The argument that he gave seems to me to be invalid, — Leontiskos

That's a separate matter. :smile:

I just like pointing out how the semiotic approach goes further in emphasising that our model of the world is also the model of "ourselves in the world". The witness and the witnessed are inseparable even in their separation.

So I wasn't meaning to correct you. Just having fun outlining the next step that people never quite arrive at. Rest easy with the covid. :up:

None of your scenario matters to the normative claim of the deontological basis being presented. — schopenhauer1

But that is because I am sensible and don't buy that as a basis. Wrong premise and thus a pointless argument.

It would be bad faith to pretend I went along with your scenario for any other reason than its passing curiosity value.

No, this isn't a slippery slope fallacy because the debate is at the normative level. Murder isn't somewhat wrong, it's wrong. — schopenhauer1

But what is murder? What acts fall into that category without involving shades of grey?

Perhaps you have a conviction in black and white thinking to a degree I cannot even fathom? I sort of suspect that deep down you must be kidding. That a little reasonableness will soon penetrate the pose. I'm still kind of giving credit to the possibility that you aren't completely in the grip of your own rhetoric.

I have said a couple times in the thread I see the importance of different explanatory frameworks on different levels but just seems to me all complex behavior are grounded on and emerge from the smaller scales as described by more fundamental, simpler physical laws or descriptions. — Apustimelogist

Sure. You've certainly said how it seems for you. But as a biologist and neuroscientist, I see this as question-begging reductionism.

This is partly because I am already very biased against attempts to reify meaning and against views that seem inherently strongly representational. The idea of symbols or signs in biology then seem to me something like an additional level of idealization and approximation that is another way of telling stories about biology, perhaps more intuitively - similar to teleology. But it doesn't seem fundamental to me compared to notions like blind selectionism which does not necessarily require things to be packaged up in terms of neat symbols and meanings. — Apustimelogist

This package of prejudices could not be more familiar.

I personally find ideas like active inference and the free energy principle have more clarity, eloquence and mathematical grounding than the Howard Patee stuff, in addition to being prima facie simpler to couple with my enactive inclinations. The epistemic cut idea also seems to draw from ideas in quantum mechanics which I just do not believe to be the case — Apustimelogist

This just shows that you haven't read or understood the stuff.

I'm sure it will make no difference here, but an irony is that I was deep into theoretical neuroscience in the 1990s and meeting up with Friston when he was still trying to find his angle of attack. Back then, he was thinking in terms of dynamical coupling and neural transients. The non-linear dynamics of folk like Scott Kelso. I was prodding Friston about the importance of switching to an anticipatory-processing based point of view.

Friston was already clearly the smartest guy in theoretical neuroscience at that time. And events have since confirmed that. But it was because neuroscience and complexity theory still seemed so far from the proper way of thinking about the mind as an enactive process that I went off and stumbled into the path that theoretical biology had already blazed. The systems science, the hierarchy theory, the infodynamics, the dissipative structure, the epistemic cut, the modelling relation. All the parts of the puzzle that come together to form a general theory of life and mind.

So I was hanging out with that new crowd for a decade. I was there as it realised how theoretical biology had been recapitulating the metaphysics of Peircean pragmatism/semiotics. The idea of the sign relation.

A further irony was that Pattee resisted this new biosemiotic turn in our discussions. After all, I guess, he had already made the same points more sharply. He had had the benefit of the genetic code being cracked and so focusing attention on the practical issue of how a molecule could be a message.

Pattee went off radar for a few years in what seemed like a bit of a huff. But then he surprised by suddenly releasing a flood of papers proclaiming himself a biosemiotician. He sharpened what this should mean and so put a couple of the other pretender camps in their place.

So you may talk from your experience, but I talk from mine. The question you deny is even a question is a question I've been academically engaged with for a long time.

For fun, let's test the pragmatic limits to your antinatalism.

So you say you are a signed-up member of the AN charter. Being responsible for a birth is deemed a sin as it is impossible for the resulting infant to have given its explicit consent to this reproductive act in advance of the fact.

But having sex is always going to carry this risk. Even contraception – as a sign of your good faith – can fail. So does your AN charter need to add the clause of no sex at all as that is putting you at risk for breaking the faith? Do you need to go out and get sterilised because you could always get drunk one night or duped into performing a service for some cunning natalist?

One could go on seeking such risks to your hardline AN stance. The risks might be diminishing, but even a vasectomy fails 1 in 10,000 times. At some point do you not eventually get a pass on this? Does even the AN extremist accept that imperatives have their pragmatic limits?

Well if reason is allowed back into the conversation, this becomes the point where we can start winding back towards the practical notion of risks being balanced against rewards. We can get back to my commonsense position that what matters in regard to approaching reproduction ethically is not whether the prospective parents can have the baby sign off on the whole exercise in advance, but that the parents are wholeheartedly engaged in making it a turn of as a positive choice.

One can have a productive ethical debate where there are two complementary imperatives in play – like risks and rewards – and so the way that we "ought to behave" is in the way that aims to arrive at an optimised win-win balance.

But if you set up your ethics on the side of a slippery slope fallacy, then why would you expect that to be useful or persuasive?

It would have shown less bad faith if you had responded to what I actually wrote.

Once you get into a mindset of looking for problems, you are never going to find an end to problems. — apokrisis

If one is simply recognising problems then that is a quite different mindset. But once you declare no line can be drawn, no balance of interests can exist, then that becomes reason eating itself.

If you have an argument against that argument, rather than some further deflection, I’m happy to hear it.

Not to sound rude, but did you actually read my reply? — AmadeusD

It could have been better written.

Recognizing, not seeking. If you do not accept this, that is pure bad faith. — AmadeusD

Well who gives a fuck when you put it like that.

It's speculative. — Banno

You can tell without even reading? Impressive. How mighty are the arguments you make on PF. How you make your foes tremble when they hear the soft padded approach of your wombling form before you turn, fart and waddle off with a small pleased expression.

I can certainly recognise problems when I see them. And going looking for problems is a problem that I can recognise.

If you think looking for only problems is not a problem, then you would have to supply your argument for why this lack of balance is not in fact problematic.

You are no lightweight, but what you serve is also opinion, hidden. Speculative physics mixed with rewarmed dialectic. — Banno

I just served you with a paper by Howard Pattee. Professor Emeritus at Binghamton University and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. One of the three sharpest thinkers I've had the privilege of learning from.

I accept that you find the task of following the paper's argument rather too daunting, even if it was written as a kind of introduction to the problem.

But is all the spit and splutter really serving any purpose? Shouldn't you be waddling off to bruncheon by now. You seem to have run out of jibes.

More speculation than physics. — Banno

An opinion. Served as usual without argument or evidence. You are such a lightweight.

Alot of the details are probably out there in the field of biology in terms of things like gene translation and cellular development. Is any of this not mediated through fundamental physics? — Apustimelogist

Seems you are trying very hard to do exactly what biologists complain about. Failing to understand the epistemic cut.

Or as a physicist put it in The Physics of Symbols....

Evolution requires the genotype-phenotype distinction, a primeval epistemic cut that separates energy-degenerate, rate-independent genetic symbols from the rate-dependent dynamics of construction that they control. This symbol-matter or subject-object distinction occurs at all higher levels where symbols are related to a referent by an arbitrary code. The converse of control is measurement in which a rate-dependent dynamical state is coded into quiescent symbols. Non-integrable constraints are one necessary conditions for bridging the epistemic cut by measurement, control, and coding. Additional properties of heteropolymer constraints are necessary for biological evolution.

When you have no adequate response, you spit. Hegel is not physics. — Banno

I never said Hegel was physics. As a paid up biosemiotician, you would have to show where I am a Hegelist rather than a Peircean. Produce the textual evidence.

And of course you can't. So you splutter. :up:

Meanwhile here is the relevant physics - The Physics of Symbols: Bridging the Epistemic Cut

Deal with it or womble off to lunch. Stop circling the bowl and be on your way.

Extra marks for getting the reference. But shame your skill at subtext is not matched by your diligence at doing actual work.

And they love you.

So here we see the rage of grandiose narcissist in most splendid form. Note the venom dripping out it's mouth when it howls. That is one fine specimen folks. — wonderer1

As insults go, this is pretty weak if not quite odd. Perhaps try getting ChatGTP to give you a hand?

I'll leave you to your crusade. — Banno

Yep. See the science and run for your burrow. Pretend it never happened.

See how this is not physics? QED. — Banno

How is this not physics exactly?

The Physics of Symbols: Bridging the Epistemic Cut

It's the pretence that is irksome. Reworking Hegel is fine, if one is honest about it. — Banno

Be honest about it. My biosemiotic position arises within a community of reason that was Aristotelean and then became Peircean. So the reworking of Hegel would have been done by Peirce.

But you seem quite ignorant of all these metaphysical distinctions. Time to womble off in the direction of your lunch. Don't pretend you have any training in either biophysics or functional neuroscience.

The wombat stirs, farts and leaves. Pleased to have made its small contribution.

Life is a balancing act. Once you get into a mindset of looking for problems, you are never going to find an end to problems.

That ain’t philosophy. It is reason eating itself.

A neuron is characterized as a physical object made up of particles that behave according to the laws of physics. All neuronal behaviors follow from this and we put information processing on top of it. Not the other way round. — Apustimelogist

So how do you derive the structure of a neuron from the laws of physics?

Sure, the laws don’t forbid the structure. But in what sense do they cause the structure to be as it physically is?

You can always in principle describe whatever a brain is doing in terms of more fundamental physics. — Apustimelogist

Well do so then. Tell me how the physical structure of a neuron is the product of fundamental physics. Tell me how neurons appear in the world in a way that does not involve the hand of biological information.

I'm afraid that my grandiosity detector has become too sensitive to read much of that. — wonderer1

…he says pompously. :up:

What does it mean for something to be useful but not real? — Harry Hindu

To be clear, yes of course information storage as genes or words has some entropic cost. To scratch a mark on a rock is an effort. Heat is produced. Making DNA bases or pushing out the air to say a word are all physical acts.

But the trick of a code is that it zeroes this physical cost to make it always the same and as least costly as possible. I can say raven or I can say cosmos or god. The vocal act is physical. But the degree of meaning involved is not tied to that. I can speak nonsense or wisdom and from an entropic point of view it amounts to the same thing,

As they say, infinite variety from finite means. A virtual reality can be conjured up that physical reality can no longer get at with its constraints. But then of course, whether the encoded information is nonsense or wisdom starts to matter when it is used to regulate the physics of the world. It has to cover its small running cost by its effectiveness in keeping the organism alive and intact.

I could argue that language use is just more complex learned behavior. Animals communicate with each other using sounds, smells and visual markings. — Harry Hindu

There are grades of semiosis. Indexes, icons and then symbols. So I was talking about symbols when I talk about codes. Marks that bear no physical resemblance to what they are meant to represent.

Animals communicate with signs that are genetically fixed. A peacock has a tail it can raise. But that one sign doesn’t become a complex language for talking about anything a peacock wants.

A language is a system of symbolic gestures. Articulate and syntactically structured. A machinery for producing an unlimited variety of mark combinations. Quite different in its ability to generate endless novelty.

I think you are saying that the a physical process can (under the right conditions) be interpreted as an information processing process, and conversely. — Ludwig V

Not really. If we are talking causality, in biology it is the genome that is causing the physics. Enzymes are switches that turn chemical processes on and off. The entropy flow is regulated in a way that builds, and keeps rebuilding, a functional body. The physical blueprint that the genome had in mind.

That is why the information processing analogy fails even if it is somewhat helpful.

Neural information encodes the behaviours that switch entropy flows off and on at the level of a general world model. We move towards food. We move away from danger. By being able to navigate an environment in intelligent fashion, we can again keep rebuilding the body that now also contains a brain as well as a metabolism.

The neural structure of the brain is plastic. Connections are forever growing or disappearing. They do so under selective pressure. They do so because the reshaping is proving functional. It is the "program" that the brain is running that is the cause of the physical structure that underpins its cognitive action.

So brains aren't really like computers as a computer's program does not have to go as far as building and maintaining its hardware. It does not have to get off the desk and ensure it is properly plugged into the socket.

Of course the genes are far more directly connected to the basic chore of regulating the entropic flow that is our metabolism. Neurons are much more removed from that nitty gritty level of ensuring the functional integrity of the body. Biology builds the neurons as cells, and experience in the world is just sculpting the connectivity of the pathways.

But still, in causal terms the neural information is paying for its own keep. If the brain has a bad world model, then the whole organism is likely not to last long as a physical device.

I am sure you feel your opinions are well qualified. I could reply if I spotted some argument.

In case you are interested, the supporting detail can be found here - https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/679203

Well this just ignores the context about which of two things is more fundamental — Apustimelogist

Well of course the cosmos is more fundamental than the bios. One creates the possibilities that the other exploits. Life and mind don’t contradict the second law. They accelerate entropification.

Again, just because it may not be your preferred level of explanation, does not preclude it from being more fundamental or at least perform a role of grounding the other more preferred explanation so that preferred explanation itself would in principle be explained by and depend on this more small scale perspective. — Apustimelogist

But you said all the complex behaviours of neurons emerge from lower level physics which is quite wrong. They emerge from the information processing which entropically entrains the physical world in a way that brains and nervous systems can be a thing.

I don’t favour computer analogies but what do you think causes the state of a logic gate to flip. Is it the information being processed or the fluctuating voltage of the circuits?

The physics of neurons is shaped by the top-down needs of Bayesian modelling. Bayesian modelling isn’t a bottom-up emergent product of fluctuating chemical potentials.

This doesn't make any sense since all of the complex behaviors neurons do are emergent from very simple ones at smalled scales - described by morr fundamental laws of physics - such as ions crossing a membrane barrier. — Apustimelogist

This ignores the fact that organisms are organised by codes and so exist in a semiotic modelling relation with the world.

This neatly inverts things. An informational mechanics is precisely what biology and neurology impose on the physical world. Not the other way around.

The world is organised by dissipation. It has an emergent structure of entropy flow. This starts down at the quantum level with thermal decoherence. Our best causal model of this is symmetry-based. Complexity arises as symmetry-breaking phase transitions – step ups in terms of the holistic constraints of topological order.

Nature is holonomic in the physics jargon. Then life and mind arise as information systems able to impose non-holonomic constraints on the prevailing systems of entropic flow. A machinery of photosynthesis can be constructed that stands between the sun's rays and the earth crust that would otherwise just bounce it off into space as waste heat.

So life and mind embody the Newtonian ideal of a cause and effect system. A mechanical construction that regulates physical flows. Billiard balls roll smoothly and recoil with constrained linearity because we have carefully machined things to be that way on a baize surface with ivory spheres.

But the world itself is not a machinery of linear cause and effect. So its non-linearity is only a comment about the degree to which it has been constrained or not in regards to some entropic process. Reality is fundamentally "non-linear" if that is our best term. And linearity or classicality is something reality can only approach asymptotically or effectively.

For all practical purposes, we may regard a wave function as collapsed as some probe with a switch mounted on its end has been heard to flip state. Holism can be considered localised. Another bit of thermodynamic history has now definitely been added to universe's equation of state.

If neurology relied on ions crossing membranes as its deep explanation, then it would be getting us nowhere. What matters in terms of a suitable causal explanation is in what sense a switch was flipped. And what meaning did that flip have within a larger holistic informational economy.

All this only works in the first place by the "information processing" being as causally separate from the physics it means to control as is possible. An organism has to stand outside its world to regulate that world. Or at least swim along in a purposeful manner while also caught in the midst of its tremendously strong entropic flows.

Anyway, my general point is that complexity theory is often reduced to just complicated dynamics – which already begs the question in that dynamics is inherently not mechanical if you dig into its causality. Non-linearity is its default as linearity is only ever some emergent tendency towards an organising topological order.

And then compounding the confusion over causality, life and mind arise by being able to impose mechanical order on entropic flows. A logic of switches can tame a river to become a transport system, an irrigation system, a power generation system. Or down at the level of organic chemistry, a logic of switches turns a bag of reactions into an an information-regulated metabolism. A cell with the intelligence to repair and reproduce itself despite the storm of entropy flowing through it.

This is proper complexity when it comes to the possible causalities of nature. The combination of entropy flows and negentropic memories. The ability to construct sluice gates across non-linear dynamics and so regulate nature in intentional fashion.

More concretely, suppose a scientist observes that they can evoke some form of experience via brain stimulation. Hanover thinks this proves that experience is untrustworthy, and yet the scientist's observation is nothing other than an experience. So why isn't their experience untrustworthy? *crickets* — Leontiskos

But isn’t this approach failing to take into account that the witnessing selves are part of the semiotic construction of a witnessed reality? And there is a difference between the scientistic and the folk phenomenological account on this ground.

One view speaks to that of “ourselves” - our socially constructed notion of being an actual experiential being. The one having the experiences when we move our heads, widen our eyes, see something come into focus and mumur to ourselves, “I see a red pen”.

My point is that already we are constructing the self as the ultimate subjective witness, when objectively - as science can tell us - this is merely a socialised narrative.

An animal lacking language just exists in its world in a direct embodied fashion. It reacts to a red pen in terms of appropriate learnt behaviours and without any extra internal narrative about witnessing the world as a self who might thus have done something otherwise than react in a direct animal fashion.

So your eyeball may be pressed to the microscope, but there is also this idea of a “you” in play that comes at reality with already a theory. It is possible “you” were dreaming, hallucinating, distracted, careless, or whatever, when you saw what you thought you saw.

Even just at this regular linguistically constructed level of being a reliable observer of reality, you felt equipped to be able judge the rationality and soundness of your verbal reports about what was in fact the case. You can contrast a real red pen and a hallucinated red pen in terms of being a counterfactually theorising kind of self.

So the next step to a mathematically informed observer - the fully scientific ideal - is not such a great difference. We can swap out our phenomenological stance for the laboratory stance at a drop of a hat.

What we can’t do so easily is recover what being a self would have been like as a languageless animal. What it would be like not to live in this narrative haze of counterfactual possibility that adds so much complexity to our sense of self - our sense of always being both firmly rooted in reality and yet also floating somewhere else beyond it at the same time.

I have come across reports that suggest some animals can learn to do basic small number counting. — Janus

You know yourself that three, four or even five things can be seen as different sized collections at a single glance. And remembered as such. But the difference between seven or eight apples starts to require a method of checking if you want to be sure of your mathematical correctness. Whereas as for a hungry monkey, it becomes a difference not making a difference. It is just seen as a lot of apples.

But I think animals have a sense of number. — Janus

Or of perceptual grouping. Human working memory famously tops out at about “7 ± 2” items. The kind of grouping in the test that Trump aced when he could recall “Person, woman, man, camera, TV.“ And probably even manage that feat in reverse order.

Animals all have working memory too. The ability to juggle a small set of particular aspects of some larger cognitive task.

But that is not the same as counting. Just the reason why we struggle with holding number strings longer than seven in our working memories.

The word "form" in information seems to reflect the relationship between information and form. — Janus

Indeed. I would call the abstracted notion of information our “atoms of form”. Form reduced to the counterfactuality of a binary switch. We can count how many distinctions it takes to arrive at something completely specific.

The game of Twenty Questions is a good example. Ideally, every question cuts the number of remaining choices in half. And that way we cut through a world of possibilities with an exponentialised efficiency.

The form I have in mind is … well you will just have to start guessing. And each guess is an atomistic act of counterfactual switching. If you are any good at this game, you will switch off half the world of possibilities as you zero in on the possibilities still left switched on.

My error was only in re-entering a long stale discussion.

Semiosis would say that animals are rational at the level of genetic and neural encoding. — apokrisis

This seems a useful clarification. Information is encoded meaning. Genetic information encodes for constraints on chemical actions. Neural information encodes for constraints on environmental actions. Verbal information encodes for constraints on intentional actions. And numeric information encodes for constraints on mathematical actions.

So information is about the pragmatic encoding of meanings. It is how an organism regulates its world by having the kind of memory that acts as a store for data and algorithms – to put it rather computationally. An organism can construct states of constraint because a meaningful relation with the world has been atomised into a system of syntax acting on semantics. Habits or routines that can be run. Behaviours which can be switched on or off.

Numbers are then just the form that information takes at the level of a complete semiotic abstraction in terms of the self that is aiming to regulate its world by the business of constructing states of constraint. A numberline gives both the data points and the algorithmic logic that are needed to encode an absolutely general – but also perfectly mechanistic – modelling relation with the world.

So four levels of information or mechanistic regulation. With maths and logic at the end of this trail as the most evolved form of pragmatic rationality. The ultimate way that an organism could think about the world. If also then, the least actually "organic". :razz:

Were you addressing me? :chin:

Animals obviously recognize forms. Should we say they are rational? — Janus

But anyway, animals obviously have good object recognition. The recognise pragmatic forms. But are they apprehending form at a rational level? Or is that level of abstraction how we humans learn to view the world for our own new purpose of seeing reality in general as one giant rational machine?

Semiosis would say that animals are rational at the level of genetic and neural encoding. They see the world in terms of a regulated metabolism and a patterned environment.

Humans have linguistic semiosis which gets us to a level of seeing the world in terms of a pattern of interaction between intentional agents. The play of viewpoints captured by being able to speak of me and you, before and after, good and bad.

And the OP concerns mathematical semiosis. Pattern abstracted to the point of a mechanical generality. The ability to construct forms in algorithmic fashion. What seems to us the ultimate level of rationalised structure.

So, you mean to say, you've been arguing with (i think) three people about antinatalism across two threads, and you don't care about, or understand the concerns of antinatalists? — AmadeusD

I've had schop bleating in my ear for a decade. And you are not striking me as someone who is suddenly going to make it an interesting subject.

You're talking about living people dealing with their already-extant lives. Not. Relevant. — AmadeusD

It does not engage with AN concerns. — AmadeusD

Who could care about AN concerns? They are ridiculous given that there is plenty enough of pragmatic importance to be getting on with in our already extant lives.

A fashion statement and not a philosophical conundrum.

Objects that are similar fall into some category and it is only then that we can assert that there is a quantity of similar objects. — Harry Hindu

Object recognition thus parallels an entropic view of information. An equilibrium system like an ideal gas is defined by its macro properties - temperature and pressure - and not its micro properties. The actual position of a bunch of particles is an ensemble of differences that becomes merely the sameness of a statistical blur. And the global state of the ensemble is a sameness that can be now treated as a difference when comparing one thermal system to some other in terms of a pressure and temperature.

If I asked you to count the number of crows in a tree, the fact that some were rooks, some ravens, some magpies, would be differences you are being asked to ignore. They are all varieties of crow, but that is being treated as a difference that doesn’t make a difference for the purpose of counting crows.

So reality is like this. There are always further distinctions to be had. Even two electrons might be identical in every way, except they are in different places. But equally, the differences can cease to matter from a higher level that sees instead the sameness of a statistical regularity. Sameness and difference are connected by the third thing of where in scale we choose to stand in measuring the properties of a system.

Are we interested in the distinctions between types of crow. Or if it is birds we are counting, is a crow any different from an ostrich?

Why does 2+2=4? Some may say that this is logically sound statement, but why? What makes some string of scribbles true? — Harry Hindu

So reality is divided into sameness and difference by its hierarchical scale. There really is something to talk about at the level of statistical mechanics. But then our talking about it is done in a way that claims to talk past the third thing of a viewpoint where either the sameness or the difference is being ignored. Information and numbers are our means to talk about reality as if from some completely objective nowhere.

It matters in language whether I think I am being asked to count birds or ravens. I have to place myself at a certain interpretive level that matches your understanding about what you were asking. But then the number line is its own abstract thing where there is no physical scale involved. Space, time and energy are all generalised as differences to be ignored. Three ravens is equivalent to three birds, three apples or three spaghetti monsters. The focus is now on the arithmetic or algebraic operations that can be performed on an abstract number system.

We have shifted ourselves into a Platonia so far as reality is concerned. And that new mathematical level of semiosis or reality modelling offers a huge entropic payback for us humans in terms of technology, engineering, computation, and other ways of mechanistically controlling the world.

It makes the whole of reality look the same in our eyes. A mechanical device. A system of particles regulated by differential equations. A sameness of physical laws with a difference in initial conditions.

So numbers and information are part of a new way of speaking about the world that is very useful in proportion to the degree that it is also unreal. It is a language of atomised reductionism that places itself outside even space, time and energy as those are the physical generalities it now aspires to take algorithmic control over.

A modelling relation with the world coming from the God’s eye view. Just equations and variables. Absolute sameness coupled to absolute difference now.

For deontologists, it would be wrong to use people. — schopenhauer1

It might be relatively wrong but then also relatively right. You of course will do your usual mad thing of talking in exceptionless absolutes.

But the decision is not taken by 'humanity' but by individual human beings in their singularity. — boundless

Remember I have already agreed that one ought to make responsible choices. One can tell if one is really in a position to do a good job of it.

I’m not a natalist in the sense Schop pushes. I think it perfectly sensible not to have kids if you see a highly likelihood of things turning out bad. Climate change could be a good enough reason. Not liking responsibility could be another,

But antinatalism is claiming this transcendent principle that no chances should be taken at all. I don’t get to choose what is right for me in my circumstances. The antinatalist has assumed the ethical high ground that trumps any choice I might make. Which seems a little fascist.

There is still the 0,01%, however, that would prefer to 'have never been born'. Their perspective is not 'wrong' only because they are a minority. — boundless

So because of this round up error, humanity should end itself forthwith as some kind of supreme ethical act?

:chin:

You'll need to let me know what this has to do with AN first — AmadeusD

Checking your comments on the other AN thread, I can explain better. You were arguing as if the “higher consciousness” of humans were something neurobiological rather than sociocultural. This makes a difference.

If you believe that human self awareness - our feeling of being a self and thus able to suffer in an existential sense - is something neurobiological, then that is something that can’t be fixed by a psychological intervention. Therapy can’t address the source of the distress.

But if instead you understand human consciousness as a socially constructed habit of thought - one based on the narrative power of language and society’s need for us to be socially self-regulating - then you can see how the inner narrative is something that can quite authentically be rewritten.

This is the shift in mindset behind the positive psychology movement. A new style of therapy for helping people realise they have internalised certain scripts and, if they want, they can rewrite them to better suit their own lives.

This addresses the five death bed regrets I mentioned. The fact that people felt their life was alright but really they should have made it more their own life. They shouldn’t have lived it so much in terms of what their parents, peers, employers, etc, felt it should be.

So we are not rooted psychologically in the deeper soil of our emotions and values. These are often just attitudes and frames that we grew up surrounded by and thus became merely our unthinking habits.

This makes all the difference. If we have a negative mindset, why not learn instead to have a positive one.

It is not the “gift of life” that is our unconsented burden. It is the attitudes we were surrounded by that could be the reason for a life of burden and suffering. That which we could not help internalising as it was how we were treated, the circumstances of our early rearing. But that which we can grow out if we have a clearer idea about how the human mind is shaped.