Reading a book on the science of consciousness right now by Antti Revonsuo, and this bit stood out (from the chapter covering the philosophical mind-body problem):

"The first person's point of view is not accepted as a valid source of data in the physical sciences, therefore it is possible to argue that subjective experiences are not a part of the overall scientific data that need to be explained by the sciences. Viewed from the third-person's objective point of view, consciousness (as data) does not exist, only behavior and brain activity do; therefore it is easy, perhaps even necessary, to eliminate consciousness from science as an erroneous folk-psychological hypothesis.

Then again, the opponent of eliminativism can argue that we need not accept the third-person's point of view of the physical sciences as authoritative or all-inclusive. If consciousness, whose very existence - as Descartes showed - is beyond any doubt whatsoever, can nevertheless be denied by some type of science, then there is something seriously wrong with the science rather than with consciousness. The task of science is to faithfully describe and explain the world: how the world works and what sort of entities it consists of. If there are undeniable subjective phenomena in the world that cannot be captured through the objective standpoint of the physical sciences, then we need to revise the scientific standpoint so that it will not be blind to consciousness anymore. We need a science that admits and takes seriously the reality of the inner subjective world. The least science can do is to stop pretending that such a reality does not exist."

This seems applicable to issues outside of the one at present.

Therefore, suffering is necessary to the wellbeing of individuals alone and as members of a society.

What kind of ramifications would this realization have?

For one, we can do away with pessimistic philosophies that have, well, misunderstood the whole point of suffering. They think suffering shouldn't exist, implying that it is unnecessary, which I've shown is actually necessary for survival. — TheMadFool

Yes, but why is survival automatically something we ought to cherish? You're right that suffering is necessary for survival, but this is exactly the pessimistic point. Survival for the sake of survival and with no endgoal in the linearity of time (re: Cioran's "stationary oscillation") makes survival ultimately meaningless, and as a byproduct makes suffering pointless.

You have to go through a grueling hell of an education to get a university degree. If you don't want to get a university degree, all that work and effort becomes pointless. There's no other way to get a university degree without going through four or more years of hell, but this is hardly any comfort to anyone who does not wish to get a university degree to begin with. In fact, it is probably one of the reasons why they don't wish to get a university degree. The costs are too high and returns are too low or even non-existent.

What Dennett is trying to draw out is the controversy over "what is a likeness" is a red herring. There is no such thing as that substance of mind. Experiences exist, and felt as they are (i.e. have a "what is a likeness" ), but that this doesn't amount to a substance of mind and subject contrary to body. All it means is that, for example, a conscious experience of a bat exists and it among to living through a feeling. — TheWillowOfDarkness

It seems to me like this is only workable if one makes a wholly different notion of what "materialism" is supposed to entail. Dennett's not an eliminativist. The mind exists, but according to him it is not itself a different substance, it's just one of the many different sorts of specimens in the world. In which case, the material world has to be altered to account for this fact.

For what it's worth, I understand the appeal to reductionist accounts of mind like Dennett's (no spooky shit), but in general agree that these theories are ultimately insufficient and more often than not motivated, not by independently good reasons, but by a deeply-entrenched opinion that the world needs to be a certain way (prophetic reasoning masking as a smug "I told you so" attitude), while the jury is still out. It's good to see people like Nagel who are willing to challenge this dogma and entertain different views, even if I don't agree with them either.

A problem with Wittgensteinean quietism is one that infects basically any attempt to disavow philosophy as we know it ("anti-philosophy") - that the very position itself is "philosophical", i.e. of the same general nature of that of which is attempts to repudiate. It's the exact same thing that makes statements like "Everything I say is a lie" paradoxical. There's always that annoying "dangler" proposition that escapes its own encompassing.

How can philosophy leave everything in its place if philosophy is supposed to have therapeutic value? — sime

I think, if we are going to take this literally, that such a therapeutic philosophy keeps everything in place while creating new relations between that which is. New paths, new connections. In other words, you can keep everything in its place while coming to a new understanding of what it is you are keeping in place. By disentangling yourself, you end up getting a better perspective on everything as a whole. In some sense, philosophy is a disease of the mind, if not treated properly.

Zing! >:O

Have fun sleeping in apo la-la land.

Your version is "what nature does is what is good". But I don't see that as a fallacy. And also as I say, that is because I don't believe in "goodness" in the usual transcendental fashion. It is the Platonic belief that "the good" is some objective quality that I reject - and so any version of the notion has to be naturalistic and immanent in my metaphysics. — apokrisis

What we have here is yet another false dichotomy you've set up. You don't need any sort of Platonic "good" to reject your version of naturalism. Nowhere "out there" is there "goodness" or any sort of value at all. All your talk of entropic structures and whatnot does not capture the essence of what people know as "good". You keep trying to shoe-horn your jargon-ridden metaphysics in where it doesn't belong.

In a Wittgensteinian/Heideggerian way, although the world does not have any value itself, Being-in-the-world and its various modalities do. The universe does not give a damn about us, so why should we give a damn about its perpetual entropic expansion?

And like I've said several times now and you've conveniently ignored, the experience machine thought experiment basically elucidates the core of axiology - welfare. Not some abstract entropic neo-scientific Taoist b.s.

So we can look to nature — apokrisis

...and we see absolutely nothing resembling what anyone typically would see as "good", unless we're talking aesthetic value or something. This is what we call equivocation. Nobody here is denying that objective "goodness" value is "spooky". This changes absolutely nothing. We all recognize that no value exists in the real world. You just go further and neuter the whole concept of goodness to fit your metaphysics.

So that is why I keep referring you to positive psychology. It diagnoses the facts of the mind correctly. There is a natural way that things are meant to work. And your obsessing on a pessimistic "philosophy" that might justify a lack of fit and flow is not going to help. — apokrisis

No, your cherry-picked "science-informed" bullshit is handwaving the problem away. Why are you not familiar with things like depressive realism, terror management theory, or observed repression techniques? Maybe it's because they don't seem to fit your narrative of how reality is supposed to be.

Sorry, Chief, but the psychology of humans is oftentimes in direct opposition to the overall direction of the universe. You approach this problem by advocating a kind of Heraclitian Taoism, just go with the flow, immerse yourself in the world and understand its processes and you're good to go. We're going about it by pointing out this is nothing more than a l'esquive, an escape mechanism, something that has been going on since day one and is represented fully by organized religion. Consciousness is a sort of "exile" from the rest of the world. Once you know, you can't go back. This is literally the whole point of the Adam and Eve narrative, a myth that has been replicated across civilizations since the dawn of time.

Philosophy, if it is to be any real use, has to be more up with the play than that. But then that's the power of the transcendental romantic tradition I guess. It is its own thing, sitting in a dark corner and thinking up ever more extravagant ways to complain. — apokrisis

Let us speak plainly: everything which keeps us from self-dissolution, every lie which protects us against our unbreathable certitudes is religious. - Cioran

I was thinking about this for a bit, and I am wondering about the "salvation" theories that a Buddhist, Schopenhauer, Mainlander, et al would say about existence. That is to say, if Being entails the fact of non-Being, and non-Being is preferable, wouldn't we need both in the picture in order to have the salvation of non-being? According to this view, being is perhaps inevitable, or built into the structure somehow, so if that is the case, despite being's harmful nature to the individual, it is also through being that non-being is achieved? — schopenhauer1

Cabrera cites Nietzsche as an example of a negative philosopher who nevertheless "affirms" life, but not through rationalist argumentation. Nietzsche criticized morality, in particular Christian morality, as having a queer valuation of salvation that is required for it to even work. Essentially, God created man in order to save man. It's very...strange.

Cabrera uses this same criticism when he talks about non-Being and Being; initially, everyone "exists" in non-Being. Then some of us get thrust into Being only to return back to non-Being. And so we have to wonder what the whole point of it all was. Being is just a little "bloop" from non-Being.

I can see, if Being "did not exist" or something like that, how it might be difficult to see non-Being as "good". And I guess I would say we have two different paths we could take: we could swallow the literalist pill and grant that non-Being is simply a fiction and that immanent Being is all there is (which might be technically correct but is difficult to work into language and general intuitions), or we could see non-Being and Being as inherently intertwined (as you were saying, I think) and that Being, from the perspective of conscious beings like us (Dasein), is always less preferable than non-Being.

I see Buddhism as an example of a pessimistically-inclined religion/philosophy that nevertheless has an overall positive undertone. Nirvana is achievable. It's not all doom-and-gloom. Existence is suffering but there is a way out, and in fact the ultimate reality is "good". Put this sort of thinking in lines of what you were saying and we get the perspective of non-Being as not necessarily "salvation" but more like "going back home". We're exiled in that Cioran-esque sense, for whatever reason. This is, I think, part of the reason why Buddhist philosophers put so little value in intra-worldly things.

But like I've said elsewhere, I don't know how much I buy into all this talk of non-Being apart from fictional discourse. It's useful but ultimately does not represent reality as it actually is. As far as I understand his work, Cabrera explicitly denies any substantial metaphysical structure in his theorizing. He works under what he calls "natural ontology" or "nature" which he describes as the way the world "naturally" appears to humans and not how it literally is. Hence how he claims he can talk coherently about value while simultaneously agreeing with Wittgenstein that there is absolutely no value in the mind-independent world. So straight-up it seems like he accepts that non-Being is not necessarily legitimately a real concept but more of a useful heuristic or fiction.

I'm not complaining about esoteric scientific jargon itself, I'm pointing out that the few people you communicate to on this forum are not scientists who are "in the loop" and because of this, the use of this sort of terminology is out of place and irritating. You use this vocabulary to communicate ideas efficiently between professionals - those online here are not professionals and so it is not appropriate to use this same vocabulary when addressing them.

And here you are, on an internet forum with a population of less than thirty people. Congratulations.

Don't blame me if you lack literacy and are too lazy even to google the unfamiliar. — apokrisis

Or, you could just not use pleonastic terminology.

Instead now I start with a head full of every kind of possibility and start to limit that in a top down fashion so it is reasonably predictive of what is likely to happen next in terms of some flow of sensory elements. I generate the idea of the room from memory and so pretty instantly will notice anything that sharply deviates from my forward model of it. — apokrisis

What does it mean, exactly, when you say you start with a head full of every kind of possibility? Do you mean to say that literally every sort of possibility is "implanted" in our heads, or do you mean that the brain merely has the capability to conjure up endless possibilities? As in, the power to actualize these events already makes these events "existent" in some sense?

If we look at the brain, we see it is limited in many respects. It has a certain size, a certain organization, a certain amount of processing power and capabilities. I cannot imagine ten thousand stars, all I can imagine is a very large amount of stars of indeterminate quantity. There legitimately is a limit to how much I can do.

How would something like you're describing evolve in the natural world? From where would the mind come from? From my perspective, a bottom-up view, while perhaps not being entirely sufficient, has leverage here. Consciousness evolves from lesser awareness to more, all in the name of efficiency. You said "less is more", but in my opinion it should be "more is more" so long as efficiency and adaptability are maintained within some set threshold.

Yeah, Cabrera's book is more meta-ethical and meta-philosophical than normative or applied ethics. He has some things about how you shouldn't kill anyone or have children but that's about it. The closest he gets is basically when he asks whether or not negative ethics is even possible, or if we need to make "negative categories" after the affirmative ones die. I know somewhere in the book he talks about how letting a murderer kill you is "technically" an ethical victory, but I also think he realizes the clumsiness of this view (severe agent centered restrictions, essentially). But I suppose that goes all the way back to the initial observation, that we can't have life without some kind of conflict or compromise. Someone gets hurt, no matter what.

So yes. This doesn't tally with the usual notions of how the mind should work. But that is because the phenomenology as we focus on it is naturally about all our constant failures to get predictions right. It seems that the homuncular "I" is always chasing the elusive truth of an ever surprising reality. However that introspective view by definition is only seeing things that way because there is such a bulk of events successfully discounted in every passing instant.

For example, in the second that just passed, I was effectively, subconsciously, predicting that Donald Trump was not about to barge into my room, an asteroid was not about to plough into the park outside my window, my foot wasn't about to explode in a shower of fireworks. So that is what brains do - allow us to discount a near infinite ensemble of possibilities as that which is almost infinitely unlikely. — apokrisis

Interesting. I can see how much of our awareness is all about what doesn't work, like Heidegger's broken tool analogy. We are most aware of that which did not go as planned. That which does go as planned is ignored immediately or soon after. I do not spend time thinking about what it was like to press the letter "a" key on my keyboard, but I do spend more time thinking WHEN i REALIZE i ACCIDENTALLY PRESSED THE CAPS LOCK KEY.

Yet I find it hard to believe that you were actually subconsciously predicting all these insane possibilities as you mentioned. That would require a hell of a lot of energy, would it not? What use would it be for the subconscious to go through all these possibilities - and how do you know your subconscious is, in fact, running through them? It's subconscious!

We keep going, don't stop running
They keep selling, we don't want it
So close to it almost found a way
Two steps closer, they keep coming
We keep yelling, we don't want it
Almost better, this things about to break.

So we aren't mincing terms, can you define affirmative narrative? — schopenhauer1

I'll quote at length before adding my own thoughts:

Someone once considered the Introduction to Formal Logic of the Spanish Thinker Alfredo Deaño as "logic for children." In some ways, I wish this book A Critique of Affirmative Morality will be considered an "ethics for children." Indeed, the questions -often exasperating –this work rises, are the basic questions of life that usually appear in the stubborn and monotonous questions of kids: Why are we here?, Why should we live?, Why do we have to die?, Why may be not kill our family?, Why should we love our parents?, Why not kill ourselves?, Why have we been brought to the world?, etc., and these questions are raised here exactly with the same innocent cruelty of children. That will no doubt infuriate the “adult” ethicists who promptly want to surpass the stage of the children‟s questions and to analyze “the serious moral crisis of our time”, the political, ecological, diplomatic, military subjects. These "adult" issues do not interest children and they are not interesting for the present book either. Philosophers and poets share with the child the unbearable conviction life is a badly told story, and that no "big issue" newspapers talk about and the more powerful countries of the world discuss will be able to extinguish the disturbing flames of Origin. In this sense, the child has his own maturity. All the “naive” and childish spirit this book could transmit is strictly intentional precisely because one of its main points is that jumping directly to those “great ethical issues of our time”, ignoring the original problems, is one of the basic features of the lack of moral sense of our time, and maybe of all times. — Julio Cabrera

[...]

The lack of radical reflection in the current ethics of beings (both classical and modern, of Kantian or, specially, Utilitarian inspiration) consists of the fact the crucial question has been, throughout the history of philosophy, how one should live, without considering in a positive way the possible ethical character of dying and abstention. Asking, in the ethical field, how to live is admitting ab initio there is not and there cannot be any moral problem in the very fact of being; that all moral problems arise "afterwards", in the domain of how. If the initial ethical question is how to live, it is assumed beforehand that living has not, in itself, any moral problems, or that living is, per se, ethically good, or that, for some motive that should still be clarified, the matter of good and evil does not concern to being, but only to beings. Affirmativeness is the historical form taken by the lack of radical character of the ethical reflection. (Indeed, a reflection that would answer "no" to theinitial question would not be radical either). But what is the philosophical-rational justification of living as ethically good (valuable) per se, and of the idea the
only thing that ethically matters is how to live, that is, how to turn into ethically good this or that ontic human life, excepting life itself from any questioning whatsoever? — Julio Cabrera

[...]

Since the beginning of this book, I have taken an attitude of that kind (which, in my view, is not “skeptical” in any pejorative sense, nor “nihilistic”), presenting the argumentations on the first chapters as of “a radical and anti-skeptical moralist” (using there Habermas‟ conception of skepticism), but disposed to argue until the end, employing the same conceptual tools supplied by the moral cognitivist. I will call “empty skeptic” the skeptic who refuses to argue, and “plenary skeptic” this who accepts to argue infinitely and radically. Perhaps the “skepticism” is maintained in the negative conviction of the plenary skeptic that it is not necessary, in argumentation, to destroy concepts and theories, but only put them in movement, let them live. From a negative point of view, the most appropriate way of denying a concept is not killing it, but –on the contrary –letting it die naturally. — Julio Cabrera

[...]

One of the most employed terms in the previous reflection has been “affirmative” and its derivatives. What has been understood as such? I understand by “affirmative”:

(a)The non-critical acceptation of fundamental theses of the type “the being is good”, “to be is better than not to be”, “the more being, the better”, etc, as well as the conviction that the ethical theory should ask directly about how-to be, how-to live, how to conduct an “ethical life”, and never ask if life itself is ethical, if there is not an ethical cost in simply staying alive, in “living a life” as if the being was, so to speak, “granted” and immunized against criticism. The ethicity of being, of living, of emerging to life, of being born, is given, in affirmative thinking – in my sense -as a granted and never thematically exposed conviction, as something already positively valued.

(b) In the second place, affirmative means assuming the task of thinking as “insuring” or “supportive” (and, maybe, as a solace, as a certain type of “conceptual edification”), in the sense that the conceptualization of the world shall protect us, for example, against relativism, nihilism, solipsism, skepticism and, in general, against all that may threat the continuity of the life of thinking. For affirmative thinking, it is not the case of pure and simple “looking for truth”, but of looking for all truth compatible with the continuity of life, with the enterprise of not allowing that thinking get blocked so it could keep developing itself indefinitely (I have used the word “affirmative” because it has, in Spanish, precisely these two meanings: “affirmative” as opposed to negative [in the sense of“positive”, of “saying yes”, of “assenting”], and “affirmative” as “affirming”, “supporting”, “finding something firm, or firming” [as in expressions of the kind: “It is necessary to firm on something, on some belief”, etc.].). — Julio Cabrera

[...]

From the optic of the present book, what is interesting in those theories is they all are “affirmative” theories, in the explained sense (contemporary north-American Pragmatism is perhaps the philosophy which has most openly assumed the “affirmative” character –in the dual sense mentioned –of ethical reflection, through a pragmatist theory of truth [vide, for example, the attempt of reconstruction of moral theory proposed by John Dewey]: true is what protects us from danger, what can be used as an adequate instrument for successful survival. What pragmatism has openly exposed remains implicit, I think,in the rest of moral philosophies in general, including Kantian ethics).

“Affirmative” are theories in which the movement of the quest for truth is conceived as a vital process (even when this “Nietzchean” interpretation might seem offensive to many of theauthors of these theories), in which the hypothesis that the quest for truth may lead us to an anti-vital result is rejected beforehand and not critically. The basic affirmative meta-thesis would be the following: life and truth go (or should go) on the same path, they never get in conflict; discovering truth is (or should be), at the same time, to discover the continuity of life, the uninterrupted process –however arduous –of vitality. There are not (or there should not be) anti-vital truths. — Julio Cabrera

___________________________________________________________________

The affirmative narrative is the historical-social-political-ethical bias towards continued existence. That there is something good, or at least nothing wrong, with life and existence and that there is some reason to continue the whole thing. If you dive into the ethical literature, you'll be amazed by how conservative and non-radical ethics tends to be, often manifesting as appeals to absurdity - something threatens the existence of society and this is taken as evidence of an ideas' falseness.

The term "affirmative" is not only referring to the affirmation of life but also the suppression of dissent. It's non-radical because it cannot exist if it is questioned all the way down. Children wonder why anything exists, why they have to do anything, why they have to die, and are looked down upon with the patronizing smug smiles of the adults who have "figured it all out" - but they haven't, they have just suppressed these ideas (if they had, we wouldn't be having this discussion!). It's as if part of the coming-of-age ritual and the subsequent assimilation into society is the systematic suppression of radical questioning. You don't do it, because it threatens everything that exists. We have places to go and people to meet and things to do and we don't have time for any of this radical philosophical bullshit. Why do you think philosophy in general, these days, is so frowned upon? Because it doesn't "fit" with the social mode of operation. Capitalism is literally a symbol of affirmativity.

Part of the negative dialectic here is to show how banal some of these questions objectively tend to be. If approached unabashedly head-on, the answers to these sorts of questions are relatively obvious. It's not as if the negative thinker believes they are handing wisdom down from above - rather, they are simply pointing out the obvious. Everyone else just has to "catch up" a bit. Deep down, most people realize life is not that great, that the manner in which we live and the relationship we have with the world at large is absurd, and that we're all going to die someday. Every now and then this manifests in little cracks in the affirmative system, and become wildly popular for their cathartic nature. But as soon as this crack begins to spread as the realization sets in that it's not just a phase, people go batshit and panic and try to pretend there's something "else" that will save them. Like Nietzsche said, only so much truth can be lived.

Negative ethics, in this case, simply takes the concepts affirmative ethics uses and applies them universally and consistently.

A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It’s not easy to be on the wrong foot with life. - Cioran

Probably my self-esteem. Like basically everyone.

pure solipsism — apokrisis

I mean, solipsism is one of those annoying philosophical positions that get in the way of affirmative progress. Even if they're wrong, it says a lot about your priorities that you're willing to deny their validity without any real argument. Instead of refuting solipsism, you use it as a threat.

It also says a lot about your powers of observation that you're willing to accuse me of solipsism when, for a very long while now, I've been articulating the point that ethics, fundamentally speaking, is about the relationship between the self and the other, and the harm and manipulation of the latter in particular.

But carry on with your repetitive affirmative narrative.

Nah, you're just missing the point by a mile. Oh well.

False. A moral agent can be rational without having affirmative values, so long as they're willing to look beyond their irrational vital impulses.

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

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

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. — apokrisis

"Naturalism" is the buzzword you use to describe anything you personally advocate. It's not as if all naturalists automatically believe everything you do regarding politics and ethics.

And no, pessimism is not based on the desire to end all pain. It's focused on the possibility of ending all purpose-less pain. Give us a good reason why pain has to exist. If, for example, you could enter a hedonic machine that would give you pure enjoyment without fail - would you hook yourself up? Of course you would. Why stick around in a world of both pain and pleasure when you could experience a world of simply pleasure? If you would take an aspirin for a headache, why not take the hedonic experience machine for relieving the stress of life?

So this whole "you can't have the good without the bad" rhetoric only applies so long as you keep this crypto-theological notion that life, and humanity, is "supposed" to be some way. It's a pretty sneaky aesthetic.

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. — apokrisis

That's it? Once again we have this sneaky aesthetic of the gritty survivor as a demonstration of your so-called naturalist ethics. Living hard is living best - but why? Certainly going to the supermarket is easier than growing your own food or hunting for meat. Guess you should stop going to the supermarket, since apparently living hard is living best...

Living creatures are almost always in a state of discomfort or stress. It's not enjoyable. It's tedious, annoying, frustrating and difficult. It's in the brief intermissions when you're able to relax, and in this relaxation you basically forget what it was like to go through the day. You mistake the intermission for the play.

It is also much easier to deal with life when you live it "again" through other people. Hence why so many people have children, those ultimately useless additions to the world. People like to see other people live life, so long as they don't have to live it themselves.

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. It does not care for our well-being - we are given this responsibility from the genesis of our existence and it's a real pain in the ass. I didn't want this, and the irritating part is how people like you are so willing to hold a blindingly obvious double standard and ignore this fact. 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.

Greatest game I've ever played.

Wait, what argument?

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

mkay, as I suspected you respond to nothing and redirect the blame onto others. Good job!

What are called facts are just approximate opinions shared by many people, always subject to change. You may consider that you are alive to be a fact, but even that is subject to change. Is like knowing you are awake, just before you go to sleep. Everything is always changing and any fact is just a memory waiting to be uttered but subject to change between the memory and the uttering. — Rich

Is this just an approximate opinion? An approximate opinion that everything is just an approximate opinion?

Is that a fact? — Bitter Crank

Was exactly my thought, BC. Any all-encompassing metaphysical position has to be able to account for itself.

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. — apokrisis

I mean, this has been a major topic investigated by existentialists and phenomenologists. Levinas, for example, specifically analyzes transcendence as an attempt to escape.

You keep trying to nudge these phenomenal experiences out of the picture as if they're not important or relevant to the discussion. So what if the world isn't actually divided up into these absolutes? How is that relevant to how we ordinarily approach the world in everyday life (what we might call "nature")?

But of course I can go about things from a different angle. Hypothetically speaking, if you had such godlike powers, would you start life on Earth all over again? Would you try to prevent it from developing? None of your hand-waving now: if you were God, would you do it again? This thought experiment is intentionally made to put phenomenal value back on the drawing board.

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. — apokrisis

First you say there is no good and bad, and then try to recommend a lifestyle of equilibrium (how incredibly novel! wow I never thought about that before...) that inevitably spirals back to hedonic satisfaction. Scienced-up taoism. Sounds great on paper!

So sure, you can trim your sails and tailor your life to equilibrium - until something inevitably disturbs this equilibrium in the form of accidents, pain, disease, aging, and death. You can tune a guitar only so much until the strings just break and the whole thing is fucked.

Schopenhauer1's (and others') point has been the absurdity of being forced to do this to begin with. The environmental and biological system we live in places constraints that, for a self-conscious, time-conscious being like us, can be coercive. Analyzing it objectively and removing any sort of anthropomorphism does not just magically woosh the oppression away, as if this knowledge correlates to calm tranquility in the face of danger. So yes, describing life in the textbook-manner style you prefer can be emotionless and passive, but life is not lived in this textbook-like manner (unless of course you are extraordinarily lucky or just blind). The biologist may recognize that death is the natural and eventual outcome of any biological system, but nevertheless retain a fear of it.

It's also helpful when you happened to get a lucky roll of the die. Far from being determined by reason, lives are dictated by chance and fortune. So you drew a comparatively good lot in life. At least have the decency to recognize when other people didn't and cannot raise themselves up to your unrealistic, dogmatic and coercive expectations.

A population of organisms (not just r-selected) is sustained by an implicit emphasis on the species rather than the individual. Individuality is tolerated only so long as it is beneficial to the survival of the species as as whole. As I'm sure you are aware, human's ability to "transcend the immanent" is an important part of existential and phenomenological analysis. Now that we are capable to reflecting upon our condition and the world at large, we can wonder whether we want to keep going. We can understand that individuality came from social interactions without making the mistake of valuing is less because of it. If we value individuality, and if this individuality puts us into conflict against the wider cosmic entropic "plan", then so be it. Maybe we were meant all along to go extinct. This rhymes well with Zapffe, Freud, Nietzsche and Unamuno's analysis of the tragedy of consciousness. As you said before elsewhere, the mind must find the right "balance" between seeing enough to survive but not too much to be overwhelmed. I'm obviously coming from the perspective that we see too much and that this inevitable disposition is the cause of the majority of our problems.

"Human existence is a penal colony; a sexually transmitted disease; a disappointment; nothing but suffering; “a sky-dive: out of a cunt into the grave”; a one-way ticket to the crematorium. “Nobody gets out of here alive”. Every day is a grim passage, a struggle through moments and hours of loneliness, boredom, emptiness, and self-loathing." — Colin Feltham

The sad thing is that the comparatively optimistic perspective you espouse inherently has to either ignore or forget about those like Mr. Feltham, myself, Schop1, Thorongil, and others who can't seem to figure out how to enjoy life like you seem to be able to. You play by nature's rules and you get to survive. You go rogue or fail to meet expectations and you're purged. And the train keep chugging.

Now you're thinking more pessimistically!

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

Goddammit CDPR, where the fuck is Cyberpunk 2077?!

(Just kidding, please take all the time you need and don't rush it.)

Commonsense Consequentialism: Wherein Morality Meets Rationality by Douglas Portmore

These guys killed it live at concert:

I don't think it's the naturalistic fallacy. Under that logic, you could say that the instinctual aversion to tall cliffs doesn't cut it, or that the aversion towards impalement is not a good enough argument. Also I don't really get how the rest of my view commits it.

Indeed, to add on, this is why people like Julio Cabrera call pain, particularly extreme pain, to be ethically disqualifying. We aren't disqualified due to some intrinsic gnostic evil, but because we live in an environment that places pressures on us and forces us to act in rational self-interest even if it's not the ethical thing to do. A spy who spills the beans while being tortured may have done the wrong thing, but cannot be blamed.

Well, forgive me, but this sounds hypocritical and seems to commit the naturalistic fallacy I mentioned. — Thorongil

I'm not sure I follow.

I also failed to mention that a major part of my "reason" to live has to do with a personal commitment to the welfare of sentient organisms, particularly non-human animals. I can't exactly help those in need if I'm rotting in the ground.

So why do you continue living? — Thorongil

Curiosity, a fear of death, the aesthetic of a spontaneous explorer, and the attitude of "modest arrogance", i.e. I'm sticking around to see if anyone can convince me there's a reason to stick around. I'm also fairly healthy and young so I might as well enjoy it while it lasts.

The best we can do is make peace with this fact and try to live accordingly. — Thorongil

An issue I see with this is that is seems to require a nostalgia for pre-Industrial history, before there were such things as nukes and pandemics. Now that we have the capability of destroying the planet, what side should the pessimist be on? They no longer have the convenience to sit back from the world as they did before when there literally was no method of ending the suffering.

I'm not saying we should launch the nukes. I think that might be flexing our muscles too much; I dont' know if we have that sort of authority to make that decision. But certainly we can still approach an Armageddon with open arms. Technology has shown its ability to change something that seemed to be metaphysically un-changeable.

Other people have to gin up some sort of "AWE" (capitals intended to show its overinflation).. AWE of knowledge, AWE of nature, AWE of other cultures.. Somehow, it's as if the scientific-minded, like priests of old, want to shame you for taking for granted the AWE of this or that aspect of existence.. yet they too are falling pray to cultural cohesion- of group think, of survival for survival's sake without question. — schopenhauer1

Reminds me of a quote from Thomas Ligotti's Conspiracy Against the Human Race:

“One cringes to hear scientists cooing over the universe or any part thereof like schoolgirls over-heated by their first crush. From the studies of Krafft-Ebbing onward, we know that it is possible to become excited about anything—from shins to shoehorns. But it would be nice if just one of these gushing eggheads would step back and, as a concession to objectivity, speak the truth: THERE IS NOTHING INNATELY IMPRESSIVE ABOUT THE UNIVERSE OR ANYTHING IN IT.” — Ligotti

It reminds you of some people on this forum, doesn't it?

As trade increased, this democratized existential thinking, and while some indulged in self-reflection of our own existence and questioned why we procreate in the first place, most people seemed to follow the inheritance of our early human ancestors- which is to worry about how to put forth a next generation without questioning why. It's as if the original use for something was no longer needed, but people still did it anyway out of habit. — schopenhauer1

Yes, it's as if every generation struggles with the same fundamental questions as the previous generations. There's nothing new under the Sun. It's the same old story with different characters who all believe themselves to be entirely unique, who only learn life is not worth it when it's already too late. Disappointing, to say the least.