Yes, you make a good point. I was reading again the other day of the atrocious story of the murder and dismemberment of Hypatia of Alexandria at the hands of 'Christian mobs'. That 'mob mentality', no matter what ideology clothes it, is a dreadful thing. And I agree that Christian history has been marked by many such episodes. But as I see it, the fact that religion is misunderstood so as to cause such atrocities is attributable to the ignorance of its followers, and also to the greed of those who get themselves into positions of power because of it. — Wayfarer

Shall we revisit the Psalms, wade knee-deep in the blood of David's enemies, to see that there is plenty of justification for hostility and violence in the Bible that believers in Jehovah can draw on?

It would be awesome if an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good being existed, because then nothing bad would ever happen.
— Pfhorrest

I'd be interested to know which Biblical or other religious texts validate this claim.
/.../
The conception of 'God' as any kind of super-director, intelligent designer, or cosmic potentate, which is how he's most often depicted by current atheism, is a 'straw god' argument, comprising an attack on what David Bentley Hart describes as the God of 'monopolytheism'. — Wayfarer

Hindu monotheism or polytheism with one major god validate such claims. But since those theisms don't threaten with eternal damnation for making the wrong religious choice, they seem to have little traction in Western philosophy or culture at large.

Right. So in your perfect world, ruled by aforesaid perfect deity, there would no birth, death, or illness, right? Because all of those entail suffering, and according to this model, no suffering could exist, so nobody could ever be born, right? — Wayfarer

No. The Hindus would say that in that perfect world, people would understand the role of illusion, maya, and so wouldn't suffer, even though there would birth, death, old age, and disease. (But no New Age.)

The question I would put to the Epiucureans is that, Socrates was accused of atheism, but he denied it. He didn’t profess any belief in the Athenian pantheon - that was one of the causes of his condemnation - but he also said he wasn’t atheist. Of course, it is legendarily difficult to pin down what he did believe in, but he denied being atheist. So is that complaint of the Epicureans directed at whatever deity Socrates did believe in? — Wayfarer

The we can surmise that he was the kind of atheist who genuinely lacks belief in God or gods.
If I ask you whether you are an atheist in regard to Altjira (and I assume that you genuinely lack all belief in this deity, and that without googling it, you wouldn't even know what that word refers to -- apologies in advance if I underestimated your erudition), the question will be unintelligible to you. You can't say you are an atheist in regard to Altjira.

Because of this, I reckon the atheist would need to account more generally, if that makes sense. — Georgios Bakalis

Would need to?
Why?
Who or what are theists that atheists would need to justify themselves to them?


Other than that, I'm an atheist, and I have one desire in reference to God: Would the right God please stand up?!

Further, it's tempting to think there is something you mean, but you can't quite find the words... but if you cannot say it, how can you mean it? — Banno

This is what it is like when you think you mean something, but you can't quite find the words.
And you can put it into words!

Effanineffable!


The Naming of Cats
T. S. Eliot


The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn’t just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
First of all, there’s the name that the family use daily,
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo, or James,
Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey—
All of them sensible everyday names.
There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,
Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:
Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter—
But all of them sensible everyday names,
But I tell you, a cat needs a name that’s particular,
A name that’s peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,
Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?
Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,
Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,
Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum—
Names that never belong to more than one cat.
But above and beyond there’s still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover—
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular name.

"does there exist in man a natural attraction to truth and to the struggle for truth that is stronger than the natural attraction to pleasure?"

It would seem to be the goal of a philosopher who prizes truth and knowledge above all things. The philosopher would be one who sacrifices pleasure in pursuit of the experience of truth.

Do such people exist anymore? Why bother with the need for truth when a person has easy access to pleasure.

Kant sked three essential questions: “What can I know?” “What must I do?” and “What may I hope?”

Is the sacrifice of pleasure worth becoming able to try to answer such questions? — Nikolas

I can't imagine anything more pleasurable than the truth.
I can't imagine that other people could be different in this regard.

I managed to give up smoking before it killed me. Still probably drink more than is good for me. Nothing philosophical or wise about it, I’m like any other of the hoi polloi. — Wayfarer

My point is that many pleasures are actually learned, they don't come naturally, contrary to your earlier claim. You, too, probably had to learn to enjoy smoking and drinking. That first puff or sip couldn't have been enjoyable.


(The hoi polloi? /blush/)

Intelligence is refective and intepretive, where sense-pleasures are essentially physical and habitual. — Wayfarer

And yet there are so many sense pleasures we need to learn to enjoy. Think about enjoying to drink coffee or smoking: those "pleasures" are learned.
And so many others the enjoyment of which is culturally conditioned.

You're just playing coy.

All that matters is that moral authority comes from a source that cannot be corrupted by man's intellectualism. — synthesis

And everyone needs to figure out on their own what that authority is, right.

However, you have probably heard my idea of catharsis by now, right? There is a catharsis in antinatalism for us already born who can't escape the existential situation. There is something to the idea that we can communally recognize the negatives, and then are deciding to do something about it on an existential level (not just at the everyday micro level). It's more an aesthetic of understanding. — schopenhauer1

Aww, you mean other people should sacrifice themselves for you?

No not at all. There is a distinction between a life worth STARTING and CONTINUTING. Different considerations, mainly involving the fact that in one case, no one exists with fears, goals, interests, and dignity. The other one does. — schopenhauer1

Early Buddhism, which in effect also promotes AN, has a context to its AN and an alternative to "life as it is usually lived".

Your AN has no such thing. The context and the motivation for your AN amount to "I'll have a measure of contentment if noone else ever gets born".

You've capitulated before the problem of suffering. And even seem to think that such a capitulation deserves respect.

So you're saying without that, conversation without politics is always divisive and negative? — FlaccidDoor

How did you get to that from what I was saying?

So you're asserting that only the philosophy forum is an exception to the divisive effects of political conversations?

No, but it seems to be one of the few venues where the divisive effects of political conversations seem to have minimum effect on the social coherence between the people. But again, a philosophy discussion forum is a very specific kind of community, one that is specifically intended to accomodate those divisive effects. Whereas other communities normally aren't.

Before I set out to bake something, I need to think it though. As such, thinking is instrumental.

In any case, Aristotelian ethics, or virtue ethics, aren't predicated on the idea that we have a pre-made destiny that we ought to fulfill. In that understanding, 'virtue is its own reward', because it instills habits, which become character, which become destiny. — Wayfarer

Do you think that the Nazis didn't feel good about themselves and their ideas of what counts as virtue? That they didn't feel rewarded by what they considered virtuous behavior?

If virtue would somehow be something that is baked into the fabric of the universe, so that it would operate by laws similar to those in physics, then there'd be no problem. So, for example, if you did X, you'd feel good, and if you did Y, you'd feel crappy. But it doesn't work that way.
People can kill, rape, and pillage, and feel good about it. Or they can kill, rape, and pillage, and not feel good about it.

There nevertheless must be an element that discerns the meaning of dharma and elects to pursue it.
— Wayfarer
It's not clear how this is the case.
— baker

If it were not the case, Buddhism would never have come into existence. Recall the story of the ascetic that walked past the Buddha after the enlightenment and more or less shrugged it off, saying 'it could be' that he had realised the goal. Then at the Deer Park sermon in Benares, five other ascetics took the Buddha at his word and so the Sangha was formed.

It's one's kamma that makes one attracted to the Buddha's teachings. -- So goes the Buddhist reasoning for conversion.
There are extra-Buddhist/non-Buddhist conceptualizations for religious conversion to Buddhism (usually inspired by Western secular anthropology and religiology, or inspired by Christianity somehow). And then there are Buddhism-internal explanations for why a person takes to the Buddha's teachings.

The notion that a person "discerns the meaning of dharma and elects to pursue it" is incompatible with Buddhist doctrine, at least as far as persons with less than stream entry are concerned.

I think we are indoctrinated by empiricism, that only knowledge based on sensation is for real. That is why it seems so awfully difficult to differentiate rational knowledge and sensation when really the difference ought to be obvious.

I don't understand what you mean here.

In Buddhist ethical theory, the aspirant is presumed to be able to validate the teachings by first-hand insight, through their attaining of that insight in the living of the principles. The key term is 'ehi-passiko', 'seeing for oneself'. In practice there are obstacles to that, first and foremost the difficulties of realising such goals, but you can't say that in principle nobody it able to do so.

This is a westernized verificationist approach. A cradle Buddhist would never set out to "validate the teachings" or to "verify" them.

(See this verse for discussion of the difference between 'taking on conviction' and 'direct discernment'.)

It doesn't make your point. Look what Sariputta says:
And as for me, I have known, seen, penetrated, realized, & attained it by means of discernment. I have no doubt or uncertainty that the faculty of conviction... persistence... mindfulness... concentration... discernment, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation."
He started off with conviction (!!), and then he did this and that, and then he came to certainty. It's a circular, self-referential, self-fulfilling, self-proving activity. No wonder "it works".

And there are, or there have been in the past, similar kinds of insights in Western philosophy.

The holy grail -- epistemic autonomy.

According to Pierre Hadot, twentieth- and twenty-first-century academic philosophy has largely lost sight of its ancient origin in a set of spiritual practices that range from forms of dialogue, via species of meditative reflection, to theoretical contemplation. These philosophical practices, as well as the philosophical discourses the different ancient schools developed in conjunction with them, aimed primarily to form, rather than only to inform, the philosophical student. The goal of the ancient philosophies, Hadot argued, wasto cultivate a specific, constant attitude toward existence, by way of the rational comprehension of the nature of humanity and its place in the cosmos. This cultivation required, specifically, that students learn to combat their passions and the illusory evaluative beliefs instilled by their passions, habits, and upbringing. 1

IOW, it's about training oneself, developing oneself, cultivating oneself into becoming a particular type of person. This is how one "sees for oneself". It's not about verifying whether some claims are true or not. It's about making oneself be such that one comes to see those claims as true, as good.

It's similar to vocational training. One doesn't engage in vocational training in order to test the claims made by the specific field of expertise. One does it to learn, to earn expertise, a vocation.
You don't test if baking "works". You do it to become a baker.

So the results 'can be checked for yourself' although if such possibilities are rejected out of hand, then it remains a practical impossibility. In other words, it requires a certain kind of openness to those modes of discourse. (Maybe it's the case that we've been inoculated against any idea of 'higher truth' by dogmatic religion, specifically Protestantism.)

I think the problem is, rather, that the matter is approached in a pseudoscientific manner of "experimenting, testing, and verifying claims for yourself". Such experimenting etc. is impossible, at least as long as one doesn't have epistemic autonomy. And if one had it, one wouldn't need to test etc. anything anyway.

But why in this place? Artistic license isn't a matter of whim.

Most ANs recognize the distinction of what it means to prevent someone from coming into existence in the first place and ending an existence that is already here. — schopenhauer1

A distinction that is close to trivial. If life isn't worth living, it's not worth living, full stop, with nukes.

Physical science is universalist about reality in that if someone doesn't experience the same phenomena that everyone else does, even after completely controlling for the objects of said experience (the environment / experiment / etc), we go figure out what's different about the subject (the person) such that they experience the same object differently, and adjust our theories to correctly predict what that kind of subject will experience as well. An ethical science would have to do likewise. — Pfhorrest

And in the process of doing so, the person gets designated as "abnormal". "Wrong". "Defective". "Inferior".

Once such qualifiers are introduced, we're back to might makes right.

The point of logic* is to make sure that we're on the right side of the line dividing truths and lies. — TheMadFool

And how can you know what is true and what is a lie, given that you, too, are, as a human, emotionally attached to your beliefs and resent it if other people contradict them?


*And no, this isn't what logic is about. Go back to that couple of introductory books on logic.

Some ancient peoples thought of it as an element, not further analyzable, e.g. here from Pali:

dhātu:
Element; property, impersonal condition. The four physical elements or properties are earth (solidity), water (liquidity), wind (motion), and fire (heat). The six elements include the above four plus space and consciousness.
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/glossary.html

One of the most important things about forgiveness is that when you forgive others, you forgive yourself, as well. — synthesis

But is it really forgiveness, or is it superiority and contempt?

I find that often, when people say they have forgiven, what they actually did is that they found a way to feel superior to the other person or to despise them and feel good about it.

I'm sorry about that comment. I apologise to you, the mods, and the site. I was drunk, and as you said, despairing. That's not an excuse, but rather to say I recognise this isn't the place to be when drunk! No more drunk philosophy from me! Sorry. — counterpunch

Holding you to it!

However if a community can exist with only disagreements to hold it together — FlaccidDoor

No, what "holds a philosophy discussion forum together" is a measure of commitment by its members to a very specific tradition of discussing things in a specific way.

why can't it simply exist in friends and family? I personally feel like friends or at least family is far from polite society.

Sure, friends and esp. family sometimes are not "polite society", but they are not intended to be a philosophy discussion forum and don't serve that purpose.

I find it hilarious that when it comes to these forums future conditionals go out the window in the name of "metaphysics". — schopenhauer1

Not in this case.

It's like having compassion and empathy for fictional characters in a book or a film. It's not a meaningful way to have empathy and compassion.

It's a compassion and an empathy that doesn't take the other person into consideration as they actually are, as persons -- and it can't, because that other person doesn't actually exist. It's not emapthy and it's not compassion. It's pity and it's patronizing. And people have plenty of that indeed. It seems to make them feel really good!
— baker

Um, so if a couple KNEW that by procreating there is a 100% chance that the child that would exist would live a horrible life, they should not take this into consideration? Get outta here.

I'm sure there's a name for this fallacy, but I can't be bothered to look it up.

But you're evading the point. I'm saying that your antinatalist has motivations that are lowlier than empathy and compassion. I'm saying that your antinatalist has merely pity and patronizing. Or possibly worse.

Buddhism is its own can of worms. Even though technically suffering can be achieve with antinatalist policy within a generation,

Not according to Buddhism; and this is because merely dying doesn't guarantee cessation of suffering.
Your "solution" to the problem of suffering doesn't solve it; it amounts to "no man, no problem". It's akin to saying that the solution to global warming is to nuke planet Earth out of existence.
But Buddhism proposes a solution to the problem of suffering that people can actually experience.
Not that I'm a Buddhist, BTW, I'm just comparing your approach with another one.

It goes back to what's in it for the antinatalist.
— baker
Preventing yet another person from suffering. Keep it nonexistent please.

What do _you_ get from other people not being born?

How many times do I need to repeat my question?????

Um, any activity you do outside of childrearing or related to childrearing. That's literally millions of things. Sports, hobbies, recreation, entertainment, anything.

Granted, one can try to find happiness those ways. The operative term being "try". The problem is that there is no lasting happiness to be found in those things.

I'm saying you can't deliberately (!) get from A to B if you don't know how to get from A to B.
Further, you can't deliberately (!) get from A to B if while in A, you don't have the ability to get to B.

I think this is the case with humans and morality. It's not clear whether a change in human morality can be brought about deliberately, or whether such a change is necessarily a side effect of other things. It seems to me it's the latter.

Do a person's notions about what is moral and what isn't change over time? Yes, they do. Do they change because the person was told so? Usually not. I already mentioned Kohlberg and his theory of moral development. He hypothesized that people don't move from one stage of morality to another by an act of will or by contemplating moral issues (such as by reading texts in favor of a particular type of moral reasoning), but that the change appears to come about due to a complex mixture of factors, these factors being time, life experiences of the person, moral reasoning they have done themselves and the one they've been exposed to, and possibly more. It's so complex that the prospect of deliberate, guided moral change seems hopeless.

They who "...aren't swayed by arguments" don't know what an argument is. The way a debate with arguments proceeds is, to my knowledge, all about what must be true given certain assumptions and/or claims and how that, on occasion, is denied, the resulting contradiction proving the incoherent nature of an individual's or group's position. — TheMadFool

So what if their position is proven wrong? Will they poof out of existence?

What's in it for you if you prove someone else's position wrong?


Remember, this thread's theme is Philosophy vs. real life!

Does anybody in the West still want to be free? — synthesis

Freedom from what?
Freedom to do what?

Still not answering the question. Yes, countries are not races and nationalism is not the same as racism, but we knew that already. The question is: why is one good and the other bad?

You could say: "just because," and leave it at that, and that would be a legitimate answer. But then you have nothing more to say on the topic. If you think you do have something to say, then you need to tell us what it is that makes racism objectionable and nationalism unobjectionable - other than them not being the same, that is. — SophistiCat

Like I said: nation states are the default, as such, they are neutral. Fretting about nationalism (insofar as it has to do with nation states) is like fretting that the sun rises in the East.

Such as?

If arguments would indeed have the power you speak of earlier, then how do you explain that there's plenty of people who aren't swayed by arguments?

"It's not that way" doesn't mean "it can't be that way".

The entire point of moral theory is figuring out how to change things. If they can't be other than they already are, there's no point. — Pfhorrest

In order to change things, you need to start with how they actually are.

Compassion and empathy are meaningful only in relation to already existing entities.
— baker

Not true, otherwise people would have no consideration whatsoever for the outcome and welfare of a future person, baby, child. — schopenhauer1

False. Consideration can be motivated by other things than just empathy and compassion. Habit, pathological altruism, pride or the desire to look good in the eyes of others can result in acting in ways that can seem as being motivated by empathy and compassion.

The compassion and empathy you're talking about are idle perversions.
— baker
Not sure why it can't be extended to people that would exist but are prevented from doing so if otherwise not precautionary.

It's like having compassion and empathy for fictional characters in a book or a film. It's not a meaningful way to have empathy and compassion.

It's a compassion and an empathy that doesn't take the other person into consideration as they actually are, as persons -- and it can't, because that other person doesn't actually exist. It's not emapthy and it's not compassion. It's pity and it's patronizing. And people have plenty of that indeed. It seems to make them feel really good!

Defective? Damn look who's harsh here. Ok, well, new social norms have and can be implemented. One where compassion extends to people who might exist, but can be prevented from doing so. Compassion the harm that could have taken place.

All along, I've been privately comparing your antinatalist stance with the antinatalism that can be found in Early Buddhism. I don't recall ever seeing the argument that the reason why one should be celibate is out of compassion for others (although the point does come up in popular Buddhist discourse).
I certainly don't find your line of reasoning convincing, even though I would, for all practical intents and purposes, describe myself as at least a selective antinatalist.

It looks more like the final drop of pleasure that the antinatalist is trying to squeeze out of life.
— baker
Final drop of pleasure-- because it is suggesting to current people born to not screw with other people by procreating them? They are not saying to not do X, Y, Z for themselves.

It goes back to what's in it for the antinatalist.

There's many ways one can try to find happiness without it involving other people's states of being.

Do list at least three such ways.

Likewise, a sound argument has the same power of persuasion that a loaded gun's muzzle pushed against the temple has. One is always, without exception, forced to accept the conclusion of a sound argument.

It seems that either way - whether you're in the presence of a philosopher presenting a good argument or whether you're under duress to believe something - we're being forced on pain of injury, death, or looking like a fool. — TheMadFool

Not at all, given that two people can be presented with the same argument, and one feels forced to accept it (because he thinks it's so irresistibly good), and the other one doesn't (because he thinks it's dumb).

IOW, an argument's strength doesn't somehow exist objectively, independently of persons, as an inherent trait of the argument itself. Rather, strength is ascribed to it by people, and different people will ascribe different strengths to it.

*sigh*
Talk about consumer philosophy ... life as a matter of consumption ...

Grammatically, why does it say "Do not go gentle into that good night", when there should be an adverb there, "gently"?

It very explicitly does not. That's the point of replicating others' experiences: so we don't have to take their word for it. — Pfhorrest

But one cannot replicate others' experiences.

For example, I don't drink coffee, because it makes me sleepy. Many people drink coffee in the morning specifically for the purpose that it "wakes them up". So which is it? Who is right, who is wrong? Who has the right experience of drinking coffee in the morning? I or they? Is there an objectively right way to experience drinking coffee in the morning?

You never explained your bizarre "empathy is incompatible with objectivism" comment, but I'd guess from that that you take "objectivism" to mean what I called "transcendentalism", which would require taking someone's word for it, which is why I'm against that, as I explicitly said. The only sense of "objectivism" I support is "universalism", the view that something being good or bad doesn't depend on what anyone thinks or says... because that would just be taking someone's word for it too.

Objectivisms are authoritarian and assume to be impersonal/suprapersonal. Yet, contrary to that, it is always a particular person, a Tom or a Dick who makes the claim that X is really such and such, and that Harry is in the wrong if he doesn't see it that way.

There is no room for empathy in objectivism, because the objectivist already assumes to know better.

Just like (according to a scientific worldview) reality doesn't depend on what anyone thinks about it, but there's still nothing about reality that's beyond observation: it's not relative, it's universal, but it's also not transcendent, it's entirely phenomenal.

But it still comes down to whose observation matters.


The problem you're actually indirectly talking about is the problem of epistemic dependence.

There nevertheless must be an element that discerns the meaning of dharma and elects to pursue it. — Wayfarer

It's not clear how this is the case. Up until stream-entry, such discernment is impossible anyway.

What does the Euclidean theorem look like? The ability to grasp a rational idea of that kind is different to a sensory impression, surely.
/.../
Also the Buddhist ‘manas’ is something like ‘organ of perception of ideas’. There are other terms for intellect in the Buddhist lexicon, notably, Buddhi, and also Citta, but considering all of those details are out of scope for this thread. The key word in western philosophy was ‘nous’ which has sadly fallen out of use. — Wayfarer

What started off this tangent was this:

Seems to me that hedonism always wants to avoid this conclusion - to say there’s no real difference between pleasant sensations and eudomonaic happiness (which is the happiness that comes from the pursuit of virtue.) One can, for example, attain happiness in the contemplation of verities, which surely can’t be reduced to sensation alone, and which only a rational mind can entertain. — Wayfarer

And we're back to the problem of who gets to be the arbiter of what is virtue and what isn't.

What does the Euclidean theorem look like? The ability to grasp a rational idea of that kind is different to a sensory impression, surely. — Wayfarer

I think that depends on the measure of epistemic autonomy that an individual person is assumed to have.
The more epistemic autonomy a person is assumed to have (ie. the more the individual person is identified with their mind), the starker the difference between the first five senses and the intellect. And vice versa.

Eudomonia in Aristotelian philosophy is linked with virtue and with fulfilling your life's purpose (telos). — Wayfarer

But how does a particular person know what their life's purpose is?

Surely the ancient Greeks weren't individualists who believed that every man and woman (!) is able and should define their own life purpose for themselves, quite divorced from the social roles and expectations placed upon them by other people.

I don't think it's difficult to differentiate those kinds of aims from the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure.

I think it depends on the particular life purpose for the particular person.

Take, for example, a professional culinary connoisseur. A person like that eats, tastes food for a living, it's their telos. Eating, tasting food is also a hedonistic pursuit of pleasure. So where's the difference between such a person's telos and hedonistic pursuit of pleasure? Can this be answered without demoting the profession of culinary connoisseurship to something unvirtuous?

But how is it that racism is less acceptable than nationalism or ethnocentrism, when they are so similar? — SophistiCat

Probably because countries around the world tend to be conceived of as nation states, not as race states.
For example, prior to the influx of immigrants of different races into Germany and Austria, Germans and Austrians were the same race -- yet considered eachother to be different nationalities.
In that sense, nationalism seems to be relatively neutral, in the sense that it is a given -- it's simply about countries being countries.

There nevertheless must be an element that discerns the meaning of dharma and elects to pursue it. — Wayfarer

Which is not incompatible with considering the intellect to be a sense.

Why should there be a problem with considering the intellect to be a sense?


(Note a parallel in Western antiquity, what "common sense" originally meant.)