No arguments as expected.

So no arguments from you? As expected.

You are not entertainment you are frightening reality. Your "support" for the Palestinians is highly prejudice, completely unbeneficial to them and prolonging the conflict by your hysterical clearly ideological caricature of the conflict.

Any death caused by Israel is murder but firing 1,500 rockets arbitrarily into another country is self defence. Way to redefine reality.

Even The Quran acknowledges the existence of Israel and the Jews. They are not colonialists. They are the most victimised people in history forced to live in a diaspora until now and now facing hate from left right and centre.

The only reason not to support Israel is Anti-Semitism.

And by the way this is one of the least lethal conflicts in History. Casualties are dwarfed by the war in Syria, in the Congo etc.

Complete and utter lies. Shame on you!

First of all stop stealing more land. — Manuel

"Property is theft"

People In Gaza have deliberately had large Families to try and outnumber the Jews. That is a fact. That is child abuse. Land is a limited resource and it has been deliberately over populated inevitably leading to conflict.

Is that your idea of an argument?

This what UAE official has to say on the conflict:

https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/international/middle-east/1621075141-report-uae-demands-hamas-stop-rockets-attacks-or-face-halt-in-investments

"If Hamas does not commit to complete calm, it is dooming the residents of the Strip to a life of suffering. Its leaders must understand that their policies are first and foremost hurting the people of Gaza.”

That girl is an actress and you are calling for the extinction of Israel.

I am a mixed race Brit. I support Israel 1000%

Countries are fictional human inventions created by force. The Arab-Israeli conflict shows what happens when people refuse to acknowledge a countries validity. You can only resolve a countries identity through force and survival of the fittest.

And finally parents are the only cause of a child's suffering. No one can blame anyone else for a parent having a child in a war zone.

No one exists in the future. — Andrew4Handel

I think death is one of the main reasons not to have children. I believe it to be the one unavoidable harm and death appears to make life pointless which ends all your aspirations and undoes whatever you have done.

People use terms like "saving lives" to describe things like cancer treatment but I refer to them as prolonging life because you can't save anyones life from inevitable death.

I am somewhat frightened of dying and like Ernest Becker I think a subconscious fear of death is a key motivator rather than enjoyment of life.

do we care about the future or not? — Xtrix

Where are you going to be in the future? One hundred years from now?

No one exists in the future.

I think the question as of why did you something is very interesting.

For example you could say "why did you drink that water?" If the person responds "because I was thirsty" that would satisfy your question.

I think that I do a lot of things to make me feel good. I think this kind of hedonsistic, self-protective motive is somehwat understandable and logical.

The problem is using other people for pleausre. I cannot force someone I am attracted to to be my partner/lover It is only in having children that you are permitted to exploit someone else to fulfill your desires with limited protest.

What is happening now due to fertility technology is that people do not need to be in a consensual relationship to create a child.

I feel that doing something without a good reason or doing something for a bad reason is nihilistic.

For example my parents are religious and I grew up in a fundamentalist hell and damnation household.

I left Christianity at 17 and discovered biblical contradiction in my early 20's. I feel my parents brought us up in a cult based on false beliefs. I think (as I am trying to pursue in another thread) that it is possible to critique peoples beliefs and reasons and find them wanting or problematic.

What I think is nihilistic is the thought that humans are wandering around living based on false beliefs, unconcerned, when their lives are therefore meaningless. The meaning is just an illusion they have created but is falsified under examination.

The only thing I can think of that might make me consider creating a child is if life had a meaning and purpose. Even then I would balk at causing suffering to another person.

A reason I oppose religion is because I think it is demonstrably false. Most moderate religious people no longer claim that religion is infallible because they know that that is a dishoenst or unsustainable position.

I don't think we should humour any beliefs that are harmful.

I think a moment's reflection will make clear to you that it is not mere belief in truth and authenticity, but caring about truth and authenticity. — unenlightened

I don't see the problem here.

In order to belive in truth and authenticity you have to believe that they are valid concepts.

If you don't care about them then that suggests something like psychopathy or ulterior motives.

The reason we have concepts like "pseudoscience" is to try and prevent science being undermined by fallacy. Why should science be protected from fallacy and not any other system of belief/thought?

I think there are a lot of reasons not to have children that are all compelling.

For example:
The Holocaist ( one of my main reasons for not having children if not the top reason).
The Transatlantic slave trade. Slavery.
9/11.
The Rwandan genocide
Multiple scelrosis (my older brother had primary progressive MS and died recently 2019 in his late 40's completely paralysed unable to eat, drink or talk after 25 years of illness)
Anxiety, depression, suicide and autism. (all my own experince.)
Cancer and HIV
ISIS Homophobia
Gendercide/misogyny/the oppression and persecution of women.
Two world wars.
and I could go on.

So I think a reason to create a child would have to be really really compelling to mitigate all this.

If you bring attention to all these facts you are considered "negative" If you ignore it all you are heroically optimistic.

I think that the things we enjoy do not make us want have children.

No pleasurable Experience I have had has made that think I must have children.

I think that the reason people have children is largely cultural/social.

The worst scenario is that people have children to validate themselves.

They want to share what they have found, and feel guilty keeping it all to themselves. — James Riley

My guilt is that what I enjoy is clearly created by mass exploitation and inequality.

I think your concept of sharing is great but with billions of humans existing now there is no danger of things not being shared. At the same time people have different preferences so sharing something does not ensure the person who recieves the share will appreciate it.

I have a lot of minority preferences such as baroque music and philosophy also am gay and throughout my life I have had to accept that I am in minority in many ways.

I think people are propogating majority preferences as opposed to propogating a diverse enjoyment of a multifaceted reality.

I think children are on average lovely.

But childhood is the smallest proportion of life.

People talk about wanting to have a baby or child but not about wanting to have an adult or adopt an adult. But your children are all these adults.

I would prefer to make an existing human happy rather than creating another billionth human to make them happy.

Here is a claim by Richard Dawkins

"“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”

One thing that is definitely a harm for all life is death.

No one knows what happens after we die. In the Christian theology I grew up with you were either a born again Christian or you would spend an eternity in hell. But no one knows a) what their death will be like or b) what happens after

The pronatalist's on here are Clearly in denial about the extent of suffering and their involvement in it.

No one should have to suffer to keep the species going.

On the issue of enforceability. In the UK where I live the majority of crimes go unsolved.

That is a classic example of how the laws don't enforce themselves and can have no consequences as opposed to the example of driving on the wrong side of the road.

I really don't understand how these are foundational or prior to a society? — unenlightened

Those two statements weren't supposed to be paired.

The first point I was making that statements like "I own this house" are fictional or "Child abuse is wrong" are fictional. There is not a metaphysical or ontological reality behind these claims. But they may be pragmatically useful.

The other point of about" foundations" I referenced in relation to the Israel/Arab conflict. There is not an agreement about who deserves to live on the land. They haven't developed a legitimacy basis to found a stable society on so they are in perpetual conflict.

It is not a smooth transition to adapt to new circumstances but an ongoing conflict. If there were objective facts about what made a just/valid society there would have been no need for these conflicts.

However the fictionalist claim is that certain things we talk about are fictions not about whether they can be effective or pragmatically useful or not. Religion has been an effective social force despite that I think it is none of it true.

I think conflicts like the Israeli/Palestinian one are going to be difficult to resolve because of the problematic status of claims concerning countries and ownership.

When a country or area like that region has not had autonomy(The crusades/Ottoman empire etc) and been the centre of disputes it has not inherited a stable identity.

Other countries have had wars over the centuries to establish their boundaries and now we take those boundaries for granted. Now major countries have large armies and even nuclear weapons to enforce boundary and nation status claims.

The whole panalopy of laws and military assets is the elaborate machinery of enforcement of social/national claims to force compliance to the tests doctrines or beliefs.

Try driving on the wrong side of the road and feel the genuine force. — unenlightened

I think you are conflating rules that people chose to obey as opposed to rules people feel obliged to obey.

I don't agree that rule like road laws are inevitable especially since cars are very modern historical development.

The invention of the motorcar made some kind of pragmatic road regulations inevitable. In this sense social structures are going to emerge once people develop a society but not because they are justified.

To make a crude analogy say someone invented a robot that came out at 7 at night and started killing people. In this scenario it would be advisable not to leave your house at 7 pm. That rule has only come about by an absurd decision to make a killer robot.

But anyhow I am not referring to pragmatic rules we chose to follow out of self interest but linguistic statements such as "You ought pay taxes" "Theft is wrong" "I own this house" "This is my country".

This is about foundational premises before your start creating your society.

The Greek answer to the question was to say that each thing has a function, and "good" merely means fulfilling this function. — Garth

Apparently evolution has undermined function talk and teleology.

In evolutionary theory it is easy to explain behaviour as simply roundabout ways to encourage people to be fit and spread their genes.

If this evolutionary model is correct it would probably entail that whatever justification we give for our actions they are just serving the mindless survival of genes.

This entry distinguishes between Linguistic and Ontological fictionalism.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fictionalism/

I would class myself as a linguistic fictionalist. I would not make the ontological claim that all abstract claims, concepts and beliefs are fictional.

I am skeptical about the basis of certain claims but agnostic about how much of discourse reflects the nature of reality.

So for instance I think moral claims need a realm of authority beyond anything we have at the moment from religion or science. I suppose moral claims have to exist in a non natural realm because nature is brutal and amoral. So I think nature does not provide moral ought's.

I think a lot of claims have been propped up by God in the past (Children obey your parents). That is mentioned in the Stanford article in reference to Voltaire saying “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”

This forum has rules that are necessary to its being a place of discussion and not full of thoughtless rubbish. If you think they are based on false beliefs, try a site where they do not have them and compare. — unenlightened

The difference between this forum and life or society is that we choose to come here and accept the rules. We are imposing the rules on ourselves to achieve the aims we want.

This forum could have a different set of rules and no moderation. There are a variety of forums that allow people to express themselves in different ways.

This reminds of the Trump Twitter ban. Banning him earlier would have probably been more beneficial to everyone but for reasons only they can know they allowed a lot of prior inflammatory behaviour.

I don't think anyone is entitled to go on twitter or on this forum it is a negotiation and a fluctuation of values and attitudes.

I think the apparent need for rules is an interesting point. Needing structure and rules does not mean these rules are not invented and without genuine force.

The fact that views on here can be and are challenged means the forum is already accepting that no persons opinions are absolute and unquestionable.

And wouldn’t that measure of usefulness be equally a basis to decide that some are better or worse than others, more right or wrong? — Pfhorrest

It depends what you mean? Useful to whom. Why should usefulness to one set of desires take precedence over usefulness to another set of desires?

The impression I get from scientists is that they they have discovered laws that are a fundamental basis for reality and not just something pragmatic.

I think to make pragmatic laws they should be based on an acknowledgement that the rules are fictional and instrumental because I think following made up rules without acknowledging them as such is a kind of nihilism.

We are here now with a couple of billion people on earth. The more interesting question to me is where do we go from here?

I'd say at this point there is no way back(...) — ChatteringMonkey

It depends what you mean by going back. Environmentalist would like to see a reduction in the human population and sustainable and more ecologically integrated ways of functioning.

I think where ever we should go should probably guided by reason and exposing and exploring fictions is part of that process.

Well I don't know what gravity is for either. Taxes are government collecting money from people. Schools are collective child-minding facilities. Gravity is stuff tending to fall down, law is societies regulate their relations. — unenlightened

The point is that gravity will it impose itself on you but social structures are imposed by other people based on what appears to be false beliefs and not by regularities and restrictions found in nature..

What motivates the creation of social structures is what is not objective.

It could be that there are no laws of physics and that is an illusion which would feed into a complete nihilism. What I want to stress is the non factual, unjustified nature of social claims that influence behaviour.

It is different also than fictionalism about maths and numbers because maths is not making value claims. To me maths is a set of axioms and the application of logic to discover patterns that does not need to rely on absolutism.

Societies have been structured around value claims which with the support of law are said to justify peoples and nations actions.

This question should be aimed at parents.

Why create a life? What makes that life necessary to create?

So if you advocate for fictionalism, then you're also advocating for nihilism? — Wayfarer

It depends what nihilism means. Personally I have found no meaning out of life. But the nature of meaning is a huge topic. If people kill themselves does that mean they felt life was not meaningful?

Is genocide meaningful or nihilistic?

Do physical laws amount to meaning?

Is the meaning of words special? (I think the meaning of words is an indisputable case of meaning)(We convey information to one another) (Yet language is a mysterious area where these kinds of symbolic representations are not understood.)

No, reason didn't tell us that. David Hume did. — Wayfarer

But he used reason. I think his formulation is logical and logic is a key postulate of reason.

That would depend on how high you set the bar, right? If you expect a society of saints, then yes that won't work. But on smaller scales and for less utopian goals there does seem to be some utility. For instance, I think moms can be successful in teaching Johnny not to hit his little sister. — ChatteringMonkey

I can use the example of veganism here.

The impression vegans give is that humans are the main source of animal suffering. However in the wild animals are eaten alive. Most deer starve to death and there are no old persons homes for animals.

Nature has been presented like a kind of Disney story.

I don't think it is possible to take the death, predation and starvation out of nature and still have life. If no one died the world would soon become over populated. Dying organisms are part of the cycle of life.

Some people would argue we should be just like nature (survival of the fittest?) and not try to transcend it. Are our attempts to control or thwart nature sustainable or psychologically healthy? I think our current era of prosperity (which is not available to many people) is ahistoric and we have to have faith that it is sustainable.

Aren't you having your cake and eating it too here? The idea that you need a justification to compel other people is a fictional ought too if you apply fictionalism consistently. So this seems like a problem to me, because if you believe that 1) no objective morality exists and 2) justification in objective morality is necessary to compel people to behave in a certain way, you are 3) effectively ruling out the possibly of morality from the start. — ChatteringMonkey

I have an intuition that some things are good and somethings are bad. I don't know where this comes from and I don't know how accurate it is.

I think if we concede that state of affairs "A" is better or preferable than state of affairs "B" we can aspire towards state "A". I don't think this is morality however in the sense that medicine is not usually coined in terms of morality but rather just an improvement in well being and medicine seems to rely on scientific discoveries about the best functioning of a body.

I think moral scepticism/nihilism is simply challenging the truth value of moral claims not claiming there is no preferable state of affairs.

But then we have the problem of teleology. The human body and its organs seem to have goals such as the heart pumping blood around the body. You could hypothetical have a healthy human body regardless of the preferences of the individual but social norms do not appear to have any kind of teleology like this to follow.

Another problem I have with morality and utopian or utilitarian attempts to improve society is that I think they are bound to fail. So I think it is impossible to not be morally contradictory/hypocritical and impossible to create a non exploitative society. If humans are just a another part of nature then we see that nature appears inherently flawed and not something we can transcend.

However I am interested in what society would look like if we looked at claims outside of the natural science as weak, contestable and pragmatic.

I think science claims that its laws are descriptive rather than prescriptive. Do you think one could regard social rules in the same way? "This is how banks, courts, neighbourhoods function, and this is how those things fall apart..." — unenlightened

I thought that the point of a physical law was that you could not break it because no exceptions to the rule have been found so it is self enforcing.

It is a description but a description of something that is self enforcing and a supposed limitation.

I think there are many ways you could describe social institutions and how they work

For example you could claim tax laws are made to benefit the wealthy or that schools intend to indoctrinate children. In this sense there seems to be an intention or motive behind creating social structures and this can be and is challenged.

I don't think you can necessarily give an objective description of social structures and norms.
So someone may say tax laws are there for the equal redistribution of wealth and schools intend to enlighten people. Some people claim taxes are theft. In this sense it is a fluctuating, contested dynamic.