Yeah. But only if they live in some other reality rather than this actual world of ours. So natural values are not abstract in the way that your affirmative values are. Again you are peddling the anti-naturalistic fallacy.

I mean, I am a consequentialist. I'm not exactly going to endorse paradoxical agent-centered restrictions — darthbarracuda

That's terrific. But the said moral agent has to be actually rational, not neurotic, psychopathic, autistic, etc. Which in turn means the agent must have values that are "natural" under my definition of them.

It's just as I've been saying from the beginning - affirmative morality is inherently aggressive and hypocritical, especially in regards to the edges of its domain. — darthbarracuda

LOL. Says the guy who fantasises about pessimism having the responsibility, because there is the capability, of wiping humanity out with nukes.

So why don't we stop beating around the bush and admit and agree on this: life was never meant to be enjoyable and it's childishly absurd to believe the universe was meant to make us happy or comfortable. — darthbarracuda

You keep making claims I don't make. Everything winds up back with your personal neuroses.

Wait, what argument? — darthbarracuda

http://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/59160

I responded to your phenomenology point by reminding you I posted a detailed argument on that which you have continued to ignore.

As to the rest of your post, it was your usual lament that I'm not taking your personal feelings seriously. But then this is a philosophy forum, not a mental health support forum.

You keep trying to nudge these phenomenal experiences out of the picture as if they're not important or relevant to the discussion. — darthbarracuda

But in fact I said that the phenomenology as I experience it is that pain and pleasure go together. They appear inextricably intertwined in everything I find meaningful. Sport, love, kids, work, study - its got to hurt or feel like an effort as part of it being rewarding and worthwhile.

So the phenomenology is irreducibly complex. And that is indeed the important and relevant fact in this discussion so far as I'm concerned.

Blah, blah. Etc, etc. — darthbarracuda

Sorry, I looked hard but couldn't discover any actual counter-arguments in the rest, just a lot of laughably lame ad homs.

I mean "scienced-up taoism"? In what world is that going to hurt?

To assume what we tend to do as a culture is what is right because it is what the culture expects us to do, is a circularity. — schopenhauer1

The logical presumption is that what a culture does must be pragmatically reasonable in some sense. It has to work in self perpetuating fashion. And therefore if as you claim, individuals are free to dissent. to be non-compliant, on the whole, individuals must be agreeing with the world they are collectively creating.

So if you actually apply logic to the situation, then cultures have to be doing something right. They are the expression of the collective behaviour of a lot of individuals who could instead dissent.

And this natural reasonableness is why you have to resort to extraordinary claims - like regular folk are all operating under some kind of illusion. If only they would open their eyes (like you) they would see its all a heaping pile of shit.

Of course I criticise the developed world's current cultural settings. I say they are focused on short-term gain at the expense of long-term costs. We have become entrained to the imperatives of fossil fuels in indeed quite a blind fashion. Oh if only the normies would open their eyes. :)

But that criticism accepts that the way things are must in some sense work for people - who after all, have some degree of choice. My worldview doesn't just say existence itself is meaninglessly shit. There is the very real possibility of living a life in positive fashion. We can all aim higher than consolation, catharsis, and other justifications for assuming attitudes of helplessness.

Unfortunately, since you can't really think outside the little box you made for yourself, you don't realize "rebelling" is not simply doing the "opposite" but rather the idea of not even considering it as the assumed position in the first place. — schopenhauer1

Sadly, your whole position is based on dichotomies of opposition, which is why your arguments turn dualistic. I am advocating dichotomies of the complementary - so yes, Taoism is one of the philosophies that gets that.

You want to divide the world up into opposing absolutes. The world being completely "the bad" is how you can - tragically/heroically - imagine yourself as the entrapped "good". The basic Romantic trope. Liberate me from this constraining world.

But I make the other case. There is no good and bad. There are instead only the complementary limits on being that seek their equilibrium. So at the level of human social being, those complementary limits on free action are the instincts towards competition and co-operation. Living well is doing both in the right way. Hit the balance and life feels great.

And the psycho-social sciences show that is the correct evolutionary view of course.

You're Brady (the bald guy) here.. Instead of the Bible, it is Systems theory.. — schopenhauer1

A quite fascinating glimpse inside your power fantasies. But isn't it odd that you are pleased by the triumph of evolutionary reasonableness in that clip?

This is kind of full of shit.. You are not above the fray.. You betray your own Romanticism- it's just of a different kind, "the reasonableness of the system". It's as if you drank the Kool-Aid Bateson et al was passing out and you went off the deep end.. turning the circularity in on itself.. Romanticizing Peirce.. You don't even know what you mean anymore except you don't like the sound of pessimism because its dark and scary to you. — schopenhauer1

So I'm suppose to mistake this for an argument? Blah, blah, blah, you're the real romantic, take that and no returns. ;)

I don't see how the scrip of the "uncompliant" who does not further the position would be of much benefit.. If anything, it gunks up the works. — schopenhauer1

It's not a problem if its just a phase. Toddlers can be very uncompliant. But we expect them to grow up. Same with teenagers. And on the whole, noncompliance is superficial - a hairstyle, a dress code, a collection of slogans.

There is nothing as restrictive on your freedom as being a punk, emo, hacktivist, gender fluid, or whatever. Genres are particularly intolerance of true difference. Again a familiar irony of modern life.

One of the nice things about being a pessimist is that you have nothing to lose if you're wrong. — darthbarracuda

Yeah. You have already embraced failure. So one less thing to worry about I guess.

These naturalistic philosophies irk me for partly the same reason Stoicism irks me. It's the idea that the stance we take must be one of bear and grin it. — schopenhauer1

Well I don't say that except to ridicule the idea that we have the choice implied.

Naturalism would be about accepting our natural condition as the necessary starting point for any personal meaning. It doesn't say we then have to accept the starting point as the place we stay. But it does encourage us to inquire into the reasons why nature is the way it is - which then tells us something about the reasonableness of our own further acceptances or departures as a matter of personal choice.

Rather, the rebellious stance is not rejecting the intertwined nature of society and the individual, but sees the situation for the raw deal it can be....It is a difference on perspective of the system, not a difference of metaphysical position. — schopenhauer1

It is a difference at the basic level. It relies on the claim that there is this mythical "we" who "exist" in ontically separate fashion. Whereas I am saying that "we" is a social and biological construction. Romanticism literally was an idea whose history can be traced through modern culture. You can see people constructing the image and then trying to live the part.

And it wasn't a wrong response in itself. It was quite natural in that it was the social construction of individuals stripped down to devote themselves creatively to abstractions - like being heroes on a battlefield or economic self-starters. This notion of the outsider, the rebel, the uncompliant, the one who resists out of personal dignity - its all a bunch of social imagery dedicated to the furtherance of the cause that is modern society. Everything you so "celebrate" is the script being handed out to today's maintenance crew. That's the irony.

We do not have to be willing vessels of the system even though we must be a part of it while alive. — schopenhauer1

And there you go. The transcendent bit that completes your dualistic metaphysics. They can do everything to you ... but break your will. You can have the ultimate revenge ... of not believing the bastards. The self is ultimately not part of the world. It can stand outside and pass its (admittedly impotent) judgement. And for the Romantic, that is what counts. The inalienability of the subjective. The helpless martyrdom becomes the very proof of the metaphysics. They could do everything to control your being ... but they couldn't force you not to suffer! :)

As Thorongil and I pointed out, the will-denying hero in this conception will probably never accomplish his goal, but his stance here is what matters. — schopenhauer1

Yep. I've read the book, seen the picture, heard the song. Impotence in the face of social conformism is not a sign of failure. Instead, it is the resulting degree of suffering that proves this metaphysics of the transcendent self right.

But it is bad metaphysics even if cathartic as light entertainment. Whereas naturalism supports a culture of self actualisation and positive psychology - the cultivation of the habits of potency, the ability to engage with the world in socially fruitful fashion.

To remind you, this is the (false) dichotomy on which you got the OP started...

At this point of birth into a particular society, are the individuals truly their own person, or are the simply perpetuators of the social relations?

So your claim was either/or. Either we are truly our own person, or we are simply helpless perpetuators. No middle ground. No interaction. Just a dualism cashed out in the familiar way - a mechanical and mindless world vs the Romantic "other" of the transcendent self.

My reply - expressing the holistic systems point of view where nature is an immanent whole - was...

So you already dismiss the alternative that the social relations are the source of the personal individuation? The capable individual is what society in fact has in mind?

I've been perfectly happy to argue my end. Selfhood is inextricably intertwined with social being. Social being is inextricably intertwined with biological and then physical being. So yes, nature is divided, but still a whole. There is a unity of opposites that underpins everything in immanent fashion.

My organicism - in being semiotic - even recognises the distinct grades of autonomy of purpose or interests that then arise within this overall connectedness. So it does count that there are "accidents of mechanism", such as a hierarchy of codes - DNA, followed by neurons, followed by words, followed by numbers. Each is generally constrained by nature in terms of the laws of thermodynamics - the globalised imperative to entropify. Yet each is a level of mechanism for achieving negentropic autonomy - localised purpose, localised interests.

So within this naturalistic framework, it is possible to see how words made a difference to Homo sapiens - we did become self-representational individuals working within a sphere of social relations. And with numbers, we became scientific creatures, living within machine-like economic worlds.

Thus there is plenty about how we have become that can be questioned and criticised.

But my point is that I have a framework that makes sense of such an inquiry. It reflects the actual structure of reality. Whereas you are recycling the machine vs spirit dichotomy that divides the natural world towards two unreal conceptions of existence - the material world as being brutely mechanical and the mental world as being transcendentally "other". And no good ethics can come from a faulty model of reality.

I never stated that we can transcend reality- simply cope with our situation and prevent future suffering. — schopenhauer1

If that was all you said - making that pragmatic point - then of course I agree. But I don't see where you have argued that society is a natural phenomenon, or that nature - and so the cosmos - might have a proper non-contingent purpose.

Your framework sets up existence as mechanistic and contingent. I argue instead that it is organic and telic - with the proviso that this does then explain how existence also does have accidental and machine-like aspects as part of the deal.

So what I have objected to is the reductionist simplicity of your ethical conclusions and I have opposed them with the irreducible complexity of a holistic or systems view of existence.

Also, the only positive claim you made "to live hard" has NO justification. — schopenhauer1

But I justified that in detail. You are simply asserting that I'm wrong without countering my actual argument.

And here we can see your bias poking through.. Life is a gift.. there we go. — schopenhauer1

My little joke. You exaggerate by calling life a burden. I say hey no, its a gift. But clearly - in saying that I am opposed to any transcendental framing of the human condition - I think the whole notion of life being "given" as either a burden or a gift is nonsensical in its invocation of some external telos.

Why do you keep insisting on the naturalistic fallacy. — schopenhauer1

So do you understand the fallacy? It applies just as much to taking the undesirable in terms of feelings to be "the bad".

I certainly take the naturalistic view. But that is something different.

So you think I have trapped myself in a self-refuting argument.. — schopenhauer1

You sound upset at being accused of vicious circularity. And yet only a few posts back....

The pessimist argument, if you want to cast it as an institution (which is contestable in itself), has the goal of broadening people to the idea that they are forced by other institutions for the sake of nothing. — schopenhauer1

...right. So now we are on the same page in agreeing that hierarchies escape circularity. There is the more general view.

Yet now you need to deal with the naturalness of hierarchies - the way they must emerge in nature as chaos or contingency already speaks to order or regulation. Only the notion of the meaningful can produce counterfactually the notion of the meaningless. And this is the bind for your position.

Nihilism is reductionist about physical existence. God is dead. Humans are meat machines. The Cosmos is without a point. The second law seems to confirm it all. Ahead lies only the nullity of a Heat Death, the curtain brought down on a meaningless fluttering of complex existence.

So as you climb to your higher level view of reality, it all counts for nothing. That is reality's big secret. And only a select few are brave enough to confront it face on. (Wait, is that the institutional figure of the solipsistic romantic already sneaking into the room?)

But again, half the story is only half the story. Reductionism says nothing on its lonely ownsome. And dividing the story into two - mechanical physics and romantic spirit - is only dualism. A doubling down on the reductionism. So you need a story that binds everything into an organic whole - one that can show how material/efficient cause and formal/final cause are systematically ... that is, hierarchically ... related.

Now the meaningful and the meaningless can be related in formal, even measureable, terms.

You frame the argument as if "pragmatic goods" are already the default goal! — schopenhauer1

Or rather, the inevitable outcome. Existence is whatever works. I mean you haven't even tried to argue against the evolutionary points I've made. You already accept the basic logic of pragmatism. Your claim is instead that you can transcend reality in romantic fashion to scoff at its illusions of doing anything worthwhile.

But that in itself is contradictory as I have pointed out - the anti-naturalistic fallacy.

It is as bad to judge reality wrong as right just for simply being what it is. I don't think you have got the force of that yet.

Not just for me but for anyone who is caught in the harms of this or that situation of life. — schopenhauer1

Ah, now back to harms again. We speak of the negative values that themselves demand the counterfactuality that which would have been the good. We are doubling down on the self-contradiction so that first existence is meaningless, now it is structurally black. Yet if we are weighing harms in the balance, we have already admitted the issue is about balance. And for normies or zombies, the phenomenological truth is that pain and pleasure are intwinned in the way I describe as the desire to "live hard".

Your failure to argue back I took as acceptance you had no useful counter. And now we are back to just repeating assertions about existence being obviously meaningless and obviously bad.

Now, by talking about once you SEE what is going, by living your day out with this in mind, you can CONSOLE with others and have more understanding about the harms that befall us all.. — schopenhauer1

Well you understand why I object to this pragmatic interest in consolation - lets all get in a dark room and have a wee cry together. It smacks too much of wanting a socially acceptable excuse for not engaging in the gift of life that has been given to you.

I'm not heartless. I agree that the modern world is fairly shit in some key aspects of its organisation. It can be a struggle to find a place in a consumer society that demands a higher level of individualisation and self-actualisation than is naturally comfortable for many people. Yes, we can certainly see how a fancier wristwatch or faster car is in the end quite a pointless measure of anything so far as human nature is concerned.

But you can't diagnose or correct imbalance unless you have a workable theory about a life in balance.

So while pessimism likes to frame matters in terms of absolutes, pragmatism says the way things are must work in some sense - otherwise it couldn't exist. And yet also - taking the hierarchical view that gets us out of vicious circularity - we can see that what works in the short run might count as failure in the long run. And in seeing the precise nature of the imbalance, we already can see how it might be corrected.

It's not rocket science.

But again, talk of consolation is talk of learnt helplessness. It is getting comfortable with failure. And I can't see the point of that as a supposed ethical system. It is not the intelligent response.

However, I see you as in fact the callous one. Here you are.. prophet of the SYSTEM.. professing to know what it wants.. it wants perpetuation by strengthening through challenges presented to the individual and individual's collectively coming together to strengthen society to create more individuals etc.. Whether the individual experiences harm in all this challenge strengthening does not matter to you.. Who is the cult leader here? — schopenhauer1

I thought I said I in fact value pain as part of the deal. But I also made a careful distinction between accidental pain and pain that is indeed part of some valued deal.

These are the kind of subtleties of my position that you hurry past so as not to be disturbed from your dogmatic slumbers.

I really don't have to give a shit about whether people see it or not. — schopenhauer1

But your angry language shows you do in fact care. As does your endless reposting of the one argument. Your actions give the game away. In your own words, you are a paid up member of another of those social institiutions performing some meaningless sub-contract.

There...is...no...escape. Heh, heh. It is all quite natural.

A belief or cultural institution that doesn't get out and sell itself is going to shrivel up and die. The church of nihilism is stuck in the same old game of claiming its essential truth.

The only question then is what pragmatic goods does it deliver to its cult followers? It has to be beneficial to their lives in some practical sense.

It is a catharsis more than anything. It is staring it face down. — schopenhauer1

Oh I see. Sounds rather manly and romantic. So the benefit is to one's self-esteem?

Why shouldn't people see this for what it is? Are you advocating for Plato's Noble Lie? — schopenhauer1

Nope. I'm asking what is consistent about claiming existence is essentially meaningless and then getting so het up about people who don't appear to believe your truth. How could it matter if you are being true to your own professed belief here?

Yes but it's the questioning that is important. — schopenhauer1

Why is the questioning important if your answer is that nothing matters?

As usual, pessimism makes no sense. You complain about the pain and futility of existence and then complain about people not appreciating that "fact" as if it could then matter.

If existence is meaningless, then who cares if the majority are delusional? What beneficial meaning is being withheld from them?

And how does it add up that you would seek to make the delusionally comfortable discomforted? If pessimism is so bothered by life's discomforts, why would it have a goal of adding to them?

As usual, nothing has really been thought through.

Is that clear from your careful rebuttal or something? Must be something up with my iPad. That post doesn't seem to have appeared my end yet.

Yep. I've just explained at length why I wouldn't invest a cent in the sad dualistic combo of mechanicalism+romanticism. So what's your point exactly?

LOL. Appealing to subjectivity is metaphysics. You can't have "a position" that doesn't make a claim on some species of counterfactual definiteness.

The essence of our difference is that my immanent naturalism opposes your transcendent Romanticism in believing in the unity of opposites. So any dichotomy reflects nature's irreducible and necessary complexity. A holist is defined by accepting this principle as true. A reductionist is defined by an insistence that instead worlds can actually be broken apart and still make sense.

So - to use the dichotomy that seems most relevant to the pessimist's position - the complaint is that the world contains the bad. And yet the world ought to be good. Therefore the world is fundamentally imperfect and bad. Goodness now counts for nothing in the reductionist calculus that the pessimistic thinker constructs as his cocoon of thought.

But for me - just phenomenologically - that stance is ridiculous. I experience pleasure and pain as inextricably intwinned. I exercise hard because that produces the most exquisite mix of these two things. Likewise, I would live life hard for the same reason. Effort is intrinsically a pain and yet intrinsically a delight.

Reductionist thinking can make a paradox of this basic psychological fact. But holism instead demands its truth. It is natural that the coin of existence has its two complementary faces and the value of each is maximised when we are most truly alive.

So this is what you and DC signally fail to understand - the logic of nature.

You instead have become enslaved to the logic of machines. You think about existence in terms of monadic reduction. Life has to be either all the one or the other. So therefore any bad counts as a blemish on the perfect good, making the whole thing irredeemably bad as the only remaining option.

Yet this is simply to ignore the evidence of your own experience. It is to misunderstand your own nature by imposing on yourself the notion that you are a machine - a notion you then want to violently, romantically, transcendently, reject ... leaving you then with no rational position at all.

I instead understand my nature because I can see why pleasure and pain are psychically joined at the hip. Perfection in the real world lies not in one reigning absolute, the other banished from the kingdom. Instead to flourish is to live with that exquisite balance where you thrash yourself up mountains (both literal and metaphoric) as living hard is living best.

Of course pain can become overwhelming in life. Shit happens. Likewise you can "suffer" from an excess of ease and satisfaction. So imbalance is perfectly possible - indeed it is a given if balance is a goal that relies on the constraint of the accidental.

The standard ethics of the enlightenment should be coming into sight now - as the enlightenment was about humanity waking up to existence of nature (with the sharp understanding of the mechanical being the ironical handmaiden to this larger psychological awakening).

That is, humanistic ethics is focused on creating the opportunity to thrive. Society needs to be organised to remove the accidental sources of the good and the bad in the life of the individual. That way, the individual has the greatest opportunity to be the source of their own exquisite mix of joy and sorrow - to be actually fully alive and not one of DC's monotone zombies or your mechanical maintenance crew.

So pessimism is based on the completely faulty notion of ending the pain inherent in living. But you can see how naturalism only wants to remove the accidental pain - so as to maximise the scope for purposive pain. And likewise, naturalism would want to remove accidental pleasures, to make pleasure properly purposive.

It all makes sense once you have a proper theory of life and nature. You can see what is hollow and pointless about taking drugs - they are accidental sources of pleasure. Although people often take drugs as a crutch to aid socialisation. And so it gets complicated. Socialisation is a natural and purposeful thing - the context that our efforts at individuation require. Social interaction - done right, done hard - hits that exquisite balance of pain and pleasure.

Thus there is a crisp choice when it comes to the metaphysics underlying ethics and aesthetics.

You can go reductionist and view existence in brutely mechanical terms. Which itself must engender the dualistic reaction of the inarticulate howl of Romanticism's transcendental protest. Something has clearly been left out. But now there are no resources with which to think about it.

The alternative is the immanent holism of natural philosophy. Now we see that existence has irreducible complexity. It is meant to be dichotomous and thus about arriving at fruitful balances. And living hard sums that up as that means we are living the life that is the least accidental, the most individuated or personally meaningful. Life is meant to be a deliberate mix of pleasure and pain - the exquisite contrast which we ride so hard that any accidents that do occur are going to be ... spectacular.

Of course a further point in all this is that naturalism is also about nested hierarchies, so "living hard" becomes an imperative now to be balanced across all its many scales. This is where what is best for the individual may exceed what is best for a family, a village, a region, a nation, a planet.

Naturalism - as opposed to romantic/mechanical reductionism - grants mindfulness or semiotic meaning to all these levels of being too. So that larger balancing act, that larger definition of flourishing, has to be worked into the ethical and aethetic story too.

What did I say about irreducible complexity? Heh, heh.

You seem to be mixing two different familiar questions. One is about the nature of your existence - the riddle of consciousness. The other is about the nature of general persistence - the problem of induction.

So a good answer on induction is indeed the existence of memory or history. If those exist, then there is every reason to think the future constrained to some definite degree. It becomes reasonable to expect you will wake up every morning. That propensity exists. And also reasonable to expect there is some smaller chance you won't wake up, as death also exists as a propensity of life.

Then the riddle of consciousness is a longer story. But one brief point is that there may not seem an answer as all our explanations of the world are based on telling the mechanical tale of states of affairs or sets of observables. We have got very skilled in describing reality in a way that pushes the notion of an observer out of the picture being described. And that way of thinking - observerless metaphysics - results in the kind of dualistic mysteriousness that seems so paradoxical. So the remedy is then to develop instead a metaphysics that incorporates observers along with observables, that is, a metaphysics of modelling relations.

Anyway, whatever the answers, your OP seems to mix two foundational questions. So the first order of business is to separate them clearly.

Surely worlds have logical properties that ordinary logic does not capture - because ordinary logic doesn't make general rules about spacetime and material action.

So the key constraints on actual worlds would seem to be the principle of locality and the principle of least action.

That is not everything can happen at once. All the action has to be spread out and take time. There is spacetime with its locality so that the world can logically exist via universalised differentiation.

And then in complementary fashion (where would metaphysics be without foundational dichotomies!), there must be also the logical rule that action follows its shortest possible paths. It spreads out and takes time, yet does so as little as possible. Hence the world is organised by a principle of universalised integration.

So even the simplest world is irreducibly complex in having to be this kind of unity of opposites. It must mathematically (let's call it Platonically) express the symmetry breaking that is differentiation~integration. Or in other words, it must be structured rationally as a self-organising fractal to exist ... because to exist, there must have been the possibility of a development, a symmetry breaking, and fractal maths describes symmetry breaking over all possible scales, or the development of maximal asymmetry.

Thus quite neatly, the world explains itself through some bare logical principles - the inescapability of the duo of differentiation and integration. You don't need extra stuff like creating gods messing up the picture. Disorganisation requires its own organisation to develop.

Either you accept we live in a natural world with immanent logic or not.

If we are part of nature, then all that asks of us is a pragmatic response.

Instead you want to make some kind of transcendentally absolute deal out of suffering. The least amount of pain or effort is sufficient reason to wish for non-existence. Which is riidiculous of course.

You can marginalize the failures all you want, this doesn't mean they don't exist or haven't existed for the past countless eons. — darthbarracuda

But you are again straying from nature's own logic. Failure spells non survival. So the ability to persist is definitional of what it is to flourish. That is the actual structure of the world.

It isn't me who marginalises failure. Failure marginalises itself. And thus antinatalism is simply being unwittingly proactive in stepping up to the plate, putting its head on the block sooner rather than later.

Whether you said it or not is irrelevant, — darthbarracuda

When I say I didn't say it, perhaps you ought to take note?

This hand-waves the issues away by trying to make life seem like a mixed bag of goods and bads. We've been saying it from the start, we are not meant to be happy, we are not meant to be secure. We are meant to survive and survival requires us to suffer. Suffering is the structural integrity of life as experienced by those involved in it, i.e. the phenomenological natural-ontology. — darthbarracuda

Alternatively, we are meant to flourish. Or same thing, flourishing would be what would be meaningful. (Try and deny it.)

So you are simply building your conclusion into your premises, which is why you make such bad arguments.

So you're coming from the perspective that being is generally, if not intrinsically, good. — darthbarracuda

Why do you keep trying to make out that I say things I don't say? Is it because your argument is otherwise so weak?

Even if antinatalism is pragmatically self-defeating (which I doubt, of course)... — darthbarracuda

Hah. I hear your discomfort and note you have no counter-argument on that point. You are promoting a philosophy that is self-defeating in only securing what it hopes to avoid. And that fact exposes a basic failure of analysis.

You are opposing pessimism against optimism. Yet nature is structurally a mixed bag in the end.

Yet you don't address the solution to the problem of the vicious circle. — schopenhauer1

Must I keep repeating myself endlessly for your pleasure? Just do some reading on hierarchical organisation.

You focus too much on the efficacy of antinatalism, and not what it provides as consolation — schopenhauer1

Yep. I've been pointing out the self-defeating nature of anti-natalism in that it in fact must result in the eugenic strengthening of the pool of willing breeders. So it really blows as a practical philosophy in that sense.

But yes, it is a consoling thought, that antinatalists might inflict their pessimism on everyone they possibly can, but at least not on their own kids. That counts as a small blessing I guess.

This project causes 100% causalities, and 100% fatality, 100% guarantee of harm for all, is something forced on 100% of participants, and is only around due to a viscous circle (surviving to survive, maintaining to maintain, experience to experience). — schopenhauer1

Oh alas, alack. Render the clothes, tear the hair.

I have to laugh as life is interesting because it is complex, both in terms of its responsibilities and its delights. Yet you choose to be as crudely reductionist as possible so as see it as structurally black.

This is the actual philosophical sin here. Mistaking absolutism for profundity.

So your argument against antinatalism is based on a dubious empirical prediction about the consequences of adopting antinatalism in a non-ideal environment? — darthbarracuda

Try and keep different thoughts separate. I was addressing Schop's OP about the "puzzle" of self perpetuating social institutions and noting the irony that antinatalism would only strengthen what it hopes to end. So the actual strategy would have to focus on increasing the structural inefficiency of the social machine.

Stick around, act helpless, be a drag on the rest. Then the whole thing might indeed collapse (only to be reborn much the same - sorry, nature and the second law are relentless like that.)

You don't have to agree with everything the pessimist says to understand the principle behind antinatalist arguments. Choice. Had I payed for a bad concert, it wouldn't be right for me to complain about its quality. I knew what I was getting into. Not so much for life. — darthbarracuda

Why must you keep misrepresenting what I say? I'm not arguing for optimism in place of pessimism, but instead pragmatism.

And also you can make your antinatalist choice if you wish. My reply to the OP was about why it would make no difference as that just creates more room for those with a wish to perpetuate their kind.

I don't expect it to be anything. That's you putting words in my mouth and assuming pessimism is merely a reaction of disillusionment. — darthbarracuda

You have yet to pull words out of your own mouth that would make a coherent case as to how a structurally black world could be quite fun and meaningful in practice.

Your best attempt was to label people who might have a different opinion "the inheriting zombies." Nice.

There is first the historical artifact -- some sort of a relic -- that we may think of as "the ship of Theseus" and which is such that we do care very much about its retaining at least some -- and maybe most -- of its original constituents. — Pierre-Normand

That would be the ship with all its "accidents". So to get the metaphysics right, it has to be sortal (or constraints-based) in Peircean type fashion. Our notion of identity has to include the accidental or contingent in smooth natural fashion too.

So that is where the causal notion of purpose pays off. A purpose - in its potential for satisfaction - also spells the further possibility of indifference. After a while, the details cease to matter because the general purpose is being served (and aught else then makes a real difference).

Thus it can be accidental that one of the ship's planks is made of kauri rather than oak. The different woods achieve the same purpose from the ship's point of view. And therefore it continues to make no difference if the ship eventually becomes all kauri, returns to all oak, or gets made of some other wood of equivalent sea-going, ship-making, qualities.

So it is possible always to get fussed about preserving the accidents of history. From the ship's point of view (ie: in terms of the formal and final causality that are the people who designed something for their own purpose), the actual wood is a matter of indifference - if it serves its purpose. All further difference gets classed categorically with the accidental. And yet there is still (say the metaphysically obsessive) another point of view ... the god's eye or transcendental view of history where all accidents are fixed in the memory of existence and never forgotten or erased. So beyond particular purposes (like wanting a ship to cross the sea) there is going to be a metaphysical level generality in which even accidents are essential to notions of identity.

But you can see the trap inherent in claiming accidents as essences. The nominalist path that leads to the Society for the Preservation of Historical Accidents really doesn't want to make claims about the reality of essences. Yet in trying to skirt the existence of differences that don't make a difference, nominalists in fact double down on essentialism without realising it.

So a Peircean style triadic approach can smoothly handle this little problem with the accidental as a component of the purposeful. Pragmaticism says that everything starts in pure contingency or accident. and then limitations arise to suppress most of it. So sortal concepts or constraints cannot eliminate the accidental - that must always be present as history gets fixed. However constraints can limit the accidental aspects of identity to the degree that it matters in terms of some global essence or sense of purpose. So continuity can be defined in that way, regardless of the continuing presence of innumerable localised accidents - the differences that don't make a difference, like whether a ship's plank is oak, kauri or teak.

And then, secondly, there is the functional artifact -- the seafaring vessel -- that retains its identity through carrying forward its function (through maintenance and repair, etc.) — Pierre-Normand

Yep. It is the telos or function that is the source and determiner of continuity. That is what would have to be extinguished.

This accounts rests on David Wiggins's thesis of the sortal dependence of identity, whereas the account earlier suggested by Wayfarer relies on the thesis of relative identity, defended by Peter Geach. — Pierre-Normand

So I have defended an equivalence between sortal concepts and constraints. But then also they speak to quite different metaphysical orientations as well.

Constraints make it clear how they operate - as the limits on freedoms. Thus they rely on proper holism. Whereas sortal concepts are the product of predicate logic - the reasoning from the particular. It rather avoids the central issue to simply point out - in circular fashion - that having more than one of some thing suggests a further thing of which it is "a sort".

Circularity is bad. Hierarchy is good. Recursion needs to transcend scale to make sense. Hence you need an inherently reciprocal metaphysics in which to frame an understanding of identity - one in which the globally top-down and the locally bottom-up are each other's natural inverse.

That's the sad thing - the world has and always will be inherited by the zombies. — darthbarracuda

Rubbish. The bar on what counts as being properly human has simply been set impractically high by institutionalised Romanticism. That is the subcontract causing all the problems.

If you expect your life should be Picasso, Einstein and Pele all rolled into one, you might indeed view your lot rather pessimistically.

Or if you expect reality ought to be heavenly bliss, no harm experienced by even a fish, a bacterium, a blade of grass, then again there is this silly belief in a transcendent value that rules from beyond the realm of the immanent.

One has the educated choice of either understanding the real structure of reality or perpetuating various socially institutionalised myths.

So the tropes or Romanticism are fun, even escapist. And also politically useful. They do underpin a certain way of life during a certain time (like right now in the blindly consumptionist West). But nature will always win in the end. It knows what is real in being the definition of reality.

Yep. Either the grey is an illusion, or the black is a delusion. So pick your poison.

How can you see grey in a world that is structurally black? What is going on there?

We are beings that are never satisfied for long, frequently harmed, and we keep institutions going that help us survive and keep our complex mind entertained . We are the maintenance crew for these institutions. We maintain these institutions simply to maintain them, just as we survive to survive.. But that is not a justification of why we continue to do it. — schopenhauer1

You say you personally see no purpose. A greater number - those that actually put their back into strengthening those social institutions - certainly do see a purpose. So who are you to call them blind fools?

And as I asked earlier, where's the problem. Those who don't believe can refuse to perpetuate any cooperative system of survival and so remove themselves from the stage. Just doing that in itself will strengthen the identity of the institution that remains.

What you advocate - if it is antinatalism - is voluntary social eugenics. So the irony is that you serve the institutional purpose in seeking to deny it. Suicide is a logical thing to encourage biologically as a way to deal with the diseased or malfunctioning. Cells are built to destruct themselves for this reason - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apoptosis

So self perpetuation is no evolutionary mystery. Voluntary eugenics can only ensure the strengthened identity of what you claim to detest. You are only making yourself part of the process of institutionalised self perpetuation in trying to promote the self annihilating trope of anti natalism.

If you really want to bring down the system, then what you actually have to do is become a source of constant friction. You must be the silt that gums up the works, the accumulating waste that eventually kills the whole.

So aim for inefficiency, dependency and wasteful consumption if it is the institutions that you want to bring down. Have as many kids as possible and bring them up to be as entropic as they can manage. Hope that they grow fat, useless and deeply in debt, as frictional on society's maintenance system as can be imagined. That way everything will surely fall apart as is the goal.

(Wait, does this sound something like the world we know?)

You are missing the point. It would be your conception that lacks coherence with your perception.

If you see only grey, yet you claim that the world has black structure (and thus a complete lack of white structure) then this is an incoherent claim about the world. Your honest impression doesn't match your professed idea.

So ship A becomes ship B, but remains "the ship of Theseus" because people continue to call it that, despite the replacement of all its planks. As apokrisis would say, echoing Bateson, for most people having one new plank - or a lot of new planks, or even all new planks if they are replaced gradually - is not a difference that makes a difference for the purpose of referring to the ship. — aletheist

Yep. It is the purpose, the finality, that causes the ship to be repaired and so there is unbroken continuity in the identity - for all practical purposes, as they say.

And even if the boat was replaced in toto instantly - as in Parfitt's Star Trek transporter: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox - then still the intent is what perseveres through time and maintains identity.

If the transporter works by dissolving your molecules at one end and then - via a transmission of information completely specifying your form - recreates you at the other, then your identity is preserved.

But note now that the logical requirement is your body at the departure point must be destroyed. There are problems if the goal of transporting you leaves this earlier you still stuck at the other end - or now this dopplegager replicant at the arrival end.

So make the change instant and the erasure becomes as important as the replacing. And so really even with a slow change of the parts, the rotten planks of the ship should be burnt to secure the identity of the new.

But I don't see the world as generically grey, I see it as structurally black. — darthbarracuda

So you agree that your perceptions and conceptions are incoherent. Great.

There's nothing incoherent in having a generally euthymic equilibrium while simultaneously having negative beliefs about life and existence. — darthbarracuda

Of course it is incoherent.

If you see the world is generically grey, you can't coherently claim it to be black on the grounds it is not white. Just as the pollyannaish reverse is also an incoherent claim.

When we divide the line, or divide time between past and future, it is not that we insert a point into the line, or insert "the present" into time, we assume that these points of potential division are within the line or within time itself, and we utilize these points for division. — Metaphysician Undercover

But semiotics transcends physics because it can imagine its marks as having zero dimensionality. So we have to recognise the computational aspect of this too.

For the hardware of the computer, a bit - the state of switch - is a purely physical thing. It has materiality and thus a cost involved in switching it back and forth. Eventually it will even wear out.

Yet then the same switch, the same bit, can also be a symbol, a sign, within a software's system of interpretance. The programmer can encode some model (representing a purpose) in a syntactical structure (a logical form), then run it on the machine. The switch flips back and forth, doing its entropic or material thing. Meanwhile - in a place with zero material constraints, as the hardware doesn't care if what it computes is meaning or noise - a system of signs does its thing, crunches away to some symbolic end.

So when talking about a mathematical model of the continuum, we have to allow for this fundamental distinction between the real world (which is materially dissipative) and the sign world (which can pretend what it likes, so long as it costs the hardware nothing extra to switch in one direction instead of the other).

Thus in the real world, cutting a material line quickly gets messy. Our knife eventually gets too blunt and starts mushing when the cuts are getting fine. And there is no such thing as an infinitely sharp blade.

But in the imagined world of maths - Hilbert's paradise - we can imagine infinitely sharp blades and cuts made ever finer with no issue about the cuts getting mushed or vaguer and vaguer.

Yet while there are two worlds - matter vs sign - in semiotics they are also in mutual interaction. So that gives you the third level of analysis that would be a properly semiotic one ... where sign and matter are in a formal, generically-described, relation. Or pragmaticism in short. The triadicity of a sign relation.

And that is when we can ask about a third, deepest-level, notion of the continuum - one in which the observer, or "memory" and "purpose" are fully part of the picture. It is no longer just some tale about either material cuts or symbolic marks - a bare tale of observables.