Do you see the presumption in this statement? — Wayfarer

That suffering can be modeled? I don't see what you are hinting at. As soon as we attempt to relieve someone of their suffering we are applying an implicit model of suffering (hypotheses/beliefs as to what causes it and what can relieve it).

What I notice is that you have good insight and clarity of thought, and I surely don't see your reactions as abnormal considering what you have been through. You have objective evidence that some people have been targeting you, so it's not a delusion to consider the possibility that some of them could target you through technological means. But indeed it is unlikely, and don't focus too much on the possibilities and the what-ifs that you forget to live the present, life is full of uncertainties and we can't ever control them all.

You have been through a lot because of others, so you have developed defense mechanisms, one of them being to question their intentions and what they could possibly do to hurt you. This mechanism is more developed in you than in most other people, you needed it to preserve yourself, so when you ponder possibilities too much other people can perceive it as if you are living in another reality, but that doesn't make you sick or crazy, and that doesn't make you deserving of rejection, on the contrary you deserve to be accepted and supported. You are more compassionate than many of them.

As far as my diagnosis of schizophrenia, I was diagnosed when I was nineteen after my first major breakdown. I became anorexic because I developed a religious fixation to fasting, in a desperate attempt to to be pure and faithful enough toward God to merit being rid of the "demon" inhabiting my body (the "demon" being my sexual thoughts and orientation). I was also in constant fear that I had inadvertently committed or would inevitably commit the one unforgivable Christian sin -- blasphemy against the holy spirit. — THX1138

You were labeled schizophrenic because of a delusion that was inserted into you by other people (pastors and church members), that you had a demon in you to get rid of. You integrated this delusion because they were forcing you to take it and you had no outside support to push it away. Then presumably these people weren't in a state of suffering like you were so they didn't consult mental health practitioners and they weren't labeled as schizophrenic, you are the one who got to bear the stigma of this label when they are the ones who forced this delusion into you.

And to this day you wear this label, as if you were somewhat sick or crazy, but I see you as neither, from all your posts what I see is someone who has suffered and who has coped to the best of his abilities with what he was facing. I see you simply as a human being who needs support and love, and I'm glad you can find some through talking with some people here.

Have you ever thought of moving to a different city? It seems where you live you encounter many people who know you and hold negative prejudices against you, it could be helpful to start anew in a place where you are not frequently disturbed by negative influences that make the healing process more difficult.

We could take the approach of Plato. The Gorgias, and the Protagoras, if memory serves me, provide the best examples. What Plato does, (Socrates in the dialogues) is to separate pleasure from pain such that they are not in dichotomous opposition to each other. Placing pain and pleasure as opposite to each other in the same category, proves to be a problem because then pleasure can only be derived as a relief from pain. Then pain and suffering are required necessarily, as prior to, in order to have the goal of bringing about pleasure. So Socrates wants to put pleasure into a different category, such that we can bring on pleasure without the pain and suffering which would be required as prior to pleasure if the two are opposed.

Does this sound reasonable to you, that pain and suffering are categorically distinct from pleasure? The distinction becomes important when we look at pleasure as that which is desired, the goal or end. When they are dichotomously opposed, then the goal or desire for pleasure is necessarily the desire to end pain and suffering. When they are distinct, then the goal, what is desired, pleasure, is not necessarily to bring an end to pain and suffering.

The question now is why do you have a desire to model suffering. If we can bring about pleasure without ending suffering, then why focus on the suffering? The desire, what is wanted, is always based in some form of pleasure, the good, and this is categorically distinct from suffering. Why bring yourself down by focusing on the suffering, when this is unnecessary for bringing about pleasure and good? — Metaphysician Undercover

Interesting comment, thanks.

I don't necessarily see the lack of pleasure as suffering or the lack of suffering as pleasure, there are varying degrees of each and there are experiences that could be qualified neither as pleasure nor suffering, and even experiences that could contain both at once. So in that sense I can view suffering and pleasure as categorically distinct.

But in desiring to model suffering, I don't necessarily attempt to bring about pleasure, rather I want to help people suffer less, give them the tools to escape a feeling that they want to escape without dying but don't know how to escape without dying. Someone who has escaped this feeling doesn't necessarily experience a constant state of pleasure, but they don't experience the terrible feeling anymore.

On the other hand, people who focus constantly on pleasure and attempt to experience relentless pleasure can't keep up forever, at some point it usually comes crashing down, and then they find themselves suffering but without the means to escape it, as they find their former means to experience pleasure not working anymore.

So it seems to me that if we focused on bringing about pleasure then many people would still be stuck in unescapable suffering. Today's society is focused on providing pleasure in many ways, and yet many people suffer and kill themselves.

I don't see focusing on the suffering as bringing myself down. It's like suffering is seen by many as this contagious thing that we must avoid talking about to not risk being contaminated by it, as if not thinking about it somehow kept it at a distance and rendered us immune to it. After all we give drugs to people who suffer as we give drugs to people who are sick, as if suffering was a disease. But then by the time we come to face it we don't know how to deal with it.

I view the bolded ones as those deserving a plan of elimination (assuming they are actually enslaved not just "feeling"). With the rest just being stuff we have to learn to deal with (I am not saying that is easy). — ZhouBoTong

Actually I see these three bolded ones as a subset of another one I listed: "Wanting to reach some goal while believing that this goal can't be reached".

When we "feel hungry or thirsty but don't know where to find food or water to stop that feeling", we want to reach the goal of satisfying our hunger or quenching our thirst while not believing we can reach it.

When we "want to stop experiencing physical pain, while not knowing how to make that pain stop", we want to reach the goal of not experiencing physical pain, while not believing we can reach it.

When we "want to feel free but feel enslaved, and don't know how to free ourselves", we want to reach the goal of feeling free while not believing we can reach it.

Note that you could be enslaved and not suffer because of it, if you don't feel enslaved or if you don't want to feel free. Suffering is linked to one's desires, beliefs and perception. You can put two people in the same situation and yet they would suffer differently, one suffering and the other not, because they are not going through the same experiences in what appears to be the same situation from our point of view. That's what leads me to think that the desires and beliefs of the individual have to be taken into account when attempting to make an accurate model of suffering, they are linked to suffering.

Ultimately, "dealing with suffering" refers to a technique that helps reduce or eliminate a suffering.

There exists models of suffering, but I see none of them as doing the job well enough, I think we can do much better. We need a model based on empirical evidence, but without constraining that evidence with beliefs so much that it becomes nearly useless. I feel that the widespread models used are guided more by belief than by evidence, with beliefs shaping more the evidence than the evidence shapes the beliefs.

There is the model that suffering is due to demonic possessions and that the technique to eliminate it is the ritual of exorcism. I haven't looked much into it but I doubt it is very successful.

There is the model that suffering comes from the brain, and that since painkillers are useful to reduce some suffering then presumably all suffering could be solved in this way and it's just a matter of finding the right drug for each suffering. It has helped some people, like exorcism has helped some people, but how many it doesn't help? Many have felt worse after taking their prescribed drug, many have killed themselves after taking their prescribed drug, many have their suffering reduced at the cost of having all their feelings numbed, the long-term effects of these drugs often cause suffering of their own, people who were told they needed to take some drug their whole life managed to get better without the drug. That's a model of suffering that doesn't work well.

There is the Buddhist model, according to which the cause of suffering is attachment to desire, and the technique to end this suffering is a series of practices called the Noble Eightfold Path. It has definitely helped people, but it demands a strong commitment to its practices and beliefs that many people aren't in a position or willing to make. Also I agree that attachment to desire is sometimes a cause of suffering, but I disagree that it is the cause: one can be attached to a desire and not suffer or suffer little, working towards making the desire a reality while being hopeful about succeeding. Many people function fine while being attached to desires, and it demands a strong commitment to give up all attachment. I see this as an instance of a model that provides useful techniques to reduce suffering, while being embedded in some beliefs that are not based on empirical evidence.

It is interesting to note though the similarity between what Buddhism sees as the cause of suffering (attachment to desire), and what I described as a potential cause in the second post of this thread (that suffering seems to come about when something is wanted while it is believed that it can't be attained), they are not equivalent but they partially intersect.

Thank you for the replies.

The point in building a model of suffering is precisely to come up with techniques to have a better control over suffering (such as to prevent or reduce it), in a similar way that building models of the world allows to come up with techniques to have a better control over the world (such as to communicate or travel more quickly across the world).

What you guys refer to as dealing with or making sense of suffering is what I see as examples of techniques to have more control over suffering (to make it more bearable, which essentially amounts to making it less intense, to reduce it).

It is easy to build a model of suffering that doesn't work well, but it's a bit harder to build a model of suffering that works well.

Frank proposes the model that suffering is something that happens to people who are alive, and proposes that the easiest technique to end this suffering is to help people kill themselves. In fact an even easier technique would be to kill them directly. It would be fine if our only goal was to end suffering, but as it turns out people also want to live. Presumably people wouldn't want to kill themselves if they had the tools/techniques to stop suffering while staying alive. People have been talked out of suicide. Most people don't need help to kill themselves, there are many ways, what they lack is tools to help them stop suffering while staying alive.

A model of suffering that works well would allow to have a better control of suffering while staying alive.


There are two main types of suffering I want to distinguish:

- The suffering that is accepted/borne, seen as temporary and as a step towards something that is wanted (masochism, childbirth, experiencing the lows to make the highs greater)
- The suffering that is not accepted/borne, that one is unable to escape and doesn't see as a step towards anything wanted, on the contrary what is wanted is to make this suffering stop.

Plenty of people go through the first type and don't mind, they don't feel like they need help at all (or maybe very temporarily with painkillers). On the other hand those who go through the second type don't have painkillers to help them out of their predicament, they suffer and see no end to it, no help in sight, and when it becomes too unbearable what they see as their only way out is to hurt/kill themselves and/or others.

There are plenty of people who need help to stop this suffering but they find no tools/techniques to help them. Telling them that their suffering is a learning experience or that they need to deal with it won't do, they can't deal with it on their own, they need help. Telling them that the easiest way is to kill themselves is not the answer that they want or need, but it might be what they end up doing if they see it as the only way out.

You could say that there are many things always changing, but then what does it mean to call them things if they are always changing, if from one moment to the next they are not the same things anymore? Then it's not things that are changing, it's that there is change, and we temporarily call some part of that change a thing while it appears not to change, but then the things (the identities) are the illusion and the change is the reality. Even though you can identify temporarily an identity within that change, that doesn't make it an identity beyond the fact you temporarily didn't notice a change.

And then in that view it is meaningless to talk about what is changing, because there is no such thing as is. It is even misleading to say that "there is only change", because the change that is referred to can't be described, the moment we try to describe it in terms of things we're missing its essence. Our language is based on the notion of things existing and being, often making use of the verb "to be" to describe, so it is misleading to attempt to describe change as the basis of reality using a language that assumes being as the basis of reality.

It seems to me that Parmenides' monism is more consistent than Heraclitus' monism. More generally, it seems impossible to be a monist and to assert that there is change, since change presupposes the existence of things. If there is only One, then how can it change? - there is nothing other than itself to change into, and changing into itself is clearly not a change. — philosophy

The idea that there is only change is also the idea that there is no thing, because anything that we call a thing is not itself anymore by the time we call it. Change itself is not something that could be described in a constant, unchanging manner, so change itself would not be a thing, and so we can't treat change as a thing changing into itself. And so asserting that there is only change does not necessarily presuppose the existence of things, nor does it imply that there is no change.

(That's just my point of view)

Does every effect have a cause, or is it possible for causeless effects to happen?

It seems to me that every effect has a cause, but is that simply because I was raised to think that way? A lot of our thinking assumes that effects are caused. It's difficult even to imagine otherwise. Is this because effects and causes are indivisibly and irrevocably linked, or our lack of imagination? — Pattern-chaser

We only say an effect has a cause because we link the effect to something else, we link an observation to something else. Now if you see something move in a peculiar way, and there is nothing you observe that you can link to this peculiar motion, you can assume that there is something you don't see linked to this motion, or you can assume that this motion is causeless.

Scientists often work from the assumption that every effect has a cause, so to any effect that they observe causeless in apparence they will assign a theoretical invisible cause, and then model that cause by studying the effect, and then come to see their theoretical construct as referring to a real invisible thing causing the effect, so by construction we come to see every observable effect as having a cause. But you could as well see the effect as causeless, and simply model the effect itself.

If the apparent behavior of the effect is random then it doesn't describe anything more to say that there is an underlying cause behind this random behavior, unless this underlying theoretical cause can be used to describe other effects that are not random. The effect of Brownian motion comes to mind, the random motion of small visible particles in a fluid could be seen as a causeless effect, or it could be assumed that the fluid was made of a bunch of fast-moving tiny invisible particles causing the apparent random motion of the small visible particle as a result. The hypothesis that a fluid is made of fast-moving tiny particles (molecules) was linked to other observable effects, so it was more convenient/useful to view these effects as having the same invisible cause rather than seeing them as causeless.

On the other hand the motion of subatomic particles is modeled as partly random (in fact they are often modeled as not even having a definite trajectory), and for now there is no significant usefulness gained in assuming an underlying cause to these random motions as opposed to making them an inherent part of the behavior of these particles, so in some sense that randomness can be seen as causeless. But then fundamentally we are never explaining why the fundamental constituents of the universe behave the way they do, we are just describing how they behave, so that fundamental behavior could be seen as a causeless effect. Every effect having a cause would be akin to asking "why?" forever and always having an answer before the next "why?".

Why does the apple fall? Because it is attracted by the Earth. Why is it attracted by the Earth? Because it is made of small things that are attracted to the small things that make up the Earth. Why do these small things attract each other? We just describe how they attract each other, and that behavior is causeless until we come up with an underlying cause which itself will then be causeless, and so on and so forth.

As a start, here are some instances I see where people suffer:

- Feeling hungry or thirsty but not knowing where to find food or water to stop that feeling
- Wanting to feel loved but feeling rejected, while not knowing how to be loved
- Wanting to feel considered but feeling ignored, while not knowing how to be considered
- Wanting to have biological children but not being able to have biological children
- Wanting some person to be alive while that person is dead
- Wanting to feel free but feeling enslaved, while not knowing how to free oneself
- Wanting to stop experiencing physical pain, while not knowing how to make that pain stop
- Wanting to reach some goal while believing that this goal can't be reached
- Wanting to avoid something while believing it can't be avoided

In all these examples there is something that is wanted, while there is the knowledge or the belief that this thing can't be had. When there is hope one can cling onto the hope and not suffer, but it seems that it is when one loses hope or doesn't have hope that what is wanted can be attained, when one finds oneself helpless to reach what is wanted, that suffering appears.

One thing to take into account is that there are various degrees in what we desire, there are things we want strongly and feel we can't do away with, while there are things we desire but don't mind that much if we don't have them. For instance I want to eat sushi, but even if I believe I can't get sushi I won't suffer much, unless I desire sushi so much that it comes to occupy all my thoughts and I feel like I can't live without it.

The examples above might not represent all the situations in which people suffer, but a temporary conclusion that can be gotten from them is that suffering seems to come about when something is wanted while it is believed that it can't be attained, and that the intensity of the suffering seems to be a function of the intensity of the desire for what is believed to be not attainable.

Two potential solutions to alleviate suffering follow directly from this. One is that suffering can be reduced by managing to desire less something that cannot be had, for instance by finding other objects of desire that can be had to focus on. The other is by managing to change the belief that what is wanted cannot be had: maybe there are possible ways to get what is wanted that weren't thought of, and then focusing on these ways would make hope return and reduce suffering.

I will keep thinking about all this, but meanwhile your thoughts are much welcome, for instance if you have examples or sources of suffering that aren't included in the examples above, or if you have any thought that can contribute to making a working model of suffering.

Assange's philosophy is that the entities who have great power over the lives of people ought to be transparent so people can have control over their own life and future, and that if these entities want to function in secrecy against the interests of people, then the way to make them transparent is to make it harder for them to keep functioning in secrecy than in transparency. One way to make it harder for them is to render public what they want to keep secret. But obviously, the powerful entities fight back, and that's why the media coverage of Assange is mostly negative.

Sure, what has been leaked may pose some threat to some people who don't belong to these powerful entities, and it can be debated how much of it is Assange's fault and how much it is the fault of those who want to commit crimes and cause suffering with the information presented, but there is a reason the media focus almost entirely on these details rather than on the crimes committed by the powerful entities and those serving them.

The absolute: Once born, the game of life/ the neverending treadmill forces a new person to deal with staying alive via social mechanisms (usually), deal with the human condition in general, and deal with the ups and downs of contingent harms that befall each and every one of us. Forcing someone to deal with life, whether good outcome or not, is not right. If I put you in an uncertain situation that you then have to deal with in order to stay alive and thrive, that is no good no matter if it is always a good outcome or not. — schopenhauer1

It seems the root of the argument has to do with the fact that the person is forced, which is a bad thing. But I disagree that we have to objectively view it as the person being forced. We can see it as the person being created, brought into being. Again, as an analogy, in a game you have to follow certain rules, you can choose to view it as being forced to follow these rules, but if you enjoy the game you don't see in any way that you are being forced. So I disagree that we have to necessarily view it as an act of coercion to bring someone to life.

You can choose to view childbirth as a source of inevitable suffering for both the mother and the baby. And yet many women call that day the most beautiful day of their life. My mother told me that when I was born I didn't even cry, I was just looking around with curiosity.

Again, we view life in a negative light when we are struggling through it, but when we enjoy it we don't see it as being forced or as having to deal with things. You are generalizing the negative view to the whole of life, rather than keeping it contained to the bad parts.

A more accurate view would be that there are periods of time where we don't feel forced to deal with anything, where we love life, and other periods of time where we may feel forced. Is it a bad thing to go through that? I would say it is a bad thing when there is more bad than good, when there is no end in sight to the bad, while it is a good thing when there is more good than bad. Which again makes it subjective rather than objective.

Sorta Absolute: And this is why the name of this thread is Nothing vs. Experience. We know that life has at the least, some harm. To force a game that always has some outcome of harm for another person, is always wrong, no matter to what degree. On one side there is no new person born to a potential couple. No one is harmed, no actual person is deprived. In colloquial terms- "nothing never hurt no one". On the other side, definite harm of the human condition/ contingent harms of life will befall someone to some degree. Nothing wins every time in the face of any harm that is forced upon another person (attitude towards it does not matter, only that harm was enacted upon someone). — schopenhauer1

Again I don't agree with the "forcing" part as being an objective description, because it focuses on the negative rather than being neutral. I can agree that life has at least some harm, but again you are focusing on the negative. To you, if there is 99% of good and 1% of bad, it's not worth to experience it because the 99% of good aren't enough to make up for the 1% of bad, but this is again a subjective view and not an objective one. It depends how much importance you give to the bad. If there is a lot of bad in your life then you see the bad as not worth it, while if there is a lot of good in your life you don't see the bad part in such a negative light that it's better not experiencing the good to avoid experiencing the bad.

Basically, you're counting the bad as a negative, but you're not counting the good as a positive, so you're led to the view that bad+good < nothingness, presumably because the bad you experience is much worse than the good you experience is good, but this is a subjective view. Some people view their life as bad+good > nothingness.

Relative: Since we can never predict the attitude someone will have about this game, nothing will always beat something. No actual person is "held hostage" by not being born, or even "denied" anything. But certainly another person's experience of harm was prevented. — schopenhauer1

This can be answered again in a similar way. For some people, something beats nothing. By not being born, the person is denied from experiencing the something that is better than the nothing, and the person's experience of good was prevented, which is a bad thing.

I am trying to make you see that your view is subjective, some people have a similar view as you and some people have a different view. They don't have a different view because they are wrong, and you don't have a different view from them because you are wrong, you and them just feel differently. There is no right or wrong here, they are not more right than you are, I am just sad that you can't see the good in life, that the bad has taken so much importance for you that you can't see the good anymore.

The claim is controversial perhaps, but sound. That is to say, if I force you to play a game that you cannot escape- the forcing another person to play the game is bad in itself regardless of the person's attitude towards that inescapable game. That is my main point. It is not whether some people see the game as good or bad- at least, not this particular formulation of the argument.

I can put it as a question: Is it moral to force another person into a nearly inescapable game/event/challenge/adventure/maze/treadmill, regardless if someone finds it to be good/bad/mixture of the two at any given time? — schopenhauer1

Ok. If you're forcing that game/event/challenge/adventure/maze/treadmill on someone and they love it, then in my view it was a good thing. If they hate it then it was a bad thing.

The problem is, we can't know beforehand whether they are going to love it or hate it, we can only guess. Another related problem is we don't know for sure how other people experience their life, we can only guess based on their reports and how they behave.

However I think we might agree that if most people found life to be unbearable, there would be many more suicides.

If people find the game to be horrible, they probably should avoid bringing in a new player until they have managed to enjoy the game, otherwise they won't know how to make the new player enjoy it.

But if we truly enjoy the game, and we are willing to do everything we can so the new player can enjoy it too, then I don't see it as morally bad to bring that new player. We can't ever predict with 100% certainty how something is going to turn out, but we can do the best we can, if we didn't take chances we wouldn't do anything.

Also I think the bigger problem is there are people who truly enjoy the game but at the expense of others who enjoy it much less because of them, and I see it as more morally bad to continue doing that, than bringing a new being into the world with the best of intentions.

And then we also need to think about the world as a whole. If everyone is enjoying the game and bringing in new players, but when there are too many players the game becomes less enjoyable for everyone, then enjoying the game is not a sufficient reason to bring a new player, we have to think a bit about the consequences. But then when we think too much it becomes less enjoyable, so it's a bit of an intractable problem. I think the best we can do is just do the best we can, and then whatever happens happens.

This site is probably a troll site, thinking about it. — räthsel

You got decent answers from 0 thru 9 and Wayfarer.

Don't take things too personally though, we don't all think in the same ways, something you see as obvious others won't understand or interpret differently and vice versa. But I agree it can be bothering when you want to talk about something and your thread seems to get derailed.

I have my own ideas of what's wrong with the modern world and my own intuition about what might be referred to as the "merely functional abyss" of today, however you were asking about published philosophers who wrote on the subject and I don't have any name to mention that wasn't already mentioned (not that I would know them all).

But still, in case you ever want to discuss the subject it can be useful to clarify what you see as a functional abyss in today's world (my own intuition on that would be that we are shaped to be more like tools programmed to function in a specific way rather than creative beings expressing ourselves independently).

It is easy to relegate a whole bunch of years and experiences as overall "good" later on as an adult. — schopenhauer1

It is not that I assess now that it was "good" back then, it is that I remember assessing it as "good" back then. I remember waking up eager to have fun and experience the world, and going to bed feeling safe and calm and loved.

Another problem is you can simply say any set of experiences is "good" simply to shut my argument down, whether that was the case at the time or not. I have no way of really telling. — schopenhauer1

My purpose here is not to shut your argument down, it is to express as honestly as possible how I feel. Whether it happens to contradict your argument is another story. You have no way of really telling how honest I am, like you have no way of really telling how other people see life, but still you selectively take for granted what supports the view that life is objectively bad, and dismiss as lies or delusions what supports the view that it isn't.

A minor example is a shitty work day. You get back home and drink a few beers and perhaps you forget it, until you return. If someone asked you during those few beers you might say, "Things are well". It's so nuanced, generalized statements are indeed not a great indicate whether something is good. — schopenhauer1

Sure, people often say they are ok even when they aren't. And a good experience might temporarily make one forget about a previous bad one, but only until you go to bed and you start stressing about going to work again the next day. Just like a bad experience can temporarily make one forget about a previous good one.

But I'm not pretending to be ok here. I have said clearly that at the moment my life is a burden. I am not embellishing things. The problem with the bias you are having here is that if I tell you I have thought about killing myself you will use it as a proof that life is objectively bad, while if I tell you I haven't thought about it you will dismiss as it being an instance of the Pollyanna principle or me being dishonest and trying to shut down your argument and convince myself that life is not that bad.

So here you are not attempting to find out whether life is really objectively bad, you are already convinced of it, you believe it fiercely, and you're trying to convince others while dismissing what goes against that belief.

I would disagree that it is not objectively an obstacle course or relentless treadmill. You keep overlooking that my statement does not depend on the person's attitude towards the obstacle course or treadmill. — schopenhauer1

I haven't overlooked it, I have addressed it, but you are overlooking how I address it. I explicitly said that seeing something as an obstacle course or a relentless treadmill is a subjective interpretation in itself. Just like you could say the glass is objectively half-empty and that doesn't depend on the person's attitude towards it, and I would tell you that the same glass can be seen as half-full, but you keep saying that it is objectively half-empty.

The point is, when you're having fun, when you're enjoying yourself, you're not seeing an obstacle course or a relentless treadmill, you're seeing a game, or an adventure, or a sport. When you're struggling you see an obstacle course or a relentless treadmill, so you say it is objectively an obstacle course or relentless treadmill, there is no subjectivity in that it is objective! But I keep saying that when you're not struggling, what you are seeing is not an obstacle course or relentless treadmill, it is something else.

A relentless treadmill is something you would struggle on (like pretty much everyone), and you struggle with life, so you associate life with a relentless treadmill, and people who struggle with life will agree with you, and those who don't struggle with life will disagree, but you would say people who agree with you see the objective truth and those who disagree are delusional. Right now I struggle with life but I still disagree with you because I haven't always been like this. If I had struggled my whole life I would probably agree and wouldn't be able to entertain a point of view I had not experienced.

Making a new person have to do X, Y, and Z actions which require them to navigate various challenges to live and entertain themselves, and generally find comfort in society is considered for me an obstacle course/treadmill that cannot be escaped. — schopenhauer1

Let's say you play a game and you like it. The game has certain rules, there are certain things you have to do, but you still like it. Then it's not an obstacle course to you. I'm sure there must be some game out there that you enjoy playing, or you must have a memory of some game you enjoyed playing, so you can see the analogy.

However if you struggle on the game, if you are forced to play it but you don't like it, and you struggle constantly, then to you it's an obstacle course, a relentless treadmill, not a fun game.

All the people who hate the game will agree that it's not a game, it's an obstacle course, it's a bad thing. But the people who love the game won't see it as an obstacle course but as a fun game. I don't know how else I could explain it.

Which is why I disagree that life is objectively an obstacle course or relentless treadmill. To me, this is a subjective interpretation that depends on how life makes you feel.

Sure we could do away with money. Other animals go on without money just fine.

If you can provide for yourself, if you don't need others to do things for you, then you don't need money. If you do something for others and don't expect anything in return, you don't need money.

A society where people would provide for themselves and help one another would not need money.

There is nothing that would prevent innovation in such a society, as soon as your basic needs are met you have free time for innovation.

But as soon as you want others to do something for you and they want something in return then barter appears. "I'll do this for you only if you do this for me". Then money makes the bartering more efficient. Then there are some people who game the system and get to have plenty of money while doing nothing for others, and those who play by the rules have to work that much harder for others to compensate.

Then when you grow up into a society where you're forced to pay money to live on a land, you are forced to work for others for money, you don't have the option to provide for yourself. Then in such a society money forces most of our interactions to be master/slave relationships, in which to get what they need people are forced to do what those who have money want.

When you think about it the whole thing is disgusting. But of course those who enjoy the way things are have all the incentives to prevent things from changing. Of course we could have innovation and technology without money, but those who live the good life while leeching off the work of others don't want them to know.

But why is sentence formation linear? Also, what would the effects on philosophy and society be if sentence formation was NOT linear? — YuZhonglu

There is gonna be some speculation here, but anyway here is my take:

Language is a tool we use to communicate what we experience, if there was no one to communicate with we wouldn't need language. We can communicate in other ways than using words, we can also communicate through drawings/paintings, through our behavior and facial expression, through looking with the eyes in some specific way. Sometimes people can understand each other on something without uttering a word.

Our experiences are rich and full of details, there is a whole lot of stuff going on, but often we focus on a specific part. If you notice something that you deem threatening, and the others have not noticed it, you want to warn them, so you attempt to communicate that specific thing to them, and one way is to utter a sound through your vocal cords, then if the community has agreed beforehand that this specific sound is used to refer to a specific threat then they are now aware there is a threat nearby even if they haven't noticed it. Or if you notice some fruits high up in a tree or whatever, you communicate it with specific sounds, so others may notice it too. The more complex the sounds you utter, the more details you can communicate.

But there is a limited complexity we can utter using our vocal cords and tongue and mouth, there is a limited number of distinct sounds we can make with them at a specific time (a few hundreds maybe?), while our experiences are much more complex than that, we may have countless different experiences, so in order to increase the details/complexity of what we are communicating orally we utter a series of sounds, one at a time, and the way these sounds are put together refers to some specific part of experience in a more detailed way than what could be communicated with just one sound. Then written words refer to these uttered sounds, so the way we form sentences in writing is a direct consequence of the way they are formed orally.

If we could utter a trillion different sounds then we wouldn't need to make sentences, each word would refer to a complex and detailed thing, we could build complexity in parallel rather than linearly, we could say with just one word where the threat is how it looks like how it moves where it is likely going, rather than having to communicate it in a bunch of sentences one after the other.

It's interesting to speculate what that would change for philosophy and society. We wouldn't have to remember a trillion different words, just like we don't have to remember a trillion different sentences, rather we would construct complex words out of more simple words, just like we construct complex sentences out of words. We could communicate much more efficiently what we experience. With our current language there is a lot of sentences that can be interpreted in many different ways, a lot of misinterpretations between people, a lot of talking past each other, but with enough complexity it might be possible to remove all the misunderstandings. It surely would have far-reaching consequences.

The inefficiency with our current language is that it takes so many sentences to refer to something precisely, and by the time we've finished reading a detailed description we have probably forgot some part of it, and then it becomes extremely difficult to connect precise ideas together. Our thinking is fast while our memory is slow. Our language is the bottleneck, we have a fast processor but we're constantly reading from a slow hard drive (our linear language) instead of a fast access memory (a parallel language).

It would, for example, kill the idea that you have a "single" soul or "single" free will. — YuZhonglu

I agree that there are a LOT of nuances that are not communicated with our limited language. The words "soul" and "free will" are used to refer to so many different things, and people most often just talk past each other when using them.

Ideas of morality would be drastically different. For example, what if one part of you believes in religion and the other part doesn't? How would theology deal with that?

The law talks about people as if they were single individuals. You committed a crime. Now you must be punished. Oh ho ho ho ho. But if people could express multiple sentences simultaneously, any defendant can argue that it was one part of him that committed the crime and the other part didn't. — YuZhonglu

We can already express that in a convoluted way, using many sentences, but indeed our very use of a linear language might influence our philosophical beliefs. Maybe there would be many less fundamentalists, and maybe justice would be different and much more nuanced if we used a different language, which has again far-reaching implications. Our language is a filter we put on the world, on our existence, and we forget it's even there, and we spend our lives attempting to change what we see through the filter without ever looking at changing the filter itself.

There is Korzybski who attempted with his general semantics to change the way we use language which is the source of many problems, but maybe what we need is a more radical reconstruction of language itself, to remove its current limitations that are a historical consequence of the small number of sounds we can utter with our mouth/tongue/vocal cords, so we could use our brain much more efficiently to communicate and to think. This could change everything.

I noticed you didn't quite address my argument but moved it to one that I wasn't quite making. What I said was that forcing an obstacle course or relentless treadmill onto someone is always, objectively a bad thing, whether one eventually identifies with it or not. Creating situations of challenge, stress, and harm for someone else, even if they eventually find joy from the adversity or despite it, is wrong to do to someone else. It is not a no harm, no foul situation, as you might object. — schopenhauer1

I understood what you said, and I attempted to explain why I disagree with it.

Your premise is that life is objectively an obstacle course or a relentless treadmill, and I disagree.

I remember being a happy kid. At the time life was in no way to me an obstacle course or a relentless treadmill, it was a source of joy, of discovery, of fun, it was in no way a struggle or an adversity. Of course I had little to worry about at the time, since my parents provided for me, I didn't have to worry about getting food or paying the rent. But the point is even though there were some constraints imposed on me, I didn't see them as constraints, it was a little price to pay for how great life was besides. I was happy to be alive, life was not a burden it was a blessing. My parents forcing it onto me was not a bad thing, it was a good thing.

Your life at the moment is a burden, so you see life as a burden, but what I try to explain is that some other people see it as a blessing.

Just like in the example of the glass half-empty or half-full. Of course if you're really thirsty you're more prone to see the glass as half-empty. If you know you're going to spend a lot of time without water you're more prone to see the glass as half-empty. Or if you want to accumulate as much resources as possible, you're more likely to see the glass as half-empty. But if you're not that thirsty, not that anxious about the future or not that greedy, you're more likely to see the glass as half-full.

And again I don't blame people if they find their life to be a burden. At the moment my life is a burden too. We don't have complete control over our circumstances or how we feel. But if things ever turn around for you, you might see life again in a positive light, and then you might realize that it wasn't life that was objectively a burden, it was the things that burdened you that made you see it as a burden.

Life is not objectively an obstacle course or a relentless treadmill, it appears to be so when we are struggling. As humans we're quick to generalize, when we struggle for a long time we think it can't be any other way, when we're depressed we think we won't ever get any better. And then one day it gets better, and we realize that what we saw as objective was a temporary state of mind.

I think this is more a limitation of language than a limitation of the brain.

Our experiences and thoughts can be full of details, but words refer to something specific, and using language forces us to focus on what the words refer to.

Even though we can think in parallel, language forces us to think linearly, one sentence at a time, one idea at a time.

We can imagine a complex scenery evolving in a complex way, but as soon as we try to describe it with our limited language we're forced to describe it one analogy at a time, and if we want to describe all the details it would take a bunch of sentences.

Forcing someone into an obstacle course or a challenge is objectively bad, even if the participant eventually identifies with the challenges forced upon him. Forcing someone on a non-stop treadmill, forced to work, deal with adversity, and unmitigated suffering, or die a slow death by starvation or a fast death by suicide, does not seem right, morally speaking. — schopenhauer1

But the problem with this view is that it is your own subjective view based on how you experience life, and not one shared by everyone. The same thing can be interpreted in different ways. The same glass can be seen as half-empty or as half-full. The same obstacle can be seen as a source of suffering or as a challenge to overcome to reach something better. These people don't see life as a non-stop treadmill full of suffering, they see it as a source of joy.

There are people who are rich, who don't have to work and yet who suffer constantly, while there are people who work outdoors for 12 hours a day just to have enough to feed their family and yet who feel content about life. As I said we don't have complete control on how we feel about life, but still it would be wrong to see life as objectively bad when many people genuinely enjoy it and find in it more joy than pain, and for whom the joy more than makes up for the pain.

I agree with antinatalism if it is likely that the children will suffer enough that they would rather be dead than alive, but many people would rather be alive than dead, and I think there is no way you can convince them that life is horrible if they enjoy it and don't want to die. You can convince the people who suffer a lot, with enough persuasion you might make some more people depressed and convince them too, but you can't convince the people who genuinely enjoy life that whay they experience is not worth it.

How do you come to that conclusion? — Pattern-chaser

Do you have a hypothetical example of something that evolution selected for, that could be connected to the existence of the mind (the existence of our experiences), but that would be unrelated to brain processes? (which in the common materialist view reduce to chemical processes, which themselves reduce to motions of particles)

You classify a part of your experiences as coming from a world filtered through what you call your senses, then at some point you come to assume that everything that exists is attainable through these senses, which leads to a material view of the world and to the belief that the mind is nothing more than matter and in principle can be described entirely from matter, or from what you call chemical and energetic processes.

The idea of these processes that you have comes from your experiences (which make up what we call the mind). Now how can you trust that these experiences tell you the whole story on what these experiences are, on what they can be reduced to?

That we can find some fuzzy correlation between measured electrical activity in the brain and reports of experiences, does not imply that these experiences can be completely described by the measurable processes within the brain that we see through our senses. Saying that all our experiences reduce to that rests on a lot of assumptions, and one could equally pick different assumptions and conclude that the mind is more than brain processes and cannot be completely reduced to that.

As one example of a difficulty arising from equating the mind with brain processes observable in principle through the senses, is that no amount of analysis will allow to say how such or such process gives rise to such or such experience, you could describe all the measurable processes going on and that still wouldn't say why this gives rise to experiences at all.

Just one of many possibilities: evolution selected for something else, and your "it" just happened to be connected to the thing that's being selected-for by evolution. This is very common. Ask an applied evolutionist. — Pattern-chaser

So in this case the mind would be connected to the motions of electrons and molecules, which leads to panpsychism.

But still, the problem with assuming that the mind is an epiphenomenon that doesn't cause anything, that it is in principle completely described by the motions of particles (so-called 'chemical' or 'energetic' processes), is that why does it feel good to eat, to drink, to win, to have sex, to be safe, and why does it feel bad to eat too much, drink too much, lose, be threatened, ..., why do most of the things that help us survive feel good and most of the things that threaten our survival feel bad? If our experiences didn't cause anything then that would be a cosmic coincidence, if we were just spectators then it might as well feel good to burn or cut our skin and it might feel bad to drink or have sex and supposedly it would make zero difference to what we do, and I find that highly implausible.

The sensation of "mind" is a series of chemical and energetic processes that result in self awareness — whollyrolling

You have a sensation of mind, and through that mind you experience phenomena that you call chemical and energetic processes, now how can you conclude that your sensation of mind is nothing more than these processes you experience using your mind?

the "mind" is an evolutionary adaptation whereby the body tells itself that it exists. — whollyrolling

If the "mind" is nothing more than a series of chemical and energetic processes, what survival purpose does it serve if we're just spectators and our experiences do not act on anything? Why did evolution select for it if it offers zero survival advantage? Why doesn't our body act in the exact same way without us experiencing anything, what is the use of the experience itself?

You have told us some stuff about yourself, that you yourself consider significant.

A. A childhood sexual experience.
B. A debilitating mental health condition.

And you seem to think there is no connection. — unenlightened

Here is how he referred to this childhood sexual experience:

"What I made the decision to do twenty years ago was not against my will"
"I willingly decided to experience what I experienced"

Here is how he referred to how he was treated for being attracted to men:

"I'm not a fan of people having to be subjugated to experiences they feel traumatize them and go against their nature and will, which in my case, came in the form religious shaming"
"I'm still haunted by pastors and church members rebuking "demons" out of me and the personification of my sexuality as a possessive demonic entity (which warped my mind as a kid)"

If you're looking for a connection between his past experiences and his current mental health, I would rather pick the experiences that actually traumatized him.

I am of the idea to let people do whatever they want, as long as it is what they want and no one is forced in the process.

I don't think it's too uncommon for 10 years old boys or girls to have some sort of sexual desires, but I would think that in most cases they are fantasies and that if presented with the occasion they wouldn't actually go through with it.

I don't know how your relationship with that 34 years old man started, but I would think he is the one who initiated you, rather than you actively looking for that kind of relationship back then.

If you weren't traumatized at all by this experience, but you truly enjoyed it, then what's bothering you is how society treats these kinds of experiences, making you an outcast. On the one hand there is you, who apparently enjoyed that experience with this older man, and on the other hand there are plenty of people who strongly desire to torture or kill older men who have these experiences with young people.

It's a touchy subject. There are/were societies and communities where this is acceptable, but today you live in a society where it's totally not. Obviously parents do not want their children to be soiled and mentally/physically destroyed by disgusting child molesters, hence the usual strong reaction. But at the same time, as a boy I probably wouldn't have minded having a sexual relationship with a woman I fantasized about as long as I was a willing participant, I surely wouldn't have been traumatized unless there had been coercion involved. On the other hand the bullying I experienced at school was real and traumatizing, but society doesn't mind that much about that, so go figure. There is some torture that society deems acceptable, and there are consensual enjoyable acts that society deems horrible and deserving of torture.

You mentioned being diagnosed with schizophrenia, do you know what led to this diagnosis?

But then our desire to achieve more and more leads us to destroy other species and the environment. We don't just want to 'survive', we don't just want to be 'animals', we want to be more than that, so we build, we create, more and more, we want to be better than, we fight to be on top, at all costs. If it ends up destroying ourselves, then maybe we would have had a thing to learn from cockroaches.

But in fact I see that desire to achieve as nothing more than a desire to guarantee our survival.

I see the desire to be wealthy as a way to guarantee one's survival: when you have accumulated wealth, you don't have to worry about working on getting what you need.

I see the desire to be famous as a way to guarantee one's survival: when you are famous, when people love you, you are not alone, and they are there for you if you need them.

Sure people desire these things not because they consciously think that it will help them guarantee their survival, they just desire these things, just like we desire to eat, not because we consciously think that it will help us survive.

Many people who work on curing diseases wouldn't do it if they weren't paid to do so. Those who do it out of the pure desire to help others, their desire is essentially a way to help other members of the species survive. It's a desire not directed at one's own survival, but towards the survival of other members of the species. Which is still about survival.

life is a bit like being on a fast moving treadmill that will fling you off into the wall if you stop running. That is to say, once born, you are then forced into the transactions and labor to at the least, keep yourself alive. You cannot get off that treadmill. There is just do it or die. This is a bit unreasonable to do to someone else. Yet we know this is the way things are, but put more people on this treadmill. — schopenhauer1

Some people love that treadmill, they are glad to be alive, their hardships make their joys even stronger. And then they have the amazing experience of sex with someone they love, then the amazing experience of being pregnant and preparing to welcome their baby to the world, then the amazing experience of having that baby and taking care of it and having fun with it and enjoying moments with it and helping it grow so it can become a great and happy and beautiful man or woman, and then they look back at their life and they are glad to have lived it.

And then there are the people who suffer every day and who wonder why the hell they are here and what's the point of living, who wonder why they would put anyone through the same torture they live every day.

Some people have an enjoyable life, some people have a horrible life. Some people have it easy, some others have to try hard or cope hard to make their life enjoyable. It's a bit of a lottery. Looking at my own past experiences, if things had played out differently I could have had a happy life now, had the circumstances been different.

We suffer when we want something and we believe we can't get it, or when we believe that it's not worth enduring what we have to do to get it. I have my own idea of what I need to be happy, when I believed I could get it I was fighting for it and life was ok, but now that I have stopped believing I can get it I suffer constantly. Either I manage to stop wanting that thing, or I manage to start believing again that I can get it, or at some point I will stop finding it worth it to keep on living.

Happiness depends on a lot of subjective and objective factors, and we don't have control over all of them, so there is some luck involved. We're not the lucky ones, but the lucky ones won't stop creating new beings so that they too can experience their joys.

Where I agree is that the people who don't enjoy their life probably shouldn't have a baby hoping that it will bring them meaning and joy; if they haven't managed to make their life enjoyable then it's likely their baby won't find the solution either, unless there is a lot of luck involved.

Hello,

I suspect I am being consistently tracked and casually harassed. I doubt this comes as a surprise to anyone, which is fair enough. Nevertheless, I want this stance to be set aside in order to get to what I'd more to the point like to address.

I want to now ask anyone interested in this topic to share the ethical implications you feel having this done to a someone undermines as a private citizen who has Human Rights. This excludes a cause for a terrorist investigation or justified concern by DHS -- whom are trained to properly handle bypassing a citizen's individual rights of privacy (for the most part, or at the very least are supposed to be) -- in order to determine a possible national threat.

I'm more referring to "vigilante" private citizens. A formed group composed of those whom are technologically proficient and whom may have the resources necessary to hack someone. Their motivation may be to "karmically" punish someone for interests found to be reprehensible and suspect. Invading such an individual's privacy systematically (phone camera, audio, geo-location, online activities, accounts, etc.) being their method of obtaining intimate details.They may then weaponize the information they've gleaned against such an individual.

Even though this is considered very unlikely, it's not altogether implausible. Simply put, if this were to occur, then, what do you believe are the ethical implications? — THX1138

Have you recently received an email telling you that you have been recorded on your webcam while watching pornographic material?

If so, that is a scam, as reported here https://blog.malwarebytes.com/cybercrime/2019/02/sextortion-bitcoin-scam-makes-unwelcome-return/

In a nutshell, many websites get hacked, when a website gets hacked the hackers can often get access to the email/password combinations used on the website, then they sell that data on the deep web. Then some scammers write you an email and mention the password in the database as supposed proof that they have targeted you personally, then pretend they have recorded you doing questionable stuff to extort money from you.


If this is not what happened to you, then to answer your question more directly, I suppose it would depend on how reprehensible your interests are. If you have evidence of them harrassing you, you could go to the police. If you don't want the police to know about your interests but want to keep doing what you're doing without being targeted, and you have evidence that your computer has been compromised, you could learn about computer security to prevent it from happening again.

Just exactly WHY are humans (and higher animals as well) conscious at all? It seems totally unnecessary and seems to have no survival value, either. — Unseen

Consciousness has value in the sense that there are experiences that make consciousness worth it, there are experiences that make you glad to be alive rather than dead.

As to the survival value of consciousness, any answer will depend on unprovable assumptions, so an answer that will satisfy you will depend on what you are willing to believe.

If you assume that each conscious experience maps to a specific pattern of electrical activity (motion of electrons) in the brain, then you see consciousness as an epiphenomenon that cannot cause anything, and so from that point of view it seems unnecessary, redundant.

But how can you know whether consciousness reduces to that? Our perception is limited. We can't 'see' the consciousness of others, we're just measuring electrical activity of their brain, we're just seeing their facial expressions or behaviors, we can't see what they experience. So if our perception is limited in that way, it's very possible our consciousness doesn't reduce to motions of electrons in our brain, that it is more than that, and that even if you assembled what you perceive to be a copy of your brain, it's very possible there would be a necessary ingredient missing for that copy to have the same consciousness as you, or for it to have consciousness at all, because you wouldn't have assembled correctly the part that you don't perceive.

Maybe consciousness is necessary in ways that the eye can't see.

And what do you base your suggestion that the majority in the mental health field reject, disrespect, ignore, and refuse to support their patients? — Hanover

You completely misinterpreted my post, I suggest you re-read what I wrote, if you actually care about understanding my point of view.

I gave the example that many homosexuals suffered not because they were homosexuals, but because of how society treated them for being homosexual. And that the solution that ultimately helped them was not the latest drug or therapy or whatever, it was for society to accept them, respect them, listen to them, support them.

As to why mental illness was in quotes, if you had cared to read my post seriously you would have seen the examples where being a slave wanting to escape and being homosexual were mental illnesses. Do these mental illnesses really exist to you, are they due to a defect in the brain of these individuals, or were they a fiction in the minds of the people who wanted their slaves to behave and who didn't like homosexuals?

Then if you believe that these were mistakes of the past but there is nothing of the sort in the mental health practice of today, here is an interesting article I have come across which gives good insights as to why people who are anti-authoritarians are much more likely to be diagnosed with some mental illness. Not because there is something wrong in their brain, but because of how society and psychiatrists treat them. https://www.madinamerica.com/2012/02/why-anti-authoritarians-are-diagnosed-as-mentally-ill/

Competition is a good thing I don't question that, it leads to innovation and other many positive things. Competition is necessary. What you've described is brutish, it's greed, but haven't we achieved a state where we should be able to be bigger than greed? — lucafrei

Competition is also what leads us to eat rather than being eaten. You care about other human beings. If you care about other animals, then I suppose you don't eat meat, and if you do then I suppose you wouldn't if you were the one who had to kill them. Then if you care about plants, you wouldn't want to kill trees to build a house or a road.

The point is, because life is a competition, we can't care about everything. We're not constantly looking at our every step to make sure we're not stepping on an ant or on some other insect. We don't care about mosquitoes. We don't care about parasites and so on, there is a whole lot of life we don't care about. But what makes the life of a human being fundamentally worth more than that of any other? What makes the life of a human being worth so much more than a pig that it's ok to kill one just to eat for a few days?

Even if you cherish life, life has to kill to live. So even if we're not killing each other we have to kill beings from other species to live. Then among humans, there are many who only care about themselves and not about other humans. Even if you show them empathy and love, they will use it against you to their advantage, and won't be there for you when you need help. Because it's so easy to take advantage of those who care about others inconditionally, many do it. The sad reality is it often pays more to use others than to help them. Not on the long run, on the long run that might lead to the destruction of the species, but they don't care about the species on the long run, they care about themselves now. It's an uneven fight, when you want to improve the lives of others while they want to improve their own life at the expense of others. So when they enjoy the good life while you're left in the dirt with no one there for you, you become disillusioned.

When we compare the few humans who want to elevate others against the majority who want to bring others down, it feels like a drop in the ocean. Sometimes I wonder if there is anything worth fighting for here.

After the fire in Notre Dame a couple days ago, a few rich families announced they would each give hundreds of millions to restore the cathedral. To those in power, a cathedral is worth fighting for, but not the people who suffer in poverty. They could change so many things for so many people if they wanted. But they don't. Maybe because they see poor people as lesser beings, as tools to be used or as insects and not as beings to elevate to their level. And they surely didn't accumulate so much wealth by caring about the well-being of others. They don't have an incentive to make the life of other people easier, they want them to struggle, because as long as they struggle they are easier to control.

If you think, for example, that today's America is manipulated by the government (and some surely do), that doesn't mean that this manipulation was orchestrated by a team of dark psychologists. — Hanover

Again I feel examples go more clearly to the heart of the point. It used to be a mental illness to be a slave wanting to escape, and it used to be a mental illness to be homosexual. People wanted to have slaves, they saw their slaves as lesser beings, they wanted them to be good slaves, so wanting to escape was a defect to correct, a mental illness. People had an aversion towards homosexuals, they found them disgusting, saw them as an error of nature, so homosexuality was a defect to correct, a mental illness.

Then in a society where Science is venerated as giving access to Truth, once you carry out scientific research and studies that refer to these unwanted behaviors as mental illnesses, you legitimize this characterization of mental illness as having a scientific basis, as being grounded in truth, as being something to believe in. Then the psychiatrists who are the trained specialists in diagnosing and curing mental illness are the authority to believe in on the subject, so if they say that your behavior is a defect that needs to be corrected, you have to believe them, you must comply, and if you don't comply, if you defy this authority you are deemed to have an additional disorder, an additional mental illness, an additional defect that must be corrected.

The people who have power over others for whatever reason (they govern people, they belong to a majority, they are able to influence public opinion, ...) have the power to characterize specific behaviors as defects that need to be corrected, then children grow up in a society where they are taught that such or such behavior is a defect, and it becomes the truth.

If you're a homosexual and the society lets you be a homosexual in peace, doesn't discriminate against you, then you feel good. If however you're oppressed, pointed at, ridiculed, insulted, if you have to hide to be who you are, if you have to live in constant fear, then you suffer, and the trained specialists on mental illnesses can tell you "look, you can see that you suffer, that you suffer because you're a homosexual, you can see this is a defect that makes you suffer, but you will feel better if we can cure this illness you have in you", then all kinds of experiments may be carried out on these people to cure their 'illness'. Maybe these people then need to ingest pills every day for the rest of their lives because the causes of the illness are "not yet well understood", many factors are at play and more research is required. Then the specialists who work to 'cure' these people say they are helping them, they are helping them function 'better', even if they aren't happy at least their defect has been partially corrected and that's the most important.

In some societies today it's obvious that homosexuals aren't mentally ill, it's obvious that treating it as a mental illness was pseudoscience but now we know better, we won't make the same mistake! And yet back then it was as obvious that homosexuality was a mental illness.

Most people don't need to ingest pills to feel better and cure or hide their 'mental illness'. They simply need to be accepted, respected, listened to, supported. If mental health practice was focused first of all on that, I'm sure it would be much much more effective.

You could have an infinite universe that contains a finite number of living beings, an infinite universe where there are only living beings in our galaxy, an infinite universe without life.

For instance there could be a finite number of galaxies in a finite volume, and beyond that volume there could be only light traveling to infinity.

Anything is possible.

The problem is as I see it is that when a space craft is traveling at 99.999 % the speed of light physicists say anyone in the space craft will not be able to tell that they are traveling near the speed of light. They say that the people on board will not be able to detect that the clock on board has slowed down. This cannot be right. They say that everything they experience onboard the ship will seem normal. They will not notice a contraction in length or an increase in mass. I believe this interpretation to be incorrect. Let's talk it out and see if this interpretation is correct. — MrCypress

If they're traveling at 99.999% at the speed of light, presumably they would be going very fast towards galaxies in one direction, and very fast away from the galaxies in the opposite direction. Then considering that when we're going towards something we receive its light with higher frequency and when we're going away from it we receive its light with lower frequency (in a similar way that when a ambulance moves towards you you hear its siren with a higher frequency and when it moves away from you you hear its siren with a lower frequency), they would be able to tell that they're moving really fast
relative to the galaxies.

Now what if they don't have any window and they only observe things from within the spacecraft? I believe that they would still be able to notice gravitational effects that wouldn't be present if they weren't moving in that way relative to the galaxies, considering there is an asymmetry in the way they are moving relative to the matter around the spacecraft.

Then if these gravitational effects are small enough that they wouldn't detect them, special relativity says that they couldn't make an experiment inside the spacecraft that would allow them to know how fast they are going relative to other galaxies. Einstein postulated that this was the case, because many experiments were carried out and didn't give any different result when done at different velocities. Now you could argue that maybe there are experiments that would give a different result, and that's possible.

For instance, supposedly if we were onboard that spacecraft we wouldn't notice that the clock has slowed down, because all our biological processes would have slowed down at the same rate, but there is an implicit assumption here that hasn't been tested in experiments. We haven't conducted an experiment to see how our experience of time changes when we are traveling close to the speed of light, there could very well be effects on our consciousness itself that would allow us to say we're traveling really fast.

Then length contraction is not something that we have observed directly in experiments, and it's possible to explain experiments in a different way without invoking length contraction. But as the standard story goes, even if the spacecraft is length-contracted you wouldn't notice it from within, but there again there is the implicit assumption that it would have no effect on our conscious experience, which we haven't tested.

Really great post, thank you, you explained it better than I could.

I would give it as compulsory reading to all psychiatrists and would-be psychiatrists, so they might ponder and be more self-aware about how much what they're doing actually heals people, and how much of it is nothing more than forcing people to adapt or shaping them to conform to oppressive social norms and policies. It's not easy to uncover a social norm as oppressive when one grows and is conditioned in a system where such a norm is taught as a normal part of reality, and to see people who refuse to bend to this norm or who suffer from conforming to it as legitimately oppressed rather than as mentally ill.

But again, this is not a thread about such things. The best you can do here is to serve as an example for those who are discussing subjectivity and objectivity. — Banno

It was a direct reply to your remark that there is appearance of agreement, you're the one initiating tangents.

You can say that "this text is written in English" is an "objective truth" if you want (as per your OP), yet people who are blind won't agree with you, people who don't speak english won't agree with you, people who are not able to recognize symbols won't agree with you, if everyone else who speaks english dies no one would agree with you, and if you become amnesiac you may not agree with you anymore. So much for objective truth.

I don't think most people care about objective truth the way you define it. It is objective truth to you that the color of this text is black, yet if you were blind it would not be objective truth to you that the color of this text is black, but supposedly you would go on lecturing people about the difference between subjective and objective truth.

How could you ever know that you agree, as opposed to appearing to agree...?

After all, all you have is your perceptions of agreement... — Banno

Sure, there are perceptions of agreement.

You may have noticed throughout your life that you uncovered beliefs you hadn't realized you had, and that you may have replaced with different beliefs. You may have noticed also that depending on what you believe, your world appears different (for instance your world is much different depending on whether you believe in an afterlife or whether you believe you cease experiencing anything when you die, whether you believe animals have feelings and consciousness or whether you believe only humans do, whether you believe things exist independently when you don't see them or not, ...).

So if your beliefs interact with the world you see, and it's not easy to uncover your own beliefs, then it's safe to say that you believe you agree.

So I have a subjective world (my world) and you have yours (your world). Where we agree, we call that the objective world. — frank

Not exactly, I wouldn't call "where you and I agree" the objective world, that would just be the parts where our subjective worlds are similar. I don't claim that there is such a thing as an objective world, however many make that claim, and I say that this objective world they refer to is a subjective world they agree on.

But what's up with agreement? Do we agree on portions of worlds? Or do we agree on statements? — frank

Well, for instance, if it is night, do you believe the Sun is traveling below the horizon or do you have no belief on that? If you believe it, your subjective world that you have constructed would have the Sun traveling below the horizon while you're not perceiving it, and someone with the same belief would have a similar subjective world in that aspect.

Leo concludes that the tree disappears when unobserved despite there being no evidence to support this. — Banno

I didn't conclude this, I said that saying the tree exists independently of us when we do not perceive it is a belief. Do you agree that this is a belief, or do you see it as an objective fact?