Hankikanto - Falling into the Anti/Natal Abyss #4: Antinatalism Between Happiness and Extinction 

Amazing that you set this up so quickly. Fantastic conversation and wonderful speakers, well done!

So refreshing to hear David speak so clearly about how NUs need to be practical in their consequentialism and reaching our intended goals. Really hope that this level of practicality continues to spread in the AN community!

This explotion of collaborations and activism to get Antinatalism out there has been amazing to see! Great work.

Dear Amanda, I just wanted to thank you for your work and tell you that you and all the other people who see this existence, this world in a similar way, give me so much support and hope to endure this everyday triviality. Take good care of yourself, Amanda! Everything is easier with you. I'm pretty sure that together we all will somehow manage to get through this life easily.

That was fast to setup lol Looking forward to this discussion.

The cartoon production at the beginning was priceless! Amanda: Is antinatalism a genetic mutation and if so where is antinatalism coming from... why are we here and how did it get so strong all of a sudden? David: How are people like us possible? Essentially, as far as I can tell, depression; low mood is in many circumstances fitness enhancing, keeping one's head down, depressive realism. Low mood depression seems to be an adaptation to group living. Non-social animals may suffer but there's no indication that they get depressed and hundreds of millions of people worldwide are clinically or sub-clinically depressed. And sometimes depression can be extremely fitness enhancing; it leads to some forms of cognitive superiority, so called depressive realism. Me: The difficulty with David's somewhat circular explanation is that we are unable to grasp it by a solid handle. Anyone reading this care to rephrase his answer and provide additional insight into what he appears to be getting at without the jargon? Amanda: So in this interim period where you have people who have been genetically engineered to experience no suffering (all bliss) you're still going to have all these people whose parents have not decided that for them and that seems bad; that seems like something that creates all kinds of ‘us versus them’ and potential for conflict. Me: You're bloody well right. And neither do we need much of an imagination to infer what these enhanced-humans will impose upon us everyday people. Mind you the interim could potentially be happening now in full scale with experiments being conducted privately throughout the world. Like any modern aristocracy, out of sight and out of mind would work best for their survival. Whatever the case, as they become a part of mainstream society then you can bet they will look out for their own self interest. Perhaps some of them, if not most, like many antinatalists for that matter, can see the advantages of bringing humans into extinction or at least significantly reducing the population, which may in truth restore order-&-stability for them and allow for the environment to heal. From a purely antinatalist position this can be seen as a win/win outcome; what do you think Amanda? Jason

Stay on the channel, folks! This one clocks at 57 minutes. You are spared of the erstwhile nANkikANto War and Peace three-hour sagas. ;)

Great conversation. I think there is opportunity for some synthesis here in these positions. I think both sides are failing to see something crucial. That thing that is missing from the visions of both parties is the vision of what "is", and what is the difference between being and no-being? If you are a being, and you are not aware that you are a being are you really a being? It's a question like: If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a noise? Alternatively: if a tree falls in a forest and nobody remembers it falling, did it make a noise? I think both parties are stuck in this realm of objective reality. But if you grapple sufficiently with the falling tree, it appears that reality is fundamentally subjective. If a subjective phenomenon does not have the apparatus to be conscious or have memories etc, is it dead or is it alive? Is a tree dead or alive? Is a rock dead or alive? Is a person in a coma dead or alive? There is some blurrying of the boundaries at the edges of deadness and aliveness. If a rock cleaves off from another rock and creates a discrete rock, is that an example of a procreative act? In my view not necessarily. It is possible to genetically engineer something to become closer to be being dead. There seems to be a continuum between deadness and non-deadness. I tree seems to be more dead than for example a racoon. If the enviornment is perfectly stabilized, consiousness becomes redundant. i think that antinatalism is really an evolved technology because we are becoming faimilar with the redundancy of our consciousness. Essentially the machine can continue functioning without our consciousness being present there. And maybe the machine will stop a few years after we depart from the machine, but we won't be there to record when the machine actually stops. Our departure from the machine from our perspective is actually the end of the machine already, if you sufficiently grapple with the tree falling in the forest problem.

I prefer the extinctionist way, over the transhumanist one. If it was possible for people to modify their own genetics, while they're already alive, they could consent to it and remove the possibility of severe pain, or give themselves the ability to regrow limbs (assuming such a thing is possible). Doing this to new life that can't consent either way seems kind of messed up. What if people decided to bio-engineer children without empathy for animals? What if they enhanced their tribalistic tendencies to turn them into better soldiers for the military? All terrifying possibilities! Willing extinction through a refusal to reproduce seems much better.

Today, some parents plan the futures of their children up to the level of university. They prepare their children for Harvard, say. They want their children to be doctors, for example. Once genetic engineering becomes reliable and accessible, parents will choose tendencies that best suit various skills, physical traits to make their children beautiful, or prepared for certain roles in the society (e.g. army where compassion is not needed). Why? Because we are narcissistic and greedy. We don't want our children to live fulfilling lives. We want our children to be better than others. The biases we have will be ever more reflected in the genetic makeup of future populations.

Badness would never have formed as a concept if life had never developed the capacity to feel bad. I don't see how it could be bad for a life to be created if it was certain that it would never feel bad and would never cause others to feel bad. But even if, through transhumanism, some lives could be created that would never suffer and were happy all the time, transhumanism would not accomplish that for all lives all at once. People who didn't know what it's like to feel bad would have a reduced ability to understand or relate to the suffering of others, and so have a reduced inclination to do something to alleviate or prevent the suffering of others.

Near the beginning of the discussion, David Pearce says that humans have an obligation to take care of the problem of suffering throughout nature (that is, including wild animals). Positive obligations are often very tricky. It's not obvious how can they be established. One can only wonder, why do we have these obligations, and does it mean exactly that we have these positive obligations.

Brilliant intro... I always liked transhumanstic ideas but they are just way too unrealistic and way too distanced from reality. Here is just a very little example. As someone who spends lot of time in mountains, few days ago I was thinking of some kind of suit for mountaniers... to look (or when needed to trasform) like space suit where you'll be able just to lie down wherever you want no matter weather condition and suit will provide heat and protection from predators (not like tank trophy system that will shoot at predators but to be made from inpenetrable material). I mean... just suit that let you explore planet without worry of freezing or getting wet from rain and catching cold, and no we don't have it. But when you look at military and meat industry "toys", weapons and all kind of machines and rockets we build to destroy a life that we are glorifying... 🤦🤦🤦 Cmon, mankind is just cruel bizzare fart Sry for bad grammar no much time to correct

i don't subscribe to any normativity, except in the strictly instrumental ends-means consistency sense. VHE just seems absurdly irrealistic and i'm 4 sure not about to invest significant energy into VHE advocacy. lol. it's futile, reifies the self-concept and entrenches unsatisfactoriness. thx no. i'm not planning to co-create children, but i arrived at that stance before even discovering VHE/AN, w/o any resistance. but understing the origin and mechanisms of breeder memes... wellll, it doesn't seem to me possible to get rid of natalist memes.

I am AN and I don't believe in any future that includes sentient beings and doesn't include suffering. And, yet, life without suffering is not life. I hate life and I am against these fairy tales about life without pain. We need to work on extinction. Of all sentient beings.