreative population ethics because we don't need to procreate nor have a population to begin with. Meanwhile every other affirmative ethical system must struggle with these problems.

Perhaps you can re-describe the asymmetry in a way I can follow its intuitive appeal. I still only see that its natural logic demands we start subtracting the miserable immediately for their own good. — apokrisis

No, it wouldn't be for their own good, it would be for an abstract impersonal good. Which I also find to be repugnant.

That is of course a repugnant idea. But largely of course because you can't create a happy world in that kind of binary fashion. Talk about happiness as an idea, as opposed to adaptive balance - some notion of flow and fit - is where the whole analysis starts to go wrong. It is not even the proper measure of anything here. And so therefore neither is this obsession with pain and suffering. — apokrisis

Again you're replacing the immediacy of phenomenological experience with a holistic behaviorism. Which is just wrong, sorry.

Or to put it another way, it is what it feels like to be pointing towards death instead of life. If you are getting pain that intense, that's your signal you are getting down to your last chance to stay alive. — apokrisis

Agreed, although this signal is extremely painful and ultimately traumatic.

Suffering isn't the end of the world, just a normal aspect of life. — apokrisis

I disagree, suffering is a notification that your world, your experiences are likely to end. Plus it's very painful.

So suffering - in nature - is affirmation that life is in fact valued. It is the fate better than death. And yet you want to take away the gift of life for untold generations of the unborn! Isn't that PC eugenics? — apokrisis

No, suffering in nature is the affirmation of life without the person suffering consenting to life. It's the body's way of forcing a person to do something, i.e. enslavement, i.e. instrumentality.

Clearly a suicidal person who jumps off a building is suffering, and clearly this is not an affirmation of life nor an affirmation of the value of life, rather the complete opposite.

And no, it's not eugenics, because eugenics is all about finding the perfect, ideal organism, and antinatalism is usually focused on the fact that there are no perfect, ideal organisms.

Anyway, in terms of your thread, I think "why anything?" is as good an obsession as any. — apokrisis

Probably the first truly philosophical question.

What does fine art do for you? — Bitter Crank

It acts as a cathartic release of tension and a way of focusing myself when I feel anxious or uneasy. I mostly limit myself to music, however. I listen to rap before I go running. I listen to classical music when I read philosophy. I listen to English indie and electro-synthwave when I'm trying to chill. It all depends on what I'm doing and how I'm feeling - art (in this case music) complements my experiences in the same way a movie score complements its scenes.

I checked out your blog and found a link to some guy whose theory was that irony was maximized in the creation of the world. I like that. There's a humor in Dostoevsky that surpasses just about everything mortal. I call it the laughter of the gods. It haunts all human earnestness. Hesse explores it in Steppenwolf. — Hoo

This aesthetic component, though, is only really helpful when you aren't suffering.

The idea of a Stoic sage sounds sublime and amazing - but we would actually rather just not feel bad in the first place. What doesn't kill you will sometimes make you wish it had.

Is the alternative of filtering and selection supposed to be truth rather than chaos? Much thinking is unconscious. I believe that. But how is this mass of unconscious thinking the truth rather than the background? Repression is used in a sly, pejorative way, as if there were something to recommend the alternative. — Hoo

I can see how it may come across this way. As if Zapffe thinks he is superior by acknowledging the repression. I see two interpretations, neither are mutually exclusive: Zapffe wishes to live existentially authentic (and thus would have a bit of pride for doing so, possibly one of the only things keeping him going), or Zapffe is merely pointing out a facet of life, just as he would be if he said that humans breathe oxygen.

Easy to agree here. And I find it easy to see Zappfe as the salesman of one more anchoring (pessimism), one that I began to resent and finally took pleasure in burying. — Hoo

I'll be honest with you because I think you are being honest, and I think this is a very important point. Pessimists argue their point because of two (conscious) reasons: they want someone to prove them wrong, or they're extremely discontent with the system and want things to change.

Again these are not mutually exclusive. I'm not content with the system. I think it is a useless, ironic and senseless machination. And yet, pace Nietzsche's dialogue on Schopenhauer, I have an acute desire to affirm existence once again. Just as Nietzsche praised Schopenhauer while simultaneously having a heart that cried out for something more, I tend to be a reluctant pessimist. I don't like being a pessimist. I don't think anyone worthy of being called a pessimist should like being one (i.e. like the fact that the world is shitty): that would go against the entire idea of pessimism. And yet I feel compelled to consider myself a pessimist because all the other positions fall short.

The previous examples show how pessimism can be seen as right and contradict one's own expectations, desires, hopes, dreams, etc. But there's another facet of pessimism that has been growing steadily inside me recently, that of not just discontent but legitimate concern and outrage at the state of the world. I'm becoming more and more angry at the instrumentality of the world. I'm not only saddened by the suffering of others but am also indignant. You could say that I'm becoming a bit more radical in my views, especially in terms of ethics. Things need to change, and they need to change now.

The third step in this pessimistic process, if there is one, seems to be the final disillusionment with the world by means of a complete de-attachment with the previous mournfully comfortable illusions. Perhaps my current state of indignation is merely another illusion. Maybe altruism and humanitarianism is also another illusion, but I kind of doubt it. Certainly it seems that many of the classic pessimistic writers "gave up" on the world. They wanted no part in it, they had no play in politics, altruism or anything like that. The final step is the final smashing of our illusions which can either result in suicide or isolation, assuming there is another step after the second. The gradual, Nietzschean descent into madness.

The object was the goal. Then a new object becomes the goal. So we can posit a goal archetype. But sometimes the goal is the sandwich we can make downstairs. We can also make living on this gradient a goal, aware that permanent satisfaction in a given object is not to be expected. No goal is central (all is vanity) but a life with many goals and attainments is good --or can be good. — Hoo

This is not as elegant as not having problems to begin with. Do we really have to have problems just so they can be solved?

When aren't we posing as heroes in a drama? — Hoo

Practically never. We are all our own white knights in shining armor.

This guy is the anti-Nietzsche, isn't he? — Hoo

Yes, Zapffe is heavily indebted to Nietzsche.

It's (to me) nakedly a grandiose religious conception. It's the sort of thing Nietzsche suspected was hiding in the "great sages," but here it is proclaimed boldly, the religion of anti-life, anti-earth, and not in the name of some better place or better principle. In the name of nothingness, right? And yet it takes a pleasure in speaking itself, a pleasure in the existence of midwives to offend. It needs the very 'problem' it wants to diagnose and cure. Zappfe climbed his mountains. Schop. played his flute. They wore their dark views like a smart new jacket from the local H & M. I won't hypocritically curse them for this. That's just the way it is. It's fun to play dress-up. Life as endless play, however edgy and grim... — Hoo

I think you're right when you say it's a religious conception. I mean it is called The Last Messiah after all. But religion speaks more clear to our emotions than other alternatives. His Last Messiah is a mythic prophecy, a way of imaging how humanity might end (by its own hand, thus fulfilling the naturalistic prophecy of survival-of-the-fittest).

Does this game have an outside? — Hoo

I think that's the legacy of psychoanalytic theory and existentialism. There is no outside that we can reach. But we can glimpse parts and pieces of it, and build an idea of what it's actually like. I suspect that the dread we experience when considering the human condition (in the aesthetic sense) has more to do with confronting the unknown, the void, the infinite limitless possibilities, than any legitimately metaphysically-horrific idea. The only horrific idea is the idea that there are horrific ideas, in the metaphysical sense. Thus aesthetic-led pessimism leads to apathetic nihilism, since dread is only maintained by the presence of illusions that are threatened by whatever is the source of dread. But there's more reasons than just aesthetics to call oneself a pessimist. Indeed the aesthetics of a metaphysical principle seem to completely independent of the nature of the principle itself - thus imo the only defensible pessimism is the one that puts human welfare at front-and-center, because horrifying ideas are inherently self-centered (as they are perceived as a threat to the self), whereas ideas about other people are distinctly less-metaphysically-dependent and more based on basic empathy and duty.

Remind me never to go in battle with you.. I guess this is a segue for dueling antinatalism? Interesting place to put it after I was defending a more general argument we both agree on. — schopenhauer1

Well I mean this thread went exactly as I hoped it wouldn't (veered off topic) so like, what the hell, why not talk about something totally off topic? :s

f you can sustain happy time periods for long periods, or forever, then I'm all for it. — schopenhauer1

Okay, then I misunderstood your position. I was under the impression that you believed that needs and desires were always bad regardless of what impact they have on the individual. The aesthetic of insufficiency.

Sorry, I meant in previous threads. I seem to recall you arguing that you view all desires and needs as though they are bad. When I think there needs to be a distinction between the satisfaction of a concern and the mood that is associated with it.

I realize that my previous post might not have been as clear as I had thought so I'm making another. When we look at our lives, we typically say we have various good and bads, enjoyments and discomforts, joys and sorrows.

What I was trying to say before is that I think most of what we consider to be enjoyable or pleasurable moments are actually just a reaction to a need or a desire: the relief of anxiety, or suffering-in-disguise.

This is why I think that although the Benatar's procreative asymmetry is not logically valid, it really strikes us as intuitive and difficult to immediately reject. The various things we typically call good are not actually really that good, for their absence doesn't seem to be bad at all. If they were truly good then their absence would be worse, but at first glance it doesn't seem as though me not being able to play my favorite video game is actually a bad thing if I had never existed, since the video game is inherently connected to a discomfort which seems to disqualify any good feelings we derive from the satisfaction of this desire. Ice cream, acquaintanceship, walks on the beach, etc - these are all enjoyable but they come with a condition: an unwanted need or a discomfort precedes them. This applies even to our quest for meaning - what meaning we do derive from our lives seems to be fundamentally reactionary. Tragedy leads to meaning.

And this is where I will disagree with your own views Schop1 on deprivation. Certainly we do have some goods that are truly good, whose absence would be bad regardless of whether or not there is already a person around. It's too bad more people can't be authentically eudaimonic (happy), the one pure, good experience we do have; in other words, it's not incoherent to look at an empty universe in sadness, knowing that it's incapable of producing consistently happy people, to value happiness for the sake of happiness.

So I don't deny that the satisfaction of desires is good, but it seems to only be good on the personal level and not when considering pre-natal conditions. Most experiences we see as positive are thus more akin to a resolution of a problem. It feels good to resolve these problems, but relief doesn't seem to be authentic goodness. It's desperation-in-disguise.

Nietzsche touched on a similar point when he observed that religions, like Christianity, have an idea of sorts that it is good to create people to help them once they are alive; it is good to make problems for no reason other than so we can fix these problems. Similarly, is it good to make people just so they can satisfy a desire? My initial thought is no, but after reflection becomes a "modal-dependent yes". In the world we live in, our desires are accompanied by a level of discomfort. But if we had desires that didn't have unwanted enslavement-like discomfort, but only led to more and more pleasure (with the other problems also resolved of course), then I suspect I would see birth in a much more accepting way.

This is silly. Have you considered that you are deluded? Both of us have our beliefs and questioning the foundations of them is going to have to be through rational discussion and not skepticism of our honesty.

Did I tell you to lie to yourself or did I say stop presuming that you own the truth? — apokrisis

You told me to ask myself if I had considered the possibility that I am wrong, in which case I responded by saying yes, I have, and that no, I will not change my beliefs without good reason, and stupid possible hopeful futures are not a good reason.

Every papercut turns into the Holocaust with you. — apokrisis

No, no they don't. In fact you're the one downplaying Holocausts as if they're papercuts.

So define suffering for me - in a way that doesn't include everything (like being tickled, vaguely bored or uneasy, laughing until it hurts, satiated until its uncomfortable, etc). — apokrisis

Discomfort that is not wanted. An experience that does not match with a person's preferences. Something that must be endured or eliminated because it is self-evidently bad. Useless and meaningless harm.

And also define pain for me - in a way that is different from your usual claim that it represents suffering of the worst kind, and hence the most important suffering to mention (as in torture, being left trapped in a car wreck, etc). — apokrisis

Any sort of discomfort that, in normal circumstances, would promote action and therefore a response. A signal, as you said, or as I say, a way for the body to enslave itself. But pain is not equivalent to suffering as we often undergo pain for the greater good.

However if we had the choice to live without any pain (and instead have an analogous signal that doesn't hurt us) we would all choose this option over the crude apparatus nature has given us.

You should have been a Christian monk. You would have loved the hair shirt and flagellation. God forbid that you might have a positive outlook on life here among all us unholy sinners. — apokrisis

I should have been a Buddhist monk if anything, although any asceticism is wishy-washy pipe dreaming that focuses too much on the self and not enough on other people and their plights.

So the worst that could happen is that you might have hope and that you would end up disappointed all over again?

Yeah. I can understand why that is a risk not to be endured, a fate ten times worse than remaining convinced that a life in a hair shirt, scourge in hand, is best preparation for a likely horrible death. — apokrisis

Are you telling me to lie to myself? What happened to Diogenes' "truth above all else"?

Disgust as virtue. — Hoo

Damn right.

The biological and social context challenges that phenomenology in a basic way. Even pain can be pleasure as any masochist knows. — apokrisis

This is hardly a challenge, as you have ignored the point I made several times about how pain is not equivalent to suffering. A mashochist who enjoys pain is not suffering, because they are enjoying it which makes them a masochist.

Certainly even a masochist would not enjoy being impaled through the stomach. There are levels of pain outside the realm of enjoyment or even endurance.

So the counter-argument is that your pessimism is based on a particular social construction - a negative habit of thought which you have mastered to the extent it seems completely real and undeniable to you. — apokrisis

Instead I would argue that my pessimism is the result of an honest look at the human condition and a compassionate connection to the unfortunate and tragic. The stegosaurus died by being mauled to death by a hoard of velociraptors - what was the use of this? So you could read philosophy or eat ice cream or have sex? That's instrumentality right there and anyone of any moral worth, I think, ought to find it repugnant.

So I think you perceive my pessimism as going about in a rather moat-and-bailey fashion, when I see it as an all-encompassing philosophy that takes into account the gutters of reality that nobody likes to talk about. My pessimism isn't comfortable, nor does it feel natural (it's not in our usual interests to think about death and suffering) - however I consistently see it manifest in the world (even just in possibility) and when I am in a relatively serene state I usually end up wondering what made me forget about all the bad. And yet these bads are real facts of life regardless of how I or anyone else wants them to be. As soon as you realize just how endemic Pollyannism and magical thinking is, you become disillusioned with the concept of happiness and security and realize that they're built on a throne of lies and concealment.

Are you willing even to consider that you are the victim of this kind of self-delusion? How are you going to demonstrate that you are not? — apokrisis

I will need to have a good reason to believe that I am self-deluded, otherwise it's:

1.) irrationally believing in something based on hope
2.) setting oneself up for the inevitable disappointment when you realize you were right after all (happened to me with the various individual-centered philosophies (although Buddhism left a lasting influence because of its kernel pessimism), as well as positive psychology and the transhumanist movement)

So no, I don't doubt myself for no reason.

That's silly because instead I have pointed out that the phenomenology - particular feelings - are shaped or individuated within a socio-cultural, and a biological, context.

So my approach is not just contextual in a way that connects the world and the ideas. It recognises the different levels on which this is happening - the biological and the social - as well as then talking about the further fact of their integration. — apokrisis

AND THAT IS PERFECTLY FINE (in fact what I was originally focused on in the OP)...

...except when you start to argue that the overall holistic context can replace the immediate specificity of immanent objectivity, thus somehow "disproving" my pessimism by ignoring phenomenology entirely. Assessing the origins and constraints imposed on phenomenology is what we would call metaphysics, and yet this does not have much relevance to the pessimistic argument in general, since the pessimistic argument starts from phenomenology, while you are starting with metaphysics.

Alternatively, you actually are parroting childish and exaggerated "philosophy" here. And you talk past any science I mention rather than answering it. — apokrisis

What science, other than the social constructivism that you mentioned in passing and your signal argument that I don't particularly doubt but neither am appreciative of the utter lack of any citation?

Your holism ignores the specifics in favor of a global analysis. When in reality phenomenologically consciousness is it's own universe in itself, regardless of what contingency factors exist in the environment in which it presides. You look at the building without looking at its random structural issues, even if the entire structure itself is generally stable. When in fact these random chinks in the structure are sentient, feeling beings that don't take kindly to being brushed aside as if they are irrelevant - for they already know that in the big picture they aren't relevant at all.

What this means is that your metaphysics can stay intact but is ultimately insufficient, just as my phenomenological analysis is insufficient for a global metaphysics. In terms of pessimism we're not talking about metaphysics more than we are talking phenomenology and existentialism. The metaphysics is derived from the phenomenology and existentialism and more often than not looks like a story than a rigorous metaphysics. In any case it's phenomenology and existentialism that is first-and-foremost and the center of attention and is what should be taken as the main argument.

If your unrevealed scientific arguments are good enough to diffuse my own, then you wouldn't have to result to clearly unscientific arguments handwaves like "stop being childish" or "stop exaggerating". Instead you have participated in these handwaves and thus your critique of my argument as being unscientific (which it's not) applies to your own argument as well.