My main source of info on Inmendham's extreme pessimism is a two-part YouTube dialogue between him and someone I call "the psychologist," because I couldn't remember his name. This other person is Corey Anton and he's more of a philosopher than a psychologist. He works in communication theory, semiotics, and phenomenology, among some other areas.
Also, I define "antinatalism" (AN) early on in the video. Strictly speaking, AN is just the view that we shouldn't have children, because doing so is immoral, given that the suffering which is produced outweighs the pleasure. The essence of AN, though, is extreme pessimism on all fronts and this pessimism has some other implications. For example, it should be just as immoral to allow all of the other animal species to go on reproducing, since they suffer too. So as long as we could find some way to kill all life relatively painlessly, that immoral act would produce the superior good of ending all of the future suffering that would have otherwise happened. Thus, AN is really about the purposeful termination of all life, as I see it. That's what's at stake when we contemplate this most extreme kind of pessimism.
Lastly, at around the 32 minute mark the video got divided into two parts and I lost a half a second of audio. The full sentence that gets partially cut out there is "No one knows whether there's more pain than pleasure."
I've also added a way to register with this blog so you'll get emails alerting you to new posts. I've tested it out and it works. You get the email sometime on the day there's a new post, but not as soon as the post is up. The registration box is located just below the Facebook icons on the right and above Recent Comments.
Update: Inmendham has responded to my critique with a four-part video beginning with this one:
Oh, and here are the notes of mine that I drew from in preparing for this video discussion, which were too long to add below the video on YouTube:
********
Inmendham’s Argument for Antinatalism:
Intelligence vs nature:
Intelligence informs us of the truth, thanks to science and philosophy, but reason comes with emotion and motive (thus Inmendham gets angry and doesn’t present mere logical arguments or calculations)
Nature includes our primitive psychology and religious dogmas which are parts of the evolutionary game we’re in, the game being genetic programming, natural selection, and the meaninglessness and horror of biological processes
The Game: (metaphors = chess, maze, lottery, tic tac toe, gladiator): the inefficient, wasteful, murderous conditions of natural life are odious, because there’s no victory or end of the game that justifies all of the sacrifice and suffering; the game is Life itself, as it reduces to consumption, reproduction, and cannibalism; we’re expendable pawns, sacrificing ourselves for the next generation, from the genes’ point of view; we’re machines, not free people, therefore little chance of stopping the game, since our force is outmatched and we’re programmed to like consumption and reproduction and competition
Intelligence vs the game: we’re too good for the game, because we’ve figured it out and it’s fit only for animals, but we’re stuck in it because of our animal nature; still, it’s better to rant against it, from a rational viewpoint, than to rationalize the game with happy-talk
The Equation: suffering is inherently bad and it outweighs pleasure; sentience is the only value in the universe (humanism contra nihilism) and it’s equally valuable in all creatures (thus vegetarianism and more horror than we can handle), but we’re stuck in a horrifying place and forced to play degrading roles in the Game; for every victor, hundreds suffer and lose and then the game starts all over with reproduction
Antinatalist Conclusion: the price paid for life to continue is objectively too high; rationally—based on utilitarianism—we should cease playing the Game, because life is morally unjustifiable (the pain we inevitably cause outweighs all the pleasure): stop reproducing and even prevent the dummies from doing so since they play God by throwing another sentient being into the jaws of nature; (metaphor: if we had the Start button, to create Earth and all biological life on it, knowing the horrors that that would cause, would we press it?); utopian/heavenly alternative (with no suffering) reduces us to even less dignified consumption-machines (infantilism) and makes life meaningless; moreover, this alternative couldn’t likely be brought into being, because we’re overpowered by monstrous natural forces; no grace or dignity in making the best out of the game, since that just apologizes for the horror
**********
Ben Cain’s Response:
Evolutionary, Machiavellian vs Humanitarian, Modern Intelligence (philosophical/truth-oriented for its own sake, not pragmatic or egoistic): Inmendham assumes the latter, but that already shows that rebellion is possible and that rebellion is best explained by positing limited freedom/self-control
I agree that nature is mostly a horror, as is life, but the Game metaphor is flawed, since games are artifacts with prescriptive rules; given atheism, natural laws aren’t like social or conventional ones; this is also the problem with the Button thought experiment since the planet then would be an artifact, but it’s not one
Inmendham’s Consequentialism: he assumes the value of life depends on the result: since no good result, but just an endless cycle, therefore no justification of life; but no one knows how life will end; people have kids because they hope that natural processes are progressive (ex. transhuman singularity); Inmendham says that since no evidence of extraterrestrial life, we’ll probably fade out too, but this is dubious; maybe the aliens outgrew their technology or live in virtual worlds; so this assumption about the ultimate end of life isn’t rational; it’s just a speculation
Contra the Game: we’ve been playing a different game since we became self-aware; this is the game of culture, which speaks to our being more free than the other animals; we’re people rather than just animals, not just because we’re informed, thanks to science and philosophy, but because we can resist natural forces and do something relatively unnatural and anomalous, namely start a new game that’s regulated by prescriptive laws rather than natural ones; thus, we create cultures and the technosphere, precisely to escape from the horrors of wild nature: we’re civilized, not wild, although we often fail to live up to our potential, given our intelligence and self-control/autonomy
Inmendham’s Equation: when quantified, mental states are objectified and they lose their value; thus, the quantity of pains is irrelevant to their badness; also, suffering isn’t inherently bad, since some is deserved or it’s a means to an end, and suffering makes life meaningful, since otherwise we’d have the meaningless heaven/utopia; moreover, again the weighing of pleasure against pain is more speculation than calculation; no algorithm to arrive at the ratio; slippery slope from valuing sentient beings and their pleasures to valuing degrees of rebellion against horrible nature; thus, false dichotomy between participating in the game and ending the game by ending ourselves (AN), the third option being playing a new game
Contra Antinatalism (AN): I recommend a third option, one which differs from (1) playing the Game as sociopaths or as deluded enablers who can’t face the horror, and from (2) ending all life: the third option is to transcend the animalistic game, and that’s precisely what humans have been doing, bit by bit, for thousands of years; we’ve civilized ourselves, learned the truth, and decided not to live as animals; we’ve built houses and cities and nations, often regressing to insane and destructive animal behaviour, but nevertheless laying the foundations for more and more artificiality which transcends biology; moreover, religions have had ascetic movements, again for thousands of years, and ascetics have declined to play the Game without losing all respect for life (granted, ascetics would be pessimistic about nature, but Buddhists, for example, find bliss in contemplating the underlying unity of causes and effects, so that’s a third option which differs from AN’s ultra-pessimism); we follow social laws and moral codes, not just genetic programming; we do philosophy, because we’re free to care about the truth which is either irrelevant to our role in the evolutionary game or is even counterproductive to it (and is thus baffling without some freewill or autonomy from the game board)
Inmendham sees this when he gives credit to intelligence, since AN requires the utilitarian enlightenment, that is, knowledge of The Game and The Equation; but this puts him on a slippery slope to acknowledging the possibility of the Third Option, which is personhood, culture, mentality, artificiality, the technosphere, etc, which do make us godlike (if not necessarily wise enough to make all the suffering worthwhile in the end)
I disagree with both you and Inmendham, when it comes to the possibility for some better world or society. When you say "we" can choose not to play the game, but can play our own game, I think you are giving the average person far too much credit. The other day at a coffee shop I ran across a copy of Alvin Toflers Third Wave, it was amazing how many things he got right in 1980 about our current technology in regards to it's impact on socializing. What we are doing right here, is pretty amazing, people who only a few decades ago would have been very lonely, due to their philosophy/outlook etc. are able to create an online community. So while this has been an improvement in some ways, it has caused entirely new problems. I guess what I'm getting at, is that a large part of the meaning we get from our existence here comes from the fixing of problems. Each problem we "fix" creates a new set of problems for us to fix later and so on, to me this seems like an endless loop. This is the main point I agree with Inmendham on, we are really just cleaning up messes that we, and nature make over and over. Here's a book I would highly recommend to you.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.amazon.com/HOMO-99-100%25-NONSAPIENS-Introduction/dp/0988553635/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1391974570&sr=1-1&keywords=gerald+lorentz
Hmm, you threw me for a loop there, Anon. I thought you were going to say that most people aren't up to improving society, which is why it's problematic to speak of "we." I've taken this Straussian line often on my blog, distinguishing between esoteric and exoteric knowledge, positing the infantilization of the masses and so on. So I'm no slouch when it comes to pessimism. ;)
DeleteI agree that new technology often creates new problems even as it solves old ones. This is sort of Jacques Ellul's point. But I doubt this entails that all of culture is just a big mess with no progress at all in the sense of transcendence as opposed to linear and inexorable social improvement.
That books looks interesting, but I think I'd disagree with its kind of elitism. The author seems to think that those who become leaders tend to be the most intelligent, so that we have a meritocracy. (I'm basing that simply on the Amazon reviews, so this could be inaccurate.) If that's what the author thinks, I'd disagree. I think those who rise to the top tend to be sociopathic and thus intelligent mainly in manipulating people, but emotionally dead, dreadfully egoistic, and aesthetically boring. They'll be the typical Machiavellian folks scheming for advantages in exploiting and controlling other people. But what's their big picture? What are their true ideals? Will to power? Me me me consumerism and hedonism? Boring and animalistic! I'm interested in behaviour that distinguishes our species by making us more anomalous and unnatural (virtually supernatural), not more brutish and predictably aggressive and selfish. No, I'm inspired by spiritual elites, not by the power elites, and as everyone knows, nice guys finish last.
Still, I'm always up for some misanthropy!
I would say the author is aligned with you on most issues, except he is not hopeful for a better world. Not sure how you came to the conclusion you did, it's pretty backward from the authors view. This is one of the first things on the page, it gives a pretty good idea of what it's about. "A revised edition of the 1985 underground work by Gerald B. Lorentz (October 1915 - April 2007) featuring a new introduction and afterword. One of his last public announcements was about this reissue of his life's work. “History clearly proves that man is a plunderer, a killer, and a hypocrite.He cannot face the reality of his own despicable nature. Even when he kills he fancies that he performs a service to God or country. Capitalism satisfies all the predatory instincts natural to man in the economic purlieu; that is, satisfies his need to plunder, prey, defend; and to mask his predations with euphemisms and hypocorisms... Predation is normal and natural for the human species. Capitalists, actors, athletes, and rock musicians do not think of themselves as plunderers of the fruits of the labors of working people, nor do union workers think of themselves as plundering from nonunion workers. Plundering has always been perfectly natural and ethical for the human animal, only the rules governing predation change.” This new edition is published jointly by APOP Records and Underworld Amusements.
DeleteYeah, I read that quotation and it promises a fine intellectual rant, which is just about my favourite sort of nonfiction these days. I believe I really will check out that book. Hopefully, a blog article or a video will come out of it.
DeleteAs for the stuff on elitism, I was paraphrasing one of the Amazon reviews. Anyway, there's no need to agree with an author on everything. I love reading Lewis Mumford but I don't agree with him on everything. For that matter, Inmendham's analogies are thought-provoking but I don't agree with AN.
So thanks for the recommendation. I hadn't heard of that oddly-titled book before, but it seems right up my alley. Maybe Inmendham has mined it for material for his videos.
I discovered Gary's (Inmendham) videos a little over a year ago, and I could not believe how much he reminded me of Shopenhauer. His philosophy, grumpy nature, wild hair etc. I came to realize that Gary had actually read very little classic philosophy, I think people recommended Shopenhauer to him, and eventually read some of his work, and Nietzsche. Gary is what I've come to call a "natural philosopher." He became philosophical at a young age, due to experience, psychological makeup etc. I tend to think his world view is VERY similar to H.P. Lovecraft, who also had issues with anxiety/illness starting at a young age.
DeleteYeah, I see your distinction between academic training in philosophy and having a natural skepticism and interest in getting to the bottom of issues. What I'm most impressed with is his ability in dialogues to call to mind very quickly the relevant parts of his worldview when challenged, to see problems in his terms and to figure out the relevant implications of his ideas. Doing this at your leisure when writing is one thing, but doing it when you're on the spot in videos or when you're debating someone is something else. Then again, he's made hundreds of videos, so I suppose he can rattle off his ideas now as a matter of routine.
DeleteI think antinatalism isn't pessimistic enough, for it is based on the optimistic assumtion that there is a way out of all the suffering. The naive metaphor with the "Start button" shows this very clearly. As you said in your video, if all live ends at one time it will most likely continue. Meaning more suffering despite the antinatalistic "solution".
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that the only thing we can do is to rebel against the horror in the world/universe by making art and living a life worth living.
Btw: I really like your videos. They make your philosophy very accessible and relatively easy to understand.
Antinatalism doesn't say that the goal of not having children is to extinguish all life as a way out of all suffering. It is the position that it is immoral to bring new life into this world knowing what we know about its horrors. Making art and living an enjoyable life is in no way a rebellion against the horror of the world.
DeleteAs for the Cain's philosophy, all he is doing is going along with programming all organisms have to maximize the pleasure and minimize the pain in their lives. He has even ensured that he will be able to preserve his self-esteem and satisfy his ego needs by relabeling the process seeking out the pleasurable experiences you enjoy in your particular instance (making art, reading philosophy, ect...) as "rebellion." It is feel-good apologetics for omega males.
The crux of the antinatalist argument is that is immoral to throw new lives into the quagmire of existing in this world. Not conceiving a child is not the same as taking a life. If your philosophy is that the world is a box of horrors but that it is still moral to bring children into this world against their will so they can bear witness to it and, if lucky, try to rebel against it, then your philosophy is purely egoistic.
"It is the position that it is immoral to bring new life into this world knowing what we know about its horrors."
DeleteAnd why would that be immoral? Because it creates suffering. That's all that this is about. So you want to avoid suffering. But as I've said, you can't make a world without. There will always be pain, horror and violence in the world. Antinatalism doesn't change anything.
"...it is still moral to bring children into this world against their will..."
Against their will? How do you know what is against the will of an unborn being? This is nothing but really naive speculation.
The thing is this. You can cowardly flee from the terrible world and stop having babies OR you can stop being such a sissy and try to make the world a little bit better place. Help people, stop at least some of the suffering and yeah, create art. Tell me, which of these ways is more egoistic?
Anon, I agree that AN is strictly just the view that reproduction is bad. I meant to add an annotation to that effect on the video, but YouTube seems to have shut down its annotation capability for the moment.
DeleteAnyway, I believe we've talked about your objections regarding self-esteem, transcendence, etc in the YouTube thread for my video.
As for the main idea that it's wrong to throw innocent lives into the quagmire of nature, couldn't we look at it differently, by thinking of the next generation as a fresh army with which to fight back against nature's monstrosity? As I say in the video, if you grant the goodness of morality or of pleasure/happiness, you should be open to the possibility of more and more goodness in the world. It's like the camel that gets its nose under the tent; sooner or later, you're going to see the whole camel under the tent (or however that analogy goes).
I don't see how the egoism charge follows from your premises. Also, it's not quite right to say that parents bring children into the world "against their will," since children don't yet have a will. When they're infants, they're still largely unformed. In particular, their brains aren't yet up to full speed and they're only protohuman until they can speak and think for themselves. Of course, a zygote has no will and there's no pre-existing supernatural spirit. So that kind of immorality (coercion) is irrelevant.
Anyway, I don't see selfishness as being central to my philosophy. I talk about the aesthetic value of tragic rebellion against natural creations, in so far as we ironically use our natural powers of creativity to partially replace nature with less horrific, artificial worlds that are at our disposal. Whereas Nietzsche would say we should do this purely for our glory as power-seeking animals, I'm more interested in ascetic self-sacrifice for the sake of producing great art. So I honestly just don't think your egoism charge sticks in this case.
Dietl, thanks for the defense but let's try to keep this civil. I grant you, though, if there's ever a topic that ought to get our temper up, it's this whole issue of whether life is worth living at all.
DeleteI'm glad you're getting something out of my videos. I agree that explanations often wind up being clearer when you're forced to give them in a conversational style, which is what happens when you've got a camcorder in front of you. I've got plans to make lots more of these videos. They're fun and challenging.
Your demeanor is decidedly unranty, ironically. Good on you. Something about Benjamin Cain in here:
ReplyDeletehttp://devinlenda.blogspot.jp/2014/02/reason-as-accursed.html
Thanks! My blog title's reference to "rants" is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. At most, they're philosophical rants, and some of my articles are angrier than others. But I'm not really an angry person, so I suppose that comes out in my videos.
DeleteAre all narratives selfish? You say art needn't be selfish, because art needn't involve truth claims. What if we see all narratives and indeed all natural processes as having an artistic or aesthetic aspect, since they're creations of natural forces? Scientific models, too, have aesthetic and pragmatic sides to them. Still, there is such a thing as objective truth. But as I say in Life as Art (and in another article that will come out on my blog this week or next), objectivity has a lot in common with the aesthetic perspective.
Your arguments against anti-natailsm are better than most, but I still don't find them convincing. I believe they make much better anti-suicide arguments, in that context I agree with them. I do think it's better to rebel against life than to kill ones self, but still don't see a truly good reason to create a new life to do the same.
ReplyDeleteWell, there are lots of factors that determine whether someone wants to have a child. If we're talking strictly about the moral value of procreation, I think that once we see the value of existential rebellion, we can appreciate having more people on our team, to make the rebellion stronger. It's like adding members to the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars, to take on the undead Empire.
DeleteBut we wil never win! We will never win. Besides, why thrust the fight on them? Don't think of the unborn as a mass of astral bodies in gray space. Think of each individual dealing with their senseless life. Every person not born is a VICTORY against the tyranny of DNA. SOmetimes I hate my own flesh for its presumptuousness, for setting such an arbitrary, asinine and arduous agenda. I'm an african and I'm alwats arguing on the pro-modern side, despite our 'extended contact' with euros. Promoting gay tolerance, english education, freethinking etc. I'm just like why does it have to be me? And I feel the same way, looking at the history of existential angst, and having to be born in order to be an antinatalist. Quoting Schopenhauer or King Solomon is merely for elegance, my own observations are as on point. So why do I have to re-heat watertight arguments? ome one ppl, Write Once Read Many, and leave the earth silent after ye.
DeleteIs not having children a victory against nature? It's hard to see how there could be a victory if there's no one left to celebrate it.
DeleteI'm not sure how well antinatalism sits with the modern liberal agenda. If you don't believe in some agenda, I suppose you shouldn't fight for it. I'm trying to convince people to believe in something they think is sacred and to fight for that. You can have kids and bring them up to share those values.
Human transcendence is already a victory against natural selection, since the genes treat their hosts as slaves, whereas we've woken up and we prefer to do our own thing. This is the flaw of Inmendham's antinatalism: he denies that we've already transcended nature, due to our personhood, even as he vacillates on that point.
this was a pretty damn good sentence: "he denies we've already transcended nature." I would assume the reply would go something like: even if you do believe you are making a choice you are not really and are just experiencing the illusion of choice whilst enduring psychological enslavement.
DeleteThat might be his response, but my case against Inmendham's naturalism is that it's incoherent. You can't claim to be a determinist and a radical reductionist and then also claim the moral high ground. So while eating meat, for example, might cause immense suffering, there would be absolutely wrong with that, given just Inmendham's determinism and naturalism. To get wrongness, you need the existence of value in the world, not just, as David Hume said (more or less), the sheer physical facticity of pleasure and pain. And when you have value, you have transcendence of nature, that is, the emergence of properties such as all those that constitute the artificial (human-made) domain (called, roughly, culture) which testifies to our personhood as opposed to our animality.
DeleteI talk about the aesthetic value of tragic rebellion against natural creations, in so far as we ironically use our natural powers of creativity to partially replace nature with less horrific, artificial worlds that are at our disposal.
ReplyDeleteGiven that we are still, ultimately, "part of nature" even if an oddly and uniquely aware and self conscious part, is this possible? Is there such a thing as a human environment that is not part of nature? I stuggle with this.
I also challenge you to find very many examples of such a superior world. it seems to me that most human artifical worlds make things worse, at least for those not at the very top. Agriculture, for example, was a new artifical food producing world. But because of hierarchy, some anthropologists I have read (no links, sorry) claim that for the vast majority of people, life was worse as a landless peasant or serf than as a tribal hunter.
I agree it's somewhat confusing because there are two distinctions to keep in mind: natural vs supernatural, and natural vs artificial. I've talked about this with Scott Bakker and he agrees that while the former, metaphysical distinction implies that everything is natural in that sense, for the philosophical naturalist, that first distinction doesn't obviate the second, emergent one. Rebellion comes in with the second distinction.
Delete"Natural," then, means wild, undead, inhuman, indifferent, physical, etc, and our artificial microcosms are intelligently designed, purposeful, meaningful, normative, governed by rules and conventions rather than just brute natural laws, and they're anomalous and what I've been thinking of recently as virtually supernatural. I'm going to write an article on this distinction, which compares the supernatural with the artificial. Don't worry: this doesn't make room for miracles. But there's something strange and unnatural--in the second, nonmetaphysical sense--going on with artificiality. I'm still thinking about this, though...
I agree that artificiality isn't utopian. I've been reading Lewis Mumford's Myth of the Machine, so I appreciate how technology often makes things worse. As I think I say in this or the last video, our cultural progress is still animalistic so there's no supernatural guarantee here. I'm interested more in transcendence than in normative progress. I'm talking about the autonomy to create new worlds, not necessarily the ability to create better ones. The normative judgments would be largely subjective anyway, and for me they'd be aesthetic.
{I'm talking about the autonomy to create new worlds, not necessarily the ability to create better ones. The normative judgments would be largely subjective anyway, and for me they'd be aesthetic.}
ReplyDeleteAh...but then I look at the wild natural world of, say Big Sur, and compare it to the artifical world of the typical American commercial strip, and I find the aesthetic judgment not hard to make!
LOL. I might be kidding. I am not, actually sure. Still...thought provoking stuff.
Have you read my article, Life as Art? I agree that natural creations are far more sublime than anything we design or build. Indeed, many mass entertainments infantilize us, as I recently argued on Scott Bakker's blog. So not everything we make is great, artistically speaking. Some of our creations are technically artificial but they're also extensions of our animalistic past and so they're unoriginal in that they don't individuate us as a species. Our better creations rebel against nature in specific ways, rather than just building on top of natural processes.
DeleteI think your conclusion about anti-natalism leading by extension, to the killing of people to prevent future suffering is incorrect. I am in favor of euthanasia for people who choose, I certainly would not be in favor of ending an existing life involuntarily. I was raised for the most part by a single mother, her and my father got divorced when I was about 3, she was then re-married and divorced again within a few years. She chose not to have anymore children, because life for her and myself was not off to a great start, and the probability of giving another child a quality life was low. According to your conclusion, my mother not only should have stopped having children, she should have painlessly killed me to prevent my future suffering.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, these aren't my contentions since I'm not an antinatalist. But yes, you're saying that the antinatalist can appeal to freedom as her principle to distinguish not having kids from outright killing people to prevent future generations. And indeed, that principle would work, but remember that Inmendham says he's in favour of forcing antinatalism on others, because they're dumb sheep who don't deserve their freedom and who are wrecking the planet with their irresponsible choices.
DeleteSo the antinatalist's problem is that her respect for freewill may be outweighed by her hatred of suffering. She'll then have to sacrifice that principle to achieve the greater good of an end to suffering. The question, then, is whether freewill matters as much as the humongous extent of the suffering we cause.
Here is a quote directly from your YT video, text top left of screen. "As I argue on my blog, it's hard to defend this view without also implying that all living things should be killed, to prevent the future suffering they would otherwise have to endure." Inmendham is not the only anti-natalist, and hardly the first to have the idea. As you are well aware, the idea is quite old and the overwhelming majority of people with the philosophy were not in favor of killing anyone. In fact, anti-natalists have been the ones on the receiving end of that historically, most notably the Cathars being slaughtered by the Catholics.
ReplyDeleteSorry, I meant this as a reply to you last comment.
DeleteI love gary. His vids took a while to grow on me because I am a text person, but they are awesome, he is so cogent! Life is a waste of time, energy, organic matter, and finer feelings. I like to think of DNA as a colonialist, and matter as preliterate ethnic tribes. The main differnece is that DNA, while made of matter, 'stores information' and elemental dust can't do that. Just like the natives, it lives in the eternal present, reactively, whereas the conquistadors can select a range of responses from their cultural heritage, or splice that heritage to create something new etc. So over billions of years, DNA adds up in complexity and control protocols, while matter knows but of the day, and is totally passive and helpless to be shanghaied into something what doesn't benefit it. The strange thing is it doen't benefit DNA, as DNA keeps its material mechanicity like the rest of the universe. This doesn't change the power relationship, it just means that out of the matter that enabled dna that enabled consciousness, the last, most removed (I think you once described it as somewhat ghostly) and abstracted one of these is all that actually...matters. Speaking of matter, isn't matter the matter with life? Maybe I have been imagining things but I think the quality of antinatalist discussion is improving on the net. I want to take the conversation to the next level: How do we gracefully retire the Last Generation, and how do we ensure life is sterilised, earth is inhospitablilised (after a fashion), and sentience never evolves? Plants and bacteria are just sustained chemistry experiments, but they aaaalways have that surplus to motivate competition and complexity in their predators. We have to zoom out and roll up our sleeves, even tho its more likely we'll just stay invested in a paradoxic paradigm, and one not of our choosing.
ReplyDeleteI like the creativity Inmendham displays in his bullying, but there's much that I don't like about his videos, as I explained in my debate with him. I don't think he spends much time trying to understand the criticisms that have been leveled against him. He's far too sure of himself, considering the radicalism of his philosophy.
DeleteBy the way, I note that what you say at the end here supports my slippery slope argument against antinatalism, since you put the point in terms of a need not just to end our species, but to end all life and to prevent the re-emergence of sentience. Sorry, but I could very easily imagine a comic book villain professing that same wish. That sort of antinatalism is consistent with evil megalomania. I'm not saying so-called antinatalists are evil, but I am saying they should be very cautious rather than arrogant, like Inmendham, since their conclusions are so radical.
But does an idea being radical necessarily make discredit it's validity? Sure, you could see a comic book villain taking up Inmendham's ideology, but you could also see a comic book villain taking up infinite varieties of goals and silliness, such as deifying nature as an "Undead God" and valuing "aesthetic rebellion" and "self-creation" above all else. Not to say, either you or him are wrong, but that's just my two cents. I'm currently struggling with concept of antinatalism myself at the moment. I don't necessarily think the phasing out of human and/or all life should be forced upon people, but why should shy away from its implications just because it doesn't apply to our sensibilities? I just don't see why it's any more foolish than your idea of dealing with our existential situation, but it comes down to personal preference I suppose. I'm starting to think that all values are aesthetic in the end. Sure, you could say that some seem more "existentially appealing" than others, but what does that even mean in the grand scheme of things?
DeleteAs an afterthought to my previous response, what are we supposed to tell the children of the future about life if we presuppose your value system? How do we raise them? Or is reproduction just suppose to be admired for its tragic irony to be left to "lower" alphas and betas, while the omegas use it as artistic fodder and inspiration?
DeleteSorry to continue yet again, but another thought popped into my mind as well, perhaps I ought to sit on these responses awhile before posting them. Anyway, you seem to dismiss the "compassionate" antinatalist's argument by citing the fact that the majority people continue to go on living despite what the antinatalist deems the "horror" of life, yet in other articles you seem to dissuade against the herd mentality's illusory happiness and counter it with yet just another illusory aesthetic concoction of your own. So which is it?
DeleteI'll be writing again on antinatalism soon (likely the article after my next big one), so I invite you to read that to help clarify the issues. I agree we shouldn't dismiss antinatalism just because it's unpleasant. The issue comes down to utilitarianism, if we're talking about compassionate antinatalism, and I reject utilitarianism (see my responses to Sam Harris and Richard Carrier, linked below). I reject happiness as the ultimate goal, so I just think compassionate antinatalism is wrongheaded.
DeleteI also suspect that moral values should be interpreted as aesthetic ones. The stereotype then says that this means everything is a matter of taste, but I think aesthetic values can be pinned to pantheism, which falls out of philosophical naturalism. So aesthetic values aren't so arbitrary.
Your question of what we should tell future generations from the standpoint of my value system is an excellent one. That's just the kind of issue I mean to take up in my upcoming article on antinatalism. I won't be doing a point-by-point response to Benatar's new book, but I'll be cutting to the chase: what should an existentialist/cosmicist say to the antinatalist, at the end of the day? Why should human sentience continue in spite of all the suffering?
I don't see a contradiction between arguing against both suicide and the delusions of the human herd. Actually, my attitude towards the unenlightened is complicated. Leo Strauss would say the herd is needed to support the enlightened minority, and I'd add that that support is given not just materially (because living alone in the wilderness is hard), but as a form of unintended comedy which can lighten the intellectual's load. Trumpism is an excellent example. Liberals moan and groan about Trump and his followers, but I wonder whether a wise person would use that farce to amuse himself, to counteract the grimness of the enlightened, cosmicist perspective. Staying alive while enlightened is a balancing act.
Anyway, I don't see a contradiction there, because the enlightened and the unenlightened have different reasons for rejecting suicide, and the former ones will be more respectable than the latter. Indeed, the enlightened will to live is godlike, whereas the vulgar will to live is bestial (existentially/spiritually subhuman, albeit not biologically so). So the enlightened, cosmicist rejection of suicide is something of a miracle in that it's thoroughly anti-natural.
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2014/02/answer-to-sam-harriss-moral-landscape.html
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2012/03/sam-harris-science-of-morality-case.html
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2016/03/against-richard-carriers-case-for.html
Art makes life worth living? How? Maybe if *I* am the artist, so that it allows me to kill time. But only if I'm really a genius, and even then --- see van Gogh.
ReplyDeleteNo, if God does not exist, suicide is the only rational choice. Hanged myself aged 23 and obviously survived. Now I'm a Christian and *endure* this existence, like Reinhold Schneider (who survived a suicide attempt at age 18); Kierkegaard prayed he may die, Pascal suffered from melancholia etc. There is no reason not to legalize suicide iff it could be shown that God does not exist: but I hardly see how such a "proof" would be feasible, given that I came to have faith not by believing in a syllogism, but via repentance.
Stll, as angry Gary is, in his video "update... moving" he was correct that many don't even know what it means to have to live with depression and an anxiety disorder. Even now as a Christian, while my anxiety and suffering from meaninglessness has improved, I still feel like an ugly loser (which I am) who does not fit in and belong here. I'm still ready to die -- but this time not through my own hands.
I agree that if there’s no God or benevolent plan to the universe, we’re in an existential predicament and much of life is absurd. Theism doesn’t eliminate that absurdity, though, since the prospect of an eternal person’s being existentially primary is mind-blowing in its preposterousness. If there’s a moral order to the universe that encompasses both human marriages and black holes and dark matter, we can have no guarantee we haven’t run afoul of that order, since who could understand the schizophrenic will of such a Creator? If God’s mysterious, as he obviously would have to be, the theist has to live with anxiety in suspecting that she might wind up in hell. Even those who end up in heaven should have to worry about the torture that would simultaneously be happening in hell. Again, there’s plenty of absurdity in the monotheistic scenario.
DeleteThe way out of this conundrum is to recognize that we’re not purely rational creatures. Perhaps if we turned off the emotional and instinctive parts of our brain and calculated the expected pleasure-pain ratios in life, in something like Inmendham’s manner, we might conclude that suicide is the rational choice. But the normal human brain doesn’t work like that. We’re not robots, so there’s nothing wrong with having a nonrational basis for living. That’s not to say all emotional or mythic answers are equal, but the criteria we should use in judging an answer to the question of life’s purpose or of whether life is worth living at all aren’t supplied by science. That’s where Inmendham is kidding himself. (His worldview is incoherent in numerous ways, as I showed. I’m sure he’s familiar with Hume’s point that reason is the slave to the passions, but then he holds up his utilitarian calculations of pleasures and pains like they’re worth a damn, like our nonrational side should care about such (bogus) quantification. When a healthy person is fighting for her life, the prospect of even a miniscule pleasure can carry her through. Tallying up experiences and pretending they can be objectified and weighed has nothing to do it.)
I’m sorry to hear you’ve struggled with suicide and still aren’t exactly at home in the world. I’m not either, and my philosophical writing is meant to work out a way of coming to terms with life’s absurdity. For example, it’s absurd that we who think too much should have to suffer the most, whereas those who are blissfully ignorant of spiritual or existential matters should be the most content. Sure, everyone suffers in their own way, but anxiety, the pervasive disgust, horror or unease that infects all experience is reserved for those who are spiritually or philosophically sensitive, and that’s a minority of intellectual elites as far as I can tell.
In fact, I hoped my writings would help “omegas” come to terms with their outsider status. Way back in 2012, in “Revenge of the Omega Men,” I identified the spiritual/existential masters with the worldly losers, as Jesus did, and I explored the implications for secular humanism. Personally, my love of knowledge and art prevents me from thinking seriously about suicide. I’m glad you’ve found a nonrational foundation that works for you. We each have one and we’re kidding ourselves if we pretend to be robots that follow logic and evidence at every level of our being. The challenge remains, though, to pick the most inspiring myths, religions, or worldviews and to leave aside those that are obsolete or otherwise embarrassing. In short, we need to keep in mind ethical and aesthetic considerations in evaluating our deepest beliefs.
It's contradictory how Inmendham constantly berates both moral and existential nihilism but at the same time notes how pointless and uncaring the universe is. I fail to understand why we "ought" to do anything if everything according to him is meaningless.
ReplyDeleteAnother point is that aside from the glaring issue with Hume's Razor, I find Efilists and antinatalists who aren't all that philosophically minded fail to address the problem of the Open Question Argument. They can't really explain that pleasure and suffering are analytically equivalent to goodness and badness. Many just throw their hands up and say, "oh well, its self evident." As a relativist who's bordering on accepting Mackie's moral error theory, this is a sufficient enough reason why I reject antinatalism or any other utilitarian argument that reduces our existence to pain and pleasure. Propagate the species for whatever reasons you have, or maybe don't. You won't get punished. We are all without meaning.
Yeah, incoherence and the naturalistic and ad hominem fallacies are perhaps the top three problems with Inmendham's worldview.
DeleteI do argue for an aesthetic reconstruction of morality which might interest you, if you haven't read it:
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2013/11/life-as-art-morality-and-natures.html
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2017/09/why-all-we-do-is-art-for-sages.html
And see the other articles (such as "Atheistic Morality Despite Life’s Absurdity") under the Ethics heading in my Map of the Articles:
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.com/2013/02/map-of-rants.html
I think one of the biggest issues with Gary's philosophy is that his hard determinism as you've said, doesn't commit him to making moral utilitarian judgements. But what would you say to someone who accepts Gary's diagnosis of life but is a compatibilist? Do you think that makes his position any more tenable?
ReplyDeleteIt depends what you mean by his diagnosis, but if you just mean pessimistic naturalism plus compatibilism, that would be close to my view.
DeleteGary is at times more cynical than me, but it's hard to gauge that because what I saw of his philosophy (some years ago) was incoherent. On the one hand, he says everything is animalistic and savage, but on the other he says that everyone's precious, and that antinatalism and utilitarian morality are perfectly rational. If something can be perfectly rational, it's not the case that everything is savage and barbaric.
Interesting reply. When I meant diagnosis, I sort of meant the tenability of compatibilist negative utilitarian reductionism. That thinking seems awfully unintuitive, but every pessimistic antinatalist tends to assert that our optimism bias deceives us to these (according to them) are better ideas then most think. I suppose this would make an entirely different conversation separate from whatever Inmendham spews, but I think the "world exploder" or "red button" thought experiments he goes on about would be interesting discussions
DeleteAntinatalists seem to be zealots when it comes to their pet moral theory. There are three main approaches to secular morality: deontology, consequentialism, and virtue theory. They conflict with each other in certain ways, but that’s especially so when we become purists rather than pragmatists about these theories. It makes more sense to say that each theory captures different aspects of morality or contexts in which moral questions arise. There are certain cases in which it’s obvious that what we should be doing is maximizing pleasure or happiness. But the trouble comes when we get lazy and start thinking that that’s all there is to morality. So philosophers raise counterexamples and the debate goes on and on.
DeleteAntinatalists who are also determinists can take morality to be illusory at best. Obviously, there’s little sense in asking what a machine with no self-control should be doing. A compatibilist at least wouldn’t have this extra absurdity to deal with. As for Gary, he aims to reduce morality to a simple “equation” about pleasure and pain, to make his philosophy sound more logical and scientific. He just skips over the question of whether we should always be seeking pleasure or happiness, or rather he berates anyone for bringing up that philosophical question, as though hedonism were self-evident. Sam Harris is guilty of the same laziness or dismissive scientism.
I’ve been thinking, but how can we properly dispute Inmendham if he’s right in the sense that there’s no spectral prison where unborn souls are deprived of happiness? Isn’t it like creating a being with needs that didn’t have to occur in the first place? Why create these needs? If there’s no source of value in the universe other then what sentient life forms feel in terms of pleasure and pain, isn’t the only game in town worth playing the one where we reduce suffering? You seem to accept nature as an unintelligent designer with no grand purpose, so isn’t Inmendham right that we should end the charade if human life consists of satisfying needs that didn’t have to be made?
ReplyDeleteWe create generations of the unborn together with their needs, many of which will not be met, and thus we guarantee the suffering of many of those descendants because we're not purely rational beings. Nor is it clear that reason ought to dictate all our choices. Reason alone doesn't prove what our values should be. Just because we feel pleasure and pain doesn't mean all our values should be based on those sensations, contrary to Inmendham's utilitarianism.
DeleteYou're forgetting about aesthetic values which needn't reduce to pleasure and pain. Some pains are good if they have aesthetic or existential merit. Perhaps we ought to suffer as people, or as relatively enlightened animals, because we're able to appreciate the world's absurdity. Perhaps we should keep our species going to perpetuate a tragic existential rebellion, not because this will ultimately produce more pleasure than pain, but because thinking in such terms is ignoble whereas a noble kind of suffering is right in a higher sense, in one that requires philosophical or religious enlightenment to appreciate.