I experience the strawberries as looking red from a non close up view. I experience the strawberries as looking grey when I zoom in very close on the pixels. A scientist with an instrument measuring the wavelength of light coming from the strawberry would measure the same wavelength from both close up, or far away.

I think the confusion arises from asking types of questions like "what colour is the strawberry really", "what colour is the strawberry independent of mind".

The confusion arises from thinking of the strawberries colour as something existing outside of human perception.

The strawberry appears different to the viewer under different conditions. The scientist measures the same length of light coming from the strawberry under these various conditions. Does this present a problem? Do these NEED to be reconciled? Only if you think the way the strawberry appears to you is directly related to the wavelength of light (as measured by the scientist) the strawberry emits.

My view is these are two different domains, one is phenomenological, the other scientific. The problem only arises when trying to reconcile the two under a single domain. Perhaps they're just separate, and need no attempt to reconcile the apparent contradiction (the strawberry appears different even though the scientist measures the same wavelength).

People seem to have the view that red objects are those that emit x wavelength of light. But this seems to conflate the scientific domain (of measuring wavelength) with the phenomenological domain of how things appear in our visual fields. Probably part of the confusion arises from the word "red" meaning different things under the two domains and yet are used as if they're interchangeable.

In fact, the only thing we know about the intrinsic nature of matter is that some of it – the stuff in brains – involves experience. — Philip Goff

We don't know this at all.

Regardless, let's say panpsychism is the case, there's still the problem of how the individual (?) inner lives of electrons, etc, give rise to singular cohesive first person experiences. How does my experience of being a human, in a world, emerge from individual particles (that have experience as part of their nature). Is my conscious experience physically located throughout the particles within my brain, only some of them, or is it an emergent entity and exists somewhere else entirely?

Most people seem to have this strong drive to reproduce, which I suspect a lot of pessimists lack. For a lot of people, what comes first is this drive to procreate, they then procreate in response to this drive and then as a byproduct of this biological drive these institutions perpetuate themselves.

Most children are just unthinkingly brought into the world by people who haven't given a single thought to examining the reasons or justifications for their actions.

Basically these institutions perpetuating themselves is more like an epiphenomenon resulting from an unexamined biological drive that the vast majority of humans posses, unexamined.

People never really reflect on why they are bringing children into to the world. They want children, it's a biological drive, children are born and these institutions perpetuate themselves as a byproduct of this.

Not many people seem to go further in their justifications for bringing children into the world than "I want a child". It's sad really. Suffering perpetuates itself for no reason other than selfish desire to satisfy ones biological drive to procreate (and probably to satisfy some sort of existential drive to 'create a legacy', or to continue ones existence beyond themselves as some sort of quest for life beyond death, something along these lines).

On my view having a child is highly immoral, based on the needless suffering the child will experience.

The table is made of matter — Samuel Lacrampe

Again, you're just begging the question of the nature of things in the world. An idealist would dispute that the table is made of matter.

An idealist can just make the same begging the question argument: "I perceive a table. The table is made of my visual experience of it, thus is experiential. Therefore I perceive an experiential world."

But we do perceive a physical world. — Samuel Lacrampe

Begs the question.

The effect of our perception of the physical world requires an adequate cause. That cause must be a real physical world. Could it be something else? — Samuel Lacrampe

Here you're just assuming, or begging the question that what we perceive with our sense IS a physical world, which the idealist disputes. The idealist also disputes that his experiences require "an adequate cause" - which is the exact same thing that you are doing, except in regards to the physical world. You hold that the physical world is a 'cause', and isn't an effect of something else/some other level of reality.

The difference between the two positions is which level of reality is uncaused/requires no 'adequate cause'. So demanding the idealist explain what's causing everything experiential to exist is missing the point - the idealist holds that experiential things are uncaused - there *isnt* some other level of reality (such as a physical world) causing them to exist.

As long as you have experienced "blue", you need to explain where this experience comes from, if not from a physical world. — Samuel Lacrampe

Why do you not in return though, need to explain where the physical world comes from? The idealist/spiritualist believes reality exists on an experiential level, with no other 'level' of reality causing or holding/bringing the experiential world into existence. You might gawk and demand an explanation for what on earth is causing the experiential world to exist, but the physicalist is merely bringing the 'uncaused' part of reality out from our experiences into a physical world.

At some point, there must be a 'level' of reality that is uncaused, that just exists with nothing causing it or bringing it into existence. You hold that this is the physical level of reality - the physical world doesn't require an explanation/another level of reality which brings it about, causing it to exist. The idealist holds that this uncaused level of reality is our experiences. That there is no level of reality bringing them into existence, the merely exist uncaused.

Do you see my point? Every position has this same feature - that there is a part/level of reality that does not require an explanation for what is causing it to exist. For you, that level is a physical world. For the idealist, that level is our experiences. Both the idealist and physicalist theories have the very same feature - that some part of reality is uncaused and merely exists with nothing holding it in existence - it just exists by brute force and requires no explanation (because it has none), the only difference between the two theories here is the disagreement over which level of reality is uncaused/exists through brute force.

So when you say "you need to explain where this experience comes from", the idealist can simply respond that his experience is uncaused/it exists through 'brute' force - in the very same way that the physicalist would respond to a question about what causes the physical world to exist.

Why must the idealist give an explanation for the cause of his experiences, whereas you don't have to give an explanation for what is causing the physical world to exist? The only difference between your positions here is what level of reality you believe is uncaused and requires no explanation.

Does this mean that, to a spiritualist, a tree (even imaginary) is a spiritual thing, not a physical one? If so, then how does he differentiate between physical and spiritual things? — Samuel Lacrampe

I think the word "spiritual" is bringing a lot of confusion to this conversation. By my reading of this thread, it appears as if you are arguing against the idea that reality is purely mental, or experiential. This position is commonly refereed to as "idealism"' or more broadly speaking 'anti-realism'.

Anyway, in response to the quote above, a "spiritualist"/idealist doesn't believe that anything is physical. To a spiritualist/idealist there would merely be different kinds of tree experiences - eg, trees experienced in waking life (such as when walking through a forest), trees experienced in dreams, trees that one imagines in their minds eye, fictitious trees referred to in books, images of trees, etc. To the idealist, none of these trees are physical, all of these trees exist only as experiences, but they're differentiated from each other by the kind of experiences that they are - they're all experienced in a clearly different way.

No I'm not giving up on omnibenevolence. I'm giving up on human ability to comprehend god. — TheMadFool

The problem here though is that if we can't comprehend god, then what are we actually believing in? We can't even comprehend the nature of the content of our belief (god). We can't even know WHAT we are believing in, and so the "god" in the "I believe in god" statement is meaningless to us. It's incomprehensible, the word is essentially meaningless.

But it appears to me like you want it both ways. As in, "god has x nature (exists, is omnipotent, non-evil, what have you), while at the same time, "gods nature is incomprehensible to humans". How can you have this both ways? It makes no sense. God can't be incomprehensible an yet you comprehend gods existence and at least a few attributes of his (its?) nature.

This apparent contradiction is why I don't think your argument works.

Personally I just don't see how the problem of evil can be resolved. There is a disgustingly abhorrent amount of suffering in this world, and I simply can't perform the mental gymnastics required to believe that an all powerful being (benevolent) being couldn't EASILY resolve. At the risk of sounding antagonistic, this "it's all for some obscure greater good so it's not REALLY that bad" strikes me a wishy washy self-comforting delusional nonsense. Forming this belief is like a child reaching for his blanket - it's a comforting feeling, but not particularly mature.

I think there's just two options here,
1. God (as an omnipotent being, benevolent, perfect, creator of universe, etc) doesn't exist
2. God exists, but just doesn't care about suffering and evil, or is downright evil himself

I'm putting my chips in with option one - although perhaps some might say that that's just me forming a belief because it's comforting - my own personal child's blanket. Option two is quite unsettling indeed.

No, the difference is that p-zombies don't have consciousness, and conscious people do. — Michael

You can't escape the fact that this is you attributing consciousness. You are here personally saying that x has consciousness.

The difference is the one described in the definition. P-zombies don't have consciousness. — Michael

So the difference here is that you don't attribute consciousness to p-zombies, whereas you do attribute consciousness to 'normal' people.

My point is that this really is no difference at all. The only difference here is whetheryou personally attribute consciousness to the person or not. This has nothing to do with actual, transcendentally existing conscious experiences which are somehow in relationship to this person before you. All it is is you basically going "that person over there is conscious, and therefore isn't a p-zombie", and nothing else.

The only difference here really between a p-zombie and non p-zombie is whether you personally attribute consciousness to that person. Here you might say, "no the difference is whether that person is actually conscious or not, he's not a p-zombie because that person is actually conscious". But my point here is that's just nothing more than you again attributing consciousness to the person. It's inescapable. Non p-zombies are simply nothing more than humans that you personally attribute consciousness to.

I think there's an issue here with our own access to the brain that is (allegedly) causing our conscious experience. I'd liken it to something like an arrow that cannot shoot at itself, or an eye that cannot see it's own gaze.

It's like this. (Allegedly) there is a brain which is causing this conscious experience I am having. But in order to study this brain I only have at my own disposal my sensory experiences (and my thoughts). The trouble here is that those things are themselves already a conscious experience caused by a brain. So lets say somehow I examine my brain (imagine I cut my skull open and start cutting into it or something). The problem here is that what I'm examining is entirely a conscious experience. It's a visual experience of a brain, a touch experience, my thoughts, etc. But these are all themselves conscious experiences which are ALREADY being generated by a brain.

So there's an access issue here. I cannot examine my brain without using conscious experience generated by that brain. But the conscious experience generated by that brain, is NOT, the brain which is causing the conscious experience - it is what that brain is doing.

It's like I cannot step outside of my own gaze, in order to examine the eye.

So I think there is an issue of access here, in that we really cannot get at what it really is that's (allegedly - this is all just a theory that there is a brain generating our conscious experience) causing our conscious experience. We are trapped within conscious experience, and cannot step outside of that in order to examine the cause.

It's like two people playing chess against one-another, but are on other sides of the planet. There's two chess sets which corresponds to each other, so if the white knight is moved on one board, it automatically moves on the other. Each person is alone in their own room, with their own chess board, but they are playing against each other in a singular match. So for example, one guy is playing as black. He'd see on the board in front of him, a white piece moving by itself, corresponding to the guy on the other side of the world moving that white piece with his hand.

Your face and body is much like this as well, when you are in public. You control it's movements, but it's appearing in the visual fields of other people. So you're in a store for example. You are intensely aware/self-conscious of the movements and expressions in your face, and of your arms when you point to a product for the store person. It's like you are basically existing in their visual field. You're kind of transported into their mind (their visual perception) and with your movements in your body and your facial expression you control what they perceive. You walk around and make expressions directly within their minds.

It's very odd to me. It's as if your body is basically an exterior, a shell or a surface, and it moves in and out of people's minds, and it's totally up to you what you express or do with that exterior, how you present it. There's a huge difference in how you experience your body compared to being in the presence of other people and being alone. When other people are around my perception of my body and face drastically switches so that I am immediately aware of myself as another persons perception - I have entered the mind of another person. And so I experience the surface of my body and my face as a visual perception for another person. I experience myself, in my mind, from a third person visual perspective. Imagining myself as existing within the visual perception of another person, and he does the same for me. We essentially lose our first person perspective that we have while alone, and see ourselves as the exterior/shell of our bodies which others are perceiving.

The world is so totally incomprehensibly bizarre! I seriously have no idea wtf is going on. I still have a lot of doubts about/towards solipsism. It seems no matter how secure I feel about myself actually communicating with others, these niggling little doubts always sneak back in, "are you really? is there truly another visual field which my body is being perceived within? Is there really a perceivier somehow associated with that persons body I see? Is there really a pain experience associated with that person hurting themselves?"

I suppose us being separate beings means we really just cannot know for sure whether the other actually exists. Which troubles me greatly. Whether you exist or not has huge consequences for morality, love, meaning, etc.

Why do you have such a negative attitude towards drug use?

You mind is not "altered"; it is impaired. — Jeremiah

This just assumes that people operate best/ideally when sober, and all drugs decrease how one functions. I don't buy it. People can work longer and harder when on stimulants like caffeine and amphetamines. Some people claim they're more creative on certain drugs. People with pain issues certainly operate better when they've ingested opiates. Most people are better at socialization after taking benzos, alcohol, or MDMA. I certainly dance better after a few drinks!

There might be some subjectivity in weighing the pros and the cons, but assuming there's not a real legitimate purpose, it's probably a better idea to live within a normal state of consciousness. — Hanover

Why is 'for enjoyment' not a legitimate purpose though?

This reminds me of the cannabis debate where somehow it's seen as better/more acceptable to use cannabis for pain, than for plain enjoyment. Society seems to be more willing to 'allow' cannabis use when there's a medical reason, rather than because the person wants to do it, for their own enjoyment.

Society seems to really look down upon people who want to take drugs because they enjoy it. They have to have some sort of medical reason. I really don't see why getting pleasure out drug use is so vilified in our culture. I think it's something to do with people seeing the pleasure gained from drug use as 'unearned', as if you should have to work far harder to enjoy yourself.

No, I'm not excluding us in saying that. I really don't know what to do to be happy etc. I simply don't understand my own body or psychology well enough, and so I stay miserable because I seriously don't understand what to do not to be. — The Great Whatever

This made me laugh! If it's any comfort I feel the exact same way.

What about drug use? Have you tried that for your misery? What's your thoughts on it as a means to be happy?

Active, purpose-driven pessimism eschews aesthetic comfort and decadence for a prescription to end the problem once and for all. This entails participating in and supporting public institutions focused on maximizing welfare and making the world a better place, and actively advocating pessimistic philosophies, within the constraints of self-preservation. — darthbarracuda

To be fair a lot of those 'comfortable pessimists' espoused anti-natalistism, something which really would 'end the problem once and for all' once implemented. Neither Schopenhauer, the Buddha, nor Emil Cioran had children.

If pleasure is merely an absence or negation of suffering, then graveyards must be filled with the happiest people of all!

Personally I think genuine pleasure exists. Granted, it's fairly rare though (too rare - this world could sure do with some improving!). I'd say our default state is suffering, suffering is a far more motivating force in our lives, suffering (and our evasion away from it) is what keeps us living, and not say our movement towards pleasure. Suffering is what our pleasure always fades away to. I don't buy this notion that "you wouldn't be able to feel pleasure without suffering", or "suffering is what makes the good times good", "nobody would know what pleasure was without first suffering". There's genuine pleasure in this world - which means there's genuine 'good', there's something of actual positive value.

What about drug induced pleasures/euphorias? Surely these aren't just (entirely) the negation of some suffering or another? IV meth, or speedballs for example - it's self-evident these are genuinely pleasurable. Rolling on MDMA!

I think I'd start genuinely considering suicide if all I did was suffer, and pleasure was some sort of illusion.

The problem is not that pleasure doesn't exist, or that it's some sort of illusion, or that pleasure isn't actually positive in the way suffering is negative/bad. The problem instead is just it's rarity. A lot rarer than I think most people believe (or want to believe).

By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul. — Epicurus

Then graveyards must be the happiest places on earth...

Doxylamine works for me when I can't sleep, better than most prescription sleeping meds I've tried.

Internet poker, mostly 2-7 triple draw and baduci. Primarily on pokerstars.

Triple draw is so frustrating, manic depression - the card game version. Half the time I want to smash a brick into my face and end it all. But the other half I'm on a heater taking pot after pot.

It mostly balances out.

Suffering motivates us to act, in order to stop feeling it, or prevent it being felt. This is perpetual. We will do this till the day we day, because we have bodily needs - food, water, shelter, etc. Hunger is suffering, thirst is suffering, cold is suffering. So we must act, expend effort and energy, struggle to avoid it. Because if we don't, the suffering will intensify greatly, until we die a horrible painful death, of starvation, thirst, exposure, etc. Life is a constant struggle to avoid suffering, and the consequence of avoiding all these various sufferings is that we continue to exist (and suffer). So I would not say that "we avoid suffering because we want to continue living". Rather, I'd say that we want to avoid suffering (because it feels bad, it's unwanted, it hurts), and the consequence of this is continued existence. Evolution has fine tuned this, whereby we feel hunger, so we struggle to find something to eat, and then we feel thirst, so we must expend effort to drink, and then we get cold, so we find some clothes or heat, etc. It's a constant series of sufferings in various forms, which motivate us to perform different actions - which produces the overall effect of continued existence (and continued suffering).

The horrible thing is that when we avoid all our bodily sufferings, we're not rewarded with anything (aside from not feeling suffering), there's no prize, no compensation for our struggle. All we achieve is a state which the dead get through no effort at all, and don't have to suffer and struggle for it. We just feel 'not-bad'. Our physical needs are met, now what? We are confronted with the emptiness of existence, it's inherent lack of value, it's ambivalence - you could take it or leave it. And we become bored, and restless. We are so used to perpetually being in action, struggling from suffering that when we rest, we simply don't know what to do with ourselves. We need tofind something to do. When our attention isn't being absorbed into something, when we lack a goal or purpose, we face life itself. And it's empty. So we must invent goals, we must invent something to absorb our attention into. We must put made up goals ahead of ourselves, so that we struggle towards those instead.

And we are so dumb, that psychologically we imagine it all paying off in the future. "I'll be happy when I achieve x, or when I reach y, or when I get z". But when we reach xyz, perhaps we feel some momentary excitement, or joy, but soon, due to our once again lacking purpose, goals or direction to distract us from the emptiness of existence, we are confronted with it again, and lapse into suffering. We become anxious and restless. And it just repeats. "I'll be happy when I reach a".

And due to psychological complexity, how complicated we are (as opposed to say a cow), we have more needs than just bodily. We experience a far greater range of suffering than other animals. We need social contact, we need to feel valued, we need to feel like what we do is meaningful, we need to feel part of a wider, greater whole (a society, a country, the human race, etc). It's just endless. Life is just a constant race, a struggle to avoid a vast range of sufferings. Because we experience such a wide range, we develop the complex and complicated societies we see today. There's no real end goal. We may tell ourselves we do it all for 'x', it all has 'y' meaning, and that's why we live and struggle. But this isn't the case. We struggle simply because suffering hurts. Pain hurts, cold hurts, hunger hurts, and so we do whatever we need to, to avoid these various sufferings. The resulting effect being continued biological existence. But we also feel the suffering of meaninglessness, and so we must invent justifications/reasons for our struggle ("we may tell ourselves we do it all for 'x'), to try and give us some psychological comfort, to avoid the ennui and anxiousness.

And there's all kinds of other sufferings as well. This is just the normal functioning humans life. Everything can go wrong, addiction, mental illness, physical illness, heartbreak, rejection, fingers down chalkboard, car crashes, being harmed by empathy (you feel bad when others do), I could go on for days.

But yet, there's no true pleasure in this world. There's no genuinely positively valued experiences. Suffering has negative value, and yet pleasure is not positive. At best it's neutral. What pleasure actually consists of, is an experience of 'losing oneself'. We say that we feel pleasure in moments when we become absorbed into something so much that we forget our existence, our struggle. We say eating good food is pleasurable. What actually happens is we become lost into the flavor sensation, we focus so much on it that we lose our sense of ourselves and forget we exist. This is what happens in sports, movies, music, sex, massages. Pleasure is nothing but a brief respite from suffering, through completely absorbing ones attention into something. An orgasm feels good, not because it's an actual genuinely good sensation in-itself. Rather, the feeling is so strong that our attention is overwhelmed into it, and we lose our sense of self, of being in the world, if only for a brief moment.

I'm writing this post right now, because I have secured my bodily needs, and the emptiness of the world is confronting me head on. I need to find something to do, to distract myself, to absorb my attention into. Just so happens that the complicated thought involved in doing philosophy, much like a puzzle to solve, takes a lot of concentration/attention, so that I don't have to face the emptiness of merely existence anymore. Soon this wont be enough, my attention will stop being absorbed by my thoughts, it doesn't last. And so I'm downloading an episode to watch soon. I've prepared to avoid the future suffering.

I don't think most people are really aware of how bad their lives are, and the world is. It's suffering all the way down. There are no motivations for action that are not a kind of suffering. We seek 'pleasurable' (which we falsely believe are genuine goods) experiences only because the lack of them is a kind of suffering. Anyone with any sense of empathy should conclude that creating another being that will have suffering inflicted upon them, day in and day out, until it finally overwhelms them and they die, is clearly not the right thing to do. It's cruel and unnecessary. But most people are deluded about the value of their lives. They are masters of pollyannaism, or just genuinely lack empathy. Some of the reasons people have children are downright shocking. "So someone will care for me in my old age", "to save my marriage", "to get money from the government". And then there's people who do it unthinkingly, because that's the thing that you do. You become an adult, you find a partner, you have children and settle down. And so they do that, because that's the thing that you do. thedoxa.

Life consists of nothing more than a struggle away from suffering, and brief respites from suffering by forgetting you exist, essentially. Losing oneself into a moment, or a sensation. That's it. We delude ourselves by perpetually imagining the future better than it will be in reality. We imagine happiness ahead, we don't really understand that we'll never reach the future, we'll always be here, presently suffering and struggling. And then one day our bodies will be lethally harmed, or give out, and we will die.

Humour and laughter is an important and effective counter to suffering. It's probably the best way to deal/respond to it. Find a way to keep laughing, try not to get too depressed.

Here's how to reconcile them: Biological sense organs are nothing but a particular type of sense-perception.

That was easy. — lambda

If you press on the side of your eye, your vision doubles. If you lose your eyes, you become blind, losing your tongue means you can't taste anything. If you lose all your sense organs/brain, then presumably you cease to have perceptions altogether and die. There's clearly something special about sense organs, that I don't think can simply be explained by saying that what clearly looks like a casual relationship between sense organs and perceptions is mere correlations of perceptions or coincidence. As in, it's just a correlation that one loses their taste perception after one loses their tongue, and there's no casual relationship between your tongue and your sense of taste. There's something deeper going on than that. I suppose I cannot prove this 100% though, but neither can we about a lot of things and yet we still believe it (eg, that I am talking to another conscious person through this forum).

What about just "I am suffering, therefore suicide."

Seems perfectly logical. Everyone still living is blue-pilled as fuck.

All I am arguing is that if for the sake of argument we grant that such a simulation, indistinguishable from real life were possible, then we would be able to choose whether to partake or not; and that the choices we make could arguably depend on our preferred model of ethics. — John

But if it was truly subjectively indistinguishable, it would just be a choice between continuing to experience the suffering of real life, or for your real life experience to become far more pleasurable. Almost everyone would pick the latter. To know that it's a simulated world you're entering is for it to not be subjectively distinguishable (because the two worlds are distinguished into simulated and real).

The thing is that if you believe pleasure machine experiences could be subjectively indistinguishable from real life experiences, then you at the very least are an epistemological solipsist.

What you are saying is that you could subtract minds from your experience of others and literally nothing would change experientially. And the only way this could be is if you exist in your own private 'experience world'. Which entails epistemological solipsism, because you can't know other minds exist.

And if the pleasure machine experience could be subjectively indistinguishable from real life experience, it therefore must go both ways - real life experience could be subjectively indistinguishable from simulated experience. And if that's the case, how do you even know you're in real life, and not the simulated experience world?

The problem here is thinking that your experience is caused by your brain.

Lets say physiological sense organs/nervous systems give rise/cause this experience that you are presently undergoing.

But the problem here is that our physiological sense organs are only known about through perception. So, your eyes and brain are causing your visual perception of seeing this screen. But what am I actually referring to here with "eyes" and "brain"? I say that what my physiological eye is, to me, is experiential. I can touch it, I feel myself moving it, I see it in the mirror, and I read and learn about it's function. Nothing about my understanding, and conception of my physiological eye is anything which transcends my experience. And yet this is precisely what the physiological eye must be in order it to be causing my visual perceptions. Otherwise you are in the situation where the cause is the effect. The eye causes it's own physiological existence.

So what I am saying is there nothing about a physiological organ which goes beyond experience. And so, if the physiological eye is causing your visual perceptions, then eg in the case of looking in the mirror at your eyes, your eyes are causing the very existence of themselves. Because you look in the mirror at a physiological eye. And how you look is through visual perception, which is itself caused by the physiological eye (among other things).So here, your perception has created your eyes own physiological existence to you.

Can things be the both a cause and an effect? Can they cause themselves? Seems incoherent.

So then I ask, what is it about our species that we keep putting more people into the world if we can reflect upon procreation itself, and even choose to stop the process. All the X reasons that are used when self-reflected upon (in other words not just "accidents" which themselves could have been avoided easily), are absurd when taken as reasons in and of themselves. I just chose "redemption" because that answer is a great example of what does not even need to occur in the first place if humans were not born. Redemption does not need to take place if there is no one to exist who needs redeeming. So what is it about the human project, that it has to be carried forth? What are we doing here that we need to be here? And again, if you answer that with any X reason, that reason can be taken to its logical end where it becomes an absurdity because it becomes circular logic. — schopenhauer1

No argument here. I'm never having children either, life is full of suffering and it would br immoral to inflict it upon someone who can't consent, and whose only escape if he doesn't appreciate the 'gift' is to violently, lethally harm his body until he's dead, causing suffering for everyone around who cares about him.

Personally, I used to care about antinatalism a lot. I believed there was a great moral imperative to prevent babies from being brought into the world. What could more important than to bring about the cessation of suffering entirely? What an opportunity this generation has, to completely end all human suffering, and the only thing we need do is choose not to do something. But I just don't care about it as much anymore. It's not my suffering that's being created, it really doesn't affect me at all. Other people will always choose to breed, there's really no stopping it (unless you invent some biological weapon which sterilizes the entire world), and it seems most people born basically delude themselves into thinking life's great and they weren't harmed by birth. Does it really matter that much if the are born? They themselves don't even think they were harmed, so why even care that they actually were?

Why actually care about the hypothetical suffering of non-existent babies? Would your life actually improve in any way if you convinced people not to breed?

Secondly, we learn from a very young age that instant gratification in all things tends to lead to very bad results. I could empty my bank account right now, max out my credit cards, and have a rip roaring time today. But I know that I will be regretting and paying for that decision for weeks to come. So I employ some modicum of self-control. — Marchesk

Does this actually make sense though, to defer current pleasure for future ones?

The only time pleasure can ever be experienced is now. When you defer the possibility of experiencing pleasure now, so that you may experience greater pleasure in the future, I'm not sure you are actually better off. I think this kind of deferring is motivated by seeing pleasure as a sort of quantitative thing. Whereby drinking alcohol on Monday morning you experience say 5 pleasure units, but on Friday night you will experience 12 pleasure units. And so there's more intrinsic goodness on Friday than Monday. But, this is not the case. Pleasure = intrinsically good, and good is good. There can be no greater intrinsic 'goodness' when it's the very same thing in both cases (pleasure). Sure, you may prefer Heroin over Meth, but that doesn't mean Heroin is more intrinsically good. Intrinsic goodness is an all or nothing thing, and not a scale.

Life exists only presently, so pleasures are only experienced now. So to hold off on reaching one's goal (intrinsic 'goodness'), so that you can reach the exact same goal 4 days from now is nonsensical. You could have just not waited and reached the very same goal.
Also, you will never actually get to the future anyway as you never leave the present. The future pleasure you are deferring your possible current pleasurable experience towards will never actually be experienced by you. The future, where you think the greater pleasure experience will be perpetually remains ahead of you. You'll always be deferring towards it. The only time you can possibly experience pleasure is right now. It's like sitting on a donkey with a carrot in your hand ready to eat it, and then putting the carrot on a stick and holding it in front of the donkey because you think you'll be better off when you catch up to it. Intrinsic goodness is intrinsic goodness - it's all or nothing, and not a scale. Something is not more i intrinsically good than another intrinsically good thing.

So, an example. You find alcohol pleasurable, but it's Monday morning. You have the choice to a) drink the alcohol right now and feel pleasure, or b) defer the present experience of pleasurable drunkenness until Friday night because you believe it will be more pleasurable then (because eg, you might be with friends, or you wont have to worry about working hungover the next day). What do you pick?
You could have experienced what's intrinsically good right now, but you chose not to for 4 days so that you can experience what's intrinsically good then. All deferring pleasure is, is you choosing not to do a pleasurable action. Nothing is achieved, you don't actually gain anything.

It's seems warranted on the face of it to balk at this idea of not really planning ahead, but when analysed logically, it makes sense. All deferring to a future, greater experience of pleasure achieves, is to miss an opportunity to experience what's good in life. You missed out on experiencing pleasure for 4 days so that you can finally presently experience pleasure. Well what was the point of that, when you can just presently experience intrinsic goodness right now? Which is the only time you could ever feel pleasure anyway. Pleasure is always experienced presently, so deferring an opportunity for a present experience of pleasure until a future time is pointless, all you've done is chosen not to feel the good in life for 4 days. All so that you can in 4 days do nothing greater than what you could have done now - experience the good in life. Why wait?

I don't know why this fallacy keeps repeating itself. There's a difference between "to be is to be perceived" and "to be is to be perceived by me". You can't go from the former to "others are exhausted by my perception of them". — Michael

Yeah but the default position is realism, and one generally comes to idealsim through epistemic concerns about realism. And so it only seems logical that the epistemic concern will follow a natural progression from external world -> ideal world -> my ideal world. Otherwise you don't have epistemic concerns in general, you just have epistemic concerns about the material world.

I mean sure, a subjective idealist can just dogmatically assert the existence of other minds, even though he does not perceive them himself. But it's kind of non-nonsensical to do this, along with bad philosophy.

In any case, the OP is an example of many of the kinds of objections that Berkeley's imagined opponents came up with in his dialogues. He didn't address the 'drugged water pitcher' scenario — Wayfarer

I believe OP is arguing against a subjective idealism where the only minds that exist are human minds (and possibly, some animals). Whereas the drugged water for Berkeley's idealism continues to be 'held' in existence by the mind of god. His whole argument makes no sense if he's arguing against Berkeley.

(This by the way is how to understand Kant's distinction between 'discursive' and 'intellectual' intuition: Kant's theory of the in-itself has nothing to do with the vulgar idea that there is a world that is 'beyond' perception in the sense that it has perceptual qualities that we cannot know. Rather, the in-itself is aperceptual, it has qualities which have nothing to do with perception, and that is why it will remain a 'thing-in-itself'. It is not that there are parts of the world that are 'beyond knowledge', as if a superior, non-human, or divine knowledge could grasp it, but that the very idea of knowledge is no longer applicable to certain aspects of the world, that is is a simple 'category error' to say we can know such and such beyond our experience of it. This is why Kant remained an empirical realist no less than he was a 'transcendental idealist'). — StreetlightX

Then doesn't this do away with the notion of anything causing our perceptions altogether?

What's causing our perceptions is a 'thing-in-itself' (if it's perceptual, then our sense organs are literally the cause of their own existence), but if knowledge doesn't apply to 'things-in-themselves', then it makes no sense to say they cause our perceptions. So the whole notion of perception having some cause dissolves.

Actually, my suffering analogy is wrong. Think of it as like 6 hands stuck in the fish tank holding heat lamps. So, the beetle doesn't strive away from the heat in any aimless direction, rather, his path ahead is shaped by avoiding the other areas of heat/suffering caused by the other heat lamps. The beetle tries to walk in whatever direction has the least amount of heat, which constantly changes because as it walks, the heat lamps move as well. Also note, the hands get in each others way, so the heat lamps can't just converge into a single circle of heat following the beetle. His path is always shaped by avoiding suffering.

The beetle is like a river, trying to take the path of least resistance. The rivers course is guided by whatever forces conform it's direction.

Yes I realize that at this point the analogy has become far too complicated to be worthwhile and I might as well have just talked about suffering directly. Lol.

I think what's missing from the Cyrenaic position is the importance of suffering - how huge a part of existence it is. The Cyrenaic sees pleasure as something one goes towards. But our lived experience is nothing like this. What motivates action is suffering, we don'tmove towards, rather we are driven away. Basically, we constantly suffer, and so are in a constant striving away from it. We aren't striving towards pleasure, we're striving from suffering. We are perpetually trying to avoid sufferings.

Take eating for example. The Cyrenaic might say that eating is pleasurable (for him), and so he eats. That the sensation of taste and eating is pleasurable. But I think in reality, what we are motivated by is hunger, and something like 'lack of nice mouth sensations'. We are driven to eat, the suffering entailed by hunger, lack of mouth flavour, etc, motivates our running from it. Intellectually we might say we ate because it tasted good, or something along those lines, but this was not the case in reality. What's good about this characterization is it avoids this 'future pleasures' issue. The suffering is presently felt, and we are presently striving from it, we are perpetually motivated away from it.

I think also there's a mischaraterisation about what pleasure actually is. Seems to me the Cyrenaic (note: I've never actually read any Cyrenaic work) sees pleasure as something far more valuable or positive, or 'pleasurable' than it actually is. A kind of pollyannaism about pleasure. Take the example above, where I've written "lack of nice mouth sensations". You might argue here that "ok, the lack of nice mouth sensations is a kind of suffering we are motivated by and strive away from. But those nice mouth sensations we experience (due to striving away from it's lack, and not as the Cyreanic says; because we positively strived towards it) are actually intrinsically good."

But I'm not so sure. If the taste sensation is actually positively pleasurable (over and above a cessation of suffering, or a kind of 'flow' distraction from suffering) and therefore good, shouldn't you want to constantly sense it? I like the taste of orange juice, but I wouldn't want to constantly experience the taste. Or take bodily sensations. I know for sure if given the choice I would want to never experience bodily suffering/pains again, but would I want to constantly experience bodily pleasures? Would I want to constantly orgasm? And if not, what does that say about how pleasurable the actual sensation is? People who orgasm like 100 times a day live in hell it seems. Note that pleasure is also extremely short lived. An orgasm is like 3 seconds, one only gets 'lost in the music' for a single song, at best. Food only tastes good until it's swallowed. A heroin rush fades pretty quickly into a sort of secure numbness, which eventually becomes sickness.

I think (what we call) pleasure really consists of, is a negation in some suffering in another, a relief essentially. An 'ahhh' I'm not being pained anymore. And if you're lucky, there's what I would characterize as a kind of self-less flow experience. Where one loses oneself into the sensation, and hence forgets ones suffering. I don't think pleasure ever actually gets into a genuinely positive thing, whereas suffering is genuinely negative, it has less than zero value, in that we aren't just indifferent to it, but are motivated to avoidance. Action is fundamentally avoidance, we are always striving from some suffering or another. And what we call "pleasure" is relief from suffering, and a loss of self into sensation. And not how I believe the Cyrenaic conceives of pleasure which is of an actual positively good thing, on the opposite side of the scale as pleasure, above neutral.

An analogy for how I conceive of suffering, is imagine say a fish tank, with only a beetle in it. Now someone is holding a heat lamp above the beetle (imagine the heat lamp being held at half the depth of the fish tank). The beetle feels the heat, and is pained, and so is motivated to strive away from the heat. Note he's not motivated towards something, rather he just goes in any aimless direction so long as he avoids the suffering. If he stops striving away from the heat, the heat lamp catches up and is held directly above it. He feels like he's burning and soon dries out to a painful death. If he strives too far away from the heat, so that he goes beyond the limit of the area it heats, he doesn't know what to do with himself. Where to go? What to do? He's in an empty fish tank, there's nowhere to go and nothing to do. He becomes bored and stops moving, and the heat lamp soon catches up, motivating him to strive from it again.

How I think of pleasure is that the beetle escapes the heat from the lamp, and then loses his sense of self by getting lost in a sensation. And not say, the beetle walks towards some corner of the fishtank where some positively valuable thing is. Think of it like the shower temperature thing. Every temperature is either too hot or too cold, except that perfect temperature. Does it make sense to think of this specific temperature as being an actually above neutral value positive sensation (whereas all the others aren't)? I believe this is how the Cyrenaic sees it, the sensation being a genuine good, something which one strives towards. I think rather we strive away from the too cold, and away from the too hot, until we find the perfect trade off between the two - and it is here where we find an opportunity to 'lose ourselves' into the sensation. The feeling of the water on your back. "Ahh, that feels good." - and then one loses their self into the sensation. But not for long, body parts out of the water soon become cold, and besides you're here to clean yourself.

So to summarize this rant, there are no genuine goods, and we strive away from, rather than towards something. Other than that I agreed with your essay and found it interesting.

Also, reading this thread it seems there's some confusion over thinking the Cyrenaic (would) still believe in this idea that one 'has' or possesses beliefs. As things which sort of persist through time. I think a belief is more a sort of lived expectation, rather than some thing which one holds or possesses. The belief is itself experiential. So eg, one doesn't posses a belief that the sun will rise tomorrow, which sort of follows him round ephemerally. Rather, only when one is thinking about the next day, or future next days, one presently expects they'll be bright. It's a sort of lived expectation of future daylight. When one doesn't have this expectation (eg, when thinking about anything else), then one doesn't actually have a belief that the sun will rise tomorrow. Intellectually that's how we speak, as if we have this large set of beliefs which constantly follow us around and are there regardless of our experience, but in reality it's not the case.

From a particular reference point — Terrapin Station

But we only have one reference point, which is us here right now. We can't even know there are others.

from your conception to your death. — Terrapin Station

This is the type of thinking I am referring to, as if what one exists as is an overall timeline, or one 'has' this timeline. A linear sort of 'thing', with right now just being a particular point of that timeline. I say this timeline doesn't exist (except as a presently experienced idea).

purposes — Terrapin Station

How though? How does this work? How can I desire the sandwich over there, and then go eat it, and think nothing about the overall purpose (eg, 'leaving the world a better place than I found it') and yet that's really why I'm eating. How does this hidden purpose work? And why posit it?

OP isn't arguing against Berkeley's idealism though, and neither am I. Granted, I shouldn't have wrote "esse est percipi", as it's confusing.

The best argument against subjective idealism is "account for intersubjectivity."

If esse est percipi, then others are exhausted by your perception of them.

Because others aren't exhausted by my perception of them (proof: it is undeniable you are reading this), subjective idealism is false.

So the desire for redeeming the world (charity, scientific advancement, enlightenment) is really instrumental in getting what seems to be the underlying case, the pure desire for more existence. — schopenhauer1

Doesn't it make more sense to see the 'underlying case' in evolutionary terms though?

Because biologically speaking, what makes us continue to exist is not a desire to live, our bodies just do it when provided with what it needs. And it doesn't get what it needs by us desiring to continue to live per se, rather we have separate individual ends/desires which overall produce the outcome of continued life, but each one is a specific end in itself. As in, we don't eat, drink water, find shelter because we want to continue to exist. Rather, we continue to exist because we want to eat, drink water, find shelter. That we continue to exist as a result of this is kind of accidental. A side effect.

At the gene level there's no desire for continue existence. It's just those genes that code for proteins which increase the chance (in some way) of that gene getting copied, are the gene copies we are more likely to see in the next generation. And those genes that don't reproduce themselves, don't. It appears as if the goal of a gene is to reproduce to itself, but in reality there is no teleos.

I sympathize with Schophenaur (although I'm not scholar), but I suspect that there's merely the illusion of will, rather than a genuine will. In the same way evolution appears to have a teleos, but it's just an appearance. Think of it like natural selection for 'willing'. Things which don't strive for more existence, don't continue into the future, whereas those that do, do.

Sobriety is intoxication, alcohol sobers one up.

These are awesome questions, but there's alot of presuppositions behind them need to be unpacked, and in some cases, perhaps reworked altogether. As a first clue to where things might be badly put, recall that our sensory world is always - if the science is right - 'cross-modal'. That is, we can't separate out sight, smell, touch, movement and hearing and treat them on their own terms without doing violence to the phenomenology of perception. Perception always occurs in an integrated 'perceptual field' in which all our senses are brought to bear on a particular 'scene'. One way to think about this is to turn around the usual intuition that our senses are individual and 'additive' (perception = sight + smell + movement, etc). Rather, one begins with an integrated perceptual field from which the individual senses can be progressively distinguished (to close one's eyes is to 'subtract' sight from a more originary sensory plenum). — StreetlightX

Reminds me of how when you watch the news on TV, the voice of the person talking appears to be coming from their mouth, yet intellectually we can step back and say that the voice is actually coming from the speakers and it's an illusion that the weatherman is speaking. We can separate the image on the screen from the sound intellectually, but our normal perception is of the weatherman speaking.

So it's not quite right to think about our 'biological sensory organs' in isolation from a integrated field of living as such; nerve optics and so on are the biological mechanisms by which perception takes place, but they do not, on their own, explain perception, an account of which would need to take into account the whole developmental history of a living being in an environment in which it lives. Perception works in the service of significance, not in the service of perceiving 'things'. — StreetlightX

This is a good point. You can imagine two identical twins, born with the same 'biological mechanisms' but one's abandoned and raised by wolves and the other raised by his parents in a society, with language, education, etc. Their perceptions would differ greatly. As an example, the normal kid would perceive a jacket as something to wear for warmth, protection, and modesty - or even to be fashionable, or to attract a girlfriend. Whereas wolfboy, well I don't even know how he'd perceive it - certainly not as something to impress the ladies, and almost certainly not even as something to be worn. I can imagine he might perceive it as something which might be edible, or something to rip up and destroy, as dogs are prone to do.

Another way to approach this is to think not in terms of 'lines' where (say) vision shoots out into the world or vice versa, but in terms of a perpetual circuit in which both body and world are implicated in with respect to a life as it is lived. Perception is not a matter of registering static images on a silver plate that is the brain, it is a matter of living, of a dynamism in which significance and movement are primary to it's understanding.We do not 'model' the world 'in the brain'; we respond to it by being in it, moving through it, reacting to the significances that it presents to us. — StreetlightX

I have difficulty understanding what this actually means though. So the brain doesn't produce a miniature model of how the world is, sure. But still, what seems to be entailed by this understanding is that the brain does produce, internally, an 'integrated perceptual field'. The point being that the our bodies and the world around us is produced by a brain. Do you agree?

So, the 'significance's presented to us' are contingent upon our individual history. If my history was different, then the world around me would be perceived differently. But the world does not actually itself change depending on my specific history. So how to account for this? You'd have to say there's a single world, containing brains, and each brain produces specific 'perceptual fields' depending on that persons (or animals) history. As an example, I'm seeing a pair of shoes, as a pair of shoes (something to wear on feet, etc). But, say I was born in some strange culture with no shoes, my perception would be a lot different. But, we wouldn't to say here that in my alternative timeline the thing in the world (which I in this timeline see as shoes) has actually changed. The shoes are not 'in-itself' things to be worn on feet. That's just my interpretation of them. As in, how the world exists 'in-itself' is not dependent on my specific history. So, isn't some sort of indirect realism entailed here? Otherwise you'd have two people directly seeing the shoes in two completely different ways. How would this work?

If so, you're still in this weird position of there being two worlds. Our individual perceptual worlds produced by brains, and the wider singular world which our brains exist within. And with this position comes all these epistemic problems, and concerns about solipsism.

Or you could say that everyone with the same 'biological mechanisms' perceives the very same object. As in, it's the actual object in the external world which we see in our visual field. But depending on our history, our brains add particular meanings to the objects. You also could say all the possible meanings and 'significance's' exist out in the external world and it just depends on someone's history which of those the person perceives.

The reason for this is that we are essentially meaning-seeking beings (or rather, 'significance seeking beings'). We perceive not in order to simply see, hear and touch objects, sounds and textures (this is a very abstract way to think about things, despite it being intuitive), but in order to negotiate an environment around which to move, to avoid threats and danger, cultivate safety and food, respond to sadness or joy. In others words we 'see' meanings no less than we see 'things' — StreetlightX

Do you think that there's a real issue for the science of perception? Because we come to know about our sensory organs, and our bodies through perception. But, if 'the senses work instead to give us clues regarding how to live' then necessarily what we are perceiving is not the sensory organs/bodies which are 'prior' to the perceptions they produce. So the sensory organs and body work together to produce a sensory field of meanings and signficance, but because the bodies and sensory organs which we know about are within this very sensory field, we can't be seeing the actual 'biological mechanisms' which produced this sensory field. Again you're in this position where these two bodies. The meaningful perceived body, and whatever it is that has produced this perception - which we can't access. Science can only study the 'meaningful body'.

We do not 'model' the world 'in the brain'; we respond to it by being in it, moving through it, reacting to the significances that it presents to us. —

What do you actually mean by this? Is the world our (perceived) bodies move through, produced by a brain/sensory organs?