My outcome leads to no negative outcome for a future individual. — schopenhauer1

....is not an answer to the question: "Why should everyone have to serve your preference in this matter?"

What is it about the word "flourishing" that draws people like a moth to a flame? — schopenhauer1

Yeah. Why on earth would flourishing be a preference? Why would you want anything standing in the way of misery?

If we know of the "sufferings", why are the positives worth it when nothing had to be created at all? — schopenhauer1

Again, you have simply failed to answer on the issue. Why should your personal "is" be society's collective "ought"?

Because there is always tension between the individual and society... — schopenhauer1

Yep. Life never runs smooth. There is always friction. And yet at some sensible level, we are indifferent to that. It ceases to matter ... probably because we have goals and hence a balanced and reasonable view of what it would take to negotiate their achievement.

If you want to take some other simplistic/absolutist position on the structural intolerability of existence, that's your personal choice. I merely point out that is bad psychology and thus a philosophy constructed on faulty premisses.

Of course we conform to society's expectations/roles/givens, etc. We eventually learn to integrate. — schopenhauer1

Why always stuck with the one side of what I say? We also conform to an expectation that we are differentiated as well. And it is precisely that modern Romantic/Existential social expectation - you are a special flower - which is a primary source of much of the angst (for the average person in a developed country with food in their bellies, a roof over their heads, time to waste on the internet).

I say rebel against that conformist role! Rebel against being a rebel. Wise up to the self-absolving meme that is antinatalism. Fight back against the expectations of differentiation. :)

But why do we want this process to continue? — schopenhauer1

You might not. But why should I want what you want? Why should everyone have to serve your preference in this matter?

What is it about seeing new people navigate the social/physical world that is valuable to you that this needs to be procreated to a next generation? It is a legitimate question, but so fundamental you seem to think it should not be asked. — schopenhauer1

You just never listen to the answers. I don't think there is an ought involved. I've said it is fine as a personal choice. My reply to the OP was that one justification is that having kids makes you less selfish, more socially responsible and involved. And that in itself is fun and healthy for good natural reasons.

It is not as if there is some world shortage of humans. In the end, we can shrug our shoulders at antinatalism as a moral philosophy. So the only thing to object to is that it is a bad idea from a psychological health viewpoint. It becomes a rationale to hide behind.

Now from here, you take this IS and make it an OUGHT by PREFERRING to have future people that experience this dynamic of the individual and society. — schopenhauer1

Huh? I am asking you to justify why your personal preference ought to be the metaphysically general preference. You are the one claiming that the reality is structurally intolerable and therefore all of us ought not to reproduce as an ethical fact.

I instead start with situational choices and end with them. We can each make our own personal choices on the issue. And collectively, as a society, we will make some general choice. Who could complain about that?

But the other issue here is what to do practically if you are personally miserable and depressed about life. That is where you need the psychology rather than the philosophy. You keep mixing the two up.

You say this is a good thing and should be carried out because that is just what happens. Again, this is an is ought problem.... — schopenhauer1

Nope. My actual argument starts pragmatically with the preference to be achieved - the purpose you might have in mind. You want life to be x. And so what would be the steps to reach that?

It is a given, a scientific fact, that we are social creatures who flourish through the give and take of some balance of competitive and co-operative behaviours. We must be both sufficiently differentiated and integrated to thrive as ... social creatures. And everything else I say follows from this basic picture of the human situation.

Now you can dispute that scientific account of things. But I am asking what is it that you hope to achieve, and what are the given conditions from which that preference would have to be expressed. Some reasonable plan of action then follows.

So nope. That is the advantage of pragmatism. It takes both the preference and the situation seriously enough that reason can operate properly. A path can be found without the kind of collapse into helpless absolutism your approach always leads you.

Huh? My claim is that it is natural to be indifferent to this bumpiness when it doesn’t really matter.

It is your pessimism that demands the perfection of a frictionless existence. Or have you now abandoned that?

I dunno. Hit a Swiss watch with a hammer and likely it's destroyed. Hit a man with hammer, and unless you hit him pretty hard, he might just hit you back. — tim wood

So what I said then? Mechanisms are fragile because they depend on material stability. Organisms are robust because they are the management of material instability.

Deux et machina? If there's a hand, it must be the various physical laws and a lot of combining and recombining. If not that, then what is the hand? — tim wood

The usual semiotic stuff like genes, membranes, neurons and the other non-holonomic constraints.

Laws are holonomic constraints. They apply universally. Life arises because codes can encode for local and personal laws - habits in other words.

Trees - news to me - are apparently amazing, dynamic and engaging in behaviours often described in anthropomorphic terms. — tim wood

Life at all levels uses communal signalling. It’s important to microbial ecosystems too. So again, the same semiotic story of self organising constraints.

Well, it is simply a preference of yours. — schopenhauer1

It is an empirical account so it stands or falls on the evidence.

I’m asserting its psychophysics 101 as well as a familiar epistemic point of Ancient Greek metaphysics. So start with that. ;j

That's quite the assertion to start your line of thought with — Ilyosha

Assertion or psychophysics 101? It's just standard psychological science.

The problem is not reason - I think it's the insistence that reason must always be validated by, and in that sense subordinated to, human sensory capacities (which is what 'empiricism' amounts to). — Wayfarer

But even the experiencing eye is imposing an intelligible structure on the world. The Ancient Greeks knew that as well. Empiricism is simply the formalising of this semiotic business - the production of the signs by which we construct an orderly representation of the world as it suits us to understand it.

So the scientific method is just about making the epistemology of being "a reasoning mind" something that is explicit and thus perfectable. We don't have to hide behind direct realism. It is OK to admit that reality is a pragmatic interpretation.

And from that prosaic truth, you can always continue on to the exciting ontic implications. Reality itself might also operate semiotically - interpreting itself into being in a "mind-like" fashion as a set of definite signs.

(Every material event is evidence for something. And it turns out to be evidence of thermalisation in progress. Every event is a tick of the cosmic thermal clock.)

Reasoning: the provision of causes, motives, and explanations for what is, i.e. for being per se whether in whole or in part. — javra

But it would be a narrow definition of reasoning to identify it with just something people pursue as a method of inquiry. The primary datum of experience is that nature itself appears intelligible, or rationally structured.

And the principle of sufficient reason/principle of locality might speak to atomistic patterns of causal action. But physics also needs its matching holistic principles - of least action and cosmological homogeneity - for a complete description of nature's causal structure. It must see form and purpose as part of the total picture that would be a generalised Logos.

I’m again reminded of the pre-Socratic notion of logos, the reasoning pertaining both to the physical cosmos and to individuals which are aspects of it. — javra

Yep. And the Pythagoreans and Hercliteans matched Logos to Flux, Peras to Apeiron, Limits to Chaos. So they did the flip I suggest. It is reason - as in the reasonableness of orderly structure - that manages or suppresses the basic instability of "existence", or flux/apeiron.

Existence, in this metaphysics, is emergent actuality, the substantial state that persists long time because there is the organisation to channel the naked chaos into a steady directed and temporal flow.

With these musings in mind—which I don’t deny are themselves one individual's reasoning—I can’t help but speculate that at the deepest of metaphysical levels truth is the arational itself — javra

Arational suggests neutrality. And that would fit with an understanding of chaos or flux as a meaningless and undirected foment of fluctuations. It is essentially neutral in being neither formed nor having matter. And neutral as it cannot stand opposed to the rational structure that must inevitably arise from it.

To be irrational is to be already actually existing as an antithetical structure of some kind. It is essentially a dualist view of nature, like mind vs body, or spirit vs world.

And meaning is too young of a thing to [hold an ability to comprehend] it.” — javra

In the scheme I sketch, meaning becomes formally cashed out as mutual information. The logos and the flux must be in a meaningful balance - so not dualistically separated but semiotically engaged. And the mutual information of two variables is a measure of the mutual dependence between them.

apokrisis seems to think there is this smooth balance of the individual with the whole- as if human social relations are simply a machine. — schopenhauer1

Trying to drag me into yet another of your scab picking pessimism sessions? ;)

For the record, I would say organismic rather than mechanical. And so you are off track thinking I would need a frictionless mechanism.

What is important from a pragamatic and semiotic view of nature is a capacity to ignore the differences that don’t make a difference. Identity or autonomy is defined by what matters to an organism, and thus what also is a matter of generalised indifference.

That is what is balanced. Things don’t need to be magically smooth or frictionless. The system just needs to be smart enough that it knows when not to care.

Your rants about the structural intolerability of existence don’t get that. You complain about every bump in the road, no matter how insignificant.

It is you who desire the smooth and frictionless existence here. Funny that. Folk are always projecting.

Life is managed instability. So it is based on a separation of powers that establishes the third thing of a synergistic and complementary relation.

So Romanticism rather conventionally opposes reason and ... some antithetical version of unreason. The irrational, the felt, the spiritual, the animal, etc.

But life as a phenomenon is a fruitful combination of material dynamics at its most unstable or volatile, and then the overlay of reason, memory or control that can ride that wild horse in desired directions.

So life certainly answers to reason in the sense that there must be a stabilising hand that forms some bunch of unstable material potentials into a persisting organismic identity.

A tree, perhaps ironically, seems about the most managed, the least lively, kind of living thing. A tree is like sedimentary being, growth fixed in woody permanent layers. What we see is it’s logical structure - the shape that had the optimal fit to its small gap in the forest canopy.

Isn’t that how we respond to trees? They are nature’s greatest living sculptures. They impose a form on the life that lives within their forest.

Have you read what Heraclitus argued for?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_of_opposites

Why should there be this balancing in the first place. Putting the cart before the horse again. Taking an is for an ought. — schopenhauer1

You need emotional range to model the richness of the world. So you need this baseline balance as the neutrally poised state from which you can launch in appropriate fashion in countering directions.

So the ought is a logical necessity. If we want to express a full range of emotions, we ought to start from a neutral position. (Did you have an actual argument against this ought?)

but it is the same basic goal-categories: survival, comfort/maintenance seeking, boredom-fleeing). — schopenhauer1

You just make things up as facts to support your case.

I was talking about what you might genuinely feel as a baseline condition when all forms of thought and action are as stilled as possible.

Boredom is what you feel when nothing is exciting your curiosity. And thinking about it, curiosity is probably our most valuable trait.

Can we have communities of existential discussion? — schopenhauer1

But @Inyenzi nailed it. Not having children is to suffer a deficiency in an especially close human and community relationship.

It is thus funny - in a sad and ironic way - that you would want to scratch your itch for community in a community of existential complaint.

But then if there were such a philosophical community, it would only be valuable to the extent it was brutally honest. So it would have to take account of the psychological and sociological science, as well as the physical and cosmological science.

At the bottom of it is a sort of emptiness/boredom- a dull silence that we wrap more routines around. — schopenhauer1

Is that really the general case? It sounds like what a person with the flat affect of deep depression might say. But some people might say that perhaps there is restless anxiety. A person with a tendency to disorders of anxiety and obsession would have that as their most unfocused baseline state.

And then there is what I would think of as the balance between too flat and too jittery. The calm instability of a meditative state of mind - a state of simple vagueness. :)

So even at a pop psychology level, we can see that your argument for some generalised baseline condition - flat affect - is challenged by the facts. It may be what is true for you. But is it true for everyone?

And my point is that neurocognition tells us the mind depends on its dichotomous responses. It needs to be able to swing both ways with adaptive flexibility. It must be able to worry when worry is required, and to relax, when that is what is best. Be jittery or be calm. Be introspective or be outwardly engaged. Etc, etc.

So the richness of lived experience is the ability to move strongly in opposing directions as suits the needs of the moment. Joy and pain.

And that lability predicts that the resting state, the deep down condition, would be the kind of neutral instability, the sense of disengaged poise, that meditation seeks after. A continuous fertile bubbling of thought and impressions that you keep letting go rather than pursuing.

It is nothing like death or the void. It is not the abyss or the chasm or the terror that needs to be managed and suppressed.

It is ... a vagueness. It is basic mindfulness, a basic level of being in the world, all ready to go, but not yet going anywhere in particular.

And it is not even some super-state of mind or anything special. It is not pure individuation but rather its opposite, the most de-individuate state of mind we can arrive at.

However, it is what it would be like to be centred. It is the balance between being too flat and too jittery for comfort. Neutral and yet alive with the potential to engage.

So if we are going to start building psycho-philosophies, they ought to accurately identify what would be the natural general baseline condition of a well-adjusted mind. We ought to know what we are shooting for when making our generalisations.

Chance and necessity make a nice pair of terms in which to explain everything, but I would imagine you could tell a similar story with other pairs (or mores) of fundamental somethings. They all make me uncomfortable, but that's my problem. — Srap Tasmaner

Of course you need many dichotomies here. There isn't just a single dialectic. Discrete~continuous, flux~stasis, one~many, matter~form - we are talking about the deeper thing of the metaphysical mechanism that is dialectical opposition itself.

It would be nice to boil down the list to a single over-arching dichotomy. For me, I think it comes down to a pair of them - a dichotomy of dichotomies.

I would defend local~global and vague~crisp as the two key ones. One talks of the hierarchical structure that is what you have when you have something definitely developed. Then the other talks about the fact of development - the move from a monadic potential through a dichotomous symmetry breaking that gets you to a final equilbrium stability which is the triadic thing of a hierarchy.

But why so many metaphysical oppositions to describe the one nature? It is because you are trying to fold all the rich variety of an emergent cosmos back into the barest metaphysical scheme. It is not about which single dichotomy covers every angle that has emerged. It is about how every possible angle will emerge once you have the singular mechanism which generates that kind of variety.

Is chance real?" We can posit it, or not, but it will always be in the model either way. And this would be Peirce's pragmatism, yes? — Srap Tasmaner

Well reductionism wants to reduce all forms of chance to some kind of hidden determinism. Nothing could be actually just spontaneous.

So that is the bold move. To actually accept absolute chance as being as real as determinism (or absolute constraint). But then, it is only accepting either being absolute in terms of being the bounding limits of the actual.

So it is a more subtle, or sly, story. Chance and necessity are only absolute and actually existent in terms of each other. They are as real as each other. Which on some views - with them being flattened limits - makes them not really real at all. They are just co-dependently real. One exists to the degree the other is lacking. And neither can be completely lacking for either to actually exist.

Oddly, this matching up makes me even more uncomfortable than the Big Theories do on their own. If the big theories already seem to hang in the air (the way a brick doesn't) on the buoyancy of their own internal coherence, this version seems more like jumping and forgetting to hit the ground. — Srap Tasmaner

Surely it is the opposite. A dichotomy is the organisation that could bootstrap itself as it depends only on that which it bootstraps. Continuity exists only as an exclusion of the discrete. And vice versa. So each is what makes the other. They have a formally inverse or reciprocal relationship.

The internal coherence of a dichotomy is complete. By definition, a dichotomy is that which is mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. It only needs itself to make sense.

But since we're talking metaphysics, do you have any qualms about the word "fact" here? What kind of fact? Are we forced to call such accumulation itself either accidental or necessary? — Srap Tasmaner

The fact is a fact about the metaphysical process. It is its distinctive structural feature. Out of individual accidents, collective order arises.

So the story is of this duality. The accumulation is not a case of either accidental or necessary. As said, it is about both. Both the chance and the necessity, the accidents and the habits, the tychism and the synechism. Each are fundamental in being the limits that sandwich the actuality of being.

So history, the passage of time, fuses together the material and the formal causes to produce the hylomorphic whole, the thing in itself. You have a past of congealed accidents that are steadily expressing the necessity of some global structure or order. And then the world as actual substantial reality - the richly varied thing - is the bit in the middle, the present moment in which much is constrained and yet much is still open and free.

That makes nice sense. Yesterday's chance is today's necessity. I understood your project to be pushing back or outward to ever greater generality, to the "purely" necessary. I guess if that's only an ideal, you'll be mapping the ossified accidental just like the rest of us. I suppose that's the sense of mapping "from the inside", as you put it. — Srap Tasmaner

The "map" is of the very fact that accidents accumulate to form the regularity of habits. That is the Peircean ontological story of the Cosmos.

And then the Platonic part of that is that there are structural attractors. Given the accumulation of accidents, certain flow patterns must be expressed. The latent structure will be what emerges by the end.

This was highly speculative metaphysics in Peirce's day. It is now routine scientific modelling - dissipative structure theory, hierarchy theory, chaos theory, constructal theory, self-organising criticality, far from equilibrium thermodynamics. There are a ton of labels for the current mathematical variants of the basic metaphysical model.

Your response helps. I still don't quite get the big picture, but I'm good for now. — Srap Tasmaner

Great. I appreciate that.

So do maps need to map the essential or the incidental? What do you think abstraction is apart from the shedding of the inessential particulars to arrive at the structural generalities?

My thought here was that the usefulness of a map is showing you what roads happen actually to exist connecting features you're interested in that also happen to exist, and it shows where the features and roads actually happen to be. You could abstract away location, distance, and so on, and just show the connections -- but this town and that city and the road that connects them are still matters of accidental history. — Srap Tasmaner

So the maps have to have enough essential information. And - for the sake of optimality - they would thus leave out all information that is inessential? Do you agree here or not?

If you are mapping the geography of a planet's surface, then sure, all sorts of accidents of time will have become today's dominating constraints. A mountain range is - in plate tectonic terms - just an accident. But for an army, a tourist, or some other relevant expression of a human interest, it is an obstacle, a constraint on our free and easy motion. So that doesn't change the principle of what I said.

A map is an umwelt - the world experienced in terms of some set of signs, some collection of affordances. We take note of all that is fixed so as to see the opportunities that are thus, dichotomously, created.

Constraints would only show you what connections could exist, where they could be, etc. We need to know which ones actually obtain. — Srap Tasmaner

They are only constraints if they obtain. If they are accidents, then they are accidents. Like it says on the label.

As individuated events, fluctuations are unpredictable. You can't draw a map of them. Even if you can record a history of them. Or draw a map of a field of probabilities - a map of the constraining context, the obstacle course, that gives a predictable shape to fluctuation now viewed as the generalised thing of a process. A structure in motion.

Granted some features are considered essential to a map, in the sense that they're included when others aren't or needn't be, but it seemed to me those included features are still historical and accidental -- this town might not exist, there might not be a road between these two, etc. — Srap Tasmaner

You are trying too hard to manufacture problems. Sure history is full of accidents. But if these accidents can accumulate, then they become the constraints that act in the present to limit the accidents of the future.

They are no longer accidents once they become part of the constraints that prevail. So you are simply attempting to make an analogy the worst possible by abusing it in the worst way you can imagine.

Yet, we are both doing choosing our habit patterns to look away from the void. — schopenhauer1

Don’t you instead wander the city streets brandishing your placard warning the end is nigh? Repent while you have the chance!

You have to have a reason why you could believe that existence is structurally intolerable when the evidence is that most people find life a mixed bag, but on the whole, worth living. And arguing with unbelievers is how you daily confirm yourself in that faith. It becomes your evidence that ordinary people really do operate under some mass delusion and only you have been gifted with the vision of the truth.

Sorry -- this just seems like the worst analogy for what you're after. — Srap Tasmaner

So not just a weak analogy, or a bad analogy, but the very worst analogy that could be imagined?

Sounds legit. I mean you made such a stellar argument for that conclusion. ;)

In fact I can't think of any kind of map that isn't based on selecting certain accidental states of affairs to mark and the rest to ignore. There's never any essential/accidental distinguishing such as you describe. — Srap Tasmaner

So I said maps would boil down to a picture of the essential constraints and their resulting degrees of freedom. Obstacles and paths.

Can you present a map which doesnt simplify in just that fashion?

Indeed, if the paths are a mechanical level constraint, like a motorway network or an underground line, you don’t even need to show the hills they skirt, the suburbs they must connect.

And what exactly is accidental about a road or rail line? It is essential that you use them if you are using a car or carriage. The only accidents now are you making wrong turns or getting on the tube heading the wrong way.

A bit fractal'ish I suppose, infinite in depth where the map maps itself. — jorndoe

When you say fractal, you could mean holographic or scalefree. So like a hologram, every bit of the reality provides a map of its whole.

And this would be the way I see it. It is what the cosmological principle of fundamental physics presumes. The Universe is homogenous and isotopic. It should look essentially the same, in terms of its basic structuring laws, over all observable scales.

And that would be like a 4D fractal. Zoom in or zoom out and the view remains the same.

So that is what I am describing. It is why from the inside, the complementary limits of the structure and the chance are flattened so that they appear to be at the beginning and end.

Like being inside a fractal, a perfect hierarchy of scales, look down towards the smallest grain and it becomes eventual a continuous blur. Look up towards the largest fractals and eventually they becomes so large that one eventually fills your whole view. The entire world is now inside a single instant of the complete design.

So the larger story is indeed fractal. And our best cosmological theories, or maps, of reality do elevate that fact to the status of a meta-principle. Homogeneity and isotropy are presumed. The laws of physics have to look the same from any possible physical point of view. That’s how the really key maps, like relativity, were derived.

I don’t follow.

Who is arguing that we shouldn’t make rational choices about having kids. Their welfare ought to be our primary moral concern. We might decide the world is not going to be a good place for them as a result.

But that is quite different from a general claim that life on the whole is structurally intolerable.

The map would be the view from nowhere. It stands outside the world it describes. So that would indeed seem a problem.

But I am defending Peircean internalism. Now the map is part of its world in being map of one of its complementary bounding limits. It is the view from the inside - while the whole shebang is still developing - of its structure as it will be frozen at the end of time. That is, its Heat Death.

And then as I said, the Peircean view treats chance or contingency as real. That is the other bound, the other limitation on being, that can be seen from the inside.

In terms of a developing cosmos, the most absolute state of chance is that which prevailed at its beginning. The hot and quantum Big Bang in other words.

So Peirce provides a map from inside the whole. In one direction, flattened to its descriptive extreme is our view of the Universe’s Heat Death. The ultimate structural outcome. And flattened in the other direction is our map, our scientific view, of the beginning of the Universe in a state of absolute potentiality or chance.

And funny that this type of thinking can only take hold (even in a minor way) in the top ten percent of countries by level of quality of life in just about every indicator. — Baden

Yep. By definition, anyone posting here about antinatalism has a full belly, a roof over their heads, time on their hands. They can take for granted all the civilised advantages that hold real discomfort at bay.

But that would be the irony. Take away the few big discomforts of life and that frees up the mind to start noticing all the tinier ones. Which are far more numerous in their diversity.

A crooked painting can cause me psychic pain. I can't even bear cotton t-shirts anymore - too heavy and restrictive. It's got to be micro-merino next to my skin. :)

So it is easy to see how a generalised dissatisfaction arises. The more luxurious your life, the more you can become overwhelmed by everything that is just slightly not perfect about it.

'All theories are tools, including this one' is one flavor of that closure, and more traditional metaphysical visions is another. — syntax

But all theories are the same kind of tool - a map by which to navigate the territory. So while - like blind men feeling an elephant - that might result in many partial mappings, there is still that single territory being explored.

And there could also be the most complete map possible map. The Map of Everything.

In regards to the contrast between lived life and metaphysical maps, a map is created by abstracting away the accidental to arrive at the necessary.

So actual life is rich because it it rich with a history of accidents, fluctuations, contingencies and particulars. Chance and unpredictability are basic to actual existence. And inexplicable to the degree they are just accidents.

So I - as with Peirce - in fact take the particularity of individual existence to be ontically fundamental. Unlike other brands of metaphysics, chance is treated as basic. We can't say why some radioactive atom actually decayed at precisely that moment. It really was uncaused and spontaneous.

My approach is thus far more generous to that other side of the story. It treats chance happenings as irreducible. They are not going to get explained away by hidden variables, or still more microscopic nudges.

But then the other side of the coin is that Peircean semiotics is founded also on the growth of global habits, the emergence of structural-level necessity. Peirce called it the spontaneity of tychism vs the continuity of synechism.

And metaphysics - as the mapping of the grand synechectic structure of existence, the very shapes of habits - derives its model of the Cosmos by abstracting away all that is just the accidental or particular about the actual world. The map metaphysics produces is of what is structurally - mathematically - necessary in terms of a globally-organising set of constraints.

It is just like real maps - the kind you use to get around. The metaphysics wants to boil away the unneeded detail. It wants to create a picture of the world that doesn't tell you what kind of trees grow on that there hill this year, or the colour of the front door that Mr Smith chose a few months back. Instead, the simplest map just tells you where are the obstacles, where are the paths. That is, where are the constraints, where are the degrees of freedom.

So to call a metaphysical model a tool is too general. There are many kinds of tools.

The kind of tool we are talking about here is a map. And maps are interested in the global structure of an environment, not its inessential details.

Yeah. Apologies. I reread and see you were being anti-antinatalist there. :blush:

And?

[....fades and crackles because we're still in the conceptual safe space] — csalisbury

Given you are posting in a thread dominated by the like-minded, which of us would be in that conceptual safe space? ;)

Alongside positive psychology, — darthbarracuda

Alongside? In what sense are they treated with the same scientific/therapeutic respect?

But those don't make people feel good. — darthbarracuda

Ah. So they are better because they don't paper over the essential badness of existence! For people in a hole, they are a help to dig the hole deeper.

Literature and, to an extent, religion, are treasures that are manifestations of hopes and dreams of real human beings. They ought to be taken as testimonies of the experiences of real people, not dismissed as being somehow fake or opaque. — darthbarracuda

I was talking about them as a metaphysical-strength basis for generalised theories. But if you want to understand them in terms of the social construction of the "human condition", they are good anthropological data. That's exactly what anthropologists do.

First off, antinatalism need not depend on the claim that everyone's lives suck. I don't know why you keep bringing this up... — darthbarracuda

Probably because antinatalists keep mentioning it. Although I agree, you might take the more interesting position that basically life is 99% OK for you, but the 1% that sucks then makes the very idea of living an intolerable burden. Even the possibility of dying slowly in a mangled car wreck means an otherwise cheerful life is a metaphysical no no.

That being said, I do think even the best lives are still quite atrocious. — darthbarracuda

There you go.

Any counterargument to this will require some form of justification of this reality - basically you need to provide a theodicy. — darthbarracuda

Well I can't get over the hopeless irrationality of a view that says a 99% full glass is still a cosmic tragedy in its 1% emptiness.

I mean I scrapped a knuckle doing some gardening this afternoon. It bled a little.

Even worse, the fibre cable installers cut through the underlawn irrigation despite me telling them exactly where to look out for it. Oh, the agony.

And yet I don't regret having been born. It's been another great day.

I accept one part of antinatalism. We ought to consider long and hard about bringing kids into the world. The future could be quite dicey.

But then that just commits you morally to doing the best that you can for them if you do. There is nothing particular to fear about life as a journey in itself. The variety of that journey, the challenges it presents, is pretty much the point.

To build a cult around persuading everyone to stop having kids seems weird. Frankly it is weird. It has value only as an illustration of what bad philosophy looks like.

Social constructionism tries my patience severely. — Thorongil

Sounds legit.

Yet there is a difference between science of life and life as it is lived. — darthbarracuda

Only the difference between the theory and its application. If the theory is right.

You say the self is fluid, but the self we value as a self is precisely the differentiating self. — darthbarracuda

Really? Do you speak for the entirety of humanity throughout human history on this score? A little presumptive and not much supported by the evidence.

My argument is that most people should construct their identity in a way that does express the possibilities of (fruitful) differentiation. But balance would involve also expressing a matching desire for (fruitful) integration.

And so similarly we cannot help but see the self as a soul-like resident of the body. — darthbarracuda

Why does that have to be so? I absolutely don't see it that way. A rational science like positive psychology certainly wouldn't teach things to be that way.

It is only if you can't escape the clutches of literature and religion that you would be trapped in such a myopic view of personal identity.

To say the antinatalist point doesn't work because soul-like selves do not exist in reality is akin to saying the antinatalist point doesn't work because there is no such thing as free will, or God, or whatever, and this risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater. — darthbarracuda

The only risk is folk building bad morality from bad metaphysics.

So your precious thing - the differentiate and competitive aspect of personal identity - is not getting chucked out here. Instead you are being introduced to its complementary twin that also wants to share the bath.

You seem to have tipped this other poor baby out. I found it crawling around on the slippery floor and return it to you. :)

Antinatalism is about taking control of one of the few things we actually do have control over. — darthbarracuda

It's attacking the symptoms rather than the causes.

Life is not "working". It's not up to standards and it never will be. — darthbarracuda

But whose standards? Sure, you can decide that it ain't up to your standards. But as an antinatalist - indeed a strident antinatalist like Schop - you are trying to force your standards on me. And the whole of humanity if you could.

So just note how you choose the third person voice. You already presume that objectively, for any possible person, life doesn't work. Thus you hope to win by rhetoric an argument you can't sustain by logic.

The pragmatic solution is to conserve what resources you do have and stop wasting them on future progeny. — darthbarracuda

That is utilitarianism - and many people do understand pragmatism to be nothing more than a selfish instrumentality.

So we have gone around the complete circle that is the limits of your metaphysics. We are selfish inherently. Therefore pragmatism can only be the instrument for satisfying the desires of this self. That is all pragmatism could mean.

Damn. You seem to have toppled your favourite baby's neglected twin out of the bathtub again. I've tripped over him crawling about on the wet floor.

You sneak in a lot of YOUR preferences as what OUGHT to be. — schopenhauer1

Alternatively, I simply speak to our best science-backed understanding of the reality. It makes a change to the literary or religious ways of addressing life's essential questions.

Anyways, I'm going off the main point which is again, just because identity may be created from group dynamics, does not negate the fact that someone can evaluate LIFE (in total) and deem it an existence that they do not want a future person to have to experience. — schopenhauer1

Sure. But why wouldn't those people be regarded as in need of the appropriate therapeutic help?

Diversity of views and experience may be healthy. My model already speaks to differentiation and competition as a fundamental part of the equation.

But antinatalism - in its monotonic obsessiveness - is then one-sided, and so unhealthy and irrational.

One would be crazy to agree with its view of existence.

And I already told you my ethic which is that if life has structural and contingent suffering — schopenhauer1

You have indeed told me that repeatedly and obsessively. My reasonable reply remains the same. On the whole, life seems pretty good for me and my family. I don't claim that this holds as a universal human view, but most folk - if asked - tend to appreciate the fact of having the chance to have lived.

So it is you who is guilty of mistaking a model of reality for reality.

Life may have to contain the possibility of suffering, but only so it can contain its "other" of flourishing. If you want to talk about structure, you would need to face up to its irreducible complexity in this regard.

Your antinatalism is reductionist and simplistic. It is not in fact structuralism. Like religion and literature, it treats experience like a monadic substance.

The objection I will raise here is that you are making it seem as though because the self is socially constructed, it must be within our control to destroy this same self. — darthbarracuda

I don't follow. It is not about a destruction. It would be about a fluid negotiation.

If the self is contextual, then it is the product of some dynamical balance. What I am saying is that it is not a substantial and located object - a mind or soul that inheres in a body. It is instead a relation between bodies and their worlds. And with linguistically/culturally evolved humans, it is then the self that forms as a result of that higher level of interplay between a social creature and its social world.

That is explicit in a general theory like anthropology. Society is understood as a dynamical system - the balancing of the complementary tendencies of competition and co-operation, or differentiation and integration.

So selfhood exists fluidly as this negotiation. I am more a singular psychological self to the degree I express a competitive and differentiated state of being. And I am more a collective social self to the degree I express the counter-tendencies of a co-operative and integrative state of being.

Thus personal identity is not monadic - a single inherent stuff. It is the balancing of the two complementary tendencies which form the third thing of a body in a relation with its world, a person in a relation with their society.

And where we stand on this spectrum at any moment - competitive vs co-operative, differentiated vs integrated - is a pragmatic issue. We would want the self which is the most effective and best adapted in terms of the long run goals - the long run evolutionary goals that shaped the whole system in play.

So this is the science-based framework through which I would view the "philosophy" of antinatalism.

Antinatalism depends on a theistic/romantic metaphysical model - one that treats mind or identity as something inherent to a body. A soul stuff of some sort or other. But I am arguing from the point of view where the mind or the self is emergent from the pragmatism of a modelling relation.

And so the locus of "the self" is a fluid thing - one poised between two complementary directions. And the optimal balance is a constant negotiation - one we are expected to actively partake in, especially in a civilised society. We are meant to be free to choose whether to be more competitive or more co-operative, more differentiated or more integrated, as best suits the prevailing context or situation.

That is what we want people in general to be good at doing. Striking the healthy balance which sees the whole flourish.

Antinatalism is instead about curling up in the corner and wishing you were dead. It is giving up on the possibility of "controlling things" - or rather, being a properly active part of the negotiations always going on "out there" in the real social world.

And I still agree that it may be the case the real social world has rather spun out of control in many regards. Maybe the problems aren't even fixable.

That could be argued. But still I would say it is excessively pessimistic. Most people don't feel that their life is that bad.

Do you think that's possible - ''Omnipotent'' cells capable of any possible bodlily function and still able to undego cell division? — TheMadFool

Cells are omnipotent in that they all carry around the same kitset of genes. But they become specialised in their expression of those genes so as to form specific functional structures like lung tissue or brain tissue. A higher level of intercellular signalling suppresses the generic genetic potential to create the specialised functionalities.

So it is the constraint on that generality that leads to the complexity of a body with an organ system. That makes it "impossible" to have generalist cells that are also, at the same time, specialists at everything. The specialism is what emerges due to the cell being constrained within a context of collective action. The functionality is a property of the higher level of organisation and so cannot inhere in the cell itself.

Well, I disagree, so I don't see this conversation going any further. — Thorongil

I can see that you disagree. And that you failed to provide a counter-argument. So yes, you have bowed out as far as any conversation goes.

Why have children? "Because I want to be a more selfless person." That is inherently selfish. — Thorongil

Word play. My argument was that selfhood is fluid. So we can (socially) construct a contracted definition of the self - as a solipsistic soul stuff. Or we can recognise that selves arise contextually to serve purposes, and so a social-level of self is also a thing.

Now you can refuse to accept the validity of social psychology here - despite the evidence. You can assert that selfhood is "inherent" and not contextual. And that would indeed be the mainstream unscientific point of view.

But there - I've called it as it is.

Why be an analyst, a scientist, a philosopher? How do we decide that it's better (for us) to accurately model existence with words than to blow on a saxophone and create an ecstasy without words? — syntax

Well yes. I do what I do because it has extraordinary beauty for me. It is thrilling to grasp the true mathematical structure of existence.

And it is not a merely word-based understanding - some kind of formula to incant. It is about actually being able to see and feel this structure in the mind's eye, recognise its form in every encounter with the world.

Any philosophical theory, no matter how grand or successful, is still a mere conceptual piece of reality as a whole. It exists among toothaches, beautiful faces, and screams in the distance at night. It exists among other grand theories, equally plausible or implausible, at least until further investigation. — syntax

I disagree. As I say, it is instead like learning to see. Except that rather than just seeing the world of everyday appearances, it is seeing through to the very pattern of existence itself.

You know something abstract is right when suddenly everything that was fuzzy or confused clicks into sharp focus. It all connects up logically in a self-explanatory way.

So (as you may well understand), it's not about opposing abstract thought to sensuality but rather about opposing abstract thought to the richness of an experience that includes all abstract thought, and not just that grand theory. — syntax

But that is why I disagree. The richness of experience is the immersive view, the subjective pole of being. I know what it feels like to live in the world. And so by contrast I know what it is like to be living in the world of the abstract.

As I say, it is not about simply having a theory. It is about being able to experience the abstract realm that is the territory for which the theory is the map. It becomes a place that you can go.

Of course, if your knowledge of maths and science is a bunch of fragments with no metaphysical structure, then you can't have it as this internal Platonic realm that you experience. You actually have to spend a long time building up that integrated picture that brings it fully alive.

In the quote above, I don't see how [2] cancels [1]. Are you offering a model, a useful perspective? Or something more? Do you grant that theories are not life/existence itself? That all theories are 'smaller' than existence? — syntax

I answered that more fully in the reply to @Srap Tasmaner a post ago.

And no, I see life/existence as the world of mere appearances - at least in being the foreshortened subjective view of what it is to be me, some bag of flesh and prosaic needs, in some highly particular moment of the here and now. And then the Peircean theory is the map of the abstract or objective reality of which my immediate pressing existence is a tiny accidental shard.

So yes. A theory is just a theory. A map is just a map. Screw one up and draw another.

But then what could really drive me? It is only that you can get to experience the wholeness of reality as it comes alive gradually as a living structure in your thoughts.

Isn't that what everyone seeks from metaphysics? And so, that makes the best metaphysics such a worthwhile journey.

What I'm struggling to get across is the oddity of your position, and it's probably just the Peirce thing.

On the one hand, there is this sort of messianic quality to your system.... That doesn't look like the sort of instrumentalist version of pragmatism that this does: — Srap Tasmaner

That's quite right. There is the epistemic version and the ontic version. There is pragmatism and then there is semiosis. So there is the Peirce that is just a story about scientific method or theories of truth, and then there is the Peirce with an architectonic system, a process philosophy theory of the Cosmos itself.

In a nutshell, Peirce starts from phenomenology. He gives an account of how a mind could even know a world. So that gives us the semiotic modelling relation. It is a story of the psychology.

That then lays the basis for a pragmatic epistemology. The reason why minds can work to know a world is abstracted so that it becomes a generalised theory of truth or well-founded belief. It becomes a tripartite system of world, sign and habit of interpretance. The scientific method.

But then this same abstract structure can be generalised ontically to be the story of creation or being itself.

It already starts with a foot in ontology. Semiosis is how minds know worlds and so it is what is the case about actual psychology. It is the theory of how that has to work in a basic way. (And that is also what psychology has agreed, at least in the kind of enactive, embodied, ecological and naturalistic models that have come to the fore once we got over the hump of cognitive representationalism.)

Now also a semiotic ontology is sweeping biology. Theoretical biologists like Howard Pattee, Robert Rosen and Stan Salthe always were taking a basically semiotic view. But these days it is being explicitly recognised by the rise of biosemiosis as a distinctive field of research.

So it is not hard to see the linkage between epistemology and ontology when it comes to life and mind. They are "knowing processes". So a theory of semiosis is about both how life and mind can even be the case, and also what it is that works best if we want to keep stepping up the game through reasoned inquiry.

But then comes the speculative metaphysics. And I quite openly call it that. Like Peirce, the next step seems obviously to consider whether the physical world in general - the Cosmos - is created and organised semiotically. Is the thesis of pan-semiosis true?

I, of course, think that yes, this looks like the final theory. I have a lot of fun arguing for it. And if you pay close attention to current fundamental physics, you can see how it is basically pan-semiotic. It just happens to call itself something else - information theoretic.

In which case, the noise in our models is also signal, and what sense now can be given to "wrong"? If you put "wrongness" in scare-quotes, is this still pragmatism? — Srap Tasmaner

You have answered your own question. I use scare quotes to show that noise - being "other" - is also part of any signal in being the background to that signal. It is what is ignored - the void, the meaningless backdrop - so that what matters, some event, can be seen as individuated and distinct.

Meaningfulness - a signal or sign - is created by the discard of information. The more you can afford to ignore, the more preciously you are treating what you allow to remain.

What immortality? Germ-lines can become extinct like anything else. — Akanthinos

Clearly the word you intended earlier was obtuse. It is my efforts to enlighten you which have proved otiose.

But if you do have any further interest in the biological arguments, try Nick Lane's The Vital Question. It deals with just this issue.