Don't know. I'm inclined to think it is one of the parts that is tied, rather than ties. In any event, various parts of the brain in a rat have to interact. Sense of smell, vision, hearing, and memory all go into rat-navigation. — Bitter Crank

Sure, but for some reason, rats can't combine blue and left together to understand left of blue. Is that because they lack language, or because their brains aren't wired up to allow such a combination? Maybe rats just aren't smart enough. The show didn't say anything about squids or dogs. I'm guessing there are some birds which get the concept.

And as The Great Whatever indicated, it's hard to gauge what people really think when they evaluate life on a philosophy forum. In the moment of living, it can be very exhausting, one thing after another, and at the end of it emptiness, but in rhetorical forums as this, or in hindsight questionnaires, people tend to Pollyannize the situation when trying to evaluate the world. I can't prove it. No doubt, people's anecdotes can be taken as the truth with no reason to give pause or one can be more suspect of it. — schopenhauer1

Yeah, but I've been asking myself that question the last couple weeks as I live my life, and it very much depends on how I feel. Sometimes I feel the emptiness and the meaninglessness of one desire after another, and sometimes I feel the fullness of life, and I look forward to the one thing after another.

This leads me to believe that all this talk really depends on how one feels about their own life, setting aside tragedy. Of course all those terrible things happen in the world, but the pessimist is arguing something more. They are saying that even if everyone were fortunate and escaped any sort of tragedy, they would still suffer from the ceaseless desiring. And yet I can't verify that for myself. It only seems to be true when I'm depressed, or highly stressed, or grumpy and irritated. It doesn't seem to be the case when I'm feeling good.

So which is it? What makes the empty feeling more real than the full feeling? What makes it wrong when I think to myself that life is worth living, for me anyway, at least for this part of it? It makes me wonder if the pessimist isn't just chronically depressed. Now that doesn't mitigate all the terrible things that do happen in the world, but just living doesn't seem to so terrible all the time. Not to me.

I can understand both points of view, but I can't understand what makes one more true than the other, except for how one feels about it. I harken back to my experience of competitive running. It was hard and painful, but whether it was worth it and enjoyable depended entirely on how I felt about it.

It's a historical fact that, in general, women were not gifted by Nature with the capacities for reason that man has. — Agustino

No it's not. And it's scientifically false. You want to know what the truth is? We all begin life as females. You might have noticed that you have nipples. Prenatal hormones differentiate males from females in the womb.

You want to know something else? Women live longer than men on average, despite those difficult nine months of labor.

This is pathetic. You should be aware that Schopenhauer is doing metaphysics, and as such he's talking about the position that Nature has allotted to women. His talk is not meant to be seductive at all; an entirely different form of discourse. — Agustino

Metaphysics? LOL. What he was doing is degrading half the human race due to his cultural prejudices as the privileged gender. There is nothing metaphysical about that.

Now the fact that your average woman in Western society today would feel insulted by those sentences says nothing of their truth, but merely proves Schopenhauer's point. — Agustino

The average male would be insulted too.

It's more like Schopenhauer was unable to find company which matched his; and therefore he preferred none. — Agustino

Or maybe he was bitter, caustic and anti-social which drove people away, and thus he masked that with his own inflated sense of self-worth.

I think Schopenhauer was a genius - and he had all the right in the world to mock mere mortals. — Agustino

Geniuses are mere mortals too. Without the unwashed masses Schopenhauer mocked, he would be spending all his time trying to feed and cloth himself, instead of writing great works of philosophy. Society afforded him the opportunity to do otherwise.

The real genius comes from collective humanity, building up on itself and providing the opportunities, not accomplished individuals, who are fortunate to be born when and where they are, and get to stand on the shoulders of millions who came before them.

think Schopenhauer had a bad case of of a bad attitude and was pissy that his colleagues were getting dates and lectures while he wasn't. So he became caustic and bitter and transformed it into a kind of miserable pride. — darthbarracuda

Certainly doesn't help one's attitude toward life.

To take just one example, I believe that the so-called 'problem of perception' was actually definitively resolved over two thousand years ago in ancient Greece. The reason it persists is not because it remains mysterious, but because people are not very good at arguing. — The Great Whatever

So that means all the professional philosophers since then who disagreed were not very good at argument. I doubt that.

Maybe people engaged in philosophical discussion deliberately choose to not answer questions as a debate tactic. Or they don't like your questions and would rather ask you a question back. Or perhaps they see your questions as an attempt to frame the debate in a way favoring your position.

These are all common strategies in any discussion forum across the net. Often times questions are asked in an attempt to force a poster to answer a certain way. But most posters are smart enough to see through that.

One small improvement would be mood alteration. There are some individuals who have a mildly manic temperament. They tend to be overachievers. It should be possible to figure out their brain chemistry and induce that state in others.

Sure, life is fundamentally impermanent, and no amount of progress will change that. While that can be unsettling and depressing, if somehow I was provided with a means to live for a billion years, my eventual death would become a very remote thing, and not something likely to cause me existential angst. At least not for the first 500 million years or so. For all we know, there are such long lasting civilizations out there in the cosmos (no idea on the lifespan of their constituents though, although I would guess it would be considerable).

I'm going to guess that our impending deaths are unsettling because our lives are so short, relative to deep time, and it seems like just yesterday when we were 20 years younger. But if they weren't, we might view that matter a bit differently. A billion year life span could provide you with all the existence and experiences you ever want. And when reflecting upon how several decades seemed to fly by, one would shrug and say, well I still have 890,000 more decades to go.

I do realize that such lifespans sound completely hellish to pessimists, but I'm going to assume that extremely long lifespans are accompanied by many other improvements.

Progress is ultimately doomed though, whether it be from our own self destruction or the eventual heat death of the universe. It is inevitable. — darthbarracuda

Well, yeah. If it's the heat death of the universe, I'm not getting too depressed about that. Of course I'm not going to be around for those billions of years, so there's that.

Mainly that I can't tell anyone how to feel — schopenhauer1

I just see that as a potential flaw in the pessimist position. It's one thing to note everything that sucks about life, it's another to convince people of this if they don't feel that way. Because some people feel that life is worth living despite the sucky parts.

As a metaphor for this, I used to run middle distance and cross country competitively. It hurt. There was a certain amount of suffering in the training and racing, and one didn't always feel like putting forth the required effort. But whether it was worth it or not completely depended on one's attitude. If you wanted to race and improve, then the suffering was worth it. If not, then it wasn't and people either quit or muddled through until the end of the season. And I know this firsthand, because I experienced both wanting to compete, and not wanting to. It made all the difference.

Anyway, I'm led back to the point that whether life is worth living is a subjective matter determined by how the individual feels about life. The problem with the pessimistic position is that it's trying to argue that how people feel is somehow wrong when it disagrees with the pessimistic position.

I experience both on a regular basis. In one state, the pessimistic position seems very convincing. In another, it seems highly debatable. After all, who are pessimists to tell the rest of us whether our own lives are worth living or not? Is not that up to us?

Also a note on suffering. I don't dislike all forms of suffering. Some suffering is actually worth it to me. Last night I played tennis for several hours, and my joints started to hurt and I tired, but I liked the feeling and I liked how I was sore and limping afterwards. It felt good. Similarly, I spent three days intensely working on something with little sleep and it was difficult. But it was totally worth it. I'm sitting there at 3am in the morning, very sleepy, thinking to myself how much I enjoy doing this.

I know several people who have run the Grand Canyon or up a 14,000 foot mountain without altitude training, both of which are dangerous and very exhausting. But they tell me how much they liked doing it.

Can't argue with this. Pessimism will never garner strength as a major philosophy because most people are unfortunately brainwashed into the progress mentality. It runs against all they have been taught. — darthbarracuda

But there is progress, and that's undeniable. It's not evenly distributed, but the trend has been toward better nutrition, sanitation, shelter, educational opportunities, more avenues for entertainment, more opportunities to travel, and improved communication. There is also a growing knowledge base in various subjects which can lead to future improvements.

Now as to whether any of that deals with the fundamental condition of being born is a different matter. But I personally would much rather live with today's advantages than what was available in the Middle Ages.

I'm not sure about contentment. I've certainly felt respite, but it feels more like getting a break to breathe from drowning. Not only is it not a positive enjoyment, but rather one that's only defined relative to just how bad what was previously happening was, but it's also backhanded in that that respite is precisely what allows you to live and continue to suffer more. — The Great Whatever

But whether this bothers me or not depends very much on my mood. If I'm depressed, I will tend to agree with you, as I did in my PM. But now I feel differently and am not really disturbed by the matter. And I do experience positive enjoyment, some contentment, and even joy at times. Those moments are certainly worth it to me. Whether all the bad ones overshadow the good is a judgement that very much depends on how I feel at the moment. So it becomes a very subjective thing.

We are not content, nor can we ever be, when life demands that we desire and want- sources of suffering. There is no way to escape it, even in principle. Thus, no practice of indifference will truly get rid of the Will/flux/becoming. — schopenhauer1

But is everyone bothered by that? Sometimes I like having desires, even when they aren't met. Sometimes I like the struggle. And sometimes not. It really depends.

But sometimes one does experience contentment with life, and feel good doing whatever they happen to be doing. Maybe it's just a fleeting feeling, and maybe it can be cultivated. And also maybe it's possible to arrange one's life to encourage feeling that way more often. It doesn't do away with all suffering or discontentment, but it sounds less bad.

Whether or not bad things happen to you is determined first by how you define bad, and second by how immersed you are in thinking in those terms. Stoics limited good and bad strictly to moral character, or virtue. To say something is still bad regardless of what your response is, is to assume the conclusion that stoicism is working with incorrect definitions. — WhiskeyWhiskers

That can work with things like boredom or minor annoyances. It's a little bit different when tragedy strikes. A storm that kills thousands of people is not good, period. Responding stoically to such an event is absurd.

One observation that I would make is that IN GENERAL pessimism is unfounded. Now this is entirely speaking in generalities, I understand. Bad things obviously, reliably and regularly. However, can't we say with some certainty that the world is, in general, always improving? Throughout history all the indicators of well being that you could possibly name - wealth, education, access to clean drinking water, medical advancement, life expectancy, likelihood of dying in a non-violent circumstance, gay rights, women's rights, racial equality etc. have advanced steadily upwards in a sawtooth (obviously not quite linearly in all regions, for all people, in all eras but generally speaking). Things just get better and better — invizzy

There is that, but I think the pessimistic position goes much deeper. It's concerned with the nature of being a conscious animal, not that material progress occurs. It is good that there is progress in those areas you listed, as it generally decreases suffering and opens up opportunities for better experiences, but it doesn't get to the heart of the matter. Which is that we're born human, and thus will suffer. And more than that, we realize it and reflect on it. We're aware, when we're honest with ourselves, what all life has to offer in the various forms of restlessness, boredom, disappointment, disillusionment, frustration, annoyance, alienation, pain, etc.

So progress in technology, science, governments, economic policies and so on won't change the fact that we are all born conscious meat with the various limitations and flaws that it has to offer our existence.

I would say that a through h are all approximately true, but none of them negate the fact of democracy. It's a crap democracy where the politicians truly represent the people - greedy, ignorant, shot-sighted, vindictive, self-serving and corrupt. — unenlightened

Problem is, what's the alternative? Either you have input from the general population, or a select few get to run it. Either way, it's still people - greedy, ignorant, short-sighted, vindictive, self-serving and corrupt. Just a matter of whether you think a few humans are better or worse than a lot. I think history sides with a lot being the less bad choice, provided there are appropriate balances built in.

As to the OP, I'd say the worst problem with US government is the large amount of monied interests corrupting the system.

This seems to be the only way we know of to fight a "winnable war" and we haven't seen it since. — Monitor

The reason for this is political, not military. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are all winnable if you don't care about casualties. World War 1 & 2 were viewed differently (win at all cost), and thus the military machine of the US was not hampered.

What about Great Britain? France? Germany? Japan? Australia? Is their experience of democracy truer, finer, less laden with crimes against humanity, etc. — Bitter Crank

Yeah right. But they probably like to think they are.

I think I want to bypass the second one entirely, because the comment was more in passing, and in any case I'm not sure that 'embodied' is anything but a hoo-ha word. The stakes of the argument or what points are to be made are just unclear to me, and I can't see the debate being productive. — The Great Whatever

Embodied cognition emphasizes the role that the kind of bodies we as humans have play in thought, perception, etc. This is in opposition to computationalism and functionalism where the functional or computational organization is what matters, not the biological substrate. Thus you can have someone like Dennett claiming that if we met a six legged intelligent, arthropod alien which utilized X-Ray version, we wouldn't have any fundamental difficulties in communicating with them.

As to the argument at hand, functionalism and computational theories of mind are at home with talk of representations and constructing perception, while embodiment would focus on how perception is part of an organism's ability to maneuver in their environment.

So, is it possible on your view that all of your experiences could be hallucinations? If not, why not? — The Great Whatever

By this you mean a BIV type scenario I take it, because it doesn't make sense that our entire life experience could be the ordinary kind of hallucination. As to how the direct realist is able to make a metaphysical distinction between hallucinations or dreams and veridical experiences, wouldn't that be a matter of inference to the best explanation amongst a life worth of experiences? Maybe when I saw a ghost I thought it was a real experience, until later when I realized that my mind was playing tricks on me.

I'd have thought that quantum mechanics has already shown that our sensory apparatuses are not causally related to anything like the objects we take ourselves to be perceiving (instead they're causally related to things very unlike the objects we take ourselves to be perceiving). But it doesn't then follow that the apple we see is fake. — Michael

Apples aren't a topic in Quantum Mechanics. You're assuming that the microphysical is all that counts, and everyday objects can be dismissed because physicists in a lab can achieve counter intuitive results with subatomic particles.

As an addendum to my post above, Simon Blackburn wrote that philosophy exists because there is a loose fit between mind and world. I found that fascinating. Our intuitions and concepts seem good until scrutinized, and then they come apart in all sorts of ways.

For philosophers to make progress, do they need to make the mind "fit" the world? Is it a grand puzzle to sort out which we apes might not be quite smart enough to do given our mammalian baggage? Or perhaps that's just one more misleading metaphor.

If there is no progress in philosophy, then why is that? Are the questions that philosophers ask unanswerable? Are they bewitched by language? Is perhaps the very foundation of philosophical thought from which questions flow mistaken? Is it that we're cognitively closed to such matters?

I think on the one hand there is progress, and on the other, there isn't. There's progress in the proliferation of possible answers to questions, and new questions which arise. Philosophical inquiry evolves over time, building on itself, despite the lack of consensus.

But there isn't progress in that fundamental questions of metaphysics, epistemology, morality and aesthetics seem to never reach a conclusion. We can't say beyond reasonable doubt and with consensus that we've arrived at the truth as to the nature of universals or whether the ends justify the means in some cases, for example. There remain deep divisions on all these matters, and an objective person might say all answers provided are problematic in one or more ways.

TLDR - philosophical inquiry grows over time, but the truth remains elusive.

Is there any evidence or reasoning to suggest that human-like behaviour (including conversion) cannot be explained by non-conscious physical influences (or that consciousness is a necessary by-product of such non-conscious physical influences)? — Michael

That nobody has been able to come up with a convincing physical or non-conscious explanation for consciousness, and philosophers such as Chalmers, Nagel, McGinn have provided fairly strong reasons for why all such attempts are doomed to fail, despite the efforts of Dennett and company.

As I see it, the explanatory gap arises because we start by abstracting objective properties from the first person perspective, such as number, shape, extension. And that has worked really well in science. But then we turn around and ask how those objective properties give rise the subjective ones that we abstracted away from, such as colors, smells, pains, etc. And there just isn't a way to close that gap, other than as a correlation. Brain state ABC correlates with feeling XYZ. But why? Nobody can say convincingly.

The result is 25 (throwing out a number) different possible explanations ranging from it being an illusion to everything being conscious. Of course one can take the idealist route and dispense with the problem, but at the cost of eliminating the third person properties as being objective, by which I mean mind-independent, despite appearances to the contrary (for us realists anyway). Of course if idealism was universally convincing, this wouldn't be a philosophical issue. But it's not. I would venture to say that realism is more convincing to a a majority of people.

And so it will probably continue to be argued going forward, despite whatever progress neuroscience makes. The correlations will be stronger of course, but it's unlikely anyone will be able to answer why it's not all dark inside. Of course that lends credibility to Chalmers' arguments, but I'm not convinced by his either.

There is a difference between experiencing pain, and experiencing misery. That's why I brought up the sports analogy. Some people voluntarily choose to endure pain, when they don't have to. It could be quite a bit as well, but I don't think it makes them miserable. Rather, it's a challenge for them, one that's rewarding.

I've certainly experienced pain and obstacles without being miserable about them. And of course I've experienced misery at other times, sometimes just because that was my mood or focus, and not because of anything external or a physical ailment.

That accurately describes how I want to live my life. Childless and immortal. — Michael

If we can achieve immortality (of a sort), I'm guessing we'll be able to give birth to people who don't suffer.

The hard problem of being a rock?

Is there a possible world of p-zombie rocks?

I don't have any particular goal here except to discuss philosophy, which I assume is what everyone's goal here is. — The Great Whatever

Over on the other site in the unmoderated section, you started a thread raising the question of how antinatalists can go about convincing the world to stop procreating. When I reply to posters I'm familiar with, I do so in context of what I recall them posting about previously. But perhaps I misunderstood your intention in those antinatalist threads.

The only odd question is why I'm the only one that has to justify myself (worth thinking about why that is) — The Great Whatever

Because you're defending two controversial positions here. One is that pleasure is the only true good. Most ethical systems disagree. But more controversially, you argue the pessimistic view that life isn't worth living, and anyone who claims otherwise is mistaken. Most people are going to disagree.

In addition, you claimed that the pessimistic view is liberating, while I find it debilitating, which I suspect a lot of others do too. Now maybe it's because I'm psychologically unable to handle the truth, or maybe because I don't stay depressed for long. However, that's what makes me think it's a matter of 'interpretation', or mood.

I think TGW's goal is to convince people to stop procreating. Now I don't think the antinatalists have a snowballs chance in hell of stopping the entire human race from procreating, but they might convince some people. That brings up the question of what a practical antinatalist hopes to accomplish. If you can't convince everyone to stop giving birth, then how about plan B where you convince people to make a world that's less terrible to be born into?

Would be interesting if some panpsychist wrote a first person story from the the POV of a rock.

But it's not up to me to determine. Pain feels bad no matter what my opinion is. That's why it's pain. If it were up to me, pain would never bother me because I'd just choose not to let it bother me. But I obviously can do no such thing, which is why pain is something dangerous at all in the first place. — The Great Whatever

But then why do people choose to do painful things such as running or climbing tall mountains? It seems like the suffering accompanied with such endeavors is worth it to them. Why would anyone climb Everest or run ultramarathons if suffering was the only thing that mattered? Clearly, it isn't.

Does thinking life is good make it good? Again, that would be quite convenient for all of us, wouldn't it? — The Great Whatever

What else would make it good or bad, as far as living one's own life is concerned? Are you arguing that there is an objective criteria for judging how life is experienced, such that those who disagree with antinatalists, at least regarding their own lives, are wrong?

As for the 'developed world,' well, first of all I disagree (hedonic treadmill), and second, the developed world depends on the 'developing' world in unsavory ways, and there is an implicit approval of what happens 'way over there,' if you see what I mean. — The Great Whatever

Yes, there is that. It was more of a snarky remark that antinatalism seems to be coming from comfortable people living in the developed world than people who suffer more than having to wait at a traffic light, or being bored because nothing is on the tube worth watching.

I don't understand the sense in which you think it's somehow 'up' to a person to decide whether certain problems make life worth living or not. What do they do, just snap their fingers and make things, even though they're bad...not bad? — The Great Whatever

It's a question of whether a person feels that the bad outweighs whatever good they get out of being alive. You seem to be arguing that people can't actually feel that way, or honestly come to such a conclusion. That they're delusional and lying to themselves.

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There seems to be this idea that on the one hand, there's how your life actually is, and then there's some impenetrable magic lens, and on the other side of that there's you, and you can swap out that magic lens to make things different — The Great Whatever

And how is life, actually? Antinatalists think it's shitty. Okay, but what about people who don't? My point is that a judgement is being made either way.

It's not that problems aren't real, it's whether those problems make a person's life not worth living. I don't think that suffering and problems alone make life miserable, although it can depend on the nature of those problems and the degree of suffering. But if we're talking about your average life in the developed world, I'm not sure I buy that life is so terrible.