^^^ But I don't think it is, necessarily. I think that there are plenty of equally reasonable arguments to be made for organic life being something kind of horrific. But the point is that I don't see either argument as terribly appealing.
I love being alive! I can smell, breathe, taste, balance, see, hear, verbalize, climb trees, and bask in the glory of sunshine. I can feel the softness of a peony, or look at a butterfly's wing. I can listen to the roar of a stream, I can hear the cranes call.
I love being alive! I can smell, breathe, taste, balance, see, hear, verbalize, climb trees, and bask in the glory of sunshine. I can feel the softness of a peony, or look at a butterfly's wing. I can listen to the roar of a stream, I can hear the cranes call.
Oh, life is something glorious!
Yes, but is it an inherent gloriousness, or simply a reflection of your individual experiences?
I love being alive! I can smell, breathe, taste, balance, see, hear, verbalize, climb trees, and bask in the glory of sunshine. I can feel the softness of a peony, or look at a butterfly's wing. I can listen to the roar of a stream, I can hear the cranes call.
Oh, life is something glorious!
Yes, but is it an inherent gloriousness, or simply a reflection of your individual experiences?
I love being alive! I can smell, breathe, taste, balance, see, hear, verbalize, climb trees, and bask in the glory of sunshine. I can feel the softness of a peony, or look at a butterfly's wing. I can listen to the roar of a stream, I can hear the cranes call.
Oh, life is something glorious!
Yes, but is it an inherent gloriousness, or simply a reflection of your individual experiences?
Precisely.
Pain and pleasure exist, physically, because we need them to in order to survive. But is that living really inherently good or bad or is any sort of value judgement just pithy and meaningless? What about human consciousness: Is it better to be aware when one becomes as aware of woe as happiness if both are, in the sum of all experience, equal; and are they equal?
Life is (necessarily) glorious. Life is (necessarily) horrific.
Both those claims are highly dubious. Formulating a theoretical counterexample to either one of them is trivial, and objectively proving either of them one way or another is impossible, as subjective accounts differ and cannot be taken as incontrovertible.
Life is a big complicated mess of possibilities and choices and emotions and relationships and a great deal besides. The suggestion that these kinds of questions could have a simple answer is bizarre to me.
Antinatalism as such consists of youtube vlogs of fading popularity and blogs that update with quotes they like maybe once in a blue moon, nowadays.
To clarify, this is true of a particular subset of the internet known as antinatalism. There will, of course, continue to be people who hold beliefs that are similar until the end of humanity in all likelihood.
I guess the deathblow was the ending of True Detective. Matthew Mconagaughey went to the pronatalist Pollyana side in the end :(
Life is (necessarily) glorious. Life is (necessarily) horrific.
Both those claims are highly dubious. Formulating a theoretical counterexample to either one of them is trivial, and objectively proving either of them one way or another is impossible, as subjective accounts differ and cannot be taken as incontrovertible.
Life is a big complicated mess of possibilities and choices and emotions and relationships and a great deal besides. The suggestion that these kinds of questions could have a simple answer is bizarre to me.
this basically
antinatalist thinking in particular has always struck me as honestly kind of childish.
Can we get an elaboration for those of us who have not read John McDowell, pretty please?
"In response to this, McDowell has a number of good points, but his central argument is
that even if value discourse can never have the form of natural scientific discourse, it
nonetheless displays all the features characteristic of assessing the truth and falsity of
claims. We can give detailed reasons for and against value-ascriptions, deploying whole
networks of interconnected value concepts. For instance, assessment of whether
something is funny does not simply depend upon our dispositions to laugh at it, but can
involve appeals to complex concepts like satire and irony."
Also secondary qualities, the world is made up of that which is thinkable and vice versa, second nature is still nature, McDowell is hard to understand sometimes.
"In response to this, McDowell has a number of good points, but his central argument is
that even if value discourse can never have the form of natural scientific discourse, it
nonetheless displays all the features characteristic of assessing the truth and falsity of
claims. We can give detailed reasons for and against value-ascriptions, deploying whole
networks of interconnected value concepts. For instance, assessment of whether
something is funny does not simply depend upon our dispositions to laugh at it, but can
involve appeals to complex concepts like satire and irony."
Also secondary qualities, the world is made up of that which is thinkable and vice versa, second nature is still nature, McDowell is hard to understand sometimes.
Thank you. :)
That's an interesting position to take and I guess opens up the possibility of these questions having some grand universal answer, but it'd still be a big leap to assume it was a simple one, I think.
Life is (necessarily) glorious. Life is (necessarily) horrific.
Both those claims are highly dubious. Formulating a theoretical counterexample to either one of them is trivial, and objectively proving either of them one way or another is impossible, as subjective accounts differ and cannot be taken as incontrovertible.
Life is a big complicated mess of possibilities and choices and emotions and relationships and a great deal besides. The suggestion that these kinds of questions could have a simple answer is bizarre to me.
this basically
antinatalist thinking in particular has always struck me as honestly kind of childish.
See, I don't see it as any more childish than the opposite, and the opposite is a pretty common assumption. The assertion is not that everyone would be better off jumping off a bridge, after all, as easy as it might be to straw-man based on some very stupid people on the Internet.
The problem is the assertion that if you must make a value judgement about, say, consciousness, that it must be positive rather than negative. Most religions assert that life is a blessing; outside of Buddhism, asserting the other possibility is generally anathema. I think that life is very complicated and thus beyond blanket statements of value, but if my hand were forced, I might say that the fact that all life fundamentally depends on other lives ending is deeply disturbing.
That kind of double standard, of condescending to uncomfortable or negative ideas, strikes me as distressing.
I'm sorry if that sounded overly aggressive, but I find the whole implication that entertaining an idea that someone else disagrees with makes me stupid extremely insulting.
I can understand why someone would want people not to be born, especially if they've had a hard childhood and they don't believe they can make a difference in a child's life. But I've also seen a lot of melodramatic "birth is child abuse"- type arguments made, and as usual, the people that are the most strident about an issue make excellent strawmen.
I disparage (the Internet movement of self-identified) antinatalists because they are, in my experience, obnoxious, arrogant, philosophically feeble and relentlessly hostile towards or mocking of anyone who voices even the slightest disagreement with their position. They are people who seem to be looking for reasons to wallow in their misery, and who condemn the rest of humanity (often by way of offensive comparisons to severe crimes or even historical atrocities) for not being as miserable as them, while at the same time insisting that misery is bad and apparently not seeing the hypocrisy here. They are childish and meanspirited, and if I did not laugh at them, I would find them extremely annoying.
I do not believe that merely holding a pessimistic outlook makes a person stupid or not worth listening to, but the people I'm talking about when I refer to antinatalists have a great many ugly characteristics besides their pessimism. The pessimism just makes them all the more tiresome.
Re: "the implication that entertaining an idea that someone else disagrees with makes me stupid"
andd how Sredni doesn't like that implicationn.
Just because you don't subscribe to that idea, doesn't mean you have to feel insulted by it.
Disagreeing with people makes me feel stupid, I'd rather you not invalidate my feelings, especially seeing how they are a part of me, and one I cannot easily control at that.
I disparage (the Internet movement of self-identified) antinatalists because they are, in my experience, obnoxious, arrogant, philosophically feeble and relentlessly hostile towards or mocking of anyone who voices even the slightest disagreement with their position. They are people who seem to be looking for reasons to wallow in their misery, and who condemn the rest of humanity (often by way of offensive comparisons to severe crimes or even historical atrocities) for not being as miserable as them, while at the same time insisting that misery is bad and apparently not seeing the hypocrisy here. They are childish and meanspirited, and if I did not laugh at them, I would find them extremely annoying.
I do not believe that merely holding a pessimistic outlook makes a person stupid or not worth listening to, but the people I'm talking about when I refer to antinatalists have a great many ugly characteristics besides their pessimism. The pessimism just makes them all the more tiresome.
This is also who I was referring to by and large
anyone who is just a philosophical pessimist. Well, I don't understand the position and probably won't ever, but as long as you don't use that belief as a reason to go around kicking infants, I have no grudge with you.
I can hear some vague crackling off in the distance.
Our park actually prohibits fireworks on the grounds because a lot of people who live here are veterans of various wars and may have PTSD problems around loud explosion noises.
I disparage (the Internet movement of self-identified) antinatalists because they are, in my experience, obnoxious, arrogant, philosophically feeble and relentlessly hostile towards or mocking of anyone who voices even the slightest disagreement with their position. They are people who seem to be looking for reasons to wallow in their misery, and who condemn the rest of humanity (often by way of offensive comparisons to severe crimes or even historical atrocities) for not being as miserable as them, while at the same time insisting that misery is bad and apparently not seeing the hypocrisy here. They are childish and meanspirited, and if I did not laugh at them, I would find them extremely annoying.
I do not believe that merely holding a pessimistic outlook makes a person stupid or not worth listening to, but the people I'm talking about when I refer to antinatalists have a great many ugly characteristics besides their pessimism. The pessimism just makes them all the more tiresome.
Now, this I find reasonable. Quite.
I just don't like to be condescended to regarding the sort of worldviews that they claim to represent, much in the way that I think the average progressive Christian would rather not be associated with the worst excesses of fundamentalism. Or socialists with Stalinists, more aptly.
Be kind to your web footed friends, For that duck may be somebody's mother She lives in a hole in a swamp Where the weather is always damp You may think that this is the end: Well it is, but to prove that we're all liars We're going to sing it again, But only this time we will sing a little higher
Be kind to your web footed friends, For that duck may be somebody's mother She lives in a hole in a swamp Where the weather is always damp You may think that this is the end: Well it is, but to prove that we're all liars We're going to sing it again, But only this time we will sing a little higher
Be kind to your web footed friends, For that duck may be somebody's mother She lives in a hole in a swamp Where the weather is always damp You may think that this is the end: Well it is, but to prove that we're all liars We're going to sing it again, But only this time we will sing a little higher
Be kind to your web footed friends, For that duck may be somebody's mother She lives in a hole in a swamp Where the weather is always damp You may think that this is the end: Well, it is!
Comments
Oh, life is something glorious!
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
That video has Death Note spoilers so don't watch it if you want to watch the shows
Both those claims are highly dubious. Formulating a theoretical counterexample to either one of them is trivial, and objectively proving either of them one way or another is impossible, as subjective accounts differ and cannot be taken as incontrovertible.
Life is a big complicated mess of possibilities and choices and emotions and relationships and a great deal besides. The suggestion that these kinds of questions could have a simple answer is bizarre to me.
Can we get an elaboration for those of us who have not read John McDowell, pretty please?
antinatalist thinking in particular has always struck me as honestly kind of childish.
If no life, how Aliroz exist?
Thank you. :)
That's an interesting position to take and I guess opens up the possibility of these questions having some grand universal answer, but it'd still be a big leap to assume it was a simple one, I think.
I do not believe that merely holding a pessimistic outlook makes a person stupid or not worth listening to, but the people I'm talking about when I refer to antinatalists have a great many ugly characteristics besides their pessimism. The pessimism just makes them all the more tiresome.
andd how Sredni doesn't like that implicationn.
Just because you don't subscribe to that idea, doesn't mean you have to feel insulted by it.
Disagreeing with people makes me feel stupid, I'd rather you not invalidate my feelings, especially seeing how they are a part of me, and one I cannot easily control at that.
anyone who is just a philosophical pessimist. Well, I don't understand the position and probably won't ever, but as long as you don't use that belief as a reason to go around kicking infants, I have no grudge with you.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
and it's nice to get out and about
Our park actually prohibits fireworks on the grounds because a lot of people who live here are veterans of various wars and may have PTSD problems around loud explosion noises.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
the fuck do I use this thing
it seems to be consistently out of step with the rest of my track.
idk
For that duck may be somebody's mother
She lives in a hole in a swamp
Where the weather is always damp
You may think that this is the end:
Well it is, but to prove that we're all liars
We're going to sing it again,
But only this time we will sing a little higher
For that duck may be somebody's mother
She lives in a hole in a swamp
Where the weather is always damp
You may think that this is the end:
Well it is, but to prove that we're all liars
We're going to sing it again,
But only this time we will sing a little higher
For that duck may be somebody's mother
She lives in a hole in a swamp
Where the weather is always damp
You may think that this is the end:
Well it is, but to prove that we're all liars
We're going to sing it again,
But only this time we will sing a little higher
For that duck may be somebody's mother
She lives in a hole in a swamp
Where the weather is always damp
You may think that this is the end:
Well, it is!
she will be back soon, I know it!