Anybody play no mans sky?

If so does it live up to the hype mill? — m-theory

lol no man's sky sucks big time. Go with star citizen.

Is it ethical to use embryonic stem cells to cure diseases? Which of these stem cell types are best for therapeutic usage? Embryos don't have emotions or any life experiences, should it really be considered as unethical using their stem cells have many benefits while curing diseases? — verbena

Yes, it is perfectly acceptable to use embryonic stem cells to cure diseases. To view it as wrong is to place more value on a someone who doesn't even exist than a fully-fledged person who is suffering. In other words, the mere idea of a future person is not important, unless of course this person is going to exist and suffer themselves.

In my view, it all comes down the instrumentality, i.e. the harmful utilization of other sentients for the selfish benefit of others. An embryo is not a person and thus cannot be instrumentalized. Nor is the person the embryo is set to become existent yet. No crystal ball predictive magic shit here; focus on the here-and-now, the people who actually exist and who are actually suffering.

Ethics in a world like ours should be focused on janitorial clean-up duty; figuring out ways we can clean up the mess we're and with the least amount of harm-trangressions as possible. If we end up maximizing happiness and becoming virtuous sages along the way, cool, whatever, but that shouldn't be our goal. So it's not surprising when I dismiss the potential future good life of a person as irrelevant.

Knights of the Old Republic I and II
Jedi Knight series
Star Wars Battlefront I, II, and the mediocre DICE remake
Republic Commando
Age of Empires and Age of Mythology
Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds
Star Wars: The Old Republic
Portal I and II
TES V: Skyrim
Deus Ex
Witcher 3
War Thunder
Insurgency
Chivalry

PC Master Race

Why is this reality apparent as opposed to other possible worlds? — Question

Why not?

From this, several questions can be raised:

• Is a happy slave still a slave?
• Can slavery ever be good for someone? Is manipulation always bad in-itself?
• Do the ends of desire-enslavement (pleasure) justify the manipulative nature of desire?
• Can sentients (desire-slaves) ever be seen as positive contributions to the value of a world, or
• Are sentients always a liability?
• Is pleasure ever an impersonal good, or is it restricted as a personal good?
• How does the feeling of power affect our views on desire-slavery? (i.e. "I can do this!" rather than "I must do this!")
• Is pleasure still a good if it has only been obtained by the addition of bad (discomfort), or does the uncomfortable process of obtaining the good invalidate the good as truly good?
• If there is no alternative to existence as a sentient other than by desire-enslavement, should we embrace this as an acceptance of our fate and essence, or should we reject it?

Pleasure, evolutionarily, seems strongly correlated with survival and procreation necessities. We achieve pleasure by eating, by exploring (and engaging in concomitant exercise), by sexual activities, in the wake (if not the midst) of significant adrenaline releases, etc. — Terrapin Station

I agree that we could not have "made it" if evolution had programmed us to live in misery our entire lives. We would have needed to feel positive and up-beat at times. So although nature is mostly bloody, tooth and nail, it also produced the capacity to feel happy or content as a means of making sure nobody goes crazy. Again, though, this is basically manipulation (by our genes): the focus isn't on our welfare per se, but rather on keeping our welfare up to a certain minimum standard so that we can effectively spread our genes.

Pain warrants change, while pleasure itself changes. Both motivate action. That is why life is structurally manipulative: the bad is guaranteed and the good only comes about by experiencing bad things. In any case, evolution has programmed most animals to be slightly anxious all the time.

It would be better, at least from my standpoint, to just use the terms "pleasure", "wants", and "needs" rather than "desire" -- especially as your account of desire seems to somehow exclude emotion. — Moliere

Yes, I would agree that moods have a very important place here. Moods can essentially over-ride brute hedonic calculus. If you are truly happy, then aches and pains don't really matter. It's all worth it.

The question remains, however: is it still manipulative to experience these pains? Are these pains still bad even though you don't care about them?

Further, "harm" is already a word bound up in the logic of desire, no? It's not like I have my desires over here which manipulate me in the middle to go to the harms over there. I want to avoid harms. And these are the things which I need to avoid. — Moliere

True, this is why I definitely see a difference between the experience and the process of obtainment of this experience. However I would say that we always want to avoid harm, while we don't always want to obtain pleasure because the costs (pain) may be too high.

But your terminology of "slave" is only relative to some sort of demi-god-like character, because it is based on a freedom that is not only unattainable, but could reasonably be interpreted as some kind of super- or post-human freedom. You seem to believe that we could only be free and not a slave if we were to act out of something other from desire. — Moliere

Well I suppose this is where cosmic metaphysics might start to come into play. If we can't actually conceive of someone as not being a slave to their will, then perhaps it is actually the case that the will is metaphysically superior than the do.

At any rate, desires aren't manipulating us. It's the self working on itself. Maybe it all comes from not enough love. And by the time we grasp that, we've gone a long way chasing our tails down the highway. — Bitter Crank

As Schopenhauer said, a man can do as he wills but he cannot will what he wills. If he didn't have a desire to get x, would the man still consent to go through all the pains of the journey? That's manipulative, even if the pay-off is "worth it".

We always have an aversion to pain. We don't always have a desire for truly pleasurable experiences, because having these experiences may cause us much pain.

Indeed. Instrumentality. Why bring in more people in order to need in the first place? How do you think absurdity fits into the picture? Specifically, the idea that we must endure each day finding ways to fulfill desires, day in and day out. — schopenhauer1

I continually flip-flop between believing that adding additional happy people improves the world to believing that addition of happy people does not change the overall value of the world.

In either case there must be an answer to the question: is there anything wrong with the existence of happy people? As I said to Moliere above, a happy slave is still a slave. Does this change anything?

The flip-flopping emerges when you start to compare authenticity with brute hedonic experience. Both aforementioned positions have their pros and cons - the former being logical but also difficult to swallow while the latter is more relaxed but also rather ad hoc.

Think of fear. Where would that fit in your schema? I imagine that we'd posit that it is a pain, and to relieve pain is a kind of pleasure. But I would say this is to misunderstand fear. Fear is neither a need nor a want, and it can vary in intensity so that it is more pressing than either needs or wants. Yet I would classify it as a desire, though it is unrelated to pleasure per se (though I do believe there is a pleasure in a continued state of non-pain -- that is a specific kind of pleasure, but I wouldn't define fear along the lines of this pleasure-pain) — Moliere

I would say that fear is an negative emotion that motivates a desire-creation that further motivates action. Fear makes us uncomfortable. So basically all desires are spawned from the instantiation of a negative experience. The insidious part about all this is that positive experiences, although being positive, will always promote a negative experience.

But this is somewhat grammatical. I tend to think of desire in fairly wide terms -- and I also tend to believe that the satisfaction of desire is somewhat illusory, that there is no lack which is being filled in the pursuit of desire. I would say that 'filling a lack' is more characteristic of our needs than desires, as a whole. (food, shelter, sex -- the craving returns, but they are satisfiable too, unlike many of our desires) — Moliere

The point I was getting at was that the requirement to fulfill desires, however illusory this satisfaction is, manipulates us into harming ourselves.

As such, a concept of freedom which denies desire is literally a super-human concept. It may in some sense be coherent and even make sense for super-human beings. But not human beings. (and, I'd hazard, that we posit it as we, as human beings, often have the desire to be more than what we are) — Moliere

Yeah, it seems related to the paradox of desire. The point being, however, is that a happy slave is still a slave.

Truthmakers are what make statements true, whereas justifications are what make asserting a statement justified. — Michael

Yet what else could make a statement justified if not that it is true in virtue of a truthmaker?

Sartre's metaphysics, at least from what I have read from primary and secondary sources, is actually kind of shallow. It's rooted more in phenomenological observations rather than holism. As such, it seems that Sartre was more focused on what it meant to be a human being from a phenomenological point of view rather than what it meant to be a human being from the biological point of view. It's also influenced by the cultural situation at the time - the world was forever changed and unstable and nobody really know what the fuck was going on or where we were going as a species or even who they were as a person.

From the biological point of view, humans are a type of organism. Normal specimens have two arms, two legs, genitals, a large head, various organs, etc. They are born in a rather gross manner, grow up in around twenty years time, and do various things before they die at ~75 years of age.

But from the phenomenological point of view, a human (or a self), isn't really anything essentially, and the self has to battle against itself when it recognizes the nothingness in which it seems to arise. In this case, there is no essential part of the self that the self can recognize and see as a suitable justification for its own existence. Without God, there is no higher, transcendental power to devote oneself to. And worldly-affairs are imperfect machinations. So a human being is quite literally thrown into the world and finds himself wondering where he is, where he is going, and who he is as a person. He exists, but has no essential properties that he can depend on.

Presumably not, which is why I favor neutral monism in that respect. Or property dualism.

So your ontic commitments amount to a bob each way. Cool. :-} — apokrisis

I never said it was ambitious, in fact I said the opposite. So spare me the pretension.

es. But why? What difference does that make? — apokrisis

Well because the nervous system controls movement and bodily processes, and so does consciousness.

Did you mean outside philosophical circles? Being immanent and not transcendent, being holist and not atomist, seem to be fairly clearcut and familiar ontic commitments to me. — apokrisis

TO YOU, but perhaps not others. You have given some descriptions of naturalism, but this is not ubiquitous. Defining your terms helps immensely.

Every Cradle Is A Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide by Sarah Perry

I am questioning your use of words like "my experience", or "experience residing". You are simply presuming the dualistic mind~world framing that becomes the locked cage of your thoughts. — apokrisis

Certainly I am supposing the phenomenological experience of being a self of sorts. But I don't really have an ambitious metaphysical structure of the world. I find idealism to be theoretically satisfying but not entirely believable in some sense, while I see a real, external world as probably existing in some form or whatever. A giant abyss of darkness, with matter bouncing into matter on the macro-scale and random events happening on lower levels. But basically I hold a position I suspect most people do: the universe is a spatio-temporal container and we are one of its many contents.

My argument is that to start unpicking that paradigm, a good place to start is to seriously address the issue of what might make life and mind actually different in your scheme of things? As a biological process, where does any claimed divergence in terms of causality arise? — apokrisis

Well, I said that then existence of a nervous system would be a starter. I mean, unless we have good reasons for believing so, there is no contextual or inferential evidence to support the claim that mind is identical or somehow intrinsically connected to life. And then there's the problem of distinguishing life from non-life. Are viruses life? Apparently not, since they don't die in the normal way organisms do when detached from their host. No sheer cut-off implies vagueness, and vagueness implies cross-over. Or perhaps prior existence, a la idealism/panpsychism.

To simply repeat "subjectivity" is to retreat back into Cartesian dualism and abandon your tentative naturalism here. And even in the end to reject naturalism, you would first have to demonstrate understanding of its best case. — apokrisis

I don't see how subjectivity is non-naturalist. And you of all people should know that "naturalism" is such a vague buzzword that it literally is meaningless outside of esoteric circles.

I of course have repeatedly said that the way to make sense of mind~matter duality is to re-frame your inquiry as one based on the semiotic symbol~matter distinction instead. That then allows you to see how - causally - mind is just life. A more complex version of the same modelling relation. And even material existence can be accounted for pan-semiotically. — apokrisis

Where, according to your pan-semiotic theory, does qualitative experience reside? It doesn't seem like a process, because I can identify specific qualitative feelings.

If I were to suddenly flash into your exact state of mind for a moment - due to some extraordinary brain blurt, say - then how is that not accessing your state of mind?

What else would access look like according to you? — apokrisis

I am not thinking about a soul, although I suppose there are actually some decent arguments for the existence of a "soul-like" entity of sorts, in the Aristotelian schema for example.

Rather I am saying that there is a distinct difference between the firing a C-fibres firing (an outdated theory nowadays but one that continues to be used out of tradition) and the experience of pain. Whatever is going on in the brain when I experience something is different than the experience itself.

The point being, however, is that a numerically-distinct experience can only be experienced by one subject at a time. A teleporter kills me because the copy of me at time t+1 is not identical to me at time t.

Only one mind can exist in a single perspective at a time, just as how only one object can exist in a single space-time location. Access to the mind would be akin to access of the exact same perspective as another person at the exact same time - impossible. My head cannot co-exist with your head at the same time. The perspective I have is unique. Of course, you can make perfect copies of my mental experience, just as you could make perfect copies of the perspective I inhabit at a certain time. But they would not be identical - it would not be true access, but rather access by "cheating".

So doesn't that make it more phenomenally accurate to say that the world seeps into your mind? And the same world seeps into my mind? So we both share access to the same world. — apokrisis

But not at the same time nor place, i.e. perspective.

You have to start thinking like biologist and see structures as processes. Mind is not located in stuff but in action and organisation. — apokrisis

So mind just "arises" out of structure/process? This doesn't explain anything really. Just seems all hand-wavy and actually kind of poetic.

Dualism depends on the presumption that animals can be dumb automata and humans are inhabited by a witnessing soul. — apokrisis

No, this is false.

Now following that same logic, I could conceivably be in exactly the same brain state as you right now. I could be accessing your private point of view by exactly mirroring your neural activity. — apokrisis

I disagree. You would be accessing a duplicate copy of my brain state, not my brain state. Both of us can stub our toe and feel pain - perhaps we would be in the same exact state (probably not though). But these are two separate, independent states.

You can have the Mona Lisa, or you can have a duplicate copy of the Mona Lisa. The two may be indistinguishable. And in fact multiple people can simultaneously look upon both Mona Lisa's. But Mona Lisa is a material object and thus it is unsurprising that this can happen. Material objects are public, mental "objects" are private. My mind does not seep into the world, or at least I don't think it does (re: externalism). It doesn't come out of my ears. Mind is the one thing that I am certain about having, yet I cannot locate it in the world I assume surrounds me.

So a better analogy would be that I have my own container filled with stuff only I have seen. You can take an x-ray and get a general idea of what is inside. But you cannot actually see the contents. Only I can see the contents, only I am allowed to. Nobody else is allowed inside. Mind is subjective. Like a Liebnizian monad.

If we look at the brain, we can presumably see the structure of fatty tissue and analyze the various synapses and whatnot going on. We can dig through the whole brain, but we'll never find mind. There's hair, skin, scalp, skull, brain tissue, then skull and scalp and skin and hair again. So where is the elusive mind? Where is it located?

If we take a deflationary view of mind - treating it less like an ectoplasmic substance and more like a complex state of world mapping - while also giving rather more credit to the actual biological complexity of a brain with its capacity for picking out highly particular points of view, then the explanatory gap to be bridged should shrink rather a lot. — apokrisis

I don't think the explanatory gap shrinks more than it is just flat-out ignored. It's also telling that you assume alternative views must consist of some sort of ectoplasmic magic goo. That's just silly.

The point was that the reference point that we inhabit ourselves - mind - is inaccessible to anyone else but ourselves. It is our personal, private sphere.

So how is the nervous system different from other ordinary biological processes in your view? Surely the answer to that should go a long way to solving the dilemma you express? — apokrisis

Apo I don't know all the answers, so stop playing with me and actually start giving me your own answers. I don't go on this board to satisfy some urge to confirm my own superiority, I don't know the answer to this question so do me the service and enlighten me with one instead of treating me like a child.

Why on earth would consciousness serve no purpose? Is that your own experience? You function just as well in a coma or deep sleep? Does paying attention rather than acting on automatic pilot not help you learn and remember? — apokrisis

I say conceivably everything we do could be done by an unconscious mechanism. Consciousness, even though it works, is not necessary for the sorts of output we have.

More rambling unfounded assertion I am afraid. — apokrisis

Or just the anthropic principle.

I'll have to get back to you in a bit, I'm currently reading Brian Davies' introduction to philosophy of religion. As of now I will say that contemporary theistic personalists see classical theistic conceptions of God as incorrect, usually based upon Scriptures, although there are some theological arguments brought up.

So far as I know, the only reason why you would look conscious to me is that you would look alive to me. If you could explain why and how the two are in fact ontically disconnected in the fashion you appear to presume, then I might think the OP had a better actual point. — apokrisis

You'll have to give me the essential characteristics of "life", then. As far as I can tell, anything lacking a nervous system cannot have a mind.

Unless you're going for some sort of panpsychism or idealism.

So my thoughts on this are that, since mind appears to be so wholly different than ordinary material objects and processes, it is unlikely that it just suddenly "appeared" as if it were an alien to an otherwise material universe. Instead, mind, or at least a derivation of it, would have always been, either in the monism of idealism or the transcendental idealism of Kant and co.

Then there's also the question as to what purpose consciousness actually serves to an organism. Presumably everything necessary to survive could have been done without the use of subjectivity. Why pain, when you could have algae? Why city-scapes, when you could have moss? Why philosophy, when you could have shrubbery? The purposeless-ness of the universe must be taken into account here, then. A decisive, yet accidental, mutation in genetic information created an organism that accidentally happened to live alongside more simple organisms. Complexity was not necessary, yet there was nothing preventing it from happening either. The rise of complex, sentient creatures was entirely unnecessary and accidental, not inevitable, but happened anyway thanks to goldylocks luck.

Evidently we can, for example, when we talk about the mind, and share insights into the minds of different speakers. Therefore, the mind is not isolated. — jkop

This is merely communication and inference. There's a reason behaviorism was so popular back in the day: mind is literally cut off from observation and thus it was seen as unfit for scientific inquiry.

OK. That's your claim. Now make sense of it causally. What is the mechanism that underpins your categorical distinction? — apokrisis

The point of the OP was that the phenomenological experience of being a black box is in friction with a universe that is seemingly open to observation, and vice versa. I have no idea how this came to be. But the fact is that I cannot see your mind and you cannot see mine.

If you can quickly say why life and mind are different in ways that make sense, we're good. — apokrisis

Mind is of life, but life is not mind. It is not a requirement for life to be mind.

ou can freely choose to pursue God’s love or you can freely choose to ignore his promptings and continue wallowing in a state of permanent isolation. He is not going to coerce anyone into loving him. — lambda

I feel like that itself is a form of coercion. Either pick a nice relationship or lonely isolation. God, if he exists, has incentivized our actions.

For the umpteenth time, not all physicalists are eliminative materialists. — Terrapin Station

Right. It's just that if they aren't eliminative materialists, then the definition of material or physical has to be stretched.

So is there a difference between life and mind in your book? Is one "just physics" and the other "something else"? Or does life start the swerve away from the brutely material. Is it a good philosophical place to start looking for the answers you seek? — apokrisis

I don't know what you're saying here.

What you don't seem to get is that it is merely an opinion (a not very helpful one at that) and that others may be of an entirely different opinion. — John

The problem I have with this and presumably Schop1 has with this is that we have reasons to hold this opinion, whereas we see those who disagree with us as having very little in terms of actual reasons to support their disagreement.

Simply saying "I disagree" is unhelpful. Much too often do people mistake actual disagreement with not liking the consequences of an otherwise fine argument.

Spinoza does not posit an "infinity of substances" but on the contrary argues that there can be only one. — John

Sorry, I meant an infinity of modes.

I wouldn't say there's anything wrong with eugenics as long as everyone participating in it is doing do voluntarily, per their own goals with it. — Terrapin Station

So like what's going on right now?

Personally I would attack the notion that the purpose of human life is the achieve happiness. Happiness is one of the most insidious myths of modern society.

Well, my point was that the outcome of antinatalism is not going to be realized anytime soon — schopenhauer1

Not with that attitude. Though I suppose we are pessimists.

We exist to entropify with slave-like efficiency.

So this idea of us having a 'life', is wrong. We merely exist presently. Time is not some linear objective thing which our present travels along. How time works is mentally we (presently) project a past behind us, and a future before us, the present being a movement. It's an illusion that there's an 'overall' time. And so there can't be an overall life which we have or lead. Essentially all there is, is what's presently being experienced. — dukkha

This strikes me as potentially incoherent. At first you deny that the past or future exist, yet then go on to say the present is a movement, or a process. Yet you can't have movement or process without a start and a finish, i.e. past and future.

What is actually happening, then, is that the past maintains its existence superficially by memory, and the future instantiates itself by teleology.

The actual outcome of antinatalism really has no great significance. It is rather the symbolic implication of what procreation stands for. — schopenhauer1

Whaaaa? The most common motivation for antinatalism is that life isn't worth it due to an unreasonable amount of suffering. The goal of antinatalism is to minimize this suffering, because suffering is bad and what is bad is what ought to be removed, eliminated, or prevented, like a cancerous tumor.

Other motivations for antinatalism are far too poetic and reserved to be taken seriously in light of what suffering is actually like.

Procreation is not about procreation necessarily, but about us and our reason for doing anything. — schopenhauer1

Indeed, it is how we achieve immortality, or the next-best alternative at least. Socrates or Plato (can't remember) understood this, so did Mainlander when he criticized Schopenhauer.

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

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

Fuck the red pill/blue pill debate. The former are a bunch of degenerate scumbags and the latter suffer an inferiority complex. Reality ain't that binary, and both groups are extreme and attempt to impose a universal sexual law upon society. I neither want to be a douche nor do I want to be a whiny bitch.

What's so great about non-existence? That you don't suffer? Existence must be quite horrible if you actually see non-existence as good for you, considering you aren't even you when you don't exist. You're a fiction when you don't exist.

The various experiences we have, extrapolated into good/bad valence, are reasons for and reasons against living life.

That doesn't sound like Tolstoy (who was a Christian) at all. Can you cite a source for that? — John

Here ya go. A Confession, by Tolstoy.

olstoy affirms that the lives of 'milliards' of people show him that all these rational categories of despair-in-life are mistaken, and that their example shows him that life has meaning through faith - though he then goes on to criticise the Church hierarchy too. — mcdoodle

Right, similar to how Sartre had characters who were deeply pessimistic but he himself may not have been.

It's the ultimate option we might have to decide freely upon our own faith and vica versa, being aware of this option might actually negate suffering seeing it can be used to willingly undergo certain circumstances instead of feeling like a slave to circumstances. — Gooseone

Exactly. The prospect of suicide keeps us sober and present.

Everyone still living is blue-pilled as fuck. — dukkha

Indeed this seemed to be the perspective of Tolstoy, who thought there were roughly four types of people:

1.) Those who were ignorant of their existential condition

2.) Those who understand their existential condition but focus on pursuing pleasure (hedonism)

3.) Those who understand their existential condition and also understand that hedonism will not give meaning or purpose to life and so kill themselves (he calls these people the "strong")

4.) Those who understand their existential condition and also understand that hedonism will not give meaning or purpose to life, but are unable to kill themselves (the "weak")

This also seemed to have been the perspective of Sartre, or at least one of his characters, when he said that every person is an accident that dies suddenly and persists out of weakness.

Sometimes I agree with Tolstoy (possibly Sartre). Other times I would like to continue to experience whatever it is that I am experiencing.

Life is not a sequence of arithmetic pleasures and pains. The existence of moods effectively disqualifies deprivationalism or any similarly crude axiological calculus.

What seems to be reasonable is to always have suicide available as an option as a means of grounding one's decisions and outlook on life. It's easy to get carried away in a stream of good fortune and forget the underlying mechanisms of life. Good fortune, of course, is good, but having an exit available in case this does not last or shit hits the fan is, in my opinion, only rational. It means to take control of one's life. If you burn a meal in the oven on accident, you don't force yourself to eat it. You throw it away. It's only rational - i.e. in our best interests.

Of course, this is all easier said than done. Probably why Tolstoy called those successful in suicide the "strong" - they were able to exit life without any present strenuous or horrible experiences, but merely the thought of the possibility of horror.

You can think of eugenics as extended care, for the future of humanity as well as for the afflicted. — Ovaloid

It's gene-worship, basically.

Why do people need to be born into the world in order to redeem it? — schopenhauer1

I'm not sure if your representation of various world religions is accurate. Abrahamic religions all see the world as "fallen" because of sin, and that we must "escape" and leave behind this problematic world and obtain salvation in Heaven with Yahweh. And Buddhism recognizes that life is suffering, and that we have to escape the cycle of rebirth in order to free ourselves (and others in the case of bodhisattvas) from the perpetual suffering. It's not about redeeming the world, it's about escaping the world, solving our problems, and seeking resolutions elsewhere.

Nietzsche criticized Christian morality for being slave-like, and specifically in this case for essentially saying that we ought to give birth to people in order to help them. This is quite poignant, I think. Just go to any Christian charity or apologetics website and you'll see this. They see themselves as doing to work of God, and see the uplifting of those in need as the highest good. In other words, it would seem as though the Good is obtained by cleaning up the mess. But apparently you can't save people if they never exist. So the whole process of saving people becomes important in-itself. Christian morality has the tendency then to see life as machine of goodness. The more people there are, the more people need saving, and saving is good. It is apparently a good thing to put people into a shitty situation in order to help get them out of the situation you put them in. It certainly feels good to help people... This is quite obviously "slave-like", in that the objectively shitty conditions of the "slaves" are twisted around to be seen as something to be cherished. A classic example of a coping mechanism - when no alternatives are apparent, twist reality to be more suitable to your tastes. However it seems pretty obvious to me that if they had an alternative to enduring a life of suffering, most would take it. If there was a way to get to Heaven without the help of Jesus, we'd all take it. But, alas, there isn't another way into Heaven - or so we are told.

Now, the Buddhist appropriation of birth, from my understanding (though don't quote me on this), and perhaps only within the higher-up levels of the religion, is that birth is actually an act of saving those from a worse existence (like an animal in the wild). If you don't have children, they will go on to be a wild animal in the wild and suffer even more. Re-birth is inevitable if you do not achieve nirvana. Not having children won't do anything. Karma literally is a bitch. At least that's what I understand it to be.

But in my opinion, "meaning" in the existential sense of purpose and justice is an imperfect coping mechanism; a hodge-podge method of ESCAPING (again! :( ) our condition by establishing a reason why things are happening the way they are and what our position is in the going-ons; a way of REASSURING ourselves that we are important (SELF-ESTEEM). Any sort of existentialist philosophy must then be powerful enough to ACTUALLY WORK but simultaneously flexible enough to JUSTIFY ITSELF as an AUTHENTIC way of life (and not just a coping mechanism). The absence of any such way leads one to extreme pessimism as panic, fear and meaninglessness solidify themselves, at least until one finds a suitable way to distract themselves.

I feel independent from my body, as if I could exist without it. Indeed I can lose bits and pieces of my body and still consider myself the same person.

I may be the same person (or maybe I'm not, the self might merely be a conventional truth), but I am not the same organism if I lose parts of my body. My body (or perhaps me?) has undergone a change. Depending on your views on composition and persistence, my body (I?) may or may not continue to exist.

The "I" which my body produces forgets its own origination and believes itself to be the owner of the body - when it is really the body which owns the self, or more precisely, the body which owns itself.

So I take it that "I", in the phenomenological sense, is an integral part of a biological system. "I" may not identify with "my" body, but "my" body is the rest of the biological system, all doing their parts for better or for worse.

Indeed the apparent authority I have over my body is placed into doubt when at the emergency room, whether that be by disease, injury or old age. If I had control over my body, I should be able to stop these things from happening. Alas, I do not, because I cannot. The body has enslaved itself, through a reflexive and recursive phenomenon known as the Self, held in check and ultimately shaped by various transparent constraints.

It's kind of disorienting to this about the body this way. You might have certain wishes, but your body has others. It's like a weight, you want to think you're independent from it but it nevertheless gets in the way and drags you down. It's no surprise that the great, historic people are either those who managed to seclude themselves in such a way as to minimize their friction with their own body, or who were able and willing to embrace their bodily needs and operate akin to a well-oiled machine in harmonious repetition, not thinking too much but thinking enough to ensure survival and procreation.