Same boat. Life is too convoluted and is full of contradictions. Someone who boldly claims to have "the truth" about any subject matter is mostly trying to sell something.
When your philosophy on life is fundamentally anti life you may have a problem. Isntead of thinking about all the things that are challenging in life go out and live it. Our purpose is so much more than to simply not suffer and feel pleasure. I have a lot to say on the topic but its a youtube comment
Of course, if someone is opposed to Life itself in some way, that's a problem. And it's a problem taken up by whoever has that view. Hopefully, consciously.
Got a few thoughts about this myself but I'll wait until I finish the video first and see what you have to say, haha. At roughly 4:03 you are talking about a "duty to not cause suffering" and how any life created will suffer. In the lab we can potentially create a creature that does not suffer but for any practical purposes the technology is not there yet. (this may turn out to be impossible, but I argue we dont know one way or the other yet) However I come at this from my personal viewpoint: The right to freedom is the only right and from it stems everything else, (in the hypothetical perfect world: the right to have a pocket universe and god like powers, sans the ability to produce life that will be unhappy with its own existence). Including freedom of choice, which extends to: If you are of "sound mind" (this is a pretty big hole in my philosophy as I dont actually have a concrete definition for sound mind, but in general I would say a consult with 2 psychologists ticking a box is probably enough for our purposes in the real world) then you have the freedom to choose to suffer. An addict is not free, they are chained by addiction and potentially you can make an argument for restricting their freedom because they never had it in the first place if they were tricked, or even uninformed due to their own lack of interest ie they knew heroin is addictive but did not truly consider the severity of what that means in detail. If you can say "it is beyond reasonable doubt" (and here I simply insert the UK court definition which would be a panel of jurors deciding on it) for an individual (not the population as a whole) to wish to not have existed then you can create such people. Repeated: If it is beyond reasonable doubt for an individual to wish not to exist, then it is not immoral to create them. Personally I would stick with the antinatalism viewpoint at a governmental level because 5% of the world suffer from depression and until you can lower that to something like 0.01% it **feels** too high for me to be comfortable with. (running out of people is a similar but seperate issue because at a single nation level you can always keep your population up via rescue humans) How one would go about implementing successful policies without causing civil unrest and widespread suffering, I have no idea. I would greatly appreciate your input.
That bit about having a duty not to cause suffering I was quoting from Gerald Harrison, it's not my own idea. Personally I don't believe in moral duties, as such, but I hope that people oblige themselves to be decent at least. It's the best I can hope for. I'm not entirely sure what Harrison, or other philosophers who deal with ethics, mean by "duty", though. I have to say I'm not sure I'm following your reasoning. If you've got someone who's more or less capable of making informed decisions, and that person decides that they don't want to exist, then it's morally acceptable to create such a person because that allows them to freely make that decision, and freedom is the highest value - is that right? Sorry for not quite understanding but that's the best I can make of it. As for AN legislation, yea, I wouldn't be very interested in that, myself, if for no other reason then it *would* cause a great deal of suffering and unrest, and then you get into this trap of having to justify "reducing suffering" by causing it, and on the proposed scale it's too much of a problem.
David Benatar's asymmetry argument isn't based on philosophical pessimism, neither is the consent argument. There are also misanthropic arguments for antinatalism - based on the harm that future humans will cause to others, animals, the environment, etc. I also don't think antinatalism directly follows from philsophical pessimism. Even Schopenhauer and the Buddha had children. You need pessimism PLUS a sense of moral obligation or duty, or a sense that you ought do something to improve the world, or least to not make it worse. Pessimism doesn't directly mean that one necessarily acts with a sense of moral duty. You could be a pessimist and also just be a bad person (according to antinatalists) and have 10 kids - I don't see the contradiction here. You need pessimism PLUS a desire to act morally to get antinatalism from philosophical pessimism - it doesn't just directly follow.
It's true Benatar wasn't deriving from philosophical pessimism but his AN is, I think, an existential pessimist position since he puts so much value on suffering, even to the point of arguing there's more of it than we realise. It's hard to see his description of Life as anything other than pessimist. Yea, AN is the ethical position one can take that can be derived from pessimism, whereas mere pessimism isn't an ethical position in and of itself, although it's making a moral claim about good and bad in a universalist way.
I'm always turned off by the overly pessimistic AN vloggers. I don't see a problem with accepting the staunch reality of AN without being given over to extreme sadness. Maybe AN is a statement of the facts of the case, whereas pessimism is a prediction of the verdict. Excess pessimism can influence the verdict.
What puts me off about that lot is just how repetitive, unoriginal and boring they are. It's just the same old tired whinging without any attempt at anything interesting. I'd say AN is more than descriptive, since it's an ethical position. Pessimism, to me, is more the descriptive part. Although yes, it is also heavily biased.
@@andrew_mcintosh Exactly what I wrote in that reddit thread. Philosophical pessimism doesn't seem to necessitate antinatalism. And antinatalism can be reached from premises and worldviews other than the philosophical pessimism. So, the two are distinct but there is an important overlap.
Have you thought of releasing tracks in a collection like an album? This has a similar sound to "I've got a good mind to quit living and go shopping instead", would probably go pretty well together.
Yes, this is pretty similar to that one, and I’ve got another one that I want to finish off that’s similar again. But I don’t think I’ll be doing an album or anything. For one thing, it’s a lot of bother getting something like that together and promoting it and all that, more than I could be bothered with. And anyway, I’m happy enough with just having them on this YT channel. Thanks for the suggestion though, I appreciate you listening to this stuff.
lol @ 2:58. Anyone who thinks anything remotely like this is so delusional it's not even funny. In fact, I'm surprised you haven't whinged about the space faring delusion. Outside the jesus and techno-capitalist delusions, it is the most pervasive delusion amongst westerners. Consider how inherently precarious every mode of travel and way of life is on earth, now consider that there are 0 life support systems in space. If space faring ever becomes a reality and I doubt it ever will, the beings who do this won't even be recognizably human.
Oh, it’s a total joke, but it’s one people take seriously. If you haven’t seen it already, have a look at this - ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-U9YdnzOf4NQ.html I think that’s about the “Mars One” project which was abandoned in 2019. But I understand people are still thinking seriously about colonising the place. Can’t remember exactly right now but I read an article about someone who had done some training in a simulated Martain colony where she lived with a bunch of other people for I think something like a year (couldn’t find the article, sorry, so don’t take my word for it).
@@andrew_mcintosh Thanks mate. I will check out that video. No surprise the project failed. Humanity only bothered to go to space in the first place bc of warfare. Unless that history repeats, no chance of people going to Mars. Space is anathema to life. People think space travel is a technological problem, which is why so many people compare it to the initial difficulties of sea and air travel. When in reality space travel is mostly a biology problem. It is orders of magnitude more difficult and doesn't even compare. Unless the species becomes a monstrosity that can live over 200 years, survive insane radiation and near zero oxygen not to mention social isolation. Yeah, people can't even agree on abortion forget about genetic engineering to fck off to interstellar space.
@@andrew_mcintosh I'm gonna have to apologize honestly, i don't why i would even bother calling it alternative, especially when it's just a marketing term in the music industry for musicians that aren't popular than the popular, should have said atmospheric instead.
Efilism is essentially degenerate antinatalism, with strong tendencies towards a brutal nihilism of violence, sadism and murder. I am an anti-natalist and fundamentally reject violence. I am much more in favor of humanity recognizing the madness of reproduction and leading itself to death gently and with dignity without children. I am also against killing animals because animals have no idea of the concept of death and therefore naturally want to live. We have to respect the animals' will to live so that we don't end up as animal abusers if we ever get to that point. No matter how much we debate whether it is good or bad to bring sentient beings into the world, people will always come up with the stupid idea of procreating, which is why the discussion on the topic of humanity's self-extinction is essentially irrelevant. since antinatalism remains only a theoretical thought construct that will never be implementable. Maybe we have to hope for a great catastrophe that wipes out humanity, but I think in the end we have to sit back and endure the tragedy of life if we don't want to take our own lives.
😄Ha! Angry didn't get the call from either AC/DC or The Saints so he settled for Pulp. Actually I quite like "Common People", and that Javis Cocker song "Cunts are Still Running the World" - "They say the cream rises to the top/I say shit floats"...
@@andrew_mcintosh Bass, guitar, possibly synth. I guess we could start a band too. I guess you'd never bother to do something with my stuff, but I could do something with yours.
@@grimmcgrimon Mate, this already has bass, guitar and synth. And yes, I never bothered to do anything with your stuff because why would I? It's fine as it is. But if you want to take this and play with it, be my guest.
I don't agree with reducing extinctionism to a singular view of ideologues dreaming of ending the human race / all life on Earth. I think the term is broad enough to encompass a family of views that relate to each other, having the judgment that a species extinction would be a good thing.
But here I'm talking about extinctionism in a particular way. Doesn't mean I don't think it's possible to seriously discuss species extinction in other contexts.
It probably can feel a bit that way sometimes. AN per se is a perfectly logical extension of pessimism, and AN philosophy can be interesting (although I'm not sure how much more philosophising of AN can be done, pretty much everything that needs to be written and said has been done so), but online identity AN just takes the fun out of everything.
@@low3242 They're both logical extensions of pessimism, if we start taking pessimism as a kind of moral value, which many do, and of course pessimism can't fully avoid moral implications. But if we just stick with pessimism as descriptive non-conciquentialist, we can avoid both easily. The problem (as I see it) is that moral implications still have to be recognised and dealt with.
@@andrew_mcintosh Pessimism must be taken as descriptive only and people must move on. If you're not on your way to off yourself then it just makes your life more miserable so staying away from it is better. After reading pessimist literature there is still life to be lived.
Another spot on analysis. Very well said, mate. This is precisely why I kept saying that antinatalism cannot be cut off from its pessimistic roots (and the inherently pessimistic value judgement it entails). Sure, you can write it in all bright colours and put some friendly smiling face next to it in an attempt to appeal to the "normie" (read: non-pessimist) masses, but in the end antinatalism-minus-pessimism just won't work out. And many of the limitations of the antinatalist position as well as its application and advocacy are due to this pessimistic element, which people tend to overlook when they get carried away by their newfound enthusiasm for this supremely moral position that is bound to solve all the problems in the world. I think it's quite telling that even techno-utopian transhumanist David Pearce criticises extinctionist (or "hard") antinatalists for their misguided optimism.
Thanks for that Lenny, appreciated. Yea, it's weird to see and hear folks like Antinatalist Advocacy, Don't Have Kids, and all the other groups and individuals try to present AN as a kind of social justice issue when its underlying premise is Life itself is the unimprovable problem. It's cart-before-the-horse stuff, as I've always thought and I know others have as well. But it's what you get when you take something like AN, that functions best as an idea to be discussed, and try to turn it into a cause. I don't think it could get more counterintuitive, but yea, I don't have a convert's zeal any more either. That David Pearce is a funny chap. But there's been this kind of animosity between futurists and ANs for as long as both have been phenomena, and in a way it's like two brands trying to compete for the same market. Make the world a paradise or blow the thing up? It amounts to the same thing in the end, ironically.
