I've answered all this already. So you are simply returning me to your assertions rather than dealing with my arguments against them. — apokrisis

I did not mean that you hadn't, only that we have strayed far away from the original intent of the thread. And your arguments aren't even arguments either. You've mentioned, what, one scientific theory that doesn't even do anything to the phenomenology of my argument. And then you claim that ignoring my arguments, counts as an argument, since you still have not addressed anything I'm saying but merely handwaved it away as childish, as if it's not worth the effort to actually explain to me how anything I listed before is unproblematic.

The question then is what metaphysically is the correct way to respond - responding in terms of notions of souls and other traditional social mythology not being a very naturalistic/scientific way of framing the issues. — apokrisis

Nor did I ever mention souls...? Sellar's manifest image doesn't just dissolve away after looking at the scientific image of man.

What do you mean by "metaphysically correct" way to respond? There is no correct way to respond, that's the rub of pessimism. Not everything can be solved, not everything belongs. Just like bugs in computer software, they must be eliminated, not allowed to continue. They're not meant to be there and yet they are thanks to lucky coincidental conditions.

So again, we are back to the same situation. I defend a naturalistic/scientific ontology. You seem to take the other road - the romantic, dualistic, idealistic path. For you, the organic whole that is the world is divided ontically into brute material objects and sensuous being. And from that broken duality, all kinds of confusion flows. — apokrisis

How you got any of that from what I've written is beyond me. None of what I have written depends on a dualistic notion of anything aside from the identification of powerful phenomenological experiences that cannot be dissolved under investigation, which is more in line with idealism than anything else.

Honestly whenever anyone argues against you you always either pull the science™ card or the dualism card without explaining anything else as if your position is self-evident or as if the authority of science today is an automatic trump card for anything that isn't explicitly empirically pragmatic. It's really annoying and patronizing.

I guess I'm still a bit confused as to how the doctrine of unknowability escapes itself. We could call philosophy (or any inquiry for that matter) a game based on baseless assumptions, but this itself is a philosophical claim based on baseless assumptions. Any meta-philosophical claim results in us doing some sort of reasoning, some sort attempt to make sense of things. That's what I personally see metaphysics as: an attempt (not a discipline per se) to make sense of thing in the most general sense of the term.

The simple answer is, you can't. But I don't think there needs to be any common ground of faculties in order for there to be communication, and the sort of pluralism and skepticism we end up with is one with positive ethical content and not a disappointment that we need to try to circumvent. — The Great Whatever

How does it end up in positive ethical content without going outside the bounds of pathe? Ethics is fundamentally concerned with what choices we should make, and this depends on others around us (what Cabrera calls the FEA - the non-manipulation and non-trangression of other people's interests). Without believing that we are justified in believing in the existence of other people, treating others with respect becomes rather empty, like treating your cardboard box with respect because it may or may not have consciousness. It would mean treating appearances as ethically valuable in themselves, which doesn't seem to have the same kind of obligation as would realist interpretations.

There may be a kind of epistemological solipsism to it, but this is not the kind of solipsism that people generally worry about. — The Great Whatever

But this epistemological solipsism is not pathe-based, or is it? The description of our epistemological and existential condition is necessarily outside of our immediate perceptions. Even if our perceptions gave us some sort of sign (like a divine hallucination that explained how everything works), this perception would still refer to something outside our own experiences - it could be falsely correlated, it could be correlated to fiction, it could be correlated to a half-truth, etc.

It's like saying we can only see colors - we certainly see red, blue, green, yellow, yada-yada but never do we see the concept "color". It's all appearances, and without prior knowlege (pace Meno's Paradox) we have no way of interpreting any of it, unless we're open to accepting radical subjectivism.

It's also worth noting that in general Hellenistic ethics was not as concerned with societal behavior as modern ethics. It taught about the good life of the individual, and thought about society only in relation to this. — The Great Whatever

True. With the development of Macedonia came an emphasis in individuality. Before that time, though, there were the poleis of Greece, and political philosophy was much more prominent.

Of intelligibility, of subject matter, of joints-of-reality, etc

Well, I mean science developed in conjunction with Descartes. Instead of science depending on metaphysics, it would be rather that metaphysics analyzes how science is possible, diagnosing the underlying structure.

Interesting analysis.

I'm curious, if the Cyrenaics thought that the only thing we know of are our pathe, how did they come to know of this general metaphysical principle?

Additionally, if all we can know are our own pathe, how can we know what others pathe are like in principle, i.e. pleasurable, painful, neutral?

How does the Cyrenaic epistemology avoid solipsism, and why does it posit the existence of an external world (one that cannot be arrived at by pathe alone) instead of adopting idealism a la Berkeley?

For the structure of the world of the Cyrenaics seems to be similar to that of the Kantian noumenon/phenomenon - and yet if all we know of are our own pathe, then any overarching principles (such as the principle that all we know are our own pathe, or the existence of an external reality) seems to be excluded from this analysis.

Maybe the only thing we can know for certain (pace Descartes) are our immediate experiences (I am experiencing a salty taste, I am experiencing heat, I am experiencing the color red, etc), but it would seem to be the case (unless we are idealists) that any epistemology that limits itself to these incorrigible experiences and yet postulates the existence of a structure to the world outside of our experiences is contradictory, or at least an unacceptable speculation.

So the existence of other people who have their own personal pathe, according to Cyrenaic epistemology, can only be seen as a sort of ancient behaviorism: "I am perceiving a person who acts as if they have desires of their own but I cannot know if they indeed have their own desires or are even mentally there to begin with". And so we arrive at Cartesian scepticism.

I think a related (and superior) view imo is that of Wittgenstein's "hinge" concepts, the concepts that cannot be rationally doubted without using these concepts in the first place. They are "extra-rational", providing the basis for rational thought to begin with.

I ask how you can talk about "life" when you don't even seem to believe in life's naturalism in this regard. The logic of your position requires you to argue that life is unnatural in some deep fashion. I'm waiting for you to resolve that paradox. — apokrisis

Indeed this was kind of the point of this thread to begin with. From a phenomenological perspective, we don't seem to belong. We're aliens to the world. We're able to self-reflect. Existentialism 101. How the hell is the universe even capable of hosting something like us?

You can see this applied in psychology by learning about Terror Management Theory and the psychoanalytic/humanistic theories of Rank and Becker.

My argument is that we would be simply replacing one construction with another in switching out your ridiculously negative construction for a more balanced view of existence. — apokrisis

What would this "balanced" view consist of? Certainly we can't just magically think away our pains and fears.

Yes, indeed Descartes was primarily focused on finding a metaphysical basis for science, i.e. a metaphysics in the service of science. The question remains, however, is whether or not science actually needed this basis.

The core issue seems to be that you treat phenomenology as brute fact - we can't help what we feel - whereas I say scientific naturalism supports the position that what we feel is controllable on many levels. So if a feeling is a problem, it is also a problem that can be tackled. Or at least solution seeking becomes the first natural response. — apokrisis

I agree that solution seeking becomes the first natural response. When I get a headache, I take ibuprofen. When I balance my checkbook, I use a calculator to assist me.

But the nature of the pessimistic argument is that some problems are just not solvable. They can be pushed aside, mentally rearranged, or eliminated, but never satisfactorily solved. And in this case, such problems are existential, i.e. structurally unremovable from life, i.e. a necessary condition for life as we know it.

Indeed, when I get a headache, taking a pill seems to only solve a surface problem. The problem may re-surface when the pill wears off, or the pain is a symptom of an underlying problem, or perhaps the ibuprofen isn't enough. In any case, it's worth noting how much of our problem-solving involves a dependency on other things. Thanks to our creativity, we have tools, medicine, and gadgets that help us and keep us in a relatively comfortable state today. But the key point in this case is that we have creativity just because we are inadequate without it.

Some of these existential problems are thus:

• the constant devotion to assessing needs (which causes anxiety and uneasiness) of which we may not want to have to fulfill (i.e. enslavement),
• the automatic and natural elevation of desires to needs (which causes anxiety and uneasiness as well),
• the general experience of dissatisfaction (of which Buddhism focuses the most on which can be minimized but never fully expelled for an extended period of time while conscious),
• the very real and very threatening danger of intense, unrelenting pain of which suffocates our ability to continue life normally (thanks to our environment and our own crude bodies),
• an environment which is prone to accidents (little mishaps are only an indication of what could happen in the future; a far worse catastrophe, i.e. a tragedy),
• the apparent lack of any important cosmic agenda that could explain why bad things happen for no substantial reason,
• the aforementioned intense pain which cannot be made up for by any future accomplishment or paradise (i.e. instrumentality),
• the combination of needs/desire-needs and the metaphysical necessity of scarcity which causes strife and conflict,
• the aesthetically un-appealing dominating and submissive nature of Being (instrumentality),
• the incompatibility of happiness with the prospect of death (a well-established psychological phenomenon),
• the general unremarkability and boring, dull repetition of the world (manifesting in sentients as boredom, apathy, tediousness, and distractions thereof),
• the metaphysical isolation a sentient mind has (its inability to "contact" other minds, forever alone),
• the morally disgusting natural practice of cannibalism in nature manifesting as predation and natural selection,
• the inevitability of destruction (our comfort-bubble of sturdy structures will fall and be replaced by something different, regardless of how we feel about it),
• the realization that history is primarily dictated by might instead of right,
• the incompatibility of the human condition with our own sense of self-worth, dignity, and/or self-esteem,
• the realization that your very existence is indebted to billions of years of trillions of trillions of organisms being selected against (and the subsequent realization that it would be selfish to subjugate all these creatures again just so you could exist, i.e. post hoc regret),
• the realization of how morally disqualified we are (we can hardly ever do anything without somehow crossing into someone else's preferences),
• the realization that we are inherently self-centered (neurotically vane) and clan-centered (thus resulting in family ties, nationalism, and speciesism - other sentients aren't important or worthy of our attention),
• the moral and legal issues of birth,
• the realization that one's culture is primarily the product of a collected subconscious fear of death as well as a reaction to boredom,
• the realization that if I am wrong about all this, then the fact that universe is capable to producing such erroneous and misguided ideas leads to skepticism of the very error of the overarching pessimistic point

So we have two quite different metaphysics in play. And where I lose patience is when you claim that your ontology is also founded on scientific naturalism. Just be honest. It is not. — apokrisis

But just to be clear, you haven't really provided anything of scientific worth. Your scientific background is not sufficient for evidence. Whereas I have explicitly given you more than sufficient data.

Again you keep slapping around the word science as if it's the end-all be-all method of obtaining truth, when in reality there are many things that are more obvious and easy to understand without a specific scientific method.

In any case, all of what I have said is either backed by scientific data or is not inherently in contradiction to the established medium.

Pain is a bad thing because it can grow to any scale and become the worst thing in existence. So even the most marginal forms of pain - like unease or boredom - need to be banished too. Hence your continual resort to slippery slope argumentation. One minute we are suffering a papercut or aching neck, the next thing we know, it is going to be genital electrodes and the Holocaust. — apokrisis

The extreme pain is the practical argument, the one that is most pressing and striking. Yet you still ignore it as if there is a justification for it happening (because you're not experiencing it right now?) The tediousness and uneasiness is also uncomfortable, but it draws more from the aesthetic. It's disillusioning to see ourselves naked and afraid. It's something that I think we aren't able to completely get over. Underneath all our actions is this ever-present rumbling of need, desire, dissatisfaction, concern, fear, anxiety. It's what is there if nothing else is, what everything else is built on. So like I said before, life is not meant to be comfortable.

You have avoided dealing with my arguments against your simple-minded phenomenalism. It is basic to my position that phenomenology - as an introspective level of awareness - is a socially constructed linguistic habit. And all you say in reply is that you can't see the point in talking about social constructionism (as it is indeed "pointless" in within your mind-stuff paradigm). — apokrisis

Because it doesn't change the fact that we still suffer. Deconstructing our experiences doesn't just dissolve them away. Such is the conviction of a lucky person.

So your position relies on a number of socially constructed delusions. The obviousness of that is why one would ask what it is exactly that you are psychologically shielding yourself from? — apokrisis

Just like anyone else, I'm shielding myself from the above ideas. What makes me a pessimist is that I'm not too good at it.

Only if you change torture's definition. — apokrisis

But not its immanent objectivity.

Let me know when you are ready to deal with nature in terms of what is natural rather than imagining yourself sitting at God's right hand, tugging his sleeve as He is doing his creating, and murmuring: "Do you really think this last little DNA thing is wise?". — apokrisis

What is natural is not what is good per se.

Could it get any more laughable? — apokrisis

I don't know, you're setting the precedent here. I mean, we can a more cordial discussion, or we can descend into useless name-calling.

But treating torture as an issue that can be tackled via social institutions is pragmatic - of much more use in real life than telling the same torture victim that "yes, you are right, life is shit for everyone from the get-go, so don't think you are anything special in the fact you have electrodes attached to your gonads right at this moment."

So stop straw-manning my position. — apokrisis

This does not change the fact that torture can occur beyond human interaction. The point is that there is a contingency factor here, in that we have the possibility that life can become unbearable. A risk factor of proportion that cannot be ignored.

Or instead, it means you don't understand psychology well enough to understand what is meant by social constructionism. — apokrisis

Or it means that I don't see the usefulness of applying social constructionism to this debate as it is not relevant. Regardless of what causes us to feel a certain way, we nevertheless do feel. Deconstructing our experiences does nothing to them, and may even disillusion us.

The only kind of universe that can produce these kinds of ideas is one where life has become so generally safe and easy on the whole that the self-indulgent have to pathologise the very fact of their own existence. — apokrisis

Or it's the life of the contemplative who are able to reflect upon the condition of humanity, the conditions that other people are too busy trying to survive to even reflect upon them. This life would be one that isn't entirely focused on mitigating anxiety and avoiding things we fear.

Even if you want to be supremely simplistic in this fashion, that still makes it a problem to solve. — apokrisis

Or to be less naively optimistic, it's a problem that cannot be solved and thus must be eliminated. A conspiracy.

But generally, solving the problem involves getting a life and learning to stop whining. — apokrisis

Ad hominem. Nobody is forcing you to participate in this debate. Nobody is on your lawn or front porch. It never ceases to amaze me how pessimism rustles people's jimmies so much if it is indeed wrong. Nobody reacts like this unless it's to an uncomfortable truth.

Pessimism is so histrionic that nothing can fix its psychic state. Time would have to be wound back to its beginning and existence itself annihilated to make things right. — apokrisis

Yes, indeed if I had the choice I don't think I would condone abiogenesis. Too much suffering for no net gain.

If an anticipated personal future is conceived of as a bunch of useless suffering, then euthanasia/suicide is a rational solution. — Hoo

Yes from the personal view, but from the metaphysical side nothing is solved.

Metaphysically speaking I doubt the universe has any moral compass whatsoever. But this also means that catastrophes can happen, i.e. a tragedy. So from the perspective of a sentient being, the universe can come across as malignant. Metaphysically speaking the entire cosmos is not good or bad, but it is the case, metaphysically speaking, that sentients exists in such a way as to be affected by the arbitrary whims of the universe. Sentients are thus metaphysical captives.

But I think most people (these days, in wealthy countries) would say yes to being born again as the same person (memory wiped) and living it all again. — Hoo

This is a major point that I had forgotten to bring up. Think about what you are experiencing right now, at this very moment. Can you honestly and indubitably tell yourself that you are happy, or that you are not suffering? Chance are that you will find that you have a general sense of unease. As soon as your tool-using brains stops using tools you start to fumble.

Apply this reasoning to pre-natal conditions. Are what you are experiencing right now worth being born for? People like to look in the future or the past contemplating what they have or might experience (part of my argument itself rests on this fact) - but in the case of birth it always tends to be about the good and never the bad, especially not the mediocrity currently being experienced in the present. It is a common and well-established psychological phenomenon (Pollyannism and magical thinking) that people's judgement of their own lives is skewed: from a pre-natal perspective, their lives would not be worth starting, and from a currently-living perspective they probably aren't worth living either but are maintained by the neurotic sense of vanity. If it is good to continue to exist, then it must be good to bring people into existence. If it's not good to bring people into existence, then it must be bad to continue to exist (for one's own sake). I accept this and the contradiction it is for me to continue to exist.

As I said, show me that the brain isn't evolved for problem-solving. And that being so, it then follows we have to evaluate biological signals of pleasure and pain in that light. — apokrisis

Or, we can also look at what it's like to experience pleasure and pain. Telling a person who is being tortured that it's just a bunch of signals in their brain meant to solve problems does nothing to help them. This is quite literally Zapffe's claim: we are both over and under evolved. We have an over-developed intellect and an under-developed signal mechanism. We are held down by a crude hedonic treadmill (a very well-established scientific fact) and are inherently slaves to our needs. The mind is filled with possibilities and wishes to be free, and yet the body and environment consistently disappoint and repress.

Well hardly. My point is that phenomenology at the level we are discussing it is socially constructed and linguistic. That is the human condition. — apokrisis

There is nothing socially constructed or linguistic about torture. There is nothing socially constructed or linguistic about boredom or repetition. Telling someone that they aren't actually experiencing any "qualitative" experience a la qualia is not only asinine but insulting.

It is natural to have some fear of heights if you don't want to fall. What is pathological in problem-solving terms is to become so overcome by the very idea of the possibility of falling that it takes over your entire life. — apokrisis

And once again we have you diagnosing pessimists as being "unnatural" or "pathological", as if they are some sort of oddity in the universe. No, we are part of the universe, and therefore it stands that the universe is capable of producing these kinds of ideas.

Or what would be ridiculous as a philosophy would be to construct a whole ethics around the possibility that someone somewhere may fall in a really bad way, while ignoring the converse fact that mostly people manage to stand in a world that is well-organised - by a problem-solving attitude. — apokrisis

Why would this be ridiculous? Certainly if you fell in a really bad way, no previous pleasures will help you out. When experiencing intense pain, you are literally suffocated by the experience. Nothing else matters.

To brush this aside and claim that the suffering of others is not important is highly suspicious. As Zapffe said, no future great triumph can justify the plight of an innocent against his will.

Your whole position is built on catastrophising. I'm just waiting for you to make an argument that brains are not meant for problem-solving and so require some way to tell whether they are getting hotter or colder on that score. — apokrisis

I'm waiting for you to tell me how problem-solving has anything to do with what I'm talking about. The function of pleasure and pain differs from how they are experienced.

How can it make sense for suffering not to exist for a mind that has to be able to make its mind up? — apokrisis

Why is there a need for problem-solving in the first place? What is so great and special about life, other than the pleasure you experience? If you accept that it's pleasure that makes a life good, then you have to, on pain of contradiction, accept that it is pain that makes a life bad.

And sure, if such a mind decides the solution to its problems is suicide, that makes sense. A rational society supports voluntary euthanasia for terminal illness. — apokrisis

Yes, or for anyone who views life itself as a terminal illness.

Problem solving is meant to consider all its options. So show me the bit where your philosophy is doing that. In what way is it constuctive to become so obsessed by the very worst things that can happen - especially when you personally claim your life is quite content. — apokrisis

The rub of pessimism is that there is no way to solve this problem. Suicide doesn't solve the problem, it just eliminates it.

So please explain to me how you can simultaneously accept that the worst possible can actually happen (a tragic catastrophe) and yet somehow twist the responsibility onto me to find a solution. All you're doing is ignoring it.

Nope. Not getting much sense of science there. Lovecraft? — apokrisis

Yes, Lovecraft. He's incredibly revealing in his phenomenology. You throw around the term "science" as if it's a get-out-of-jail-free card. "nuh-uh, Lovecraft wasn't a real scientist, so none of this matters". Absurd, the reason Lovecraft is so famous is because he made such provocative observations.

I've read him. I don't find him particularly insightful as he conflates the issues of biologically evolved consciousness and culturally evolved self-regulatory awareness. — apokrisis

In any case this does not matter very much considering the main focal point - phenomenology - is still being pushed aside. Your argument is akin to telling a person who is afraid of heights that "it's just a chemical reaction" - that doesn't change anything. You're completely ignoring the phenomenon of extreme pain as well as tediousness and repetition in favor of an impersonal explanation that does nothing but ignore what I'm actually arguing about.

People like to live through other people. They like to see others persevere. They like to have children so they can re-live their own childhood (babies are aesthetic objects). They like to witness heroism. They like to escape their own lives. But they like to do this in the comfort of their own homes. They don't particularly enjoy going through hardship and pain, but they enjoy it when others do and when they "rise above", but interestingly enough they tend to forget about those who didn't and succumbed. So it's easy to dismiss all of what I'm saying here by telling me to "grow up" or "man up" but that's all it is - easy. And short-sighted as well.

Specifically read this, it's an introduction to his theories.

Good lordy. What did you say about bubbles and psychological science? Do you believe animals have to be protected in some way from their existential dread and the constant temptation of suicide? — apokrisis

Well, I mean I doubt most other animals have existential crises like we do. But certainly they have instincts that keep them from doing things that would destroy them. Like Lovecraft said, the first experience was fear. We don't get to decide whether or not life is to be continued - we are forced by our more primal instincts to continue whether we like it or not.

Get back to me when you can link such lurid claims to real neuroscience. — apokrisis

LOL, go read the neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger and his associates over at the ASSC.

For instance, a smart brain must be able to trade-off the short-term pain vs the long-term gain, and vice versa. Hence stuff like endorphins to help you keep climbing through the suffering. — apokrisis

And my argument is that this smart brain evolved this tendency in order to trick its captive self-model into continuing to exist. You seem to be implicitly favoring smartness as goodness (because survival is "obviously" good) when I'm arguing that our hyper-intellectual ability is what pins us to the ground more often than not. Our level of sophistication of consciousness does not "belong" in the environment; it has to support itself by its own flexibility. The phenomenal self-model is the brain's way of enslaving itself.

“No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little”
- Edmund Burke

Right. It is instead a goal that has to be worked at. — apokrisis

Not sure what you mean by this. Why does anything need to be worked out at all? Why do we need to give people problems?

But we seem a long way now from your original thesis that the very possibility of a nasty paper cut is sufficient reason to unwish the entirety of existence. — apokrisis

That's a strawman.

And yet pain, stress and suffering can cause the release of endorphins, serotonin and adrenaline - which feel pretty good. So you are not respecting the complexity of the neuroscience. — apokrisis

Yet we don't go around breaking people's arms so they can feel a pulse of endorphins. Sure, maybe your emo cousin cuts herself to feel better, but is that seriously good behavior that ought to be condoned? Not all pain, in fact most pain, is not accompanied by any sort of endorphin balancing-act. It is clear that these endorphins are being used by you as an excuse for pain - i.e. the opposite (that the release of endorphins is accompanied by pain) is not how we would describe the situation.

The UN banned torture because torture is a human rights violation. It wouldn't be a violation if the endorphins released during these traumatic episodes "made up" for the pain experienced.

Eventually I think you will come to the same conclusion that I have and realize that life is not meant to be fair, balanced, or comfortable.

Sure, he might have said it was as pointless as life. But still, he did it. And so there must have been some point to it. And thus also some point to life.

Note I'm not defending sports or climbing particularly. They are rather self-indulgent pursuits of course. The issue is instead that they show that suffering is intrinsic to having fun. — apokrisis

No, suffering is not intrinsic to having fun, otherwise it wouldn't be suffering! Pain may be but again pain is not equivalent to suffering.

People usually solve their existential crises by growing up and getting stuck into life.

I agree of course that there is plenty to criticise about the way life is supposed to be lived in the modern consumer society, lost in romanticism and hedonism.

But to have that grown-up conversation, you have to be already past needy pessimism. — apokrisis

Growing up - yes, the process of hiding one's scars and adopting a symbolic facade to appease the crowd. Truly an impressive phenomenon...

What do you know about psychology or positive psychology? Get out of your own bubble. — apokrisis

I know a lot more than you do, apparently. Reality can be insulting but that doesn't change anything.

Surprising as it might be, I'm generally a content person albeit with a bit of a melancholic edge. The prospect of suicide used to scare the shit out of me, but as Cioran said I have come to see it as a kind of salvation of some sort - if shit hits the fan, I'm okay with exiting.

What doesn't kill you will sometimes makes you wish it had.

That is why your argument is weak. You have to jump to unrepresentative extremes to make your case. — apokrisis

Not really, though. Extreme pain is indeed an extreme example but not because it's strange, unusual or anything like that. It's extreme because it's extremely intense. As Adorno said, how can we do poetry and metaphysics after Auschwitz?

And even if these extreme pains were unusual - does that change anything? Does the concept of unrelenting and useless torture not give you the chills or make you question the nature of the world?

And then of course there is the part of my argument that you keep missing, the parts about tediousness, boredom, unremarkability and suffocating emptiness.

Your whole approach is flawed in trying to reduce human existence to some calculus of joy and anguish weighed on a set of scales. A life is a construction in which happiness and pain are useful signals. We need to focus on the nature of that construction - it's good or bad - rather than on the signals. This is because the signals themselves will be interpreted quite differently, depending on the kind of life being constructed. — apokrisis

I don't get what your getting at here. In the end, we have all sorts of experiences, good and bad and neutral depending on what our preferences are. I'll admit that I am indeed a utilitarian consequentialist which not all pessimists were/are, but only because I think other positions are untenable.

I mean why is a rough sport like rugby so enjoyable. Why would anyone punish themselves climbing a mountain. How does suffering of this kind become the most fondly remembered aspects of a life? — apokrisis

Pain is not equivalent to suffering. As Levinas said, suffering is useless, and that's also why Ligotti called life "malignantly useless". The pain you experience while playing rugby is acceptable...however I'm sure you'll agree that the pain that happens when you break your arm playing is not.

But anyway rugby, like most sports and entertainment, is fun because it challenges us within a certain threshold of security. We fundamentally trick ourselves into believing that we are heroes for overcoming the opposition in a purely fictional setting.

Zapffe was a prolific mountaineer, who climbed mountains because he thought it was the most pointless thing to do. A real irony, but then again, the aesthetic may be the only redeeming feature of a pessimistic worldview.

Now you will just repeat your mantra that I am talking about exactly the self-delusion which you - in all your superiority - have the better sense to see through. — apokrisis

I'm not saying I'm superior. But once an illusion/concealment has been shown to be what it is, it's difficult to submerge yourself again. That's how you solve an existential crisis in the usual way, isn't it? Surround yourself with your comforts and securities and distract yourself for long enough that you eventually forget what was bothering you. Until something inevitably triggers the questioning again, usually in the form of something tragic.

You are here because countless other organisms have suffered uselessly. You are the product of their combined subjugation by the whims of the environment; a billion-year-old gladiatorial arena. None of this is worthy of praise - it is utterly useless, pointless and morally repugnant. But to come to this conclusion requires one to look past your favorite ice cream shop or the next order on Amazon.

You have a flawed thesis. You think the point of life is not to feel the slightest discomfort, rather than to actually live it and make something of it. — apokrisis

I didn't say that was the point of life. In fact I'd argue the point of life, pace Nietzsche, is to make art and express oneself by the aesthetic.

All the science stands against you there - from biology through neuroscience, sociology and psychology.

Your case hinges on a mentality you have chosen to construct - one where you have got into the negative habit of focusing on the very worst possible outcomes and treating them as the sole determinants of your existence.

It's learned helplessness dressed up as "philosophy". — apokrisis

No...it's not. Get out of your bubble and read some psychology, and none of that positive psychology bullshit. Go read Becker, go read Freud (the parts that don't involve penises), go read Zapffe, go read Heidegger, go read Adler, go read Rank, go read Fromm, go read Schopenhauer, Cioran, Ligotti, Brassier, Feltham, Darwin. They've said it better than I can, and a lot of it is free online.

Again, my point is that you start from the histrionic and personal position that suffering, in any degree, is an unbearable fact. But most people just don't think that do they? Life has it ups and downs but that doesn't make life not worth living. — apokrisis

I'm not just arguing that life has its ups and downs, I'm arguing that life has far more downs than ups (and that the down are structurally apparent), and that the reason most people don't find life unbearable is because they have found methods of dealing with the pain, just as Zapffe, Freud, Becker, Nietzsche, and others have argued. All of this leads to the idea that life is something to be endured - which a lot of the survivors of Auschwitz did but that doesn't mean it was good that they went through Auschwitz. Now of course Auschwitz is an extreme example, but in fact it's a poignant one as well since it shows the extreme polarity and unbalance of pain and pleasure as well as the systematic exploitation (instrumentalizing) of the structural pain within life itself.

Affirmative existential thinking can potentially justify the continuing of a life in a purely irrational, emotional and aesthetic way (pace Nietzshce) but that does not make starting a life totally fine. Indeed the reason we have to act this way is out of desperation.

So you have structural pain manifesting as tediousness, boredom, unremarkability, daily uncomfortable experiences, and a general sense of unease on the day-to-day while also having the prospect of extreme, utterly horrible pain, pain that can only be described as torturous, pain that would make us question continuing existing at that moment and which, pace Cabrera, removes us from our ability to act ethically (as in these situations we are solely concerned with ourselves and thus may neglect others). This is not an exaggeration, it is an absolutely real prospect. What if your entire life led up to you dying in horrible pain?\ Would all the good experiences in the past have any effect on you in that circumstance? No. The pain you experienced would be so intense that you would question the very decision to bring you into existence.

Ignoring this prospect is a classic example of Pollyannism and magical thinking.

This is silly. Things with a telos in this fashion can't get worn out unless they are used to achieve things. So you could say living and dying without properly living is certainly a waste of a life. Thus the end point of a drill's existence or a person's existence would have to be judged in terms of the negentropy created as well as the entropy spent. — apokrisis

Heidegger does indeed call achievement the essence of action. Doesn't change the fact that action is inherently predisposed to inevitable destruction, not to mention that many actions are quite terrible.

Your position relies on constant exaggeration. Mostly we have all those things to deal with the realities of life. To claim they are "exactly" fictions to hide death is more argument by histrionics. — apokrisis

Unlike what you claim here, I actually have scientific data to support my views. I'm not just going to ignore an entire sector of inquiry because you personally don't like it.

I agree that there can sometimes be something sexy about pessimism or existentialism in general, but ultimately I think if you are more often than not preoccupied with being suave and fresh with your pessimism then you're doing it wrong. Scotsmen aside, a real pessimist does not enjoy being a pessimist. I conceive of a pessimist as someone who is systematically reducing their life-affirming biases in pursuit of the truth in a risky and fragile existence.

In regards to the compatibility between instrumentality and objectivity, I don't know. I suppose this is one of the reasons I tend to be suspicious of pessimistic metaphysics, which seem more like narratives than insight into the reality of the world (as most metaphysics for that matter tend to be - elaborate fairy tales that trick us into believing that we know something).

I accept that. But that also makes pessimism less interesting here in being less a metaphysical issue and more a practical one - unless it is actually then related to the philosophy of biology. — apokrisis

It's more phenomenological and existential than philosophy of science, concerning the qualitative experiences of a sentient organism, or a mind. A conglomerate of phenomenology, existentialism, philosophy of science and philosophy of mind and perhaps some others.

The claim that consciousness is a curse is not really a philosophy of biology claim. It's definitely more poetic although this does not necessarily take away its force, and it's fundamentally sourced from a reflection on the human condition than a reflection on a specific biological feature. Although I'm sure you could get to the same conclusion regardless of what method you take, so if you're a reliabilist about the scientific method I can see you coming to the same conclusions, albeit in a longer and annoyingly tedious way. Things need not be perfectly crisp or mathematically quantifiable to be meaningful, useful, and more importantly right.

So in a sense pessimism is indeed existentialism, but it's a different kind of existentialism that makes it unique in that it does not affirm life or existence whereas the famous existentialists like Camus or Sartre did.

Whereas some pessimistic thinkers like Schopenhauer made pressing observations about an isolated phenomenon (consciousness) and tried to explain the rest of the world based on it, we need not limit ourselves this way to make pessimistic claims. But generally pessimistic claims are going to center around the objects of ethical value - sentients - and the constraints imposed on them.

Just as your pragmatism has a rich history, pessimism has a rich, albeit neglected, history, extending as far back as the Sumerians and their Epic of Gilgamesh, or with Plato's condemnation of the immanent, or the Book of Ecclesiastes, or the Gnostics, or Shakespearean theater, or the comparatively radical nature of Buddhism and its focus on ending suffering. The modern pessimist rides on these ideas while attempting to find global similarities between them all and staying within the realm of the intelligible.

Not having a grandiose or systematic metaphysics does not usually affect pessimistic works, since pessimistic metaphysics is usually in response to the immanent objectivity of phenomenological studies. Whether or not Schopenhauer's metaphysics holds water does nothing to his evaluation of the human condition, although certainly metaphysics can be used as a rejoinder as discussed below.

But my position is not that life is bliss. Things being less than positive is not uncommon. We all know that. However what is histrionic is to then call it all a tragedy. — apokrisis

I never said it had to be bliss in this case, although I might question why we ought to settle for less (the mediocre). The point is that I think generally life is far worse than mediocre and we're not willing to face this immediately accessible fact. As Ligotti said, life is malignantly useless.

But that is hardly true. We spend a long time growing before we start decaying. So again your position - to the degree it has to depend on these kinds of histrionic claims - is unconvincing. — apokrisis

It is in fact true, because at the ontological level Dasein is a being-towards-death. Heideggerian ontology implicitly places focus on possibilities more than the actualities, since Being is a process; there is never a complete thing. Actuals are quite simply an ever-tumbling series of possibilities falling over each other.

Our "telos", or end-point (not the functional point) is death. A tool's function may be to drill holes or hammer nails, but ultimately its final destination is with it breaking and being tossed out. The final destination of a star is a supernova or a white dwarf. The final destination of a human is death, regardless of all the existentially-heroic feats a human does in their life, just how a terrorist may go through many growth spurts before ultimately blowing himself up - in the end, we always knew what was coming, we were just kicking the can down the road. Claiming we grow and flourish during life does not change this fact, and claiming that death is not psychologically problematic is laughably absurd - on the contrary, death is exactly why we have culture, religion, political parties and the family unit as well as a host of other reassuring fictions, such as entertainment or pop-science.

But it was bad metaphysics that did the deceiving - the idea that individual lives must have cosmic or divine significance.

And it is still bad metaphysics to jump to the other extreme of complaining of existence as a complete state of generalised contingency, brute fact, and cosmic insignificance.

Modern understanding confirms life and mind as special in being - in the cosmological sense - very highly developed in terms of complexity, or negentropic organisation. We are at the centre of creation in that way.

And a proper analysis of the human condition ought to respect that objective truth. Which is why the almost instinctive reply to the Pessimist is start paying more attention to the biological and social context that is actually psychologically forming you.

Stop thinking simply, start thinking in terms of reality's complexity if you want to talk accurately about what is true or right. — apokrisis

Pessimism is generally less concerned with the lack of meaning than existentialism is. It's more of the combination of the lack of meaning + the inevitable and structurally inherent pain in life that makes life problematic. The abstract notion of the lack of meaning is actually relatively unimportant here, as we can see pessimistic ideas in the thinkers of the ancient world, during the time of luck, chance, and gods and before any serious nihilism was pursued.

You might personally find interest in Ray Brassier, who argues that scientific inquiry, instead of liberating us in the Enlightenment sense, reveals to us complete and utter nihilism. We are a species doomed to extinction. He is committed to a naturalistic metaphysics and draws heavily upon modern science to support his claims as well as the phenomenology of Heidegger and others.

Furthermore, Zapffe focuses more on the lack of cosmic justice than meaning. Accidents happen all the time for no reason. The struggle for space and resources due to a cosmic scarcity cause strife and conflict. To live is to be deprived. The universe is unable to support our dreams, and our novelty interests are merely distractions - objectively speaking there is nothing in the universe worthy of praise, as if the universe is a Spinozistic pantheistic god and whose priests are the pop-science dolts on the front page of Time magazine, proclaiming the wonder of life and universe while systematically ignoring the fundamental instrumentality of being and subsequent suffering this inflicts upon conscious beings. Life continues to continue to continue to continue to continue for absolutely no rational reason whatsoever. Hedonism is merely a distraction. An empty universe is not a tragedy. etc.

The overall point I was getting at is that Stoicism and your enlightened pragmatism and the like all are philosophies that affirm life without what I see to be a good enough justification. Your particular version focuses on the broadest holistic sense we get from physics while ignoring very real psychological phenomena, from Pollyanna-ism to the neurotic episodes to our disturbing desires and repressed memories and fears. The fact that we are having an argument about this is, I think, a point in favor of pessimism: what if you're actually right and I never agree with you and live my life in a less-than-positive state - wouldn't that be a tragedy? Is it my fault that I'm wrong? Let's not forget the Heideggerian notion of being-in-the-world: you and I and everyone else are manifestations of Being itself. The existence of pessimistic thinkers like Schopenhauer are not something to be ostracized as if they are less-than-natural manifestations of the world: instead, the world is capable of producing such miserable ideas. The world is capable of producing great suffering. And the world is oftentimes incapable of producing equally great experiences. From your perspective, these thinkers might be akin to a tumor on an organism that must be removed before it metastasizes - and yet this also means you are ignoring the ontological fact that an organism can be so flawed as to produce a tumor and instead focusing only on removing it.

Is it that your claim is the crisp possibility (like your fear of torture) can't be in anyway unthought or defused once experienced? I'm dubious of that as a psychological fact. I see it as the development of a psychological habit, and habits can be forgotten or at least be unlearned in ways which eventually render them vaguer. — apokrisis

As soon as a person is born, they are in a state of decay, or being-towards-death. When we live, we are in a state of defense even if we don't realize it. Defending against threats. And ultimately forgetting that we lose in the end.

Happiness, pleasure, and the like are thus distractions, or concealments, of our basic ontological structure. This structure is incompatible with our psyche due to an over-evolved brain. Thus our entire lives are basically one episode of neuroticism after another, which can be seen from Becker.

I'm not wrong about any of this. Maybe there's other aspects I'm forgetting about, or I'm exaggerating the importance of these claims. But they are nevertheless real aspects of reality that are inherently problematic. And I think that once these are seen, it is difficult to un-see without self-delusion.

Yes, I think there is an element of heroism, as there is in practically any action we take. The number one priority of the ego is to affirm itself as an important piece in the world, as a symbol that stands out from the rest of them. Like Kierkegaard said, we quite literally constrain the world to fit our own little neighborhood, i.e. limit the contents of consciousness a la Zapffe. It's human nature just as it is human nature to breathe oxygen. Therefore a key aspect of pessimistic literature is the disillusionment with the world, the idea that there is nothing here for us, that we have been deceived this whole time.

Instead of "vague" I would use the term "uncertain". It's uncertain whether or not the world has meaning, or if there is any sense of justice, or if we'll get horrible hurt tomorrow. This was, as I interpret it, a key point in Zapffe's (and in fact Kierkegaard's) philosophy - the mind is a hive of possibilities and we don't have an easy way of dissolving these possibilities. Particularly with the possibility of extreme, torturous pain - how does one live, not just survive, but live when experiencing horrible physical pain?

Possibilities rear their ugly head when they are seen as threats. When the Stoic sage tells us to ignore these possibilities and carry on with life serenely, they implicitly accept the fact that they are first and foremost threats. Ignoring these threats may give us some relief, but this is inherently an act of concealment. From a purely scientific point of view, this may be no more interesting than the fact that humans depend on oxygen to live, or that water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. But from an aesthetic, ethical, and existential perspective, the nature of this phenomenon threatens the very dignity of a human, the assumption-illusions underneath affirmative ethics that make it seem more like a religion than anything else.

The idea of hope is deconstructed as well - what does it say about man if what keeps him going is a twisted sense of fear projected into vanity? We must be a sad specimen indeed if this is what keeps our spirits up, the illusions that the grass is greener on the other side. If we're honest with ourselves, we won't bias our perceptions with ideas that might be fictions, i.e. self-deception. Once again, we have a threat to our dignity, our self of autonomy, uniqueness, value and importance, concepts that are not able to be destroyed without repercussions.

In any sense, I think the idea that there is no rational ground for hope has more support than the idea that there is. The fact that we depend on self-imposed delusions is, I think, evidence of the lack of any substantial justice or importance. As Zapffe said, any constructed meaning is a pseudo-solution to the metaphysical lack of it.

To say that pessimists should suck it up is then, from the perspective of a pessimist, akin to telling a domestic abuse victim to love their spouse.

So, all worldviews are distractions in this sense, and the desire for "objectivity" you mention is often a neurotic desire to be correct, so as not to appear the 'fool' who is 'deluded'. How much this psychological dynamic seems to drive philosophical discussion on forums never ceases to amaze me. I think it is all a distraction from what really matters. What really matters is that you come to see what will change your life and take you away from holding worldviews; this is the meaning of life and there is no formula: it is different for each one. — John

I see you've read Nietzsche. Interesting points.

Existential angst seems to require some degree of objectivity and a desire for objectivity. Delusions can be comfortable but we inherently don't like to see them as delusions. We want objectivity. Tricking ourselves is not acceptable, even if it is comfortable.

Namely, James Ross's argument for the immateriality of the mind. — Marty

I've been meaning to make a post on Ross's argument. I'm not sure if it is as persuasive as others make it out to be.

For sure it's gendered, but that's the point: to avoid instances where women's voices are overwhelmed by men who think they know what's best for them. — TheWillowOfDarkness

You see the same thing from women, though. It's apparently wrong for men to tell women what is best for them, but it's totally okay for women to tell other women what is best for them. As if there is a strict metaphysical divide between men and women, and personal liberty is thrown out.

A woman prostituting herself is shamed by many feminists, and used as an example of the Patriarchy's influence. But is the woman actually being oppressed here, or is that just an aesthetic of the feminist ideology? What if the woman doesn't mind prostituting herself, or actually, god-forbid, enjoy it? Should other people be able to tell her what it best for her, or tell her that she doesn't know what is best for her because of something-something the influence of the Patriarchy?

They need one another to sustain their interdependent conspiracy theories. — Hoo

This.

Radfems and co. often berate the Men's Rights movement, and the Men's Rights movement often berates the Radfems and co. It's an endless series of fear-mongering and strawmen.

We've all been offended at one time or another because of something that someone has said or because of someones expressed belief which we find objectionable. Conversely, we've all found something that someone has said praiseworthy, or some belief that someone has expressed to be admirable. The simple explanation, which also happens to be the one that I find the most plausible, is that this is because some beliefs are wrong, and ought to be eschewed and condemned, and others are right, and ought to be accepted and promoted. — Sapientia

The only reason I can see for this, though, is because we fear the ramifications of a poor belief or desire the functionality of a good belief. Beliefs, in my opinion, are simply latent actions, or actions that have been repressed because of more dominating actions. They are desires and judgments that inherently have a motivational component to them - unrestrained, all beliefs lead to action.

Indeed if you're going to have a belief and yet not do anything, I would question your honesty or your will. Beliefs without actions are useless. What is scary about bad beliefs is that we can imagine what will happen if these beliefs are put into practice.

Resuscitating this thread. What is the place of existential angst in nature? Where does it come from?

As far as I can tell, humans are the only known organisms that have the capacity to reflect upon their existence to such a degree as to confront at least the possibility of meaninglessness, nihilism, the absurd, annihilation, etc.

This notion of possibility fits well with what Zapffe wrote in his essay:

"But as he stands before imminent death, he grasps its nature also, and the cosmic import of the step to come. His creative imagination constructs new, fearful prospects behind the curtain of death, and he sees that even there is no sanctuary found. And now he can discern the outline of his biologicocosmic terms: He is the universe’s helpless captive, kept to fall into nameless possibilities.

From this moment on, he is in a state of relentless panic."

The medieval Scholastics also thought that modality was a critical aspect of the Intellect, and actually many of them went on to argue that our Imagination is what leads us away from the truth (which would be, in their eyes, their metaphysical structure and religion, somewhat begging the question - a great way to convert people, though).

Then we have Kant, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, etc who all were transcendental in their phenomenology, in that the realm of the possible created the conditions for actuality (in a top-down fashion). Especially in regards to Heidegger with his idea of "being-in-the-world": a person is not "apart" or "away" from the world, a person is inherently a "part" of the world, or a "manifestation" of the world itself. The human mind becomes no more special than a falling leaf, or a photon, or a nuclear warhead; furthermore, the failings of a human being become not just personal failures but cosmic failures as well (i.e. a catastrophe in Zapffe's terminology).

Put all these thoughts together and we get a basic idea of what could be a defining characteristic of a mind, that it is a hive for possibility-modelling. Even if these possibilities are in fact false in the naive correspondence realist theory of truth, they still hold sway for the self model that is emergent from the mind itself.

Indeed this is an important aspect of theories of cognition and rationality: the ability to think counterfactually by conceptually piecing together if-then propositions in an endless series of combinations, discarding the ones that are "problematic" and maintaining and/or rearranging those which are "useful" or "sensible".

How all this works, from the computational aspect to the semantic aspect to the metaphysical substrate aspect, is still a mystery. Perhaps finding the answer to these will give us a better understanding of what the mind's place in reality is; i.e. how the world is able to model itself, or how the world is able to create a functional, yet transparent system (i.e. "cosmic amnesia"), or how the world is able to host what Zapffe called "cosmic panic" (i.e. "cosmic insecurity").

I don't have an excellent background in feminist philosophy, nor the history of feminism, but this apparent third-wave feminism strikes me as a rather hateful movement whose proponents are getting angry over things that never happened to them decades ago, i.e. taking the abuse of others in the past as a personal attack.

Additionally, it's striking imo how these radfems are so vocal about the woman's right to choose or the woman's liberty and yet oftentimes act quite paternalistic themselves. Ideas such as "all sex is rape" is justified by appeals to the Patriarchy, as well as claims that women "don't know what's best for them" - as if a woman can't think for herself despite the apparent influence of the Patriarchy. Is it still oppressive if the woman enjoys it? If so, then this becomes an aesthetic argument and not an ethical one.

Just to clarify on this point – an important thing to note here is that hunger is not a notification in the sense of providing the organism with information. The organism learns nothing about the objective state of their body from being hungry per se (that is, not unless they are prior aware of some theory of objective hunger and take this sensation merely as an indicator of some separate state), nor what needs to be done to recognize this. — The Great Whatever

This is precisely what I was referring to. Thanks to a familial relationships and pseudo-memories imbued within genes (i.e "instincts"), hunger automatically, or very quickly is learned to be, a signal for the need to consume something. A baby, when faced with the crisis of hunger for the first time, cries out in anxiety, and is then fed goopy food or breast milk. Soon the baby learns that there is a direct relationship between them experiencing hunger, crying, and getting food (a something that tastes interesting and goes in the mouth), therefore, the experience of hunger is connected to getting food. As the baby matures into a child and adult it takes responsibility for this necessity and gets food on its own without (usually) crying.

How am I even supposed to respond to this? — The Great Whatever

To interject here, sometimes people eat because they enjoy eating, or because they're bored. You are correct in that we seem to eat primarily to get rid of an uncomfortable notification; indeed without this uncomfortable notification the only thing that would compel us to eat would be an understanding of biological functions paired with a general desire to continue to exist. Generally I would say that most people would prefer to rather continue to live without having to eat instead of being constrained by the biological necessity of fuel and the subsequent motivational discomfort.

Perhaps this is why Aristotle was quite reserved and pessimistic in his thoughts on the telos-attaining man. As I recall, Aristotle thought contentment and "happiness" was only available for those who didn't have to work hard, manual labor for their entire lives and had a certain degree of comfort and luxury. These comfortable people inevitably started doing philosophy, and reflected upon the human condition and thus we have existentialism/pessimism.

There have of course been attempts at what you would call a positive ethics, notably Utilitarianism, but they inevitably find themselves caught in the barbed wire of the realisation that it is rarely possible to promote pleasure or happiness to the primary aim at no cost in terms of harm to others. — Barry Etheridge

So this is exactly what I was talking about: the prioritization of harm. You haven't really done anything to explain why harm is more important than benefit, though, other than say that harm is an emergency, which begs the question as to why harm is an emergency.