My intention was to show why everything is not meaningless. The experience of suffering has a quality that is intrinsically bad for any subject that experiences it. This is an objective statement (pinch your skin with your fingernails and you will clearly recognize it). There is no intrinsic value in a value judgement reached through reasoning or "what your emotional state tells you", just like there isn't intrinsic value in a computer deciding what instruction to execute based on input.

Your judgments certainly have instrumental value, as they are a form of attachment which gives rise to positive or negative feelings when things go or don't go as you would prefer them to, and they guide your behavior, which causes feelings to (not) be experienced in you or other sentient beings.

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Would this go under philosophy, or just basic logic?

>Since the first good superintelligent AI knows that humans can create superintelligent AIs, it would have to take complete control of humanity to protect us from a bad superintelligent AI being created.

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Interesting, and I didn't think about that. The only issue I see is that it needs two animals. This could be a learned experience. Children can think they are helping people even when they are not. Then, associate that action with receiving help. My dogs are a great example of this. When they run around wanting to be a part of things and only create choas.

It feels good receiving help. To do good then is based on what is understood about good. So we reciprocate.

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Evolution provided us with moral values. Some moral values are selected by natural selection, like for example reciprocal altruism. Animals also have that.

You need tto give a definition of unique first, so we can answer.

thanks for the ted talk

Well, for starters you would be missing the fourth element needed to complete the analogy. Philosophy is to semantics as politics is to... what, exactly?

Do you support the benevolent world explorer full Thanos solution then? lol /s

"I will exterminate all life to save them from suffering." lol

On a serious note, suffering cannot be justified by philosophy, it can only be accepted or rejected based on individual circumstances, you can philosophize as much as you want, but when the stage 4 incurable bone cancer hits, many will choose the quick way out.

Its also true that with the right motivation and goals, people can endure a lot of suffering, just look at Nelson Mandela or any wartime soldiers, dissidents and civil rights advocates in authoritarian countries, they may not even see the result of their hard work and suffering, but they do it anyway because they believe it will benefit others after they are long gone.

I think the key takeaway here is possibility, when you have an incurable disease and just suffering to die, there is no possibility for anything good left, so you will prefer to end it. But to suffer for a noble goal that could be achieved in the future, even if you wont live to see it, is a power motivation to keep going, because its not impossible to win, unlike stage 4 incurable bone cancer. lol

Philosophy cannot justify suffering, but the possibility of circumstances can.

>Indeed, it doesn’t matter what causes our emotional state, but it would be a mistake to think that the emotional state has no value. Even in the case of meaninglessness, it’s the sense of meaninglessness—the state of despondency—that is intrinsically bad, not the conclusion itself.

If everything is meaningless then there is no such thing as things that are intrinsically "good" or "bad". These words express human value judgements which vary from person to person, not objective statements that say something about the real qualities of a thing. Within this paradigm you yourself propose, suffering simply is, in the same manner that a frog is simply a frog, not good nor bad. To value these things as either good or bad is to find some meaning in them.

But let's look past this issue for a moment. Your "argument" for suffering being intrinsically bad is, from what I can tell, simply that it is bad because our emotional states tell us it's bad. Let's assume this argument is valid. In that case, we must also grant that most people associate their own existence with a positive emotional state, often even when they're suffering. By the same logic which claims that suffering is intrinsically bad, this would lead us to conclude that existence is intrinsically good. If you disagree then you need to show why it is that we should listen to what our emotional states tell us about suffering, but ignore what they tell us about existence.

Butler exposes herself as anti-scientific, "For Butler, it makes no sense to talk about biological “sex” existing outside of its social meanings. If there is such a thing, we can’t encounter it." as most any Biologist will explain that humans are a sexually dimorphic species and they have and do encounter sex throughout the natural world.

Gender as a social construct and questioning of gender 'norms' is a worthwhile philosophical inquiry, but Butler's disbelief in Biology gives me great pause. Primatologist Frans de Waal, in his recent book "Different," believes gender differences are likely explained at the Biological (i.e. cellular) level. Peterson (who I know I will get hate for mentioning) but as a world leading clinician in personality, and highly cited, believes personality differences account for variance in gender expression, and that this is at least partially psycho-physiologically informed. Peterson does support the idea of Gender being somewhat abstracted from biological sex surprisingly enough.

EDIT: I see my point is debated thoroughly already in other threads. I do think Frans de Waal's thought on gender is interesting though and distinct from Butler. Butler goes too far with her abstractions in my opinion. You might as well say biological life is not a real thing, and wouldn't be if we didn't exist to categorize it, and we're merely performance art to be interpreted relativistically. There is no grounding in the material or scientific. I get that that is the the point, but then what's the point.

The problem is in opposing, as idealists usually do, determinism and indeterminism. In reality, there is no such thing as a free will that does not depend on anything, since the acts of men are determined by definite causes and it is a mistake to suggest that the natural course of things in the world is not subject to laws.

Regarding the Big Bang, the same thing happens, it could be said that it was not a random or fortuitous event, but was determined by the conditions and physical laws that existed at that time.

Now, to recognize the conditioning of all the phenomena of nature, it is also necessary to deny absolute metaphysical determinism, which affirms that the recognition of the existence of necessity leads to completely denying all chance in nature and in society and makes the active intervention of man is unnecessary, which, taken to its logical conclusion, becomes fatalism, belief in luck (destiny) or in quietism and preaching of the complete passivity of man. By recognizing the existence of necessity in nature and in history, chance is not denied, but is explained as a form of manifestation of objective causal connections. The same occurs with the acceptance of the relative freedom of human will, where the active, diligent participation of man in the course of events is required.

Well put. I liked "Meaning becomes tied to the fascinating structures of our existence", but it does send me a bit down the rabbit hole with what those structures are and how they are shared.

To explore the point, there is none. Finding a mechanism to explain what the hell we are doing here is in itself a cognition bias. The vast majority of science, literature, the arts, fuck- even our relationships, is to validate that there isn't a void, but that void is always present.

Optimistically, we seem to be the right combination of atoms and neurons to be capable of some pretty outlandish, seemingly pointless endeavors. There is no reason for jumpin' dirtbikes, blowin' shit up for fun, fuckin' when there's no possibility for babies, drinkin' hard liquor, and rally cars. My cultural nexus aside, entertainment in itself is a validator.

"Caring" "Living" and "Finding meaning" as far as I can see without become a nihilist, are secondary to hard work and the absurd.

Whenever people say they are free it is a subjective claim. They say it when they finish an exam or when they’re out of a toxic relationship or when they like the way their life is currently structured or better yet, when they’ve found internal peace. If I feel free, then I obviously don’t have to wait for some external objective change in order to be “really free” as you seem to be suggesting. What exactly is this “objective” definition of freedom that you’re referring to?

I'm salty that my recent post about bio-information integrity and aging was moderated as non-phosophical, that's pretty short-sighted in my opinion

Honestly? What do you think this contribute to?

1. Freedom does not exist
2. You talk about freedom as a feeling. And sure it can have value to talk about illusions
3. Also to talk about freedom as difference of associate or dissociate with something, is just to high jack the term freedman for something else. It implies freedom is always the feel you do what is true to yourself. Which is easily proven not to be the case.

This entire article rest on Redefinition of words and unstable premises. Do better

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Sorry for the delay. I will touch on this point. Judith butler does deny biological sex. "First, the idea that sex is a social construct, for Butler, boils down to the view that our sexed bodies are also performative and, so, they have “no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute [their] reality” (1999, 173). "

ONTOLOGICAL: relating to or based upon being or existence.

Put the meaning of ontological together with the idea that biological sex is a mere performance that, if taken away, would not exist, and you come to the conclusion that Butler believes sex is not real. To further emphasize my point, here is more from her work:

For Butler, sexed bodies never exist outside social meanings and how we understand gender shapes how we understand sex (1999, 139). Sexed bodies are not empty matter on which gender is constructed, and sex categories are not picked out on the basis of objective features of the world.

What does the above mean, you ask? Well, because Judith doesn't believe in any sort of objective truth relating to humanity, claiming biological sex is a mere social construct is her get-out-of-jail card. She is using a branch of postmodernism feminists which claims all human beings are blank slates, with no inate biological underpinnings.

My last point. Judith butler was born into this world from a woman. What ontological status can explain that? How do animals reproduce? Are they performing their biological sex as well?

Well, thanks for the debate. Since you defeated my other arguments previously, except the Judith biology denial, I humbly concede. Take care!

I think you're misunderstanding what non-locally real means

Haha! I feel your pain.

I apologize in advance for this sounding sarcastic, but I'm really not sure what it is you think Butler is talking about. Butler isn't talking about how physical traits make certain people more adapted to do certain tasks, so I'm not sure how you're addressing their arguments.

>It is very much the same as how someone with bigger muscle mass will end up lifting the heavy things and the short person will crawl into difficult to get into spaces. There is nothing of a performance in any sense of the word, merely people doing what they are naturally good at.

Note that Butler doesn't use the word performance, and this is important. "Performative" refers to an act which produces a series of effects. In a way, a person lifting a box is a performative act, but it is not necessarily a performance. And Butler doesn't argue that people are performing their gender, but that gender is constituted on performative acts that are essentially non-private.

>what Butler sees may be largely performative, but it is not entirely and solely performative, which is an incredibly difficult kind of case (the "all" structure of her argument, which I think may just be to seem controversial. She may not even truly believe it) to make for even the most modest of claims.

Note that Butler does in fact believe that this performative structure is pervasive, but is also arguing this on the basis of a particular cultural phenomenon, not an all-encompassing concept of gender. The point is that gender identity, as a classification, is essentially a public thing and so is something imposed on people, but not simply or solely imposed, as it is possible to break away from cultural conventions with whatever limited success.

I just want to emphasize two points, since I've been frequently recalling them in this thread and it seems clear that many commenters here are attributing positions to Butler that Butler does not in fact hold:

1. Butler is talking about identity, not some trivial form of classification that biologists (for example) construct in order to indifferently talk about certain things. Butler doesn't deny that bodies come with certain physical traits and properties and that these physical traits and properties effect how people are perceived, how they act, etc. What Butler is saying is that, insofar as this physical dimension contributes to an understanding of gender/sex identities, it is a social construction (= decided on in a public context, it does not mean that these classifications are simply fake). But identity is established socially, so that it moves into the everyday (into relations with family, coworkers, friends, strangers). Any analysis of gender that ignores the various ways that it is constituted is not a good analysis, and insofar as scientists are also people living in a society, they also have a pre-scientific understanding of gender which informs their inquiry.

2. Performativity is not performance. Butler is not saying that we go out every day and simply act out our gender as though it were a garb one wears or a role one plays on a stage. The term "performative" comes from linguistics and denotes a speech act which, instead of merely describing something, creates an effect. "Open the door" is a performative utterance. On this basis, Butler proposes that gender is a performative phenomenon since, as social system of classification, it is constituted and established in various acts (not only linguistic) which solidify a conceptual determination as if it were an inherent identity (e.g., there is a difference between saying "this person has manly features" and "this person is a man inherently, and expresses manly features due to that fact").