Do most myths and scripture across religions emulate / symbolise the conscious journey played out and interpreted by baby in the crib from its caregivers, and throughout it’s life from infancy to end of life?

no

Does « No word is farther from the truth than when spoken » make sense?

David Benatar’s antinatalism

I have been listening to David Benatar a lot lately and have been reading in his books. Benatar is an antinatalist and argues that life is not worth living. I have engaged mostly in thinking about Benatars argument that the bad outweighs the good in life (by a large margin). This is what I would like to weigh in on. Benatar uses three measurements of human wellbeing (the three most established ones) and argues that by any of these standards the good outweigh the bad. These three alternative measurements of human wellbeing are: the objective lists theory, hedonism and desire theories. It is my understanding from what I have read that none of these theories are widely accepted. They all have their problems, which I choose not to get into.

Benatar goes through each one of them and “proves” that the negative comes out on top. As for hedonism, according to Benatar, there is more pain than pleasure in life (I think he says even in the best life). For example, there is such a thing as chronic pain, but there is no such thing as chronic pleasure. There is also a tendency for people to underestimate how bad their life is. They remember and anticipate positive things, something known as an optimism bias. In objective lists Benatar suggests that in anything we put on the list we always score pretty low. For example, if knowledge is on the list, there is always going to be way more that we don’t know. If a long life is on the list, well, he says, “a life of 80 years is much closer to zero than to a thousand”. In the desire fulfillment theory Benatar argues that there will always be more desires that we don’t fulfill then the once that we fulfill.

My problem with this is that the weighting system seems arbitrary. How do you measure pain versus pleasure in a human life? How do you know that the bliss of a person’s romantic escapade is outweighed by the pain they experience struggling with decease in later life? How do you know weather the pains of a frustrated career goal is outweighed by the happiness of great friendships? I don’t think you do. As for objective lists and knowledge I also think that it is only a relative truth that we know “little”. We know more than any other animal on the planet. There is an infinite amount of knowledge that a being could possess. Human beings place themselves somewhere on an infinite spectrum when is comes to the knowledge that they possess. It is only relatively “little” or relatively “a lot”. Benatar’s desire fulfillment argument I think can be rebutted in the same way as the objective lists argument. I am not even sure it is true that most of our desires remain unfulfilled. But my overall point about Benatar’s analysis about “the human predicament” as he calls it, is that the weighting system that he has set up is arbitrary. If you want to arrive at the conclusion that life is not worth living than you set up the weighting system in such a way so that the negative outweighs the positive or vice versa.

In that thought experiment, wouldn't it even be more devastating the massive extinction of not only all human life but most life in the planet (or possibly universe, like in "the last question" from Asimov) when that "magic" of immortality leads us to our own self-destruction in an exponentially increasing immortal over-population that keeps consuming ever decreasing resources? That, or we'd have to be forbidden from birthing new life, so we'd be replacing death with the denial of life for future generations. Is that ethical?

Either way, that "magic" would be a problem, because it would make it much easier for a group of humans to mess things up. You can't just impose control over death and birth like that, not everyone is gonna agree with you, neither "sterilization" nor "euthanization" would really be a "solution" if people are not accepting it willingly. A system seeking control over life and death in a calculated and artificial way governed by humans is likely to fail horribly.

I believe that the needs of humanity as a species outweigh the needs of any particular individual human, or even any one particular generation of humans from a specific point in time.

Our evolution is proof that the death/birth cycle is extremely beneficial for our development as a species. If life were immortal it's likely we wouldn't have ever gotten past the primordial pond.

A life being replaced with the next allows for a sustainable stream of life... yes, I will ultimately die, but in doing so I'll be making space for someone else to be born, more human lives would exist, more opportunities of experiencing and enjoying life, new eyes to explore and learn from new points of view. In my mind those things are the whole point of us existing as a species. If you are stuck with a fixed set of immortal people then you are essentially denying a lot of new humans from their opportunity to exist. I don't think that would be good for humanity.

We cannot all exist at the same time... if we figured out a way to do that then things might be different, but that's not the same question as the one being discussed here. We can't just hand-wave the problems caused by immortality and assume that they will be fixed somehow sometime, cos with that logic one could justify almost anything.

The Stranger left me in disbelief. Enough to attempt a poem to summarize it. I don’t write. Wasn’t sure how to feel about Flowers for Algernon by the end of the book. Guess I’ll be adding your books to my list

I understand that the UAP topic is not for eveyone, and I respect that, but to me this seems like an interesting question.

I lurk around r/UFOs and I follow some hardcore scientific YT channels that do not shy away from a scientific approach to the UAP phenomenon, despite this not being their main topic. As prime examples, I point out to "Dr. Brian Keating" and "Theories of Everything" channels. Again, we are talking about classically-trained and mainstream physicists, and not about supposed abductees or conspiracy theorists. So, the notion that UAPs have something to do with paranormal stuff or sci-fi is outdated.

Assuming the UAP phenomenon is not real, then it is a social/psychological phenomenon. As such, isn't it reasonable to devote philosophical attention to it? Along this line, the work of religious studies professor Diana W. Pasulka, "American Cosmic", is quite interesting and might provide material for philosophical questions.

On the other hand, if UAPs have anything to do with non-human intelligence (NHI), then I'm sure there would be immense and sudden philosophical interest. So, I ask: Isn't speculation justified before we have definitive proof of NHI? If not, what can we say about questions regarding God, consciousness, and other topics for which we either lack hard proof or a precise definition?

Judging by the large number of exoplanets in the habitable zone that have already been catalogued, the idea of a Universe with no NHI is becoming harder to support by invoking Occam's Razor to deal with this topic. So, while I welcome the sincere and pragmatic response of u/Canadianacorn, I believe that there might just be interesting (and why not important?) philosophical topics concerning NHI. An analogy with the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence would not be perfect, but it would show us that it is worth pursuing philosophical questions concerning something that is yet not known to be possible; in this case, conscious machines. Whether or not we will build such machines one day (I work in the area and I'm not convinced that we will), laying the groundwork for a possible positive answer seems warranted. (I'm not talking about ethics of self-driving cars, which are a near-future reality, but about sentient machines.)

I'm still skeptic about UFOs and the like, but in the interest of (i) asking the radical questions that philosophy is responsible for asking and (ii) laying the groundwork for a reality that might manifest itself very concretely in the near future, I believe the attention to NHI (and, by association, UAPs) is meritorious. Sure, it will not find wide acceptance in philosophical journals, but that's more a statement about the way the publication market works than about the topic itself.

It depends what you mean by evil. Many people have a different concept of evil. But I would say that yes it does work, for some people being evil works. But I would say that being evil is not an absolute thing just like being good all the time is not one either.

at least you will be able to manage the little money you will earn.

I'm having trouble reconciling Spinozist metaphysics (Natura Naturans and so on) with how Deleuze adopts and treats it in a seemingly prescriptive (albeit unspecific) way. How do we act freely if everything is determined by Nature?

Does anyone have any recommended reading on this topic? Or just any enlightening comments? Thank you.

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Interesting

(too deep for you) As you are reading this your mind is making associations in order to determine whether it's worth while to continue reading. Without infringing on your free will I invite you to explore a concept that is difficult for the imagination to grasp. Everything you have done has led you here. This is the x that is marked on the treasure map. All you have to do is dig where you stand. But you won't. You think it's hard work and way too deep to dig and probably not worth it. It's not calling to you and you're just passing through.

You might be interested in what some fans call "metaphysical satanism", which is a kind of gnostic pessimism developed in the works of the band Deathspell Omega. Think Georges Bataille throwing a party with Schopenhauer and Jon Notveid. They take Satan as figuring a cosmic principle of destruction, and then infuse that thought into every aspect of theology and politics. In a manner of speaking, evil is their conclusion, yet not in a monolithic, edgy teenager kind of way.

If you're interested, check out the lyrics to their two most recent albums, The Furnaces of Palingenesia and The Long Defeat.

If there were two guys on the moon and one of them killed the other with a rock would that be fucked up or what?

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Is there a philosophy of life where evil is the answer? Not that I want to follow lol, but this question came to me. There are many philosophies with an optimistic (or virtuous) conclusion to view life, and other more pessimistic views, but I've never seen one that being evil is the answer.

‘The Dude abides.’ -The Dude

“To abide something is to follow it, to obey the rules. But when The Dude says it, he doesn’t mean being a square or listening to the man. When you abide, you go with the flow. You accept life as it comes. And if there’s anything that The Dude will always do, it’s go with the flow.”

I think this is my first post in r/philosophy…

Anyhow, I’m just going to respond to the second example post. I’m currently The Stranger by Albert Camus and jumping in and out of Critique Of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant, and I plan on starting Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis after I finish one of the other books I’m reading.

My favorite philosopher is Angela Davis, at least at this point in time — granted, I’m a philosophy novice. I was fortunate enough to have an incredible Ethics teacher last term, and I fell in love with all of the readings we did, especially Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete (we only read a portion) and Kant’s Metaphysics Of Morals. I’m heavily considering adding a double major of philosophy to my economics major.

Anyone here appreciate Habermas? Is there an active subreddit or forum that discusses his work (possibly in a larger context)?

Read Felix Guattari’s “Schizoanalytic Cartographies.” But it definitely requires you to read Deleuze and Guattari’s “Anti-Oedipus” and “A Thousand Plateaus” first in order to even begin to comprehend it. Not for a casual, but D&G changed my life, and did really well to distill everyone from Freud/Lacan to Marx to Nietzsche, and finally reconcile them with ancient Eastern philosophy (not explicitly, just my realization)

To me a philosophical statement is any one about how someone should live life. It could be a statement about lifestyles, morals, good vs evil, priorities, choices, etc.

It's a broad definition, but I take philosophy very broadly.

I try, but I regularly fail.

For an entertaining read that looks at this question from the standpoint of mid-century philosphers, see "Metaphysical Animals"

Socrates: be curious and know that you don’t know.