I think you can refute the idea that existence is harm. For example say someone cures cancer then that existence alleviated a lot of harm.

I am an antinatalist but I am always unconvinced by Benatars approach.

He seems to be telling everyone their lives are terrible.

He also seems to be ruling out an afterlife and to be coming from a reductive materialist atheist position.

I feel that punishment comes from peoples fear including a fear of lacking control in an uncertain world. People attempt to make the world seem more just by inventing a system of values and justice to validate their actions and beliefs.

I believe that it is pathological and artificial.

Some of it has been informed by religion and superstition and enforced by those with the most power to justify their power or simply hold onto it.

It might also come from the just world fallacy and the fundamental attribution error where people subconsciously believe life is fair and people are to blame when things go wrong.

I do think people can be malicious can be to blame but I still don't want to harm another person as retribution.

Punishment seems to spring from anger to me.

I think that an atoms behaviour is not the same as my behaviour when I move my arm.

I believe in freewill and so when I decide to move my arm the atoms have to move. Otherwise who decides what an entity does?

Also if I am moulding clay to make a jar I think my will is what causes the clay to take a particular shape.

This makes me think will is another aspect of consciousness where even if you are paralysed you can express a desire or preference for a certain course of action.

Human civilisation and innovation to me is testament to the power of human desire and will.

I don't see any reason to grant subject to experience status to everything.

How would you define a thing in this case? Is every atom in my body having seperate experiences to me?

Experiences are usually linked to a perceptual mechanism like eyes and ears and the nerves on the skin for touch so it is not clear how a rock could have an experience.

On a dualist perspective souls or minds interact with the brain to receive sensory data. It is not clear where experience could be had without nervous systems.

I don't think that interactions between inanimate objects need to or do invoke subjectivity.

You claim that there is no afterlife.

How do you know that?

Your position can be refuted if any of your various premises are false.

To me meaning is more important than pleasure and I don't value meaningless pain or meaningless pleasure.

I think that just mindlessly pursuing pleasure or pain minimisation is problematic. And indeed trying to minimise pain has led some to an extinctionist position because there is so much of it to tackle that it seems to outweigh pleasure.

Pleasure is not synonymous with good and can be insatiable and destructive.

I think the only circumstance I might create a child in is if life was provably deeply meaningful.

The most neglected and fundamental aspect of consciousness is the experiencer/observer/self, the thing being subject to experience. I don't think consciousness can exist without a subject and so I think that limits what kind of things could be conscious.

Entities with perceptual apparatus such as eyes and ears seem more plausible candidates for being conscious. Some things only exist in consciousness such as pain because it doesn't make sense to say pain is existent with no one conscious of it.

At this stage I don't think we know anything about consciousness and are groping in the dark.

Some people would say that good and bad don't refer to anything. Likewise with right and wrong.

That seems to be the only source of explanation.. Thought

You mentioned that it was widely believed that infants operated with dumb association mechanisms. Why did people believe this? These kind of assertions seem arbitrary.

I don't think it possible to know what is happening in a pre verbal infants mind. But by observing their behaviour you can try and assess what they know in a crude way.

I have had my own varied experience with the mental health services in the UK. After decades of having problems I was diagnosed with aspergers two years ago. My experience suggests to me that diagnosis in psychiatry and psychology is poor and I encountered all sorts of prejudice such as being criticised for not making eye contact which it turns out is a symptom of autism.

I would have thought with better theories of mind we would have less mental health problems.

I didn't say psychology was easy but rather that we do it all the time to understand and negotiate with other people.

Academic Psychology has faced a replication crisis so a lot of its findings are under question.

If people have prejudices and false beliefs about other people than I am sure they will be surprised by psychology findings.

Psychologists have claimed that babies are egocentric and made lots of other negative and limiting assertions about them and are then surprised to find their assertions undermined.

I think assertions about mechanisms in the brain underlying behaviour and attitudes is not falsifiable. It is rather ad hoc. The final datum of psychology appears to be verbal testimony.

Psychology seems to have negative and or shallow assumptions about people.

When I interact with a child I have no assumptions. I take people as I find them.

I did a degree in psychology myself and one thing I noticed is the naive assumptions. Humans are too complex to be reduced to simple paradigms and laws.

Personal testimony about mental states is problematic and this also effects correlating self reports with brain states.

For example there is lying and exaggeration. How can we prove that someone is not lying or exaggerating about a mental state? A similar problem comes with trying to accurately describe ones own mental states.

Then there is the issue of reports of the supernatural and false beliefs. People including myself are skeptical about claims people make concerning things like seeing ghosts, hearing gods voice, miracles, psychic abilities and so on. But can we refute them? Skepticism about mental states can be arbitrary.

The most reliable criminal conviction would be one where there's fingerprints, CCTV footage, DNA and so on.

I think indirect evidence gets more reliable when the evidence base, predictive power and explanatory scope becomes more objective.

Neuroscience studies particularly around brain damage are interesting in that they appear to show that mental faculties are more diverse than we imagined. For instance memory used to be considered one thing by some people. Now we have seen that people can retain one type and lose another. So people have weird pathologies where they can't name faces or in another instance can't name living things or where they can learn something but not recall the learning process etc.

But there are so many different studies and there has been a replication crisis that it is hard to process the data.

I think the main phenomena to be explained is experience/awareness the subject/centre of perception and mental representations (language/beliefs/memory).

(This is just general comments from me thinking aloud)

It seems to me that all humans are psychologists and manage to understand other people with varying degrees of success but enough to interact usefully.

People learn about other people though interactions, conversation and analogy to ones own mental states but I am not convinced psychology has found out anything more profound than what we all can through experience.

I think conversation is very informative and can be analysed for content that expresses private or mental information.

There is the external versus internal problem though. One picture, especially in cognitive theory, is that everything is a mental representation and we have no direct access to an external world.

So it is unclear how much of reality has a mental component.

It seems a big part of understanding language is through analogy to ones own experiences.

I think this attitude of only relying on the scientific method leads to a unrealistic and unproductive and unjustified dismissal or reductive attitude to personal testimony.

If you think the scientific method is limited then you have to come up with another explanatory framework.

My experience with my brother exposed me to peoples misconceptions about other peoples feelings and the completely differing degrees of coping mechanisms.

Discussion about experiences is bound to be anecdotal . Hence the problem.

I think we gradually come to have mental state concepts through experience but also through literature or stories and other peoples testimony.

For example I don't remember the word consciousness being used or discussed throughout my whole childhood. Studying philosophy of mind exposed me to new concepts but all of them linguistic or conceptual as opposed to referring directly to transparent mental states.

If someone tells me they have a headache I cannot experience it with them.

I was involved in the care of my severely ill brother for many years who ended up paralysed. I have no idea what that was like for hi m. I just had to listen to him and make no assertions about how he felt.

You can't compare your headache with someone else's. Also like the Mary's room scenario she couldn't know what red looked like by just trying to imagine it.

I think that not defining something accurately means you are not likely to be explaining or exploring the right thing.

This is particularly relevant in psychology and philosophy of mind but also in any field with where there is not an external object to hang a definition onto including social theory and politics.

How are you defining studied?

I reflect on my mental states but so far I don't know what they are.

Maybe we can explore the language we use to define them?

I think that any theory is going to rely on introspection and personal analysis of ones own mental states. In comparison I don't think a theory of something like cancer needs any introspection.

Pressed enter by accident.

We have beliefs about other peoples minds but we can't directly compare mental states.

I think reliance on introspection or phenomenology makes it hard to define mental states.

The less visible a phenomenon is the harder it is to describe it seems. For example we can define a horse in a basic way based on very distinct features or family resemblances. At the level of it's cells we need a microscope then at the atomic level we have quantum theory weirdness and math.

A book and a game of hockey have a coherent ending not an arbitrary one.

I think there would have to be some reason to end life prematurely rather than await its inevitable cessation. What would be the reason for ending life wilfully?

I think there is a difference between maintaining yourself as a means of preventing pain or pursuing basic pleasure as opposed to giving a specific reason for prolonging and creating life.

Pain and pleasure are probably more relevant to the maintainance of life than reason.
Reason probably can't resolve the dilemma.

I think personal extinction is inevitable unless there is an afterlife. I have asked in the past why people care about a future they won't be in or have access to after they die.

For example I don't think any of Hitler's ancestors could have predicted his impact on the world just like no one really knows what their future impact will be.

But as an agnostic about meaning and the afterlife I cannot categorically and honestly rule out some kind of underlying purpose to reaIity.

But I think we shouldn't resort to platitudes or make things up. It seems the current pandemic is shaking up perspectives though.

I think fear of death is rational.

You might fear death ending your goals and pleasures prematurely.

You might see it as negating your efforts.

You might be worried about a bad afterlife or just the ending of yourself.

You might fear a painful or protracted death.

But as a general agnostic I can't say I know what my death will entail.

If you enjoy any aspect of life then that is reason to live.

Another is whether you should create new life if you think life is fundamentally pointless.

I think general agnosticism is a strong position where you try and avoid making false judgements by over confidence.

But I think it is possible that life is terribly meaningless and that we shouldn't try and mitigate that conclusion by sentiment or vagueness.

I do find it hard to understand peoples rational motivations because life is so complex that it seems seems very hard to evaluate what people ought to believe.

I think a problem with a lack of meaning is that it makes neither living or dying meaningful.

I am agnostic about whether life has meaning so I can't rule it out.

I do feel like philosophers are defeatist though and settle for a weak conclusion rather than examing the hard conclusions of a stance.

whereas in the East it's much easier -- due to their very different traditional ontologies. — Xtrix

Apparently Hindus believe in the soul/self but Buddhists don't but the issue is constantly debated in their histories. I don't see it as a resolved issue in those cultures.

There is pain, yes. There are sensations. There are thoughts. There are sights and sounds. There are all kinds of phenomena in the world. To attach a "I," "me," mine," "you," etc., to it is tricky. — Xtrix

I am not attaching anything to these things I am saying they don't make sense without an experiencer to be subject to them.

It is quite easy to imagine a tree continuing to exist without being observed but I don't see how things like pain and language and dreams can continue to exist with out someone to have them as experiences. I have also recently mentioned the binding problem and the issue of unified perceptions.

Either one person combines sensory input and ideas to see an object or scene, or several people communicate with each other to build up a picture. But then in the latter scenario each individual still needs to unify all the information for a coherent perception.

I was recently thinking about the issue of whether two things can exist in exactly the same place at the same time (and even found a thread on here about it).

It seems to me it must be a fundamental fact or constraint and the law of identity that at some stage, such as even the atomic level, that there are individual things.
Just in order to identify any entity and to have any structure. For example a bike has several distinct structures which allow it to function. And so I have no problem with the concept of distinct entities. And therefore why shouldn't the self work like this?

So I don't think we all merge into one universal consciousness.

I agree, I do not see much point in living in that state all the time, or much time at all. That doesn't mean it isn't useful at all though. — DingoJones

Yes but the point is that if we really had no self or a fractured self we would be less functional. And If I am right then that makes the self indispensable.

This is a general point. The self unifies perceptions and this is related to the so called "Binding Problem. The brain processes input from the nervous system in different places but we have a coherent unified perception. Somehow brain processes and inputs (or something else) interact in such a way as to create a coherent gestalt (whole). This also lead to the problem of homunculi.

I think some people are motivated to and illusionist or reductive explanation to preserve materialism but I don't see the need to deny things existence to preserve an ideology and I am not defending the self for ideological reasons.

I do not know what causes me to have a self but I know it exists for various reasons. You can know something exists without being able to give an account of its constituents.

I think it has the same status as consciousness which we know exists but can't explain or model.

Saying the self is fractured or a composite is not the same as saying no self. But I have compelling evidence for my self about it's continuance.

For example every time I meet family they recognize me and reaffirm that I am the same person.
The genes in my body and my finger prints are unique.

There are photo albums with me in at different stages in my life. When I wake up after sleeping I have no confusion about who I am I can validate my memories by things like visiting the house I grew up and looking at examination statistics. And I can't swap bodies and become someone else.

So this level of continuity is sufficient for me to believe I am a continuous entity.

But as I have been saying the main issue is who has experiences and perceptions. Consciousness is solipsistic in a sense that we can't get outside of what to be truly objective.

In other words, the "self" is a useful idea with practical utility. But does that warrant the promotion of the "self" to the status of ontological primacy? — sime

I have given my reasons for the necessity of the self for perception, language and experience and memory.

My example of amnesia and dementia is is responding to the idea we should try and minimize the self. And these are examples of the confusion caused by having one's identity compromised.

Meditation may help someone deal with pain (likewise hypnosis) but it is not a permanent state to function in.

Ironically Buddhists have been accused of being selfish for sitting around meditating and even begging to support this lifestyle whilst lots of people need help.