This is an embarrassing discussion for a philosophy forum. Pseudonym is the only one taking it seriously. I'm deeply disappointed by the tone and content on Streetlight's part (often a careful thinker). This is an uncomfortable chime in on my part, but the PC game being played has grown very tiresome and I won't be part of the silent crowd that enables a false notion of consensus.

Edit - I don't want to be unfair to mcdoodle, his posts have also been of reasonable quality here.

Could be that God shines his consciousness through all living things as experience filters so he can experience His world in an endless variety of ways. He, Himself, can't really act or prioritize because he's outside of time and loves everything.

The notion of fairness is an eternal wellspring of cognitive dissonance. Starting with the genetic lottery at birth, nothing about life is actually fair outside of a very narrow and arbitrary level of analysis.

We find ourselves in the current equilibrium of competing interests and abilities that vary across 7+ billion participants and it's a bottom-up configuration. It's not 'supposed' to be any which way and it doesn't happen to be fair.

You don't like opiates?

I enjoyed the OP and it resonated with a line of thinking I've been pursuing on my own. Try not to be too pretentious, all.

Life is complicated and you can view it through an endless variety of paradigms. This culture of victimhood and fashionable misandry is an overcorrection. And it will be looked back on as the period when we drifted too far astray in that direction, from the vantage point of wherever we'll have drifted too far next. The errors of the current age are always in our blindspot, but are easy enough to see if you take a step back and look. Misogyny as a theory of everything is only worth a yawn.

Gender is basically a template for fashion and behavior at a high level that correlates highly with biological sex. Not everybody fits the templates well, which leads to 1 of 3 reactions:
1) OK no problem
2) Let's get rid of the templates
3) Let's make a whole lot more templates

I think 3 is the least feasible.

Thanks for the input. There are so many dimensions to these simple statements. You've pointed out one that I didn't think of: men being insulted because women are excluded from the fool class in statement 2: all fools are men. It's a rather narrow view, morally speaking, because it reeks of misogyny. Anyway, thanks for looking into the problem. — TheMadFool

Statements don't just exist on their own in some objective dimension. Someone has to say them. The 2nd statement says more about the speaker - specifically that they are a misandrist. This invokes a different reaction with or without any misogyny in play.

Interesting angle. I've been thinking about identity lately because I have the sneaking suspicion it's a source of much confusion and conflict. It's generally taken for granted, so I wonder what alternative identity paradigms might look like.

I think the ethical challenge is a bit of a softball though. Utilitarian ethics, for example, have no problem with this. The reality is that there is widespread coercion in social life - that's a big part of what society is.

The statements each say something different, but the bigger difference comes from what they don't say - the undefined context.

The first one fits into a wider variety of broader views or narratives, some of which are more palatable than others (e.g. Gandalf might say that as a helpful reminder of your limitations).

The second one places a bigger emphasis on sex and implies that no women are fools. I wouldn't necessarily say this is a bigger insult, but its meaning is more narrow and likely causes a different, more specific, kind of reaction.

Trump's contribution to the US is disenchantment. We've been headed toward some Orwellian dystopia for a long time. The first step of recovery is never comfortable.

The narrative itself is one way to tell we aren't really like that.

Personally, I've found it really therapeutic to simply drop the premise that people generally speak truth. Things are exactly what they are, and that's usually quite different from what people say they are. Dissolves a lot of cognitive dissonance.

You're projecting all the sass. The point has to do with off-limit trivialities stifling broader discussion. I do understand that you don't see my point, but you've made it for me to anyone who does.

I still don't feel victimized. Not sure why you want me to be/feel victimized.

What about the hypothetical I gave. What if you had to bet on it? You'd bet on the men's team right?

I don't feel victimized at all. Don't get worked up. You're right that I don't think the assertion requires much argument to support it - it's plainly obvious to both athletes and spectators. You agreed with it yourself by acknowledging "the gap" and providing an exception where the gap was smaller than usual. Would have been a really strange argument on your part if it were most any other topic, which again is my point.

Of course it's okay to say, not true but okay for you to say. — Tiff

Insofar as generalizations are truth-apt, the claim that men are generally superior to women at sports is true. If there were a sports competition (sport to be randomly selected) between a men's team and a women's team (participants randomly selected from each population), the Vegas odds would greatly favor the men's team. People tend to be pretty honest when their money is on the line.

But I don't care that men are generally better at sports than women. It's trivially true and uninteresting. Just like everyone else, I know to tiptoe around this sort of thing as a matter of social pragmatics and I don't plan to belabor the point much longer. I just find it interesting how people respond to this sort of claim with a special arsenal of sophistry and double speak. That's the part I'm interested in. Is it because they don't regard it as a trivial? Is it that they're actually responding to something other than the claim, like the perceived motive of the claim?

That men are generally superior to women at sports. Even though you said this wasn't true I wasn't convinced you believed yourself and didn't take you seriously. That's because your exception itself (marathons) was just an instance where the gap is smaller. The gap you acknowledged is what I regard as a trivial truth.

Not everything is OK to say, no.

Anyway, I just think there's something interesting about the systematic denial of trivial truth. Symptomatic of something.

I asked whether it's OK to say it, not whether it's true.

But your position is that men are inferior to women at sports? Or that they're exactly equal? Or that the two groups cannot be compared generally?

Women are inferior to men at sports.

Is it OK to say that?

Now, in our free time we have chances for "flow" experiences (the stuff you were talking about.. funny how exercise is the best you can think of :D). — schop

You completely missed my point. Exercise is not the good stuff of life, it's one of the proper ways to "spend suffering". I consider the endorphins (short term) and increased fitness (long term) to be the general payoffs for that. But, importantly, I also suggest that the suffering aspect of exercise, should you forgo it, will rather sneakily present itself in some other way regardless. That full spectrum of boredom, among other things, is what happens when you try to avoid suffering instead of spending it.

Arguments will not convince you. Experience might. I'm really just making a general recommendation as to how you might go about gaining this insight that many antinatalist opponents (believe they) have. If laundry detergent choices are part of your suffering, your overall strategy could use some work.

Nope, don't buy that one. Please don't reward anyone.

Well, I'm with you in that I find anyone in camp 1 suspect. Suffering is a fundamental part of life. I tend to view suffering in two basic categories:

1) Suffering as currency
There is an unavoidable baseline of suffering. The more you try to avoid it, the more ubiquitous it becomes (e.g. boredom, restlessness). If you fall into the habit of avoidance, this can becomes quite pernicious. Avoidance is the wrong strategy. This baseline suffering is biological currency that can be exchanged for pleasure. Meet it head on with physical exercise, strategically directed toil, and to do good for others if you have anything left to burn. That's how you cash it out.

2) Suffering as tragedy
This is the gratuitous suffering that I'm sure we mostly agree about. This is where you find the horrors of life that give the antinatalist position any bite at all. Statistically, it's virtually inevitable that life involves some of this. It's possible to get luck or unlucky here and, on one extreme end of the spectrum, it's hard to make the case that such an unlucky life is worthwhile. That's a fuzzy line to draw and folks draw it in different places. Where you draw the line, along with your sensitivity to risk, should guide certain moral decisions like whether to have kids. Having kids is a very serious gambit. Using your own subjective threshold and risk aversion to make this decision for others is the big mis-step of antinatalism. It's simply uncompelling to them.

What's funny is there is so much hostility when it comes to questioning life itself, in a philosophy forum out of all places. It is assumed it must be good, and someone questioning should be castigated. The notion itself is not even taken seriously, yet people are willing to entertain all sorts of philosophical stances even for the sake of devil's advocate, except this one. Too close to home perhaps. Too real. Easier to deal with symbolic logic and unicorns. — schop

I think most people are sympathetic to the notion that life sucks. But, sure, it's a topic that can attract defensiveness. It's a visceral topic. However, try to also recognize your own defensiveness in these discussions. Being a broken record and refusing to engage what your opponents are actually saying can draw hostility too.

Also note that some measure of hostility may be appropriate when someone doggedly demonstrates these 2 things simultaneously:
1) a fundamental misunderstanding of how others experience life and make important decisions
and
2) that they nevertheless feel somehow suited to direct an overarching strategic existential agenda for our species.

The general tendency that procreation is good because we have procedure followed by release-valve, stimulation seems like a milktoast answer at best. — schop

Autistic version of an answer nobody has given.

There's a pretty enormous gap in these positions that you should acknowledge if you want to move past this broken record phase of argumentation:

1) Procreation is always good (basically nobody takes this position)
2) Procreation is not always bad (try to deal with this one)

I had something closer to an existential double entry accounting system in mind, but yeah the trinity might be a religious analog. I don't pretend to know any answers, but I suspect some causes and effects might come to exist simultaneously, as equilibrium.

Try love. You suffer all the time. Go suffer for other people, say for 1 month, and see how you feel. Suffering is a resource and you're spending it on the wrong stuff. You don't have a family to support, so you really are free if you have any balls.

If 2 "brute facts" co-arose from nothing, each contingent upon and sustained by the other, would they be brute facts?

I think if time were simply change, neither of us would be as interested in it as we are. Indeed, you've given a remarkably uninteresting account of it. Fair enough. If you'd like to elaborate, I'd like to consider. I think the concept includes something extra that is inextricably to do with us.

Anyway, you said you were interested in time. Would it have meant the same thing (to you) if you said you were interested in change? What is it about change that's interesting. I don't want to get too caught up in semantics, I just want to know more about the part you find interesting.

Sure, which supports my position that time is a specific type of change. Squares are rectangles, but squares and rectangles aren't the same thing.

I think words are whatever we want them to be insofar as they facilitate effective idea sharing. So, I don't like time=change because I find it limiting and maybe a touch disingenuous. Both words are useful, which hints that they aren't totally redundant. For example, how do you deal with the phrase/concept 'change over time'?

The part you're not saying anything about is the interesting part - the extent to which time is something about us. To me, that's more or less the distinction between time and change. Time is a specific category of change; changes we notice. How this mechanism of 'noticing' works, its thresholds, its limitations in either direction, seems like the key to understanding, and perhaps manipulating, time's "speed".

I think about time a lot too. Do you really think it's identical to change? If we were totally indifferent to change, would time still elapse?

Are there non-speculative metaphysics? In a nutshell, I just don't see the distinction between cause and correlation as crisply as I used to.

I have trouble explaining myself because 1) I'm not good with words and 2) I'm coming to believe that the verbal quest for truth culminates in a tip-of-the-tongue experience. The world is utterly strange and literally beyond words. I can feel that I'm making progress in understanding, but whenever I attempt to pin it down, something seems to dissipate. To say the attempt causes it to dissipate would be yet another such attempt. Thinking in terms of 'causes' is a good example of that sort of activity.

Real truth can only be held very gently. Or so it seems to me lately..

I'm with Andrewk on this. He's not merely being pedantic. I believe he has something coherent in mind, a perspective from which the concept is a distraction that just doesn't lend itself well to effective communication. That you can spin your wheels forever identifying 'causes' at any arbitrary level of scope is a symptom of dissonance between the paradigm and the world itself.

It's not that my inner world is more lucid than the external world. I'm saying I have experience (as I think most people do) with both kinds of inner states - (a)"life is obviously terrible" and (b)"everything is OK".

While experiencing (a) it feels undeniably true. If I only ever felt (a), the antinatalist arguments would be compelling. It's from the vantage point of (b) that (a) is clearly just a subset of a broader awareness (lucidity/richness) available to me.

Dreams can feel very real until you wake up. I'm wondering if Schop is stuck in a bad dream I've had before. I don't mean this in a patronizing way, like I know the truth about life's value and if you disagree you need to wake up. I'm saying the truth about life's value is fundamentally subjective and driven by your inner world, something primal and much more real than words and arguments. So, for example, I wouldn't try to convince Schop that life has value because I realize, no matter what combination of words I use, it won't take unless he already feels it.

The antinatalist argument, to the extent it's anything beyond preaching to the choir, is distastefully presumptuous about the ineffable inner worlds of others.

Schop, do you ever have days where you don't feel this way?

It's been really striking to me just how primary the 'way I feel' is. It seems to be what animates these otherwise hollow verbal exchanges. Sometimes it's obvious that life is fundamentally terrible. That seems to happen on its own from time to time, but there are some consistent ways to produce the outlook (e.g. opiate withdrawal). Anyway, for me, it's more common that I don't feel that way. And when I don't, there's something somehow more lucid about my inner world where it seems clear that the 'life is terrible' outlook is the dream to wake up from rather than vice versa.

The arguments, logic, words, are just byproducts. My view is that the anti-natalist simply overextends language beyond its context. The arguments are hollow when that's not your inner experience. You are doomed to only ever preach to the choir.

'everything' is a word.

Now, I haven't given my critique, I am answering your questions as if self-actualization is a reason to have children. I will just start off with the idea that why give a new person (inevitable) burdens to overcome, especially if achievement of the supposed ultimate goal (of some elusive self-actualization) is not achievable for many? — schopenhauer1

You're looking for someone to make the case that we should create more people purely for their own good, that good being the fuzzy notion of self-actualization. I think the problem is that this is not a position many (any?) people hold.