Non-existence, despite it's literal interpretation, is given existence-dependent values. — darthbarracuda
But there is nothing satisfying about non-existence, rationally speaking. — darthbarracuda
Was this from my response to your other post earlier regarding goals? — schopenhauer1
I remember explaining a while back the difference between a totally ideal world in the preference satisfaction sense, and a totally united world in the Schopenhaurian sense, and I think these two ideas might help with your question..
Preference satisfaction ideal world: In an ideal world all preferences would be satisfied at a particular instant of time for the exact outcome one would want at that particular time (even the preference for an unknown amount of pain/misadventure that might enhance one's overall satisfaction). All dials would be adjusted accordingly. The idea of one's life needing to be a tragi-comedy would not even have to be entertained as one is just "satisfied" enough not to default to this coping aesthetic.
Schopenhauerian ideal world All would be stasis and not flux. There is no want or need as one would be completely unified with everything else. Thus a unitary existence where everything is everything is almost equivalent to everything is nothing. It is absolute completeness in the metaphysical sense. Nothing is lacking. — schopenhauer1
Therefore, many of our actions seem to involve a faulty image of non-existence and a need for a good outcome. — darthbarracuda
Alternatively, we can say that non-existence is characterized as the differences between possible worlds. — darthbarracuda
If a bad thing happens, then the avoidance or resolution of this bad must result in a good outcome. But this is entirely irrational. It is the exact same reasoning behind the valuing of recovery - if I recover from cancer, recovery must be a good in itself, right?! — darthbarracuda
So you can't talk about the possibility of you having a sibling in any plausible fashion unless it is in fact plausible that such a sibling might exist. And you say such a sibling doesn't exist - but how can you be so sure? Did you check in the basement where your parents have had him locked up all these years?
So sure, modal logic is good for reasoning as often the world is atomistically disjoint to a high degree of approximation. It is close enough to a collection of independent events fixed by a history for us to just argue in that fashion. You could have had a brother. But you don't.
I'm just pointing out that this is not a secure basis for the kind of grandly general argument you want to mount here. — apokrisis
It is of course entirely rational. Bad and good encode a counterfactuality that makes it possible for there to be definitely something. Things can be one way because it is a real possibility they could be the other way.
I realise you find this problematic because it means life being bad means life can be good. But tough. You just have an illogical approach to this issue. — apokrisis
Schopenhauer may have been a pessimist, but if his ideal world is as you describe then he's still anchoring on to the idea of a redemptive staticity. While a full-going pessimist, in my view, negates any redemption. There's bad and not-bad. Never any good in our case. Equivocating not-bad as good reeks of desperation. — darthbarracuda
I don't see how this is necessarily of cosmic importance. — darthbarracuda
I've said this before, the ethics I work with is not necessarily of cosmic importance, rather, it's of person-al importance. — darthbarracuda
Well, sorry, you've just ignored the whole point of my post. — darthbarracuda
So non-existence initially seems like it might be advantageous to the tortured child - yet clearly if this child does not exist, then there are no advantages to be found. — darthbarracuda
If a red chinaplate does not exist, what color is it? It's an inane and irrational question: the plate isn't even able to even have a color to begin with in virtue of it not existing. — darthbarracuda
I'm talking about the logic we would apply to anything. And you already agree we are talking about "possible worlds" don't you? — apokrisis
Again, your dualism in this regard is only possible if you reject the holism of natural philosophy.
So yes. You continually claim this kind of atomistic freedom. It appears to validate your logic. I'm just pointing out its deep flaws. It is the reason why you just accept that there is the world, and there is the self. — apokrisis
I dunno. Suppressing the potential for tortured lives by addressing their contextual causes seems a lot more logical to me. Doing something about that is what would be actually logical wouldn't you say? — apokrisis
But red china plates can and do exist. So there is both the general possibility and the literal actuality. — apokrisis
But if you recognize that, you can simply realize this interpretation of non-existence as a future non-painful state of affairs which you appear to be doing in this post. — schopenhauer1
To those caught up- perhaps instrumentality makes no sense at all.. Many people might feel it eventually in angst, but do not reflect on it enough to make sense of it and thus is a subtle feeling of discomfort behind the scenes and not seen as something that drives every decision and forces us to move forward. — schopenhauer1
If we were to prune everything down to one person sitting in a deserted island with enough food to stay alive...
...Life is just an expanded version of this scenario.. — schopenhauer1
And yet of no evolved creature could this scenario ring less true. Humans are socially and even culturally-constructed beings. We are only complete as functional members of functioning groups. So you are basing an argument on an utter fantasy. — apokrisis
Because phenomenologically that is the case, and that is where ethics resides. — darthbarracuda
Suppressing the potential for tortured lives only benefits those who exist. — darthbarracuda
And then we have the non-identity problem, and the related issue of lives that are inherently shitty - i.e. if they weren't shitty, they wouldn't be the same life. — darthbarracuda
Well, sure, but we're talking about an individual china plate, just as we are talking about the advantages a potential, single person can have in non-existence. Does non-existence benefit anyone? I answer in the negative.
Everything else is gibberish, sorry. — darthbarracuda
And you're trying to reduce transparent phenomenological experiences to a foreign anthropological structure. As if recognizing the sustaining force of our existence doesn't make it less (or perhaps more?) absurd. — darthbarracuda
You make a strongman because you think I deny that we are social animals. I do not deny this at all. — schopenhauer1
That would be more convincing if you just hadn't begun by presuming the opposite - that society is a bunch of people who for some reason wandered off their desert islands, with their abundant food supplies, to go live collectively and dependently in the name of a little light entertainment and big city distraction. — apokrisis
That was meant to convey that LIKE being a on a desert island where we are solely focused on upkeep/entertainment- — schopenhauer1
...SOCIAL reality that we actually DO live in, is the same except DUE to the social nature of it and more complex environmental/historical situatedness of it, we may THINK that it is otherwise. — schopenhauer1
But anthropology has no trouble explaining the phenomenology. It is obvious that modern folk live such insulated lives that they develop a magnified fear of the real world. Every papercut becomes the Holocaust because life has lost its normal calibration.
If you grow up dressed in silk, even the manufacturer's tag may seem like an unbearable annoyance.
So this kind of complaining about the unendurability of life is simply a symptom of something you need to fix. It has none of the grandeur of a fundamental philosophical problem or even a Shakespearian tragedy. It is just simply a practical issue - how can we design modern society better in a way that might be more natural to what makes the human animal most content? — apokrisis
You have to make up your mind whether the world exists then. If it does, then there may be something beyond your person-al phenomenology. :-} — apokrisis
And?
Unless you are going beyond phenomenology to claim ontic idealism or dualism, there is no reason to treat pain as some disembodied quality whose existence can be weighed in Platonic fashion. — apokrisis
How many different abuses of logic can you conjure up just to maintain an argument that doesn't work? — apokrisis
You agree - even going so far as to say the specific context is you and me agreeing verbally about the absence of some currently experienced particular. — apokrisis
That would be more convincing if you just hadn't begun by presuming the opposite - that society is a bunch of people who for some reason wandered off their desert islands, with their abundant food supplies, to go live collectively and dependently in the name of a little light entertainment and big city distraction. — apokrisis
Done unbiased it shows how humans have developed civilization as a hodgepodge method of postponing/procrastinating death. — darthbarracuda
Oh, it exists sure, but we're not focused on the World, are we? We're focused on the inhabitants of the World! The basic focus of ethics! People! Not the relations they have to the environment or how they are part of the great cosmic plan of entropification. — darthbarracuda
You're making this impossibly difficult. Pain exists where people exist. If people do not exist, then pain does not exist. — darthbarracuda
We're not just talking about things that already exist, we're talking about potential existants. — darthbarracuda
Just because the lack of pain would be good for us, doesn't mean the lack of pain would be good for potential, unborn people. — darthbarracuda
What is more realistic is that society developed initially to support our needs to survive, but later began to develop as a means of keeping ourselves entertained. — darthbarracuda
Where is your evidence that anyone living on a desert island would think about their existence in this fashion? In what sense are you describing a natural state of being for humans? — apokrisis
You can't scale up from an unnatural state to explain the natural state. Complexity is different (as the slogan goes). — apokrisis
So modern society exists primarily for mass entertainment.
Are you for real? — apokrisis
Let's not be ridiculous. — apokrisis
What level of natural selection do you want to talk about then? Merely the cultural? Not the social or the ecological? — apokrisis
Is there a reason you skipped my actual point? Pain can only exist in counterfactuality to its phenomenological "other" - pleasure. So if the existence of pain is your big ethical concern, then that is the counterfactual that is actually relevant. — apokrisis
Yet you state that the red plate, along with your sibling, is literally are non-existent. — apokrisis
So yes, this kind of logical talk is very familiar. It works well for reasoning about states of affairs. It is very pragmatic.
But it is all at sea when it comes to addressing deep metaphysical questions. — apokrisis
Well, it would seem to remove what is in your eyes a major constraint on their existing. What would they say if you indeed allowed them to exist having created such living conditions? Thank-you? — apokrisis
It's actually pretty rare for people to wish they have never been born even in this imperfect world. So it seem presumptuous of you to talk for the unborn billions. — apokrisis
It is actually THE natural state.. upkeep/survival and entertainment for big-brained social animals. — schopenhauer1
I doubt this. Surely we can feel pain without feeling pleasure. Surely we don't need black to see white. We just see white. — darthbarracuda
I thought you were all about pragmatism. — darthbarracuda
Right, cause the majority can't at all be wrong, or because the majority wins by sheer might. — darthbarracuda
You might not have noticed it, but entertainment is an industry. — apokrisis
any action that eats up free time — schopenhauer1
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