A simple answer is the two talk about things at different levels of generality. So enthalpy is a measure of useable heat. Entropy is a measure useable information. One focused on the primary interests of the steam age. The other on those of the current information era.
So two different, yet related, ways of reducing reality to mathematical quantities that make sense from their respective embodied points of view.
Pessimism could surely pull the same trick and quantify the notion of burden as yet another thermo-metric? The level of disappointment that could be generated by some amount of simply being alive and so generating the steady metabolic heat equivalent of running a 100 watt bulb?
The higher the initial expectation of a life of effortless joy, the greater the work to be extracted in terms of generating a sense of crashing disillusionment. Is that the ethical equation you had in mind? :smile:
The level of disappointment that could be generated by some amount of simply being alive and so generating the steady metabolic heat equivalent of running a 100 watt bulb?
The higher the initial expectation of a life of effortless joy, the greater the work to be extracted in terms of generating a sense of crashing disillusionment. Is that the ethical equation you had in mind? :smile:
Haha, that is an interesting take. I am thinking more on the idea of creating work to counteract the forces of entropy. Animals are fighting this all the time.
@apokrisis Edit: Looking back at your response, I think you were saying that, so yeah.
Reply to schopenhauer1 Exergy would likely be the better term for what you want then. Biology prefers it because it is the useful work that can be extracted by a system coming to equilbrium with its environment.
This speaks to the particular energy potential being dissipated. It might be chemical bonds, solar radiation, whatever.
Or even better are still more specific measures like ascendency. This deal directly with the material closure that sets ecosystems and societies up as dissipative structures which can repair the living fabric that is metabolising its environment.
Ascendency is derived using mathematical tools from information theory. It is intended to capture in a single index the ability of an ecosystem to prevail against disturbance by virtue of its combined organization and size.
One way of depicting ascendency is to regard it as "organized power", because the index represents the magnitude of the power that is flowing within the system towards particular ends, as distinct from power that is dissipated naturally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascendency .
That is the fun of thermodynamics. From the super abstracted notion of entropy (and information), you can derive all sorts of metrics based on the same fundamental maths.
Out of the ground of a heat death, we can conjure up all we hold dear. Including vibrant rain forests or the throb of daily city life.
Exergy would likely be the better term for what you want then. Biology prefers it because it is the useful work that can be extracted by a system coming to equilbrium with its environment.
Or even better are still more specific measures like ascendency. This deal directly with the material closure that sets ecosystems and societies up as dissipative structures which can repair the living fabric that is metabolising its environment.
Energy is energy is energy until it has a point of view. Then it is just cruel-ty. Are humans causing other humans which need to do their little ascendencys and exergys necessary to cause? A rock rocks and rolls. A human eats and poops out its a-holes. Why the need for this?
To pretend there isn't a reason and an agenda is ignorant.
Energy is energy is energy until it has a point of view.
If you want to talk in terms of psychic energy, then Bayesian information is as close as you could get I guess.
But it sounds now like you are falling back into the incoherence of substance dualism. And even physics, let alone the sciences of life and mind, has been doing its best to move on from the substance ontology that talk of energy once implied.
Science now takes the systems view where gradients must be constructed down which outcomes flow. Teleology is built in to animate the Cosmos.
Your complaint is that intelligence has been dropped into the heat bath that is the Universe and is being required to do work. A planet was orbiting a star. The laws of entropy demanded that life and mind arise to accelerate the dissipation of the resulting thermal gradient.
All this effort we humans are putting in to burn all that accumulated fossil fuel. My god, what is it all for? Etc.
Your complaint is that intelligence has been dropped into the heat bath that is the Universe and is being required to do work. A planet was orbiting a star. The laws of entropy demanded that life and mind arise to accelerate the dissipation of the resulting thermal gradient.
All this effort we humans are putting in to burn all that accumulated fossil fuel. My god, what is it all for? Etc.
Indeed, but your systems view discounts that procreation is a choice. Ascetics exist. Birth control exists. Abstinence exists. Pessimism exists. Realism (informal) exists. Reasons exists (not just causes). There is an agenda behind every human point of view. The "agenda" of entropy barreling towards a heat death does not necessitate humans shooting out another POV into the world. Exergy from a POV is different than a rock rolling.
Indeed, but your systems view discounts that procreation is a choice. Ascetics exist. Birth control exists. Abstinence exists. Pessimism exists. Realism (informal) exists.
The other must always exist. The systems view adds the constraint that the fundamental dynamic must express a win-win dichotomy. That is how nature works. That is how we could measure the degree of pathology in the current stage of the human story.
You want to deal in absolutes. If things aint perfect, then they are a disaster. But that isnt how systems thinking would set up its metric. The spectrum would have to be instead based on complementary limits on being.
With a society for example, it would be how well does it maximise both local differentiation and global integration? You want a relation where each is reinforcing its other rather than negating its other.
There is an agenda behind every human point of view. The "agenda" of entropy barreling towards a heat death does not necessitate humans shooting out another POV into the world.
We are entrained to the telos of the Cosmos. But that doesnt prevent us showing our mastery over entropy gradients by surfing, dancing, gardening, cooking, procreating, and all the other ways of just having a little fun.
You can choose the misery of not having hobbies or activities. You can dismiss these as worthless diversions. But dont expect me to agree that this is a sensible point of view to have just because Im human.
surfing, dancing, gardening, cooking, procreating, and all the other ways of just having a little fun.
The bolded one is much different. One you are fighting your own entropy. The other you are creating another (POV!) creature fighting entropy. We want to see others fight the entropy. How strange. Just fight your own entropy. Don't pass it on. Don't assume other should fight the entropy. If only everyone had MY point of view. How narcissistic. I like X, therefore others should [s]like[/s] live out a lifetime of X.
This was inspired by this little exchange:
[i]The OP frequently writes on what is known as antinatalism which is apparently a philosophy that stresses it would be better not to have been born or not to exist. Like many traditional philosophies, it sees existence as being inherently imperfect and painful. Gnosticism is another example. It sees the world as the creation of an evil demiurge, usually identified with the OT Jehovah, and the only hope being an escape from the created world and return to the Plelroma through gnostic insight.
Yet unlike the ancient world-denying philosophies modern antinatalism seems to have no conception of there being anything corresponding to the release from suffering. Existence is a mirage, a trap, a painful charade, but theres nothing higher to aspire to. Only the wan idea that maybe if we dont procreate, then weve made a meaningful gesture towards non-being.[/i]
Wayfarer
[i]My question to you iswhy do the majority keep on (making the mistake of) trying to make a meaningful gesture towards being? I noticed you never answered me directly but wrote generally, or to DA.
I have maintained that there is a political implication to this- that people ought to be making gestures towards being, the great IS. But why? Anything less than a paradise done on other's behalf should be justified. You cannot deny it is putting people through not only good but trials of varying degrees and kinds. That in itself means societally, and individually, it is deemed as some sort of goal to direct others towards. But, as Cioran points out, the decision, once made, is not reversible, even by suicide. So why make this choice for someone else? Thomas Ligotti called the concept, "The Cult of the Grinning Martyrs". But why more martyrs?[/i]
I talk of play and mastery. You turn it into fight and misery.
Why not ask a surfer or procreator and discover what actual metric seems more accurate of their experience.
Pessimism is projection. As bad as the pollyannarism it welcomes as its congenital other. A systems view speaks to the balance of flow states and habits that integrate selves and their worlds.
Incidentally there's a well-known anecdote concerning a conversation that occurred in in around 1940-41 in a discussion between Claude Shannon and John Neumann, during Shannons postdoctoral research fellowship year at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, where Neumann was one of the main faculty members. During this period Shannon was wavering on whether or not to call his new logarithmic statistical formulation of data in signal transmission by the name of information or uncertainty (of the Heisenberg type). Neumann suggested that Shannon use neither names, but rather use the name entropy because: (a) the statistical mechanics version of the entropy equations have the same mathematical isomorphism and (b) nobody really knows what entropy really is so Shannon would have the advantage in any argument.
This is sometimes dismissed as an urban myth but I believe that there is documentary evidence of Shannon himself attesting to it. I like the fact that rhetorical considerations come into it.
Pessimism is projection. As bad as the pollyannarism it welcomes as its congenital other. A systems view speaks to the balance of flow states and habits that integrate selves and their worlds.
That's an error to muddle deliberation with necessity. No decision has to be made one way or the other. People have reasons and act upon them. As for projection, projection is simply self-involved X. Procreation is other involved. You should not muddle that either. Your happiness at X moment does not mean it is another person's lifetime of ? happiness.
That's an error to muddle deliberation with necessity.
The problem I have here is self-fulfilling prophecies. Buddhists do it when they say that humans need to be born to suffer to escape suffering. But you can just not have humans that suffer. It's suspiciously post-facto reasoning for why procreation is justified in an obvious knock-down rebuttal to the cycle of karma and samsara. It mixes up impersonal things (the cycle of suffering that is beyond human) with the deliberate (the human being who can at least not cause a point of suffering).
Apokrisis has just now written about this notion of an impersonal balance of the system, implying necessity despite the fact that humans can deliberate about things like suffering and understand the very fact of suffering. In fact, it seems ethically imperative to not throw more POVs into the entropy EVEN THOUGH, it is a necessary thing for other entities. Again, humans can at least not cause a point of suffering. Same kind of flaw of self-fulfilling prophecy, just different costumes.
More broadly, animals must deal with homeostasis, of FIGHTING entropy (decay, dissolution). But decay and dissolution sound tame if it is a rock, a molecule, a star. It takes on something different from a POV, a self-understanding POV.
Apokrisis has just now written about this notion of an impersonal balance of the system, implying necessity despite the fact that humans can deliberate about things like suffering and understand the very fact of suffering.
That's just misreading. What isn't constrained is what is free. The Second Law absolute forbids perpetual motion machines. But humans can build any kind of motion machine for which they can stack up the entropic budget.
What's your preference? Roller skates or a Lamborghini? Pink or gold? Leather seats or vinyl? The customer is king.
That's just misreading. What isn't constrained is what is free. The Second Law absolute forbids perpetual motion machines.
Yet if you admit deliberation than deliberating the ethics of creating another POVs dealing with entropy is an example of this. More existential and significant than leather or vinyl but yes, both are points of deliberation.
Yet if you admit deliberation than deliberating the ethics of creating another POVs dealing with entropy is an example of this.
But I simply don't accept your one-sided view of existing as a human. If it is a reason for you not to breed then that's fine.
I have often enough expressed my concerns about the way civilisation is going. But that is quite different from your claims that life can't be fun and feel the opposite of a burden.
Going back to enthalpy. Why is it we would want to burden people rather than quietude?
Wayfarer said gesture towards non-being. I do take that serious. It is good to not cause the burdens of being. Yet people keep perpetuating it. Grown adults not connecting the dots and going for tradition and selfish material or existential reasons.
Whats wrong with nothing. Of diminishing the amount of burdens, of not initiating another enthalpy machine to maintain. Its like the noisy neighbors who cant stop setting off fireworks. Burdening over and over and over because they like boom boom sounds.
The gods were pissed off from the noise of the humans and created a flood in one of the oldest written myths, The Epic of Gilgamesh. Humans cant seem to keep their angst contained so they splatter it with noise and work and burdens and more and more people.
I said that for modern anti-natalism, as distinct from gnosticism 'Existence is a mirage, a trap, a painful charade, but theres nothing higher to aspire to. Only the wan idea that maybe if we dont procreate, then weve made a meaningful gesture towards non-being'. The difference being that in gnosticism there is still the understanding of salvation from suffering or release into a higher realm, albeit perilously hard to attain.
There's absolutely zero point in wringing your hands about the fact that you exist. You can wish all you want that you didn't exist, but that horse has, so to speak, already bolted.
There's absolutely zero point in wringing your hand about the fact that you exist. You can wish all you want that you didn't exist, but the horse has, so to speak, already bolted.
Questioning why we create burdens and increase our version of enthalpy machines is not a futile endeavor even if its too late for me. Precisely because I am living out the enthalpy does it matter most as the central question that everything returns to. Religious thinking wants you to think its necessary because they cant justify it otherwise.
Human facticity / adaptivity insofar as misery needs ("loves") company, miserable bastards are homeostatically hardwired to breed more miserable bastards ad nauseam. 'Reduce misery' (how?) in order to voluntarily reduce breeding. 'Eliminate misery' (how?) in order to voluntarily eliminate breeding. On the other hand, antinatalism puts the proverbial cart before the horse by, in effect, absurdly attempting to 'destroy the species in order to save the species'. :eyes: :mask:
Human facticity / adaptivity insofar as misery needs ("loves") company, miserable bastards are homeostatically hardwired to breed more miserable bastards ad nauseam.
I agree with the sentiment but contend the particular point. Are humans "hard-wired" to have children or are we a more complex (albeit still animal) that have an existential nature to it? With deliberation, we can have reasons rather than instinct. There isn't a breeding season, etc. Pleasure is good, but we regulate it all the time, or at least have that capacity to. It would be the same error of self-fulfilling prophecy I was discussing earlier to say, "We are doomed to keep the enthalpy machines fighting against entropy / create yet more POVs that feel burdens etc. so therefore we shouldn't act accordingly". That's the same post-facto justification as Buddhist's needing humans to be born to escape suffering (rather than simply not procreating in the first place), or apokrisis' systems ideology whereby we are just balancing out energy in a greater system and denying that we have reasons and choices. It's all kind of like, "Don't look at the man behind the curtain". Trying to obfuscate a deliberation with some sort of futility on a systems level.
However, I do agree that misery loves company. That speaks to this existential aspect that we are not content, so why spread discontentment? It is self-refuting to say thus, "I am discontented thus I should create people to alleviate that". Rather, the very fact of your own discontentment is a signal of the discontentment you will thus be creating. It is misguided.
On the other hand, antinatalism puts the proverbial cart before the horse by, in effect, absurdly attempting to 'destroy the species in order to save the species'
This is just a kind of sophistry to make antinatalism logic look absurd. Rather, AN isn't trying to "save the species"; And the goal isn't to destroy the species. It's to not bring more suffering beings into the world. Not to create more little burdened things that need to overcome burdens. Not creating things that must continually fight entropy whilst having a POV that knows the situation they are in.
A doctor doesn't stop saving a patient because they can't save "all of humanity". They do what they can, and recognize what is in their capacity.
P1 : Human experience is bad, negative, undesirable.
P2 : We should act to reduce that which is bad, negative, undesirable.
Therefore we should strive toward the cessation of human experience, preferably nonviolently, by discouraging reproduction.
As I see it, the problem is almost always P1 (though P2 could be challenged.)
Yes, that is it basically. What @180 Proof wants to do is to try to make the attempt "futile" and to say that if someone doesn't exist to experience the "relief" of "not suffering", it is essentially like you are doing nothing. I don't see it that way. Rather, someone isn't suffering, and that is good (from the perspective of someone who could recognize what is not taking place).
Reply to plaque flag
Also, on point 1 there, others will argue that creating people that can experience happiness/good things is somehow "moral" despite creating the suffering/negatives/burdens/enthalpy-fighting-entropy that goes with it. However, I do not see creating "happiness" as anything ethically obligatory, and more so when there is no one existing already. So I think that argument is also bunk. So if I was to parse that out it would be:
1) Happiness-giving is not an obligation, especially when no one is deprived of happiness to begin with.
2) Happiness-giving when accompanied by numerous intractable harms is not even purely happiness-giving. It is not a gift in the traditional sense that it comes with many burdens. Thus this "gift" is negated as such.
And finally, the rebuttal that "people don't exist to be relieved of not suffering", is simply a non-issue, as what matters is the state of affairs of not suffering. The hidden assumption is the asymmetry that the not-happiness should matter, but going back to 1 and 2.
Excellent. As you probably remember, I think antinatalism is fascinating. To me 'antithetical' philosophy is counterculture. Antinatalism is almost perfectly antithetical / countercultural. (Recently Elon Musk supported a tweet suggesting that nonparents should have no vote. )
I got this use of 'antithetical' from Nietzsche, and I find it useful to think of Nietzsche (in this context) as a rebellious philosophical son of Schopenhauer.
Excellent. As you probably remember, I think antinatalism is fascinating. To me 'antithetical' philosophy is counterculture. Antinatalism is almost perfectly antithetical / countercultural. (Recently Elon Musk supported a tweet suggesting that nonparents should have no vote. )
I got this use of 'antithetical' from Nietzsche, and I find it useful to think of Nietzsche (in this context) as a rebellious philosophical son of Schopenhauer.
I heard about the Musk thing. Really weird anti-democratic stance. Nietzsche, as you may know, I find problematic as he is another philosopher used to justify self-fulfilling suffering. In other words, his idea of an Eternal Return is used to say that we are doomed to simply always exist, so attempts at something like not bringing people into existence would be futile because of the eternally repeating nature of the system, or something of this nature.
Also, on point 1 there, others will argue that creating people that can experience happiness/good things is somehow "moral" despite creating the suffering/negatives/burdens/enthalpy-fighting-entropy that goes with it.
I can't speak for @180 Proof, but perhaps you are overlooking a different perspective : The moral issue is secondary to the practical issue. We are primates 'programmed' to replicate. It looks impossible to stop the machine.
I can't speak for 180 Proof, but perhaps you are overlooking a different perspective : The moral issue is secondary to the practical issue. We are primates 'programmed' to replicate. It looks impossible to stop the machine.
But we are primates who can deliberate, so are we really the same in that respect to other primates? Are we not more like Zapffe's mechanisms of ignoring, anchoring, denying, etc or Sartre's idea of bad faith? In other words, are we not also an existential animal?
But we are primates who can deliberate, so are we really the same in that respect to other primates? Are we not more like Zapffe's mechanisms of ignoring, anchoring, denying, etc or Sartre's idea of bad faith? In other words, are we not also an existential animal?
I think we are indeed the existential animal.
I find us more determined than free. We 'know' this in our data analysis while at the same time holding the opposite notion of the free-responsible agent at the center of our culture. Sartre squeeze this lemon for all it's worth : his 'nothingness' is like free will maybe. I am condemned to be [s]free[/s] held responsible.
. In other words, his idea of an Eternal Return is used to say that we are doomed to simply always exist, so attempts at something like not bringing people into existence would be futile because of the eternally repeating nature of the system, or something of this nature.
To me this is almost stolen from Schopenhauer's discussion of the futility of suicide. My death doesn't change much, because I have seen through the illusion of personality. 'I' will just be reborn. Real change has to happen at the level of the species.
I like to think of Nietzsche as a more recent Hamlet. For me he's a highly instructive and relatable dissonant tangle of voices/perspectives.
Yes. To me the religion of babymaking is at the core of 'thetical' culture. The individual dissolves into the replication goo: hive mentality.
As far as human-survival, we develop strong cultural beliefs that are enculturated, but surely that can be de-programmed by other ideas. The individual does have some agency. We are working against common tropes, but these tropes are simply learned and not intractable.
I think we are more determined than free...while at the same time holding the notion of the responsible agent at the center of our culture. (Sartre squeeze this lemon for all it's worth : his 'nothingness' is like free will maybe. ). I am (as he puts it well) condemned to be free held responsible.
Sartre was against bad faith thinking, the idea that we are destined to play a role. Rather, cultural beliefs calibrate the individual to the "hive mind" so-to-say, that speaking against the core beliefs creates anger and anxiety, so we stick within its bounds. It's group-think. You can't complain too much in society, or you will be hated and spit upon. You are worse than a criminal because you reject all of it, and not just this part or that part of it.
To me this is almost stolen from Schopenhauer's discussion of the futility of suicide. My death doesn't change much, because I have seen through the illusion of personality. 'I' will just be reborn. Real change has to happen at the level of the species.
I like to think of Nietzsche as a more recent Hamlet. For me he's a highly instructive and relatable dissonant tangle of voices/perspectives.
True, even Schopenhauer retreats to the self-fulfilling idea that Will will always will itself in various forms, so one cannot prevent it. Yet, at the same time, he offers various forms of "escape", mainly via asceticism. This speaks to his metaphysics which to me, is not completely airtight. That is to say, if asceticism leads to death of the individual ego or something like that, how does this really "stop" Willing in the broader metaphysical sense, rather than just one's own manifestation of it? And if that's the case, then indeed, not procreating would make a difference from at least one POV, just like that ascetic person dissipating their ego. I think he wants to have both where the individual ego is the World, but it seems like he wants both. Not sure.
As far as human-survival, we develop strong cultural beliefs that are enculturated, but surely that can be de-programmed by other ideas. The individual does have some agency. We are working against common tropes, but these tropes are simply learned and not intractable.
One of my concerns in this context is Moloch (game theoretical). It's the prisoner's dilemma, the tragedy of the commons, that sort of thing. Concretely, I'm a nonparent taciturn thoughtcriminal --not very contagious, even if there was much susceptibility out there. I can't teach my children to not have children, but self-consciously virtuous breeders can very much send out missionaries, generation after generation potentially. I recently saw a vid suggesting that Israel is shifting politically for reasons involving the correlation of ideology and number of offspring.
Sartre was against bad faith thinking, the idea that we are destined to play a role.
Right. He's a bit of an old school moralist on this issue. Personal responsibility ! A streak of the GOP in this famous lefty (which probably helps make him sufficiently complex to keep me interested.)
I think you are correct that his metaphysics isn't airtight. I like him best as the grim theorist of futility. He's also great in Nausea. Along with anti-natalism, another great countercultural moment in philosophy is the essentially apolitical attack on the spirit of seriousness. Sartre could be very earnest, but there's a grim-transcendent streak in his persona that I value.
Rather, cultural beliefs calibrate the individual to the "hive mind" so-to-say, that speaking against the core beliefs creates anger and anxiety, so we stick within its bounds. It's group-think. You can't complain too much in society, or you will be hated and spit upon. You are worse than a criminal because you reject all of it, and not just this part or that part of it.
Yes. Socrate's being forced to drink the hemlock is not (only) something that happened but something that's happening and will continue to happen. But part of me wants to say that he was a corrupter of youth. It's a matter of perspective and identity.
One of my concerns in this context is Moloch (game theoretical). It's the prisoner's dilemma, the tragedy of the commons, that sort of thing. Concretely, I'm a nonparent taciturn thoughtcriminal --not very contagious, even if there was much susceptibility out there. I can't teach my children to not have children, but self-consciously virtuous breeders can very much send out missionaries, generation after generation potentially. I recently saw a vid suggesting that Israel is shifting politically for reasons involving the correlation of ideology and number of offspring.
Indeed, good point. Parents missionize de facto. Ironic that AN is accused of it, when by force their ranks are filled :wink:. AN simply says to stop and think, what is going on here? I think this can all be summed up with simply not reflecting. Even well-educated people don't think much about "existence" itself. That's because the hive-mind (enculturation process) wants that thinking to go towards production. to ENTHALPY to keep the individual and societal ENTROPY AT BAY!
Its always burdens and never boons. Its always suffering but never pleasure. Its always entropy but never negentropy or free energy. How come anti-natalists never include, and even avoid, opposing events in their screeds?
Many parents just did/do what everyone does. This does contribute to the sense of what everybody does, but the explicit breeding ideology is more on the right at the moment. I notice Matt Walsh speaking of homosexuality as a 'disordered' sexuality, presumably (in his mind) because sex is 'supposed' to be fertile. I also read a female conservative's review of Cormac McCarthy's last novel, which features a female nonparent genius who commits suicide. The reviewer was clearly educated, but at the bottom of her analysis was a crude mysticism of the mystery of parenthood. Roughly, it was if she was allowing that even Science is empty when compared to Parenthood. All is vanity except for that sacred continuation of the species --- which is a line I might put in the mouth of personified DNA.
When I read Schopenhauer, I identified with that futile individual struggling against dissolution in speciesgoo. In other words, the spirited thing to do is to cheat nature with birth control, homosexuality, masturbation, life-extending treatments, etc. 'The life of the child is the death of the parent.' At the same time, this attitude has always only a finite intensity, because we are programmed to find great joy and depth in nurturing.
Existential HopeJuly 05, 2023 at 18:27#8203060 likes
Reply to plaque flag One's life does not have to be someone's death if one's is not forced to contribute towards the cause of life by physical or psychological pressure. I would say that procreation can certainly have value, just as life-extension and exploring the esoteric aspects of life do.
Being a pessimistic missionary against the continuation of life is probably slightly worse than frivolous parents ignorantly pushing everyone to reproduce, though I acknowledge that the latter can easily become extremely troublesome.
Burdens and boons both exist. There may be decay, but there is also creation and sustenance of that which already exists.
1) Happiness-giving is not an obligation, especially when no one is deprived of happiness to begin with.
2) Happiness-giving when accompanied by numerous intractable harms is not even purely happiness-giving. It is not a gift in the traditional sense that it comes with many burdens. Thus this "gift" is negated as such.
And finally, the rebuttal that "people don't exist to be relieved of not suffering", is simply a non-issue, as what matters is the state of affairs of not suffering. The hidden assumption is the asymmetry that the not-happiness should matter, but going back to 1 and 2.
Obligations for happiness-giving is of very little or no moral consideration. Suffering-preventing (or giving depending on how you frame it) is very significant for moral consideration, however.
If life was indeed a paradise that no one ever got bored of, that you are creating for another, you might have some traction with that consideration. But it's obviously not, so now you have to justify why you are suffering-creating (at least the conditions thereof that will inevitably take place).
The problem is negentropy is a word, the actual lived experience of negentropy is the varying things to keep homeostasis in the animal. All the work, stress, and burden to fight entropy's tendency.
When I read Schopenhauer, I identified with that futile individual struggling against dissolution in speciesgoo. In other words, the spirited thing to do is to cheat nature with birth control, homosexuality, masturbation, life-extending treatments, etc. 'The life of the child is the death of the parent.' At the same time, this attitude has always only a finite intensity, because we are programmed to find great joy and depth in nurturing.
Yep. What is it about this "nod" to being that people seem to be programmed for? What is the programming exactly that aligns with "being is good, AN is bad. you go away now" (said in the vein of Homer losing part of his brain).
That good exists doesn't negate the bad. The problem is humans are an existential creature, which means we can at any time contemplate existence itself.
In terms of chemistry I know the difference, though if pressed I always have to look up what enthalpy means.
Enthalpy is one of those terms that highlights how much science is built for humans rather than is a universal concept. We wanted to know how much energy was not because of a change in temperature when measuring the temperature of chemical reactions so we invented a term called enthalpy to distinguish between heat and work in a chemical system which allowed us to put "heat" in a similar category to "friction" -- that other force/work that allows us to make the balance sheet work out.
Funnily enough humans invented the topic before modern theories of chemical bonding. It's very much an artifact of classical thermodynamics. And so your interpretation of it will depend upon how you interpret the various "levels" of science and how much historical terms are merely influential vs. are actually true. (EDIT: Also, funnily enough, by "modern theories of chemical bonding" I really only mean ones influenced by the quantum revolution. Soooo ya'know -- at least 100 years old)
But maybe this is all off-topic, because you're asking after ethical implications, of which I'd say there are none.
Reply to schopenhauer1 I don't think so. Entropy is too rarified a concept to include in what I'd call what we face on the day-to-day. It's too complicated, and for specific purposes.
Even in terms of things falling apart -- entropy drives structures as much as their dissolution. But what we face daily? If it is a structure it's at least not obvious that it maps to entropy. In a sense I can interpret what I face entropically, but it's just one way of looking at what I face.
Reply to Existential Hope
Just for context, I don't count myself as an antinatalist. I'm also not a pro-natalist. I'm nothin' -- I'm a stone-hearted analyst in this context, fascinated by the social logic involved.
What is it about this "nod" to being that people seem to be programmed for?
The positive motive is something like : ...the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life...
The nurturing instinct can be included in the lust of the flesh, though this'll be offensive to some.
The negative motive is fear of injury, fear of death.
We don't need to be programmed with a conscious ideology, right ? Though at another level the church might come in and keep birth rates high for an empire that needs workers and soldiers.
I agree with the sentiment but contend the particular point. Are humans "hard-wired" to have children or are we a more complex (albeit still animal) that have an existential nature to it?
Are you talking about philosophical types or just humans generally? I can see the point of not breeding, particularly now the way the world looks like going. I would not want to have children at this point in human history because I would then be condemned to worry about how they were going to cope with what inevitably seems to be coming. But I never had any desire for kids anyway; I'm too selfish, absorbed as I have always been in my own pursuits and obsessions.
I certainly don't regret being alive. On balance I would count my life as a definite positive. It is a well-worn cliche that thinking too much will bring misery, and that is probably the view of a majority of humans, who don't experience their lives overall as miserable, and like to cling to the illusions that too much thinking might dispell. Maybe it's down to brain chemistry; those low in seratonin have a negative, depressive view on life, and those with abundant seratonin feel life is good.
I know how miserable life has seemed for me at times a day or two after taking MDMA, and this is attributable to seratonin depletion. Selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors are given to people who suffer chronic depression. If you try to imagine how life would seem if you always felt good, you might be able to understand and acknowledge that your perspective of life as misery says much more about you than anything else.
I would say that procreation can certainly have value, just as life-extension and exploring the esoteric aspects of life do.
I agree with you. I mean that from a 'greedy' personal perspective it may be good to experience parenthood. Especially these days, with our technology, and especially if you are rich. Joyce is one of my heroes, and the family man experience is useful to a writer in its near universality. But the nonfamily men buy books too, I guess -- maybe more books on average.
'The life of the child is the death of the parent' gestures towards the life cycle to me. Schop liked to talk about insects dying after mating, their purpose served. He really had his eye on the centrality of sex and death. The mating instinct and the nurturing instinct tie us to life, along with narcissist/status projects, some of which are probably delusory escapes from annihilation.
Existential HopeJuly 06, 2023 at 03:23#8204440 likes
I agree with you. I mean that from a 'greedy' personal perspective it may be good to experience parenthood. Especially these days, with our technology, and especially if you are rich. Joyce is one of my heroes, and the family man experience is useful to a writer in its near universality. But the nonfamily men buy books too, I guess -- maybe more books on average.
'The life of the child is the death of the parent' gestures towards the life cycle to me. Schop liked to talk about insects dying after mating, their purpose served. He really had his eye on the centrality of sex and death. The mating instinct and the nurturing instinct tie us to life, along with narcissist/status projects, some of which are probably delusory escapes from annihilation.
I would say that people of all economic backgrounds can benefit from being able to raise a person, witness their journey, and help them become a better person. Although there undoubtedly are many selfish parents, I wouldn't say that it is impossible to wish to procreate because you want others to experience the positives of life. If this is still greedy or selfish, rhen I would argue that not procreating is also selfish. After all, non-existent beings have no need to not be created.
Schopenhauer, predictably, had a negative interpretation of the life cycleone thar I don't agree with. It can also be seen as a symbol of continuity. If it were the case that not procreating bestowed a significantly longer life upon someone, ae would definitely find ourselves in an interesting situation. However, since this is not necessarily the case, the life of the child can also be the life of the parent (as, at least in the case of humans, it can give them a purpose that keeps despair at bay). Generation possesses the capacity to transcend annihilation.
I hope that you will have a beautiful day!
Existential HopeJuly 06, 2023 at 03:29#8204460 likes
Just for context, I don't count myself as an antinatalist. I'm also not a pro-natalist. I'm nothin' -- I'm a stone-hearted analyst in this context, fascinated by the social logic involved.
I am not a universal pro/anti natalist either. I believe that procreation can be ethically justifiable, but it is not obligatory.
Don't assume other should fight the entropy. If only everyone had MY point of view. How narcissistic. I like X, therefore others should like live out a lifetime of X.
Maybe it's down to brain chemistry; those low in seratonin have a negative, depressive view on life, and those with abundant seratonin feel life is good.
But that's not the ethical point. If it was as simple of you like vanilla and I like chocolate, than this wouldn't be ethical. Rather, it is making decisions for others, and this becomes ethical, political, and existential. The way you are flippantly making it about preferences, belies the grave ethical import.
1) Happiness-giving is not an obligation, especially when no one is deprived of happiness to begin with.
2) Happiness-giving when accompanied by numerous intractable harms is not even purely happiness-giving. It is not a gift in the traditional sense that it comes with many burdens. Thus this "gift" is negated as such.
And finally, the rebuttal that "people don't exist to be relieved of not suffering", is simply a non-issue, as what matters is the state of affairs of not suffering. The hidden assumption is the asymmetry that the not-happiness should matter, but going back to 1 and 2.
The positive motive is something like : ...the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life...
The nurturing instinct can be included in the lust of the flesh, though this'll be offensive to some.
Going back to enthalpy, why create more work for people because you have happy moments? That is the biggest con of an argument. We have the power to not throw people into the enthalpic process.
It is paternalistic thinking. "I know that someone else should deal with burdens of survival". Imagine that in almost any other context as a fully functioning adult?
Maybe there is some chemicals deluding people but it is very much reinforced culturally. As you said:
We don't need to be programmed with a conscious ideology, right ? Though at another level the church might come in and keep birth rates high for an empire that needs workers and soldiers.
Perhaps it's even more perverse than that. Having just enough happy experiences makes it seem justifiable to do for another. Happy workers, happily working, in their happy projects.
I once thought of a sci-fi plot where the heroes set out to eliminate all sentience as an act of mercy, their assumption being that awareness was essentially negative.
Perhaps it's even more perverse than that. Having just enough happy experiences makes it seem justifiable to do for another. Happy workers, happily working, in their happy projects.
To me the trickiest part is the evaluation of life. Life is good or life is bad -- this is like music.
I like the idea of a gentle and effective suicide pill. Perhaps the state could provide a nice incineration shoot, equivalent to the painless version of jumping into a volcano. I believe that most people would not use this option while they were lucky ( healthy, in good relationships, safe-ish), so that life is often judged (tacitly) to be a positive good. Personally I'm still invested in this game, though I do dread the ravages of further aging in the long run. I the idea of choosing the right moment for one's death -- embracing the beauty of it. I'm down with Kevorkian.
Going back to enthalpy, why create more work for people because you have happy moments? That is the biggest con of an argument. We have the power to not throw people into the enthalpic process.
I'm not sure we do have the power. A minority may have a certain self-image and the motivation to abstain, but I don't believe in free will. What's possible is, to some degree, proven by what actually happens. It's easier to talk about utopia or a cessation of birth than to bring such a situation about. It's as if individuals are always only fragments of human nature. Even individuals speak only for or as mere fragments of themselves. 'Finite' personality (which excludes and opposes other finite personalities) is a kind of mask or front.
To me the trickiest part is the evaluation of life. Life is good or life is bad -- this is like music.
I like the idea of a gentle and effective suicide pill. Perhaps the state could provide a nice incineration shoot, equivalent to the painless version of jumping into a volcano. I believe that most people would not use this option while they were lucky ( healthy, in good relationships, safe-ish), so that life is often judged (tacitly) to be a positive good. Personally I'm still invested in this game, though I do dread the ravages of further aging in the long run. I the idea of choosing the right moment for one's death -- embracing the beauty of it. I'm down with Kevorkian.
I was explaining how the the first written myth, the Epic of Gilgamesh, spoke of gods who were pissed at all the noise the humans made so flooded the Earth. Why do people want to create the din of noise? We can't be quiet?
I'm not sure we do have the power. A minority may have a certain self-image and the motivation to abstain, but I don't believe in free will. What's possible is, to some degree, proven by what actually happens. It's easier to talk about utopia or a cessation of birth than to bring such a situation about. It's as if individuals are always only fragments of human nature. Even individuals speak only for or as mere fragments of themselves. 'Finite' personality (which excludes and opposes other finite personalities) is a kind of mask or front.
Why do you think people lack sufficient free will enough?
Why do you think people lack sufficient free will enough?
So much could be said here, but we can talk about pork. Do we really need it ? Are pigs treated decently in order to make it ? I guess I'm cynical. We are not fundamentally rational and righteous creatures. I look on YouTube and see the resentment industrial complex. These fuckers are professionally outraged, like the guy with the glass to his throat in that Black Mirror episode.
I gotta name for the type : the politician. It's not just folks actually seeking election but the personality type ('finite') that earnestly brings a narrative of the good versus the bad. Spengler called the general structure ethical socialism, by which he meant the evangelical assumption. Whatever the Good or Truth may be, it's our duty to spread the word. Right or wrong, Spengler thought that some ancient philosophers just 'offered counsel.' I'm personally interested in the 'muted post horn' as graffiti hinting at 'infinite' or 'undecided/undecidable' personality. Antinatalism puts the birthmania into question (offering a counterpolitics, just as earnest.) But there's also the putting of the spirit of seriousness into question, along with the assumption something can and must be done ---one of course does not preach this putting into question, for that would be a misunderstanding --hence graffiti and gallowshumor.
Reply to plaque flag
I'm not quite following what you are saying. I think you have some interesting ideas but I can't seem to link them together. It seems something to do with evangelistic outrage.
You also suggest not being serious perhaps? E.M. Cioran I think represents a gallow's humor sort of approach to AN. Thomas Ligotti is very dark, and depressing, but he couches it in basically saying it's just his opinion. Schopenhauer was serious, but his aphorisms had some humor. I'd say it is serious in that people are seriously affected by birth and suffering. So the stakes are high, no?
It seems something to do with evangelistic outrage.
Yes. There's also a psychonanalytic theme here. The 'surface' of a personality is a mask or a performance. The finite personality depends on what it excludes for its value. If the Cause succeeds, I lose my heroic role, the very meaning structure of my life.
E.M. Cioran I think represents a gallow's humor sort of approach to AN.
Yes, Cioran's tone is often exactly what I have in mind. Samuel Beckett is relevant too: nothing is funnier than unhappiness. Nietzsche writes of the festival of cruelty, ambivalently aware of our enjoyment of the spectacle of suffering and humiliation. Joyce brilliantly explores the enjoyment of one's own humiliation in Ulysses (cuckolding), akin to the self-vivisection of Nietzsche's introspective ascetic. This self-vivisector is an image of critical reason, of poisoning and poisoned Socrates, corrupter of youth, destroyer of comfortable platitudes. This is Nietzsche's Hamlet-like significance. He endlessly turns his knife on himself. He subverts himself, would rather be a buffoon than a pompous politician. He wants company on the endless dangerous road, like Whitman, rather than followers who, as followers, have already lost him. In short, I'm talking about Nietzsche (or Freud or Shakespeare or ...) as possibility rather than substance. We re-enact their heroic intentions, make it new, etc.
I'd say it is serious in that people are seriously affected by birth and suffering. So the stakes are high, no?
Sure. And gallowshumor references the situation of one about to die. Most of us care at least a little about strangers, but just about everyone cares intensely about their own death in the new few minutes.
I like this one:
At his public execution, the murderer William Palmer is said to have looked at the trapdoor on the gallows and asked the hangman, "Are you sure it's safe?"
Reply to schopenhauer1
Just to be clear, I'm not saying it's wrong to argue AN on a philosophy forum. Anonymity and the lack of funding is important here. The politician is a public performer who develops a persona as a brand. They win power, fame, and money from playing their role. It's in their interest, as persona product, to keep things comfortably finite and one-sided. Don't expect the politician to look into their own motives or discuss how nice it is to be famous and admired. To be sure, they'll have a sentimental yarn about their love for the oppressed, etc., which may indeed be part of the truth.
Yes. There's also a psychonanalytic theme here. The 'surface' of a personality is a mask or a performance. The finite personality depends on what it excludes for its value. If the Cause succeeds, I lose my heroic role, the very meaning structure of my life.
Heroic roles indeed. I see what you're saying. But can there be more of a communal commiseration aspect to it rather? Like, "I see this, does anyone else see this? Isn't this crazy?!". It is why people join groups and communities, but these are communities about existence itself, something so holistic that many don't want to face it. They rather therapy to be individualistic, about their ego and how they move about in the world, not the human condition tout court.
He wants company on the endless dangerous road, like Whitman, rather than followers who, as followers, have already lost him. In short, I'm talking about Nietzsche (or Freud or Shakespeare or ...) as possibility rather than substance. We re-enact their heroic intentions, make it new, etc.
Indeed, heroism dies through tedium. Hence the subversion of Tedious Warrior.
The politician is a public performer who develops a persona as a brand. They win power, fame, and money from playing their role. It's in their interest, as persona product, to keep things comfortably finite and one-sided. Don't expect the politician to look into their own motives or discuss how nice it is to be famous and admired. To be sure, they'll have a sentimental yarn about their love for the oppressed, etc., which may indeed be part of the truth.
Oh yeah for sure, good points on the public performer. It's more an industry they have created for themselves, not trying to create real dialogue.
I was explaining how the the first written myth, the Epic of Gilgamesh, spoke of gods who were pissed at all the noise the humans made so flooded the Earth. Why do people want to create the din of noise? We can't be quiet?
I love this part of the story by the way. Freud might relate it to the death drive. Let's all just go to sleep.
The answer to your question might be simple. Such a trait, a preference for Silence, would remove itself from the gene pool. It can only linger on the margins as a kind of parasite or stowaway, possibly serving the Noise party in the long run.
But can there be more of a communal commiseration aspect to it rather? Like, "I see this, does anyone else see this? Isn't this crazy?!".
Totally, and I think Beckett's work is part of that. He's grimly hilarious. He's willing to face the horror, describe it, while also acknowledging the part of us that's addicted to it. He's got one sad hobo character who invents a complicated ritualistic system of sucking stones and moving them from pocket to pocket. He describes this system in hilarious detail. To me the 'muted post horn' or 'open storm thud' (as I've also seen it, a sneaky anagram) is a little piece of tragicomical graffiti. In the shadows of the Resentment Industrial Complex, riding like a parasite, is a little symbol of the undecidable undecided infinite.
'Does anyone else see through all the simple-minding bullshit that drowns out almost everything ?'
'Does anyone else confess the complexity and ambivalence and ambiguity of our situation ? Or is everyone just a false doctor with a snake oil cure, looking for clicks and clams ? '
For more on the post horn theme:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crying_of_Lot_49
The answer to your question might be simple. Such a trait, a preference for Silence, would remove itself from the gene pool. It can only linger on the margins as a kind of parasite or stowaway, possibly serving the Noise party in the long run.
I do like the poetic imagery of the Silence vs. Noise party. Ties into my other thread on being and becoming. But we come back to this difference we have where you see inevitability in what I tend to see as simply ignoring, anchoring, and denying. A child has an injury and the whole world has to know that it feels pain. A child is lonely and it complains loudly to its parents or anyone in earshot. An adult apparently does this by creating more humans and giving themselves something to do. We can't handle quietude. Meditation is had in small doses, at retreats, to rejuvenate. The idea of quieting in its ultimate sense of living off of nothing and just dying out slowly, of course, is not part of this.
In that case, balance is the shady subversive word used. Thus one is quieting to become better at the parts that are not quiet. It is not to diminish one's need for need. It is another self-improvement strategy to live in the world of noise. It's not gnosis, its simply routine like the health-shake, exercise routine, etc. In the end, it makes you a better worker. The fast is now a diet because it creates a better lifestyle choice.
They rather therapy to be individualistic, about their ego and how they move about in the world, not the human condition tout court.
There's plenty of 'politicians,' though, who attack apolitical ironists as escapists. 'Ethical socialism.' The rule is grand social issues, the spirit of seriousness. "I am a serious and respectable public intellectual commenting on The Serious Issues of the Day. "
In that case, balance is the shady subversive word used. Thus one is quieting to become better at the parts that are not quiet. It is not to diminish one's need for need. It is another self-improvement strategy to live in the world of noise. It's not gnosis, its simply routine like the health-shake, exercise routine, etc.
The balance involved is thermodynamic or biological. Game theory dictates that counterculture is a parasite. In my opinion, the free will thing is roughly a misleading illusion. The culture of responsibility itself emerged as a faster way to get the coal out of the hills and burn it.
Perhaps I embrace the fatalism in Schopenhauer more than you do. When I was studying Darwin, Dawkins, and Dennett, I had Schopenhauer in mind. These evolutionary thinkers vindicate and naturalize his insights, making them stronger and less sentimental. I took from them an even harsher brew (those offensive 'moist robots,' slavishly serving the machine-cold code with mathematical necessity.)
I'll be impressed if humans stop eating pork because it's Ethical to do so. Asking them to stop breeding is on another level entirely.
Oh yeah for sure, good points on the public performer. It's more an industry they have created for themselves, not trying to create real dialogue.
Right. And, to be fair, they may be truly invested in or identified with their finite-exclusive personality. We can hide from our terrible ambivalence in the illusion of being simply virtuous, projecting the repressed on others. 'Whatever is unconscious is projected.' Joyce has his universal figure split into opposing sons in Finnegans Wake. We wear the mask not only for others but also for the mirror.
There's an old meme about the paralysis that comes with too much vision. What keeps the rat on the wheel ?
Perhaps I embrace the fatalism in Schopenhauer more than you do. When I was studying Darwin, Dawkins, and Dennett, I had Schopenhauer in mind. These evolutionary thinkers vindicate and naturalize his insights, making them stronger and less sentimental. I took from them an even harsher brew (those offensive 'moist robots,' slavishly serving the machine-cold code with mathematical necessity.)
I get it for sure. Schopenhauer did have that idea of "inevitability of our programming" idea.
But I think Zapffe counteracts the determinism in a way. He psychologizes it rather than mechanizes it. In other words, it is learned, cultural, a defense mechanism perhaps, but one that can be unlearned by knowing about it in the first place. "Oh, mea culpa, I am just throwing up a defense mechanism by ignoring, denying, and anchoring".
As I see it, antinatalism is extremely unlikely to succeed, become popular. Is that how you see it ?
It depends on measure of success, but I don't see the idea catching on. Working and consuming seems to be the ethos/reality of the day. Travel and "balance" is I guess the ideal/religion. Antinatalism disrupts that vision. If anything, childfree for lifestyle choice would be much more attractive than the idea that we must prevent suffering. As you indicate here:
I'll be impressed if humans stop eating pork because it's Ethical to do so. Asking them to stop breeding is on another level entirely.
Caring about suffering in the abstract is not our strong point. We rather create the suffering and then mitigate than not create it. I am not sure how to get around this habitual way of thinking. As long as we can disconnect cause and effect because it is inconvenient, we will do so because we can't live with such cognitive dissonance of knowing and doing, so denial and vehement dismissal is the only way to react if confronted with it.
Also quietude makes us sad-face. The blankness, the blackness, the void. It gives some sort of anxiety of non-being. It reminds me of this:
Existential HopeJuly 07, 2023 at 17:03#8207770 likes
Reply to schopenhauer1 In the depths of a programme, there can be efficiency and wonder that provides something beyond the universal essentials. An anchor to a consequential hope can lead to the materialisation of a genuine good. But this should not translate to untrammelled consumerism.
I don't appreciate the "vision" of multiplying expectations, even if I would prefer the disruption to come from a nuanced understanding of life.
In the end, we will, hopefully, continue to create happiness and passionately defend the positive. The significance of the cause certainly should not be downplayed as the effect (the provenance of which may lie in the abstract realm) is intimately connected to the joys of life.
When the inner light is not extinguished, external sources of succour become less urgent.
But I think Zapffe counteracts the determinism in a way. He psychologizes it rather than mechanizes it. In other words, it is learned, cultural, a defense mechanism perhaps, but one that can be unlearned by knowing about it in the first place. "Oh, mea culpa, I am just throwing up a defense mechanism by ignoring, denying, and anchoring".
I tend to see one myth displacing another. It's not that we get beyond orienting metaphors and heroic roleplay (defense mechanisms). We just (hopefully) trade up. To me Freud (for instance) is an instance of the archetype that might be called the hero of consciousness, which goes back to shamanism. Zapffe is a version too.
so denial and vehement dismissal is the only way to react if confronted with it.
There's also the sublimated evasion, sort of what I'm doing, though I can't sincerely call it an evasion. Most people cling to life and avoid death most of the time.
My own suggestion (if you recall) was to make suicide easy and painless --and cleaner, because that's the tricky part for the suicide who wants to be polite and not leave a mess. This fits the individualism of our times.
Caring about suffering in the abstract is not our strong point.
There seem to be evolutionary reasons for that. As the likelihood of shared genes increases, so does the likelihood of bonding and cooperation. I feel the pull of the universal human family, but these days I can't forget that in-groups depend on out-groups. There's no us without them. Just as the body shits and externalizes, so does the group. If aliens attack, then we'll have some fiery humanism.
Comments (93)
A simple answer is the two talk about things at different levels of generality. So enthalpy is a measure of useable heat. Entropy is a measure useable information. One focused on the primary interests of the steam age. The other on those of the current information era.
So two different, yet related, ways of reducing reality to mathematical quantities that make sense from their respective embodied points of view.
Pessimism could surely pull the same trick and quantify the notion of burden as yet another thermo-metric? The level of disappointment that could be generated by some amount of simply being alive and so generating the steady metabolic heat equivalent of running a 100 watt bulb?
The higher the initial expectation of a life of effortless joy, the greater the work to be extracted in terms of generating a sense of crashing disillusionment. Is that the ethical equation you had in mind? :smile:
Haha, that is an interesting take. I am thinking more on the idea of creating work to counteract the forces of entropy. Animals are fighting this all the time.
@apokrisis Edit: Looking back at your response, I think you were saying that, so yeah.
Maybe this: right conduct's unintended, or unforeseeable, consequences á la local ordering that increases global disorder.
Indeed thats @apokrisis big one.
This speaks to the particular energy potential being dissipated. It might be chemical bonds, solar radiation, whatever.
Or even better are still more specific measures like ascendency. This deal directly with the material closure that sets ecosystems and societies up as dissipative structures which can repair the living fabric that is metabolising its environment.
That is the fun of thermodynamics. From the super abstracted notion of entropy (and information), you can derive all sorts of metrics based on the same fundamental maths.
Out of the ground of a heat death, we can conjure up all we hold dear. Including vibrant rain forests or the throb of daily city life.
Quoting apokrisis
Energy is energy is energy until it has a point of view. Then it is just cruel-ty. Are humans causing other humans which need to do their little ascendencys and exergys necessary to cause? A rock rocks and rolls. A human eats and poops out its a-holes. Why the need for this?
To pretend there isn't a reason and an agenda is ignorant.
If you want to talk in terms of psychic energy, then Bayesian information is as close as you could get I guess.
But it sounds now like you are falling back into the incoherence of substance dualism. And even physics, let alone the sciences of life and mind, has been doing its best to move on from the substance ontology that talk of energy once implied.
Science now takes the systems view where gradients must be constructed down which outcomes flow. Teleology is built in to animate the Cosmos.
Your complaint is that intelligence has been dropped into the heat bath that is the Universe and is being required to do work. A planet was orbiting a star. The laws of entropy demanded that life and mind arise to accelerate the dissipation of the resulting thermal gradient.
All this effort we humans are putting in to burn all that accumulated fossil fuel. My god, what is it all for? Etc.
Neural networks?
Quoting apokrisis
Indeed, but your systems view discounts that procreation is a choice. Ascetics exist. Birth control exists. Abstinence exists. Pessimism exists. Realism (informal) exists. Reasons exists (not just causes). There is an agenda behind every human point of view. The "agenda" of entropy barreling towards a heat death does not necessitate humans shooting out another POV into the world. Exergy from a POV is different than a rock rolling.
Semiotic networks now. Bayesian mechanics has been generalised to include life and mind.
Quoting schopenhauer1
The other must always exist. The systems view adds the constraint that the fundamental dynamic must express a win-win dichotomy. That is how nature works. That is how we could measure the degree of pathology in the current stage of the human story.
You want to deal in absolutes. If things aint perfect, then they are a disaster. But that isnt how systems thinking would set up its metric. The spectrum would have to be instead based on complementary limits on being.
With a society for example, it would be how well does it maximise both local differentiation and global integration? You want a relation where each is reinforcing its other rather than negating its other.
Quoting schopenhauer1
We are entrained to the telos of the Cosmos. But that doesnt prevent us showing our mastery over entropy gradients by surfing, dancing, gardening, cooking, procreating, and all the other ways of just having a little fun.
You can choose the misery of not having hobbies or activities. You can dismiss these as worthless diversions. But dont expect me to agree that this is a sensible point of view to have just because Im human.
The bolded one is much different. One you are fighting your own entropy. The other you are creating another (POV!) creature fighting entropy. We want to see others fight the entropy. How strange. Just fight your own entropy. Don't pass it on. Don't assume other should fight the entropy. If only everyone had MY point of view. How narcissistic. I like X, therefore others should [s]like[/s] live out a lifetime of X.
This was inspired by this little exchange:
[i]The OP frequently writes on what is known as antinatalism which is apparently a philosophy that stresses it would be better not to have been born or not to exist. Like many traditional philosophies, it sees existence as being inherently imperfect and painful. Gnosticism is another example. It sees the world as the creation of an evil demiurge, usually identified with the OT Jehovah, and the only hope being an escape from the created world and return to the Plelroma through gnostic insight.
Yet unlike the ancient world-denying philosophies modern antinatalism seems to have no conception of there being anything corresponding to the release from suffering. Existence is a mirage, a trap, a painful charade, but theres nothing higher to aspire to. Only the wan idea that maybe if we dont procreate, then weve made a meaningful gesture towards non-being.[/i]
Wayfarer
[i]My question to you iswhy do the majority keep on (making the mistake of) trying to make a meaningful gesture towards being? I noticed you never answered me directly but wrote generally, or to DA.
I have maintained that there is a political implication to this- that people ought to be making gestures towards being, the great IS. But why? Anything less than a paradise done on other's behalf should be justified. You cannot deny it is putting people through not only good but trials of varying degrees and kinds. That in itself means societally, and individually, it is deemed as some sort of goal to direct others towards. But, as Cioran points out, the decision, once made, is not reversible, even by suicide. So why make this choice for someone else? Thomas Ligotti called the concept, "The Cult of the Grinning Martyrs". But why more martyrs?[/i]
I talk of play and mastery. You turn it into fight and misery.
Why not ask a surfer or procreator and discover what actual metric seems more accurate of their experience.
Pessimism is projection. As bad as the pollyannarism it welcomes as its congenital other. A systems view speaks to the balance of flow states and habits that integrate selves and their worlds.
That differs from the dictionary definition.
Incidentally there's a well-known anecdote concerning a conversation that occurred in in around 1940-41 in a discussion between Claude Shannon and John Neumann, during Shannons postdoctoral research fellowship year at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, where Neumann was one of the main faculty members. During this period Shannon was wavering on whether or not to call his new logarithmic statistical formulation of data in signal transmission by the name of information or uncertainty (of the Heisenberg type). Neumann suggested that Shannon use neither names, but rather use the name entropy because: (a) the statistical mechanics version of the entropy equations have the same mathematical isomorphism and (b) nobody really knows what entropy really is so Shannon would have the advantage in any argument.
This is sometimes dismissed as an urban myth but I believe that there is documentary evidence of Shannon himself attesting to it. I like the fact that rhetorical considerations come into it.
That's an error to muddle deliberation with necessity. No decision has to be made one way or the other. People have reasons and act upon them. As for projection, projection is simply self-involved X. Procreation is other involved. You should not muddle that either. Your happiness at X moment does not mean it is another person's lifetime of ? happiness.
:cool: :up:
Quoting apokrisis
Quoting schopenhauer1
The problem I have here is self-fulfilling prophecies. Buddhists do it when they say that humans need to be born to suffer to escape suffering. But you can just not have humans that suffer. It's suspiciously post-facto reasoning for why procreation is justified in an obvious knock-down rebuttal to the cycle of karma and samsara. It mixes up impersonal things (the cycle of suffering that is beyond human) with the deliberate (the human being who can at least not cause a point of suffering).
Apokrisis has just now written about this notion of an impersonal balance of the system, implying necessity despite the fact that humans can deliberate about things like suffering and understand the very fact of suffering. In fact, it seems ethically imperative to not throw more POVs into the entropy EVEN THOUGH, it is a necessary thing for other entities. Again, humans can at least not cause a point of suffering. Same kind of flaw of self-fulfilling prophecy, just different costumes.
More broadly, animals must deal with homeostasis, of FIGHTING entropy (decay, dissolution). But decay and dissolution sound tame if it is a rock, a molecule, a star. It takes on something different from a POV, a self-understanding POV.
That's just misreading. What isn't constrained is what is free. The Second Law absolute forbids perpetual motion machines. But humans can build any kind of motion machine for which they can stack up the entropic budget.
What's your preference? Roller skates or a Lamborghini? Pink or gold? Leather seats or vinyl? The customer is king.
Yet if you admit deliberation than deliberating the ethics of creating another POVs dealing with entropy is an example of this. More existential and significant than leather or vinyl but yes, both are points of deliberation.
Yeah, it wouldn't make any sense if there were no real good.
You mean like higher love?
But I simply don't accept your one-sided view of existing as a human. If it is a reason for you not to breed then that's fine.
I have often enough expressed my concerns about the way civilisation is going. But that is quite different from your claims that life can't be fun and feel the opposite of a burden.
Youre dodging the question at hand. You know entropy and POVs. I am not questioning if its good to gift Quoting apokrisis more if you make others deal with entropy. Fun is not the whole of entropy upon a POV.
You are badgering me for no good reason. I answered your question. How is it ethical for you to keep burdening me with more work?
Now magnify that over a lifetime with no escape.
Going back to enthalpy. Why is it we would want to burden people rather than quietude?
Wayfarer said gesture towards non-being. I do take that serious. It is good to not cause the burdens of being. Yet people keep perpetuating it. Grown adults not connecting the dots and going for tradition and selfish material or existential reasons.
Whats wrong with nothing. Of diminishing the amount of burdens, of not initiating another enthalpy machine to maintain. Its like the noisy neighbors who cant stop setting off fireworks. Burdening over and over and over because they like boom boom sounds.
The gods were pissed off from the noise of the humans and created a flood in one of the oldest written myths, The Epic of Gilgamesh. Humans cant seem to keep their angst contained so they splatter it with noise and work and burdens and more and more people.
I said that for modern anti-natalism, as distinct from gnosticism 'Existence is a mirage, a trap, a painful charade, but theres nothing higher to aspire to. Only the wan idea that maybe if we dont procreate, then weve made a meaningful gesture towards non-being'. The difference being that in gnosticism there is still the understanding of salvation from suffering or release into a higher realm, albeit perilously hard to attain.
There's absolutely zero point in wringing your hands about the fact that you exist. You can wish all you want that you didn't exist, but that horse has, so to speak, already bolted.
Questioning why we create burdens and increase our version of enthalpy machines is not a futile endeavor even if its too late for me. Precisely because I am living out the enthalpy does it matter most as the central question that everything returns to. Religious thinking wants you to think its necessary because they cant justify it otherwise.
I agree with the sentiment but contend the particular point. Are humans "hard-wired" to have children or are we a more complex (albeit still animal) that have an existential nature to it? With deliberation, we can have reasons rather than instinct. There isn't a breeding season, etc. Pleasure is good, but we regulate it all the time, or at least have that capacity to. It would be the same error of self-fulfilling prophecy I was discussing earlier to say, "We are doomed to keep the enthalpy machines fighting against entropy / create yet more POVs that feel burdens etc. so therefore we shouldn't act accordingly". That's the same post-facto justification as Buddhist's needing humans to be born to escape suffering (rather than simply not procreating in the first place), or apokrisis' systems ideology whereby we are just balancing out energy in a greater system and denying that we have reasons and choices. It's all kind of like, "Don't look at the man behind the curtain". Trying to obfuscate a deliberation with some sort of futility on a systems level.
However, I do agree that misery loves company. That speaks to this existential aspect that we are not content, so why spread discontentment? It is self-refuting to say thus, "I am discontented thus I should create people to alleviate that". Rather, the very fact of your own discontentment is a signal of the discontentment you will thus be creating. It is misguided.
Quoting 180 Proof
This is just a kind of sophistry to make antinatalism logic look absurd. Rather, AN isn't trying to "save the species"; And the goal isn't to destroy the species. It's to not bring more suffering beings into the world. Not to create more little burdened things that need to overcome burdens. Not creating things that must continually fight entropy whilst having a POV that knows the situation they are in.
A doctor doesn't stop saving a patient because they can't save "all of humanity". They do what they can, and recognize what is in their capacity.
Here's my attempt to simplify and clarify the anti-natalist argument.
P1 : Human experience is bad, negative, undesirable.
P2 : We should act to reduce that which is bad, negative, undesirable.
Therefore we should strive toward the cessation of human experience, preferably nonviolently, by discouraging reproduction.
As I see it, the problem is almost always P1 (though P2 could be challenged.)
Hey plaque you're back! Good to see you.
Quoting plaque flag
Yes, that is it basically. What @180 Proof wants to do is to try to make the attempt "futile" and to say that if someone doesn't exist to experience the "relief" of "not suffering", it is essentially like you are doing nothing. I don't see it that way. Rather, someone isn't suffering, and that is good (from the perspective of someone who could recognize what is not taking place).
Also, on point 1 there, others will argue that creating people that can experience happiness/good things is somehow "moral" despite creating the suffering/negatives/burdens/enthalpy-fighting-entropy that goes with it. However, I do not see creating "happiness" as anything ethically obligatory, and more so when there is no one existing already. So I think that argument is also bunk. So if I was to parse that out it would be:
1) Happiness-giving is not an obligation, especially when no one is deprived of happiness to begin with.
2) Happiness-giving when accompanied by numerous intractable harms is not even purely happiness-giving. It is not a gift in the traditional sense that it comes with many burdens. Thus this "gift" is negated as such.
And finally, the rebuttal that "people don't exist to be relieved of not suffering", is simply a non-issue, as what matters is the state of affairs of not suffering. The hidden assumption is the asymmetry that the not-happiness should matter, but going back to 1 and 2.
Thanks!
Quoting schopenhauer1
Excellent. As you probably remember, I think antinatalism is fascinating. To me 'antithetical' philosophy is counterculture. Antinatalism is almost perfectly antithetical / countercultural. (Recently Elon Musk supported a tweet suggesting that nonparents should have no vote. )
I got this use of 'antithetical' from Nietzsche, and I find it useful to think of Nietzsche (in this context) as a rebellious philosophical son of Schopenhauer.
I heard about the Musk thing. Really weird anti-democratic stance. Nietzsche, as you may know, I find problematic as he is another philosopher used to justify self-fulfilling suffering. In other words, his idea of an Eternal Return is used to say that we are doomed to simply always exist, so attempts at something like not bringing people into existence would be futile because of the eternally repeating nature of the system, or something of this nature.
I can't speak for @180 Proof, but perhaps you are overlooking a different perspective : The moral issue is secondary to the practical issue. We are primates 'programmed' to replicate. It looks impossible to stop the machine.
But we are primates who can deliberate, so are we really the same in that respect to other primates? Are we not more like Zapffe's mechanisms of ignoring, anchoring, denying, etc or Sartre's idea of bad faith? In other words, are we not also an existential animal?
Yes. To me the religion of babymaking is at the core of 'thetical' culture. The individual dissolves into the replication goo: hive mentality.
I think we are indeed the existential animal.
I find us more determined than free. We 'know' this in our data analysis while at the same time holding the opposite notion of the free-responsible agent at the center of our culture. Sartre squeeze this lemon for all it's worth : his 'nothingness' is like free will maybe. I am condemned to be [s]free[/s] held responsible.
To me this is almost stolen from Schopenhauer's discussion of the futility of suicide. My death doesn't change much, because I have seen through the illusion of personality. 'I' will just be reborn. Real change has to happen at the level of the species.
I like to think of Nietzsche as a more recent Hamlet. For me he's a highly instructive and relatable dissonant tangle of voices/perspectives.
As far as human-survival, we develop strong cultural beliefs that are enculturated, but surely that can be de-programmed by other ideas. The individual does have some agency. We are working against common tropes, but these tropes are simply learned and not intractable.
Quoting plaque flag
Sartre was against bad faith thinking, the idea that we are destined to play a role. Rather, cultural beliefs calibrate the individual to the "hive mind" so-to-say, that speaking against the core beliefs creates anger and anxiety, so we stick within its bounds. It's group-think. You can't complain too much in society, or you will be hated and spit upon. You are worse than a criminal because you reject all of it, and not just this part or that part of it.
True, even Schopenhauer retreats to the self-fulfilling idea that Will will always will itself in various forms, so one cannot prevent it. Yet, at the same time, he offers various forms of "escape", mainly via asceticism. This speaks to his metaphysics which to me, is not completely airtight. That is to say, if asceticism leads to death of the individual ego or something like that, how does this really "stop" Willing in the broader metaphysical sense, rather than just one's own manifestation of it? And if that's the case, then indeed, not procreating would make a difference from at least one POV, just like that ascetic person dissipating their ego. I think he wants to have both where the individual ego is the World, but it seems like he wants both. Not sure.
One of my concerns in this context is Moloch (game theoretical). It's the prisoner's dilemma, the tragedy of the commons, that sort of thing. Concretely, I'm a nonparent taciturn thoughtcriminal --not very contagious, even if there was much susceptibility out there. I can't teach my children to not have children, but self-consciously virtuous breeders can very much send out missionaries, generation after generation potentially. I recently saw a vid suggesting that Israel is shifting politically for reasons involving the correlation of ideology and number of offspring.
Right. He's a bit of an old school moralist on this issue. Personal responsibility ! A streak of the GOP in this famous lefty (which probably helps make him sufficiently complex to keep me interested.)
I think you are correct that his metaphysics isn't airtight. I like him best as the grim theorist of futility. He's also great in Nausea. Along with anti-natalism, another great countercultural moment in philosophy is the essentially apolitical attack on the spirit of seriousness. Sartre could be very earnest, but there's a grim-transcendent streak in his persona that I value.
Yes. Socrate's being forced to drink the hemlock is not (only) something that happened but something that's happening and will continue to happen. But part of me wants to say that he was a corrupter of youth. It's a matter of perspective and identity.
Indeed, good point. Parents missionize de facto. Ironic that AN is accused of it, when by force their ranks are filled :wink:. AN simply says to stop and think, what is going on here? I think this can all be summed up with simply not reflecting. Even well-educated people don't think much about "existence" itself. That's because the hive-mind (enculturation process) wants that thinking to go towards production. to ENTHALPY to keep the individual and societal ENTROPY AT BAY!
Many parents just did/do what everyone does. This does contribute to the sense of what everybody does, but the explicit breeding ideology is more on the right at the moment. I notice Matt Walsh speaking of homosexuality as a 'disordered' sexuality, presumably (in his mind) because sex is 'supposed' to be fertile. I also read a female conservative's review of Cormac McCarthy's last novel, which features a female nonparent genius who commits suicide. The reviewer was clearly educated, but at the bottom of her analysis was a crude mysticism of the mystery of parenthood. Roughly, it was if she was allowing that even Science is empty when compared to Parenthood. All is vanity except for that sacred continuation of the species --- which is a line I might put in the mouth of personified DNA.
When I read Schopenhauer, I identified with that futile individual struggling against dissolution in speciesgoo. In other words, the spirited thing to do is to cheat nature with birth control, homosexuality, masturbation, life-extending treatments, etc. 'The life of the child is the death of the parent.' At the same time, this attitude has always only a finite intensity, because we are programmed to find great joy and depth in nurturing.
Being a pessimistic missionary against the continuation of life is probably slightly worse than frivolous parents ignorantly pushing everyone to reproduce, though I acknowledge that the latter can easily become extremely troublesome.
Burdens and boons both exist. There may be decay, but there is also creation and sustenance of that which already exists.
It goes back to this:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Obligations for happiness-giving is of very little or no moral consideration. Suffering-preventing (or giving depending on how you frame it) is very significant for moral consideration, however.
If life was indeed a paradise that no one ever got bored of, that you are creating for another, you might have some traction with that consideration. But it's obviously not, so now you have to justify why you are suffering-creating (at least the conditions thereof that will inevitably take place).
The problem is negentropy is a word, the actual lived experience of negentropy is the varying things to keep homeostasis in the animal. All the work, stress, and burden to fight entropy's tendency.
Yep. What is it about this "nod" to being that people seem to be programmed for? What is the programming exactly that aligns with "being is good, AN is bad. you go away now" (said in the vein of Homer losing part of his brain).
Enthalpy is one of those terms that highlights how much science is built for humans rather than is a universal concept. We wanted to know how much energy was not because of a change in temperature when measuring the temperature of chemical reactions so we invented a term called enthalpy to distinguish between heat and work in a chemical system which allowed us to put "heat" in a similar category to "friction" -- that other force/work that allows us to make the balance sheet work out.
Funnily enough humans invented the topic before modern theories of chemical bonding. It's very much an artifact of classical thermodynamics. And so your interpretation of it will depend upon how you interpret the various "levels" of science and how much historical terms are merely influential vs. are actually true. (EDIT: Also, funnily enough, by "modern theories of chemical bonding" I really only mean ones influenced by the quantum revolution. Soooo ya'know -- at least 100 years old)
But maybe this is all off-topic, because you're asking after ethical implications, of which I'd say there are none.
And we are not facing entropy daily?
Even in terms of things falling apart -- entropy drives structures as much as their dissolution. But what we face daily? If it is a structure it's at least not obvious that it maps to entropy. In a sense I can interpret what I face entropically, but it's just one way of looking at what I face.
Just for context, I don't count myself as an antinatalist. I'm also not a pro-natalist. I'm nothin' -- I'm a stone-hearted analyst in this context, fascinated by the social logic involved.
The positive motive is something like : ...the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life...
The nurturing instinct can be included in the lust of the flesh, though this'll be offensive to some.
The negative motive is fear of injury, fear of death.
We don't need to be programmed with a conscious ideology, right ? Though at another level the church might come in and keep birth rates high for an empire that needs workers and soldiers.
Im thinking more along these lines:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life
Are you talking about philosophical types or just humans generally? I can see the point of not breeding, particularly now the way the world looks like going. I would not want to have children at this point in human history because I would then be condemned to worry about how they were going to cope with what inevitably seems to be coming. But I never had any desire for kids anyway; I'm too selfish, absorbed as I have always been in my own pursuits and obsessions.
I certainly don't regret being alive. On balance I would count my life as a definite positive. It is a well-worn cliche that thinking too much will bring misery, and that is probably the view of a majority of humans, who don't experience their lives overall as miserable, and like to cling to the illusions that too much thinking might dispell. Maybe it's down to brain chemistry; those low in seratonin have a negative, depressive view on life, and those with abundant seratonin feel life is good.
I know how miserable life has seemed for me at times a day or two after taking MDMA, and this is attributable to seratonin depletion. Selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors are given to people who suffer chronic depression. If you try to imagine how life would seem if you always felt good, you might be able to understand and acknowledge that your perspective of life as misery says much more about you than anything else.
I agree with you. I mean that from a 'greedy' personal perspective it may be good to experience parenthood. Especially these days, with our technology, and especially if you are rich. Joyce is one of my heroes, and the family man experience is useful to a writer in its near universality. But the nonfamily men buy books too, I guess -- maybe more books on average.
'The life of the child is the death of the parent' gestures towards the life cycle to me. Schop liked to talk about insects dying after mating, their purpose served. He really had his eye on the centrality of sex and death. The mating instinct and the nurturing instinct tie us to life, along with narcissist/status projects, some of which are probably delusory escapes from annihilation.
I would say that people of all economic backgrounds can benefit from being able to raise a person, witness their journey, and help them become a better person. Although there undoubtedly are many selfish parents, I wouldn't say that it is impossible to wish to procreate because you want others to experience the positives of life. If this is still greedy or selfish, rhen I would argue that not procreating is also selfish. After all, non-existent beings have no need to not be created.
Schopenhauer, predictably, had a negative interpretation of the life cycleone thar I don't agree with. It can also be seen as a symbol of continuity. If it were the case that not procreating bestowed a significantly longer life upon someone, ae would definitely find ourselves in an interesting situation. However, since this is not necessarily the case, the life of the child can also be the life of the parent (as, at least in the case of humans, it can give them a purpose that keeps despair at bay). Generation possesses the capacity to transcend annihilation.
I hope that you will have a beautiful day!
I am not a universal pro/anti natalist either. I believe that procreation can be ethically justifiable, but it is not obligatory.
I'm just going to give response I gave to apokrisis:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Quoting Janus
But that's not the ethical point. If it was as simple of you like vanilla and I like chocolate, than this wouldn't be ethical. Rather, it is making decisions for others, and this becomes ethical, political, and existential. The way you are flippantly making it about preferences, belies the grave ethical import.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Going back to enthalpy, why create more work for people because you have happy moments? That is the biggest con of an argument. We have the power to not throw people into the enthalpic process.
It is paternalistic thinking. "I know that someone else should deal with burdens of survival". Imagine that in almost any other context as a fully functioning adult?
Maybe there is some chemicals deluding people but it is very much reinforced culturally. As you said:
Quoting plaque flag
Perhaps it's even more perverse than that. Having just enough happy experiences makes it seem justifiable to do for another. Happy workers, happily working, in their happy projects.
It doesn't have to be human.
I once thought of a sci-fi plot where the heroes set out to eliminate all sentience as an act of mercy, their assumption being that awareness was essentially negative.
To me the trickiest part is the evaluation of life. Life is good or life is bad -- this is like music.
I like the idea of a gentle and effective suicide pill. Perhaps the state could provide a nice incineration shoot, equivalent to the painless version of jumping into a volcano. I believe that most people would not use this option while they were lucky ( healthy, in good relationships, safe-ish), so that life is often judged (tacitly) to be a positive good. Personally I'm still invested in this game, though I do dread the ravages of further aging in the long run. I the idea of choosing the right moment for one's death -- embracing the beauty of it. I'm down with Kevorkian.
I'm not sure we do have the power. A minority may have a certain self-image and the motivation to abstain, but I don't believe in free will. What's possible is, to some degree, proven by what actually happens. It's easier to talk about utopia or a cessation of birth than to bring such a situation about. It's as if individuals are always only fragments of human nature. Even individuals speak only for or as mere fragments of themselves. 'Finite' personality (which excludes and opposes other finite personalities) is a kind of mask or front.
I was explaining how the the first written myth, the Epic of Gilgamesh, spoke of gods who were pissed at all the noise the humans made so flooded the Earth. Why do people want to create the din of noise? We can't be quiet?
Why do you think people lack sufficient free will enough?
So much could be said here, but we can talk about pork. Do we really need it ? Are pigs treated decently in order to make it ? I guess I'm cynical. We are not fundamentally rational and righteous creatures. I look on YouTube and see the resentment industrial complex. These fuckers are professionally outraged, like the guy with the glass to his throat in that Black Mirror episode.
I gotta name for the type : the politician. It's not just folks actually seeking election but the personality type ('finite') that earnestly brings a narrative of the good versus the bad. Spengler called the general structure ethical socialism, by which he meant the evangelical assumption. Whatever the Good or Truth may be, it's our duty to spread the word. Right or wrong, Spengler thought that some ancient philosophers just 'offered counsel.' I'm personally interested in the 'muted post horn' as graffiti hinting at 'infinite' or 'undecided/undecidable' personality. Antinatalism puts the birthmania into question (offering a counterpolitics, just as earnest.) But there's also the putting of the spirit of seriousness into question, along with the assumption something can and must be done ---one of course does not preach this putting into question, for that would be a misunderstanding --hence graffiti and gallowshumor.
I'm not quite following what you are saying. I think you have some interesting ideas but I can't seem to link them together. It seems something to do with evangelistic outrage.
You also suggest not being serious perhaps? E.M. Cioran I think represents a gallow's humor sort of approach to AN. Thomas Ligotti is very dark, and depressing, but he couches it in basically saying it's just his opinion. Schopenhauer was serious, but his aphorisms had some humor. I'd say it is serious in that people are seriously affected by birth and suffering. So the stakes are high, no?
Yes. There's also a psychonanalytic theme here. The 'surface' of a personality is a mask or a performance. The finite personality depends on what it excludes for its value. If the Cause succeeds, I lose my heroic role, the very meaning structure of my life.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Yes, Cioran's tone is often exactly what I have in mind. Samuel Beckett is relevant too: nothing is funnier than unhappiness. Nietzsche writes of the festival of cruelty, ambivalently aware of our enjoyment of the spectacle of suffering and humiliation. Joyce brilliantly explores the enjoyment of one's own humiliation in Ulysses (cuckolding), akin to the self-vivisection of Nietzsche's introspective ascetic. This self-vivisector is an image of critical reason, of poisoning and poisoned Socrates, corrupter of youth, destroyer of comfortable platitudes. This is Nietzsche's Hamlet-like significance. He endlessly turns his knife on himself. He subverts himself, would rather be a buffoon than a pompous politician. He wants company on the endless dangerous road, like Whitman, rather than followers who, as followers, have already lost him. In short, I'm talking about Nietzsche (or Freud or Shakespeare or ...) as possibility rather than substance. We re-enact their heroic intentions, make it new, etc.
Yes. What is the nature of humor ? Is it a sly confession of ambivalence ? Of the pleasure we take in disaster ?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Sure. And gallowshumor references the situation of one about to die. Most of us care at least a little about strangers, but just about everyone cares intensely about their own death in the new few minutes.
I like this one:
At his public execution, the murderer William Palmer is said to have looked at the trapdoor on the gallows and asked the hangman, "Are you sure it's safe?"
Just to be clear, I'm not saying it's wrong to argue AN on a philosophy forum. Anonymity and the lack of funding is important here. The politician is a public performer who develops a persona as a brand. They win power, fame, and money from playing their role. It's in their interest, as persona product, to keep things comfortably finite and one-sided. Don't expect the politician to look into their own motives or discuss how nice it is to be famous and admired. To be sure, they'll have a sentimental yarn about their love for the oppressed, etc., which may indeed be part of the truth.
Heroic roles indeed. I see what you're saying. But can there be more of a communal commiseration aspect to it rather? Like, "I see this, does anyone else see this? Isn't this crazy?!". It is why people join groups and communities, but these are communities about existence itself, something so holistic that many don't want to face it. They rather therapy to be individualistic, about their ego and how they move about in the world, not the human condition tout court.
Quoting plaque flag
Indeed, heroism dies through tedium. Hence the subversion of Tedious Warrior.
Humor in the Horror. I think that's always been associated to some extent. It's a way to help cope.
Quoting plaque flag
Oh yeah for sure, good points on the public performer. It's more an industry they have created for themselves, not trying to create real dialogue.
I love this part of the story by the way. Freud might relate it to the death drive. Let's all just go to sleep.
The answer to your question might be simple. Such a trait, a preference for Silence, would remove itself from the gene pool. It can only linger on the margins as a kind of parasite or stowaway, possibly serving the Noise party in the long run.
Totally, and I think Beckett's work is part of that. He's grimly hilarious. He's willing to face the horror, describe it, while also acknowledging the part of us that's addicted to it. He's got one sad hobo character who invents a complicated ritualistic system of sucking stones and moving them from pocket to pocket. He describes this system in hilarious detail. To me the 'muted post horn' or 'open storm thud' (as I've also seen it, a sneaky anagram) is a little piece of tragicomical graffiti. In the shadows of the Resentment Industrial Complex, riding like a parasite, is a little symbol of the undecidable undecided infinite.
'Does anyone else see through all the simple-minding bullshit that drowns out almost everything ?'
'Does anyone else confess the complexity and ambivalence and ambiguity of our situation ? Or is everyone just a false doctor with a snake oil cure, looking for clicks and clams ? '
For more on the post horn theme:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crying_of_Lot_49
I do like the poetic imagery of the Silence vs. Noise party. Ties into my other thread on being and becoming. But we come back to this difference we have where you see inevitability in what I tend to see as simply ignoring, anchoring, and denying. A child has an injury and the whole world has to know that it feels pain. A child is lonely and it complains loudly to its parents or anyone in earshot. An adult apparently does this by creating more humans and giving themselves something to do. We can't handle quietude. Meditation is had in small doses, at retreats, to rejuvenate. The idea of quieting in its ultimate sense of living off of nothing and just dying out slowly, of course, is not part of this.
In that case, balance is the shady subversive word used. Thus one is quieting to become better at the parts that are not quiet. It is not to diminish one's need for need. It is another self-improvement strategy to live in the world of noise. It's not gnosis, its simply routine like the health-shake, exercise routine, etc. In the end, it makes you a better worker. The fast is now a diet because it creates a better lifestyle choice.
There's plenty of 'politicians,' though, who attack apolitical ironists as escapists. 'Ethical socialism.' The rule is grand social issues, the spirit of seriousness. "I am a serious and respectable public intellectual commenting on The Serious Issues of the Day. "
Still not what I'm talking about though. Social issues and existential issues are not the same, and perhaps even a bit opposed.
The balance involved is thermodynamic or biological. Game theory dictates that counterculture is a parasite. In my opinion, the free will thing is roughly a misleading illusion. The culture of responsibility itself emerged as a faster way to get the coal out of the hills and burn it.
Perhaps I embrace the fatalism in Schopenhauer more than you do. When I was studying Darwin, Dawkins, and Dennett, I had Schopenhauer in mind. These evolutionary thinkers vindicate and naturalize his insights, making them stronger and less sentimental. I took from them an even harsher brew (those offensive 'moist robots,' slavishly serving the machine-cold code with mathematical necessity.)
I'll be impressed if humans stop eating pork because it's Ethical to do so. Asking them to stop breeding is on another level entirely.
There is something special about AN. I agree.
As I see it, antinatalism is extremely unlikely to succeed, become popular. Is that how you see it ?
Right. And, to be fair, they may be truly invested in or identified with their finite-exclusive personality. We can hide from our terrible ambivalence in the illusion of being simply virtuous, projecting the repressed on others. 'Whatever is unconscious is projected.' Joyce has his universal figure split into opposing sons in Finnegans Wake. We wear the mask not only for others but also for the mirror.
There's an old meme about the paralysis that comes with too much vision. What keeps the rat on the wheel ?
I get it for sure. Schopenhauer did have that idea of "inevitability of our programming" idea.
But I think Zapffe counteracts the determinism in a way. He psychologizes it rather than mechanizes it. In other words, it is learned, cultural, a defense mechanism perhaps, but one that can be unlearned by knowing about it in the first place. "Oh, mea culpa, I am just throwing up a defense mechanism by ignoring, denying, and anchoring".
It depends on measure of success, but I don't see the idea catching on. Working and consuming seems to be the ethos/reality of the day. Travel and "balance" is I guess the ideal/religion. Antinatalism disrupts that vision. If anything, childfree for lifestyle choice would be much more attractive than the idea that we must prevent suffering. As you indicate here:
Quoting plaque flag
Caring about suffering in the abstract is not our strong point. We rather create the suffering and then mitigate than not create it. I am not sure how to get around this habitual way of thinking. As long as we can disconnect cause and effect because it is inconvenient, we will do so because we can't live with such cognitive dissonance of knowing and doing, so denial and vehement dismissal is the only way to react if confronted with it.
Also quietude makes us sad-face. The blankness, the blackness, the void. It gives some sort of anxiety of non-being. It reminds me of this:
I don't appreciate the "vision" of multiplying expectations, even if I would prefer the disruption to come from a nuanced understanding of life.
In the end, we will, hopefully, continue to create happiness and passionately defend the positive. The significance of the cause certainly should not be downplayed as the effect (the provenance of which may lie in the abstract realm) is intimately connected to the joys of life.
When the inner light is not extinguished, external sources of succour become less urgent.
I tend to see one myth displacing another. It's not that we get beyond orienting metaphors and heroic roleplay (defense mechanisms). We just (hopefully) trade up. To me Freud (for instance) is an instance of the archetype that might be called the hero of consciousness, which goes back to shamanism. Zapffe is a version too.
There's also the sublimated evasion, sort of what I'm doing, though I can't sincerely call it an evasion. Most people cling to life and avoid death most of the time.
My own suggestion (if you recall) was to make suicide easy and painless --and cleaner, because that's the tricky part for the suicide who wants to be polite and not leave a mess. This fits the individualism of our times.
There seem to be evolutionary reasons for that. As the likelihood of shared genes increases, so does the likelihood of bonding and cooperation. I feel the pull of the universal human family, but these days I can't forget that in-groups depend on out-groups. There's no us without them. Just as the body shits and externalizes, so does the group. If aliens attack, then we'll have some fiery humanism.
:up: