It almost seems too clunky to explicitly break down the consonances, but I think it wonderfully fits with all of this! — csalisbury

I like that quote and love the self-knowledge aspect. Wise as a serpent, gentle as a dove. Different quote, but maybe related. Knowing yourself as a sinner, acknowledging the truth of the your own mother/matter/matrix/cross. Something like that. Hard to find just the right words. Probably never can or will be just the right words, which is maybe part of the lesson. I also think of Schopenhauer differentiating the philosopher and the saint. Articulation is to some degree a separate task, emotion recollected in tranquility perhaps.

Agreed. I guess the good thing about online forums is that trolls do not do as much harm. Frustrating. „ It is a massive uneaten book of personalities“ what a lovely way to put it :) — Franz Liszt

I'm very glad you enjoyed that metaphor. As far as trolls go, a certain amount of trollishness is maybe even good, but obviously pure meanness that prevents conversation is worthless. I mention this because sometimes it's been good for me to get my feelings hurt, in the long run. It hurts to let go of this or that idea. It hurts to revealed as sloppy or ignorant or biased, etc. And yet that revelation is valuable. It's like a little piece of the self being chipped off. Personally I think jokes can do some real work in philosophy. IMO, it's not at all like math or chess. It's more like poetry of life & death significance.

For me a hidden God is functionally exactly the same as no God. There would still be no good reason to believe. — Tom Storm

Good point. And tangentially: if the hidden god did come out of hiding for just me, I would believe myself and at the same time not expect others to believe my account. If we grant that some accounts are false, that humans are subject to delusions, then how is anyone supposed to tell the difference? Low-grade madness and sloppy thinking are the rule, not the exception.

In short, it's fishy that theology has to be so fishy.

I can imagine. As you say, it isn’t a big issue, but frustrating. There will always be trolls — Franz Liszt

Trolls and sometimes misunderstood jokers and occasionally some people on the edge of madness. I remember a guy who was living in the woods and having persecution fantasies. I've followed forums like this for a long time. I love the variety of personalities. It's a massive, uneven book-in-progress.

Don’t worry, I have just been asked to prove my atheism, that is all :) — Franz Liszt

Don't take it personally. There really are lots of roundabout theists on forums. In itself the theism is no big deal (it's just an 'uncool' position) but the slipperiness can be frustrating.

I thought we were all about leaving dogma — Franz Liszt

I'm with you there, but I won't entertain all propositions with the same seriousness. I don't think anyone can. I don't believe that dead people come back to life. The day may come somehow (presumably through technology) and the very concept of death will change. But in the meantime, I look on reports and hopes of resurrections as implausible to put it mildly. In general I don't believe in miracles and afterlives. That's the main thing: we are alone down here and we all die. If pushed, I'll grant that I could be wrong. I'd even like to be wrong perhaps. [We might, on the other hand, want to give genuine personal death its due, for its kernel is sweet, if you just cross the fiery brook.]

I object to metaphysical theism for more complicated reasons that involve my vision of how language works. I don't want to derail the thread, so I won't go into those.

No. Just because an atheist is saying something that might seem pro–theism, it does not mean I am a theist. I thought we were all about leaving dogma, and instead in reach of questioning god and other religious claims. — Franz Liszt

I do believe you. I was just being playful. Sorry I wasn't more careful. I did say (teasingly) that I thought you had the metaphysical heebie-jeebies, and that's because you mentioned Enformationism, and I don't like that kind of thing and couldn't resist a joke. But I did hear the siren song of metaphysics once, so I understand, even if I have stopped my ears since then.

Regarding Cioran, Kafka, and Tim & Eric. I think you're right about the castration, the laugh at the void, and all of it. What I want to say is that I think it is, to echo an earlier post, sort of one genre among others. There's this Joanna Newsom song where she sings - plaintively, sweetly, patiently, understandingly - 'honey, where'd you come by that wound?' - and the plaintive, sweet, understanding vibe felt so nice that for a few months, I kept playing that song again and again - the feeling of loving attention gets tied to identifying with your wound. It's a powerful complex of things (in every 'cioran' theres an offstage 'joanna newsom' singing that song. For me it maybe echoes being sick as a kid, and mom taking especial care of me) It is a powerful aspect of life and should be given a spot - refusing loving care is its own temptation - but I also feel that it is not the sovereign genre (or emotion, or stance) I want to take - or I don't want to take any genre (aspect, region, vibe, atmosphere, emotion, frame) as sovereign at all. — csalisbury

I relate to this as well. I love the offstage joanna newsom, and I adore Joanna Newsom herself. Where did we get that wound? I suppose all of us are beaten into civilized creatures and that men in particular are (most of them) beaten into a performance of masculinity. What does the little boy learn? A contempt for vulnerability. My dad used the belt, and at some point I could take the whipping without tears and that's about when they stopped. A boy who cries over a little pain deserves the belt in the first place, right? So the sissy soul of the boy goes into hiding or rather projection....and the castrated girls (actually uncastrated one might say) are more fascinating than ever. We end up with a classic system (possibly crumbling) of men insisting on 'sublimated' relationships with one another and saving some secret tender private side for women. (I know this is cis-het biased, and I just can't speak for other situations.)

Returning the The Possessed and Stavrogin's confession: why does he hate the little girl after seducing her? After her confused initial resistance, she is shockingly enthusiastic. I think he is appalled not because of her physical youth but because of her trust, because of how easy it was to deceive her and instill faith in her. He suddenly hates her, because she suddenly loves him, because he was inspired by an imp of perversity or demon of irony in the first place, and certainly not by love. In another book, Ivan talks about a child being pointlessly abused. I also recall Harold Bloom talking about Iago willing the Moor in him to suffer. Basically the little joanna newsom must be tormented, beaten into a by perhaps. There's also the judge in Blood Meridian, fantasizing about how he'd raise his sons....by throwing them in a cage with wolves. Billy Budd, and so on. Until we finally arrive back at the old cross, and 'we both know it was a girl back in Bethlehem.'

One thing I've been drawn to, reading about Taoism, is the refusal of any one aspect (the mechanical ritual, the normal workings of life, the philosophical frame, the ecstatic experience, etc) to be the 'real' thing - it's all part of it. — csalisbury

Yes, we are on the same page, very much. And I like Taoism. If you want to be whole, let yourself be torn. I think you are nailing the tone, which is difficult. It's hard to talk about wisdom and spirituality without lapsing into a certain unpleasant role. It's what Zizek means when he calls wisdom obscene. I totally get that and yet it's obvious that humans want wisdom, which is something like the skill of living well where words are perhaps a secondary part of the skill. IMO, there's a playful attitude that's primary. When disaster is not forcing us to be serious, there's a creative ground state that could only play at launching manifestos. I like some of Tristan Tzara's stuff quite a bit, self-eating manifestos that (importantly!) register as joyful and not bitter. There's no definite conceptual content to be communicated. It's the attitude that matters. I project this on Zen, which I don't know well.*

*Side-issue, but I can imagine someone saying 'well, that's not Zen.' OK, Cool, I reply. But what matters to me is an attitude/realization that exists now for me, which is maybe (doesn't really matter) what someone else somewhere else called something else. Even a shared American misreading of Zen can be a bridge, or just sharing in the cloud of the concept. Koans and shit! Waking people up to something behind language. Some kind of mutated OLP boredom with mind-matter-blah-blah. Also knowing that what keeps me going might not work at all for someone else and will only work temporarily for me.

You wake up with a gasp and want to delete a post - I almost did with my last one ('ecumenical spiritualism', what are you talking about dude?)- but that impulse feels like not wanting to be the individual who made that mistake. And if you made it, that's part of how you're currently operating, and that's a good thing to know! Deleting it - as I've done in the past, and have been tempted to do - is like taking the stance of 'silent contempt' as you put it, toward yourself. The 'bad' part is pushed into the cellar again, to stew and resent, while you do stuff in a 'good' way, until the cycle repeats. Original SIn gets a bad rap, in may cases rightfully so, but one way at it is just: it's a worldview that allows you to fuck up, and makes sense of it after, without recoiling from and repressing it. — csalisbury

So many good themes here, it's hard to start. I'm for Shigalyovism original sin. (I'll leave in the obscure, dorky Dostoevsky joke but get back to The Possessed.)

A more targeted response: I think I learn more from online conversation because it hurts to overhear one's public self. Dead text is a terrible nudity. Maybe you are stuffed with high feeling but then the text stain sometimes looks so pathetic. If any human being is great, then I suspect such greatness is momentary. Flowers stand pretty in the manure of ordinary life. Nietzsche wrote about the higher arising from the lower. It seems like a small point in the book, but it's everything. Instead of perfect gleaming greatness being self-created and having no shameful past, there's the slow crawl out of the mud. Warhol did some book that was just 24 hours of his friends and him talking bullshit, uncensored and raw. Maybe they performed a little for the tape-recorder, but I like the aim of sanctifying ordinary life, or making peace with the banal, the lazy, the imperfect. (I wish Byron's journal hadn't been burned. It would have been nasty, sure, but illuminating even in its nastiness.)

But yeah original sin and forgiveness...these old ideas are valuable even without traditional notions of god. It's just good relationships 101, a class which is maybe never mastered, despite its priority.

You're right, he's a professor of math and he puts his ideas out there under his own name, and the likes of me throws rocks from behind my anonymous handle. Can't deny it. — fishfry

I decided to look him up.

The pure mathematical community depends on these and other fancies to support a range of “theories” that appear pleasant but are not actually corresponding to reality, and “theorems” which are not logically correct. Measure theory is a good example –this is a subject in which the majority of “results” are without computational substantiation. And the Fundamental theorem of Algebra is a good example of a result which is in direct contradiction to direct experience: how do you factor x^7+x-2 into linear and quadratic factors? Answer: you can’t do this exactly — only approximately.

By removing ourselves from the seductive but false dreamings of modern pure mathematics, we open our eyes to a more computational, logical and attractive mathematics –where everything is above board, where computations actually finish in finite time, where examples can be laid out completely, and where we acknowledge the proper distinction between the exact and the only approximate. This is a pure mathematics which is closer to applied mathematics, and more likely to be able to support it. It also gives us many new insights, more precise definitions, and theorems which are actually …correct. — Wildberger

https://njwildberger.com/

My first reaction is that this guy is another Cantor crank! But if he taught at Stanford at one point and is about to retire at some other school, presumably as a full professor, then he must 'know better. ' He must know how crankish he sounds and how bold he is being to abandon traditional foundations in some kind of informal constructivism.

I'm not the only one, Google around. And FWIW, I'm a crankologist. I enjoy reading math cranks and am familiar with the work of most of the prominent ones. — fishfry

I believe you, and personally I think you know your math very well, significantly more than me, clearly. But still, it matters that all of this is anonymous. To profess really is to profess, to take the risk and burden of professing, subject to accusations of being a crank, for instance. That's his proper name, probably the one he was born with, and he's publicly called a crank. A little part of me cheers for the underdog, though I wouldn't want to be a crank myself.

Anyway, if information hygiene is really the issue, I don't see how we can unironically play doctor in our masks. I'm not at all suggesting that anyone unmask...quite the opposite. Academia already exists, so what's needed is a place where people can play with ideas, take some risks.

Oh boy they're gonna gossip about the rest of us! — fishfry

Well, I hesitated when it came to posting that, but I thought it would be rude to not reply publicly to such a friendly hello. Seems silly now. At the same time, I really like anonymity. (Since I want to freedom to react quickly and maybe say something silly, that anonymity comes in handy.)

Early or late Wittgenstein?

You may be right. I would like to hear a solid academic account of this. We know the axioms are tautologies. They are also called that by some. — Tom Storm

I have later Wittgenstein in mind, but I'm pointing at a cloud of thinking on the issue of meaning, so I'm using Wittgenstein as a symbol for this cloud and what I've made of it. Lee Braver's Groundless Grounds is the kind of book/thinking I have in mind.

I don't for a moment think you are an atheist. You are making a theist case, and you disguise yourself as an atheist.

Many atheists use the same stupid and deplorable, but all-too-obvious and transparent tactic to denounce religion, and many theists employ the same method to denounce atheism. — god must be atheist

Do you really think so? Such an approach would ultimately be the worst propaganda for theism.

Time will tell (please be telling the truth, @Franz Liszt), but I think this is a case of the metaphysical heebie-jeebies.

Hi ! I'll private-message you about that.

I prefer the term logical axioms. But as far as we can tell, they are absolute. You cannot have any discourse without them. As soon as you argue against them you are using them to do this. — Tom Storm

IMO, these laws are redundant and/or tautological and/or 'grammatical' in some Wittgensteinian sense. (Not saying they are wrong or false, though.) The laws of identity and contradiction are almost definitions of 'identity' and 'contradiction.' I suspect that these 'laws' are about as useful as the luminiferous ether. There are just ways that we must use words if we want to be intelligible. Still, someone can say I'm mad and I'm not mad. Or this cigar is not a cigar. In the right context, it could be witty, it could be appropriate. Think of a background of expectation and a foreground of surprise.

Have you ever seen the cauchy sequence of a non-computable real number? If I claim that that Cauchy sequence is for the number 42, how could you challenge that claim? — Ryan O'Connor

We can embed the rational numbers in the real numbers this way. Let f(n) = 42 for all n in N (a constant sequence). Then the real number 42 is the equivalence class that contains f and all g such that |f(n) - g(n)| --> 0 as n --> inf. Another representative of 42 in R would be f(n) = 42 - 2/n. Clearly there are infinitely many representatives for each real number, and there are proofs that show that it doesn't matter which representative is used in computing sums and products, etc.

It's a pretty good system. The interesting stuff is (as you hint) the gulf between computable and noncomputable numbers

You may be right, but I'm of the view that we don't know exactly what we're talking about because there's more work to be done. — Ryan O'Connor

The point I was getting at in this context is something like: we often think we are talking about numbers when we are really talking about talk about numbers.

I agree that there's more work to be done, but there's already a mountain of stuff out there. After years of formal study (proof writing), I still would argue that intuition is primary and that math is a language.

Wildberger is a nut, his math doctorate notwithstanding. He does have some very nice historical videos and some interesting ideas. But his views on the real numbers are pure crankery. You should not use him in support of your ideas, since that can only weaken your argument. — fishfry

I don't know much about Wildberger (I remember him being passionate and unorthodox), but you touch on 'the' issue here, social reality. Any philosophical conversation about numbers is perhaps bound to get back around to authority and who has it. For instance: obviously you have every right to call Wildberger a crank and indicate that you find him anti-persuasive in this context. But we are in the strange situation of talking anonymously. If Ryan can't trust a PhD who uses his own name and face, why should he trust you or me? There's just no substitute for looking around the space and seeing what those in power are actually saying. Being in power doesn't make anyone right, but typically what people actually want is recognition.

It's not strange, it is a venerable academic argument. He may not know it but he is referring to the Logical Absolutes (I think Aristotle first articulated these) which it is argued are true, above and beyond human minds.

These are the laws of identity, non-contradiction and excluded middle which allow us to have reason, maths, science. They are necessary presuppositions to have any kind of communication or thought. — Tom Storm

I'm aware of those, and if that's he meant then it's not such a strange thought, though I agree it's not obvious to get from these to some god.

Still, I'm not fond of the 'law' metaphor. I view it more empirically and grammatical. Every thing is identical with itself because that's how 'identical' is used. I don't see any deeper meaning. We learnt he language of the tribe. We can use it to get things done, but the meaning is not 'in us' or present to some inner eye, even if these metaphors have been useful.

It's a bit of a digression, but I'd generalize this point by suggesting that nothing is immediate. There is no corner stone, no deep structure that bears all of the weight and has independent significance (semantic holism, basically, is where I'm coming from...it's all subject to the Monet-effect and only makes sense at a distance, against a background.)

My point is that we need to be designed by something that has all truth for our logic to be correct. — Franz Liszt

To me this is a strange thought. Why should our logic be perfectly correct? Humans just reason in a certain way, and we can examine the way we reason and seemingly do it more carefully. Why be attached to perfect certainty, perfect logic in the first place? Perhaps these concepts (taken as absolutes) are just residues of monotheism in the first place. The big bearded father in the sky fades away like the Cheshire Cat, and his last residue is metaphysics (the a priori, Forms, etc.)

IMO, studying philosophy (which involves some emotional work, no doubt) leads (some at least) to make peace with a fuzzier view of the world. It's annoying when people mention Wittgenstein, but I'll do it anyway and say that studyingthat kind of language-demystifying philosophy really does dissolve some knots and confusions. It's not at all that certain questions are answered but rather their sloppiness and non-centrality is made visible.

For instance, if you are only hypothesizing about some abstract god who isn't the dude in the bible that gives us all eternal life, then what does it matter? It would clarify things for me and maybe for you to figure out whether this is trivial metaphysics or a genuine religious crisis. Is this issue important because you fear hellfire? Or do you have the philosophical itch for Certainty and a Reason? (I have been interested in mind-matter blah-blah off and on, but in the end it just seems dead to me...with no practical-emotional relevance, a form of chess but without the clarity of its rules.)

What an insane world. Have you ever read Peter Zapffe? He talks about how we have an "over abundance of consciousness" that provides us more evaluative reflective capacities than is needed for an animal to survive. This meta-evaluation gives us that much more to grapple with. We don't just "do". We don't just go from garbage can to garbage can looking for food, and finding shade under a tree like a racoon. We KNOW we are doing something and can say, "Ah shit, not this X task again...". Why!? — schopenhauer1

I've read some Zapffe. Good stuff, part of the truth-telling tradition. I'm guessing you have Schopenhauer's Essays and Aphorisms. I love the end of 'On philosophy and the intellect.'
He talks of a crown of thorns blossoming into a laurel-wreath. He talks of an insect laying its eggs so that it can die in peace. Btw, isn't God on the cross a supremely pessimistic image? The fucking divine itself is crucified, shamefully executed, naked to the storm. Our luciferian pride reveals the cross. If we were just scavenging raccoons, we might suffer but the pain wouldn't be spiritual. 'Only the damned are grand.' It's grasping the absurdity of existence that paradoxically almost sanctifies it.

We live in the belly of the empire and most of us haven't experienced war. But I think of Xerxes, etc., and of all the drama of conquest, the violent risk of life. There is a submerged part of our nature that hates the routine, hates swallowing pride. Peace has been described as rotten and decadent. Even in time of peace, men have fought duels. In Hegel/Kojeve the 'master' is only a master because he proves his freedom from the slavish attachment to life. In WWII, there were men who couldn't enlist for health reasons and killed themselves out of shame and envy. We're not in a moment where talking about this kind of toxic masculinity is going to win you a cubicle.

YES to this. The character of Lucifer is a good one here. I rather like the the Gnostic concept of reversing this. The NAYsayer of life is the hero. — schopenhauer1

I connect the nay-sayer (our dear 'negative creep') to the skeptic as Stirner & Kojeve describe him. The stoic, who as his charms, is more of an optimist. Both are terribly proud, but the skeptic is really not sure if the game is worth the candle. Maybe the luckiest are the neverborn. Even Socrates implies that life is a disease, when he's about to be cured of it.

There's a default prudent optimism which politicians must echo and which politeness dictates when dealing with strangers. 'Herd animals' gets it right, and I say this as someone who is largely another herd animal. We know that we will die, but we take precautions, let risky opportunities pass. Even monogamy may be a manifestation of sloth and fear (and not only of love.) We like TV shows where people risk their lives for honor, or trade a mediocre future for a intense moment. But politicians and schoolmarms and university administrators have to spurt out the same sentimental inanities. It's literally their job...to tell a partial truth, that we all agree to pretend to take seriously in public. It's not all bad, and ultimately it's virtuous to keep strangers out of our own risks and ecstasies. Ordinary life is the boring background that we all need a private sinners for our adventures to be adventurous. Hard drugs, sexual excess...these do often manifest in crimes that we'd hate our families to be the victims of.
The no-sayer, the skeptic who isn't sure about life, is scary because he claims to not be tethered to what keeps us all in line, fear of death and its primary agent, thiswordly diminishment (being cancelled, poverty, prison,...)

'Minutia-mongering' is good. In this economy, we are machine-parts, some more than others. I like the way you follow the for-the-sake-of's around in your post. To see the vast machine from the outside despite actually being trapped within...that's a piece of transcendence. It's our glory and our torment. I don't the other animals have that kind of experience (which is why it's still a little strange to call humans animals, even if it's biologically useful.)

Why give special status to " a preponderance of mathematicians", granting them the capacity to determine the existence of things? — Metaphysician Undercover

You ask a good question, and one I can't answer. This is the only thing you've ever said to me that has made me stop and think, and for which I have no good answer. — fishfry

I hinted at this in my first reply to the OP. I'm amplify that answer here: We are social beings, profoundly interested in one another. We want to be respected, and for intellectual types that involves our words being respected.

Anyone can make up whatever philosophy or mathematics they like, but they are highly unlikely to be taken seriously, largely because they are highly unlikely to create anything impressive by starting from nothing (or rather by starting from inherited commonsense, a cage that the less uneducated won't even see as one.)

The broader question is: why is peer-review valued and important? Even a brilliant individual is just one little short-lived human being, likely too in love with themselves to be sufficiently self-critical. Envy and competition keeps people grudgingly honest, and thousands of minds together can cover far more intellectual terrain and see into one another's blindspots.

I appreciate your politeness. Sorry if implied that you weren't an atheist despite your saying so more than once. I probably read into your ambivalence.

IMO, we tend to hide our ignorance from ourselves in the smoke of language. I like philosophy for trying to make us aware of this strange stuff that comes out of our mouths.

The person who says that we are just a bunch of chemicals is making a claim that leads to a paradox. — Franz Liszt

Hi. I think the issue here is this questionable portrait of the atheist. I'm an atheist , and I think such a statement is silly. One way to think about a certain type of atheist is as an agnostic who is pretty sure that the gods from all the holy books are figments of the human imagination. This kind of atheist doesn't have to deny something like consciousness or identity or what-have-you, or reduce mind to matter. This atheist doesn't have to have a theory about how it all got here, etc., or of what humans really are if they aren't just a 'bunch of chemicals'. They just don't find the god-stories plausible when taken literally. And they are OK with not having all the answers that a theologian might offer.

After all, when we write it out explicitly we always write it as some algorithm. Why can't it simply be an algorithm? — Ryan O'Connor

This reminds me of the construction of the real numbers from Cauchy sequence of rational numbers. Equivalence classes are required though, because there are infinitely many approximations of the 'same' real number. For instance, consider f(n) = 1/n and g(n) = -1/n. Both converge to the rational number 0 and are representatives of the same real number 0. Errett Bishop went around the use of equivalence classes somehow. I can't remember how, and I'm not a specialist, but you'd probably really like the spirit of his constructive mathematics. Have you looked into Brouwer? Or Chaitin's Metamath: The Quest For Omega? In short, I think some experts have problems with the real numbers, but these problems are philosophical/intuitive rather than technical. A mathematician can always retreat to formalism, etc.. I distinctly recall conversations with one mathematician who disliked philosophy altogether. In math (IMO), you really can know that you are correct if you don't mind not knowing what it is you are correct about. [In general, we don't know exactly what we are talking about, but math tempts us to forget that.]

and it becomes rational to adopt the best of them instead of trying to cling to the old paradigm and its mess of special exceptions. — Pfhorrest

Why is the most compressed the most rational theory? Are we equating rationality with efficiency here? In other words, is it just manifestly rational to get a good deal?

Just wanted to say you have some really interesting thoughts here and I enjoyed reading them. However, I myself have found questions demanding a justification for human life to be kind of strange. What kind of justification do people want? A god given purpose? — Albero

Deep question, and we could talk about it forever. But yeah, a god-given purpose of some kind given by some kind of god. Maybe the god is just History. For most, the justification should include some restitution, like the resurrection of the dead or the arrival of the Federation (but without the Klingons).*

*To me a big question is whether a society can be strong and cohesive without some external threat, but that's a different issue.

Yes, hence I think there should be opportunities for communities that allow for catharsis. — schopenhauer1

Yes, indeed. And we are doing that here. It's not the same as in-person, but it's not nothing. Anonymously people can tell some truths. You don't want your next employer to know that you are as proud as Lucifer and think that the company is a piece of smoke.

I liken it to this: Is it worth perpetuating a life that is anything less than (and not even close to) a paradise? In a paradise, one would either want for nothing (you would be all things at once or nothing at all), or you can turn the dial of harm wherever you wanted at any given time. Clearly we are none of those things in this actual world.. In fact, we are so gaslighted about suffering that we have to say bullshit like "Suffering leads to more meaning".. If that's true, what does that say to live in a world where "meaning" is obtained through suffering? Fuck that shit. — schopenhauer1

I agree with Blake that Satan is the hero of Paradise Lost. Fuck this shit, indeed. But also...fuck the shit out of this shit. I like Cioran and Schopenhauer for not being saccharine. Our ears are stuffed with the sounds of salesmen, or therapist who fix the workers like malfunctioning machines who need to quickly return to the Amazon Warehouse, until robots replace them next spring. 'This great stage of fools,' including the bitter fools like Lear's, like us. But I guess I'm bittersweet, because I'm wired wrong. I tend to get happy when I talk about death and comedy. I suppose that I do find a piece of paradise when the weather is good and I can have bittersweet conversation with a true friend. We agree about the commiseration clubs. I just find it is fleeting genuine friendships. Even if they last 10 years, they tend to dissolve eventually in the nightwaters of life.

So what if a serious (not comedic) shaman said, "Don't force others to have to engage with the socio-economic-political structures of life". Survive, find comfort, find entertainment all through the social structures historically situated.. Why should more people deal with this at all? If people can evaluate the very activities needed to survive as negative (I hate doing this task, etc.), then why create these evaluative creatures? Hope is just an ideology as much as any antinatalist one that people should be not forced into this. — schopenhauer1

I can't pretend to answer this neutrally. For me the 'spirit of seriousness' is a fallen state, which is not to say that it can be avoided, or that we should never be serious. I also don't like the ideology of hope. When Caesar heard that his troops were afraid of an enemy, he would gather them and assure them that the enemy troops were worse than they currently imagined, much worse. That makes me smile.
Personally I'd be OK with state-funded suicide boxes that painlessly killed the willing and vaporized them. One of the things that annoys me about suicide is the rude mess that one is forced to leave behind. The guy that jumped into the volcano...that sticks with me. Dissolve like a ghost, what I say, but when the time is right. I believe that this kind of talk is considered creepy. Somehow it's more respectable to end up helpless in diapers (and we agree to pretend to think so, etc.)

You can probably grasp that I don't see a justification for human life, and I don't subscribe to an ideology of hope.

To have children is to squarely believe life to be worth continuing and expanding, and perpetuating. So we have two sides of the debate.. the procreationist typical view (those think this is good or at least agnostic) and the antinatalist. One is forcing the situation of the socio-cultural-economic way of life (You have to work, get comfortable, find entertainment, suffer throughout all this and repeat basically). But why put forth this way of life over and over as a necessary or good thing as if this is decidedly so? — schopenhauer1

If you got some parents drunk, maybe they'd confess that it's selfish to make babies. What in this world is more delightful than a happy baby? I don't have any (for reasons that include the guilt and the risk of it) but I adore them when I see them (friends' kids, siblings' kids). Maybe it's like the meat industry. Many knows it's 'bad' but in the end it's what most people still do. Rationality is something we can strive toward occasionally, but we seem to be animals only dimly aware of what we are up to. As I see it, people like you and me are freaks to spend the energy we do articulating these things.

I speculate that anti-natalism is also driven by a contempt for vulnerability. Humans are so disgustingly fragile. Maybe it's not only pity but also even hatred. If we can't roam the world like gods, then fuck this place. We think we are such clever monkeys, but we sit in traffic for hours and can't keep the heat on in the cold, etc.

Can you explain the difference between the shamans and most people with cameras jammed in neckholes? Is it the difference between those who wipe their ass an those who don't or those who put their hands in the spaghetti and those who don't? — schopenhauer1

That's a great question with an endless answer. I'm using 'shaman' somewhat metaphorically when I say that comedians and some philosophers are shamans. A 'shaman' will say out lout (to the right people) what others might not say in the privacy of their mind. I think of people who know both the angels and the devils, while being neither. I'm tempted to call all great drama shamanic in that it conjures spirits within the magic circle. What is it to watch a simulacrum of MacBeth? I just reread Dostoevsky's Demons, and that's 'shamanic.' Spirits are summoned for my mind's eye, mad with the madness of this world. To see it calmly, to contemplate it...detachment, transcendence, some kind of dark laughter that lifts one out of one's petty little life.

Yes, Seinfeld and the like is a sort of catharsis. But the comedy makes more palatable. — schopenhauer1

It is hard to laugh during a root canal, no doubt. I suppose I'm saying that 'spiritual' pain is sometimes contaminated by a wicked pleasure (and the reverse.)

"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new." ~Samuel Beckett — 180 Proof

Beckett's another example of first-rate comedian.

Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.

How is it that saying the worst, confessing the thing we think we fear, is such a relief? There's some kind of complicated, counter-intuitive transcendence involved.

What comes to my mind is algorithmic information theory, not the gritty details but the philosphical inspiration from Leibniz. The best theory best compresses the data. Given the imperfection of measurements and other factors, the compression tends to be lossy, but obviously good enough for me to post this with the expectation that it'll become readable around the world within seconds.

In this context, it's thinkable that a patchwork could still require less bits than one grand theory. In that case, we might shift from parsimony to aesthetics. Unification might just deeply please us, even if it costs more.

Damn, that's the best antinatalist call to action I've seen. I completely agree with you. I actually have an idea for the name of these groups as something like "Communities of Catharsis". In these groups one can bitch, moan, and gripe all one wants without any remonstrations to stop complaining and "get with the program". Rather, one unburdens oneself and is allowed to see their fellow humans as fellow-sufferers. — schopenhauer1

To some degree I think this already exists. Seinfeld loves to talk about how annoying everything is, ad he's ridiculously wealthy. But even without the wealth, to be able to talk with a friend about the horrors of life and make jokes about it is such a relief that life actually becomes pleasant for awhile. Kafka was a comedian. Dostoevsky was a comedian. The best clowns have tears in their eyes.

So we live in a society.. this big superstructure.. basically we participate in it as a species to survive, get more comfortable, find entertainment. I'll just call it the "human enterprise". Why should we procreate more people and perpetuate this project? More to the point, if people could be born that don't just "live" but can evaluate that they don't like living, why would we put people into that situation where they can evaluate the very thing they need to survive as negative? — schopenhauer1

I think one of the things that 180proof was getting at, which I agree with and will put in my own words, is that people aren't fundamentally rational. We're animals. A certain potential for suicide and voluntary infertility exists in the species so that a few of us can manage it. This has maybe served the community in some roundabout way, brave warriors and shamans perhaps. But mostly we are along for ride, cameras jammed into neckholes with the illusion of 'free will.' FWIW, I sympathize with anti-natalism. If we truly want to be innocent, unstained lambs, then we should not be at all, for we are worse than lions. There's a short story about a sect who takes it upon to destroy all life on earth, not only human life, because they fear than any residue will climb its way back up the evolutionary ladder back to a recognition of its absurd guilt. Actually that was the short story. I haven't fleshed it out. Why bother? [Nothing is funnier than unhappiness and futility.]

But unlike eliminating waste or eating, procreation is never such an immediate need, and so the motivations are much more complex and culturally based. — schopenhauer1

Is this so obvious? I agree that sex is mediated, but so are the others. Eat spaghetti with your hands. Take a shit and omit the wipe. Things will not go well for you. Before long, it doesn't even occur to you to eat spaghetti with your hands when you're alone.