This is a response to Mrs Neutron’s Garage‘s (of this comment thread‘s fame) post ANTINATALISM. I comment point-by-point on what I think are the relevant points in that post.
Somehow, in the light of my life experience, (because it’s the only experience I can experience), I have to try to understand, or, put myself in a mental place where I wish I were never born. Beyond that I must wish I never had children or grandchildren. I must, if I am to make any serious attempt to see the world through “Antinatalist” eyes, somehow, see life as not worth living. The curious part of all this is the fact that, for myself and I would say the overwhelming majority of other humans is… I can’t.
You do not need to do any of this. You simply need to realize that those who are never born have no need for the good things in life. There is no cost to pulling life’s plug. On the other hand, there is a cost to not pulling the plug.
Culture manufactures the stupidity we desperately need and crave to function in this world. It is, for lack of a better way of putting it “a skill” that sentient beings had to develop. It is the “invention” of a creature in need of something to absorb the chaos and overwhelming mystery of the universe it finds itself imprisoned within.
Indeed, sentient life has needs, and when these needs are frustrated, it suffers. Creating a sentient being entails creating these needs, which can never be a good thing.
We should by NO means be shocked that a very small percentage of the human population find themselves bereft of that skill.
Whatever. I am not bereft of this skill, nor is Jim Crawford, nor are most people who frequent his blog. I defy you to point out one “antinatalist” who is bereft of this.
It would be shocking, I submit, were this not the case. What kind of a universe would it be after all if it did not, in fact, contain everything?
If you define “everything” to mean “everything contained by the universe”, it would be a strange universe indeed. What is the point of this sophistry?
The ability that comes with sentience to see and predict the future seems, in Antinatalists, to be wholly untempered with the prerequisite cognitive skill to construct, psychologically, an invented reality that both cushions the horror of an inevitable and painful extinction and demands, for the overwhelmingly majority of sentient beings, that life go on. In short, they are victims of imagination failure.
Either that, or they have not allowed this invented reality to cloud their evaluation of life. I for one actively try to see the actual reality, despite being distracted by the invented reality that my subconscious keeps creating. Maybe you should stop telling yourself stories to glorify insanity and try the same instead.
The question I think that should interest us is not why Antinatalists exist, but, why they are not in the majority? Life is painful and brutal and short and each and every thing we come to love must die, or end in rot or destruction. The question… “Why bother if pain and loss are the inevitable outcome?”… must, it seems to me, be answered with the obvious… “No point really.”
*narrows eyes*
Proceed.
That is what I find so curious. In all but a very small minority of sentient beings the question isn’t answered that way at all. Far from it! Instead, since the first sentient being walked the earth the opposite has been the case. Life, with all the horror of death and pain has been not only preserved and continued, but championed above all else. Why should this be?
Because those who did not have a cushion to derail their judgment, went extinct. Yes, it really is as simple as that. Nature selected in favor of (some level of) detachment from reality.
The answer, I would suggest, is obvious. Imagination trumps pain.
It does not. Buddhist monks dedicate their lives to overcoming suffering. Yet you claim that this sought-after state of mind is built into all sentient organisms, save for the few of us who see life for what it is. If I ever do end up skinning you alive, I’ll ask you again whether imagination trumps pain. I think you will find that the goggles do nothing.
Could it be that the answer, the goal or the purpose, if evolution can be said to have a goal or purpose, was NOT sentience, but its necessary twin? Could the universe have been after wonder and conjecture and imagination using sentience, with all it’s inherent pain and horror, as a mere vehicle, a means to an end? Is that why we cherish art? Is that why we have music?
Even if this were somehow the intent of the universe, what makes you think we should go along with it?
Is that why those who see the price to be paid by life in matter as too high are and must be continually removed from the gene pool?
Probably not. There is no evidence that the universe is after anything. Sentience emerged indeliberately. If pessimists are and must be continually removed from the gene pool, that is just another unfortunate indeliberate side-effect.
Nothing of positive value would be lost if this game were to end. Yet you want this at best worthless game to continue, despite the apparent fact that it is worse than worthless because some if not all players are known to suffer under it.
2011-03-29 at 19:24:31 |
It should be understood that I have no objection what so ever to you viewing or constructing a reality of your choosing. It’s none of my business, really. I plead guilty to finding yours curious enough to have inspired my interest.
…But when you write… ["Because those who did not have a cushion to derail their judgment, went extinct. Yes, it really is as simple as that. Nature selected in favor of (some level of) detachment from reality."] You are speaking, of course, only of objective reality defined by your particular set of tools. You are CERTAINLY not speaking of mine, or, I would venture to say, the majority of sentient life on this experimental ball of dirt & rocks.
Then again, perhaps, it isn’t your judgement that got “derailed”. Perhaps, as is my hypothesis, you just lacked the imagination to lay competent track.
You write in closing… ["Nothing of positive value would be lost if this game were to end. Yet you want this at best worthless game to continue, despite the apparent fact that it is worse than worthless because some if not all players are known to suffer under it."...]
What a universe! …”despite the apparent fact that it is worse than worthless”…
Well, I’m sorry that you feel that way, but, I’m afraid there is nothing I can do.
All the best anyway (in spite of the fact that it will do “you” absolutely no good)
Mrs. N
2011-03-30 at 17:20:26 |
Whether or not everything is subjective is an objective property of the universe. Clearly, not everything is subjective.
2011-03-29 at 20:49:23 |
This is priceless. Very good piece.
2011-03-29 at 21:34:07 |
I’d like to take a stab at this quickly. Good post, but I have some ideas to contribute:
“The answer, I would suggest, is obvious. Imagination trumps pain.”
When people say things like this, I get the impression that they haven’t really suffered before. I could be wrong, but I somehow doubt that they’ve ever passed a kidney stone without pain relief, suffered from bone cancer, had waves of panic attacks, endured a medieval torture device, or suffered from trigeminal neuralgia (look it up if you don’t know what it is; it’s horrendous).
Pain is a neurological signal that fires across synapses on its way from one neuron to another; it utilizes nocireciptors to this end. Basically, it’s a signal in the truest sense of the word: it relays information relevant to the whole of the organism in chunks of chemicals analogous to digital packets.
Sometimes, the organism’s equivalent to load balancing becomes impossible due to an overload of pain signals, meaning that, acting as a kind of “server,” the organism has no choice but to devote all of its memory and processing power to the task of handling the pain. This causes the system to “lock up”; if you’ve ever undergone any sufficiently painful experience, you’ll know that this essentially means that you’re more or less physically incapable of concentrating on anything other than how horrible you feel. Most pain comes in intermittent “waves,” but occasionally, when things get really overloaded, the pain is continuous and uninterrupted. This can go on for hours in the case of things like kidney stones, et al., and can very easily cause people to cry out for mercy killing in cases like cancer, et al.
In especially impoverished regions of the world where water is scarce, kidney calcifications are especially prominent. For anyone who may fear a life of kidney stone after kidney stone, malaria, AIDS, starvation, dehydration, or daily diarrhea and horrific stomach cramps for hours on end, I somehow doubt that, in the actual moments where the pain occurs, imagination triumphs.
This may not cause anyone in particular to reevaluate the quality of his life, but consider that, at least in the United States where people aren’t constantly distracted by horrific circumstances (upwards of ten percent of the world is starving to death, and over half of it is living off of less than two dollars a day), suicide is the sixth leading cause of death, and within twenty years, depression will be the second leading cause of disability.
As for the other sentient creatures, they don’t want to live — they have no choice. No non-human organism has ever been interested in anything other than consuming parts for the purpose of reproducing copies of itself; only humans live to “thrive,” or for some other similarly pretentious notion. Animals don’t kill themselves not because they love life, but because they don’t even know what death is, so suicide is not even a function of their genetic wiring. In short, when an organism thinks, “I need to end this horrible suffering immediately,” it will do whatever it can to this end, and for humans, this is sometimes suicide. Animals do not struggle to “survive” — they struggle to run from things which they find unpleasant, and these things coincidentally can cause death in some cases. The correlation obviously has an evolutionary advantage, but survival and avoiding negative sensation ARE separable, and far from synonymous. Obviously, though, if an organism ever found out that it could kill itself to end its suffering, and found this to be a palatable solution, it wouldn’t be here right now. What this means is that the “agenda” of life as a concept does not have to be the same as the agenda of an individual organism. Given this premise, is there any reason to proclaim a hypothetically suicidal deer’s agenda to be of less validity than the agenda of the universe?
As Tim noted, most living things which sufficiently hate their circumstance go extinct. Considering that over 99% of all species to have ever lived have gone extinct, I’d say that, if you were to put horrific lives that didn’t lead to reproduction on one side of the scale, and mediocre to excellent lives on the other, the horrific side would be pulling all the weight; most organisms do NOT reproduce. Surely, the five out of every six baby birds who fall off cliffs, starve to death, or get pecked to death by their own mothers before their first year is over aren’t part of your conception of “the majority of sentient life.”
“Could it be that the answer, the goal or the purpose, if evolution can be said to have a goal or purpose, was NOT sentience, but its necessary twin? Could the universe have been after wonder and conjecture and imagination using sentience, with all it’s inherent pain and horror, as a mere vehicle, a means to an end? Is that why we cherish art? Is that why we have music?”
The universe possesses no meta-desire to desire things; in short, there is no need for need. If there were — and if the universe had a will beyond basic physical cause-and-effect — then there would be 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cute puppies or people with Facebook pages instead of 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars.
“Is that why those who see the price to be paid by life in matter as too high are and must be continually removed from the gene pool?”
Analogy: If I have a reason to believe that the price of gas is too high, and I provide an argument for this, does that mean that I should be removed from the economy? Because the economic game seems fixed in favor of people better off than myself, does that mean that I should be disallowed from buying and selling goods and services?
2011-03-29 at 22:47:50 |
Hi LS…. I’m afraid you have completely misunderstood the “imagination trumps pain” bit. I was speaking metaphorically. My point was, since antinatalism is SUCH a minority position people who “imagine” and conclude, based upon their own REAL LIFE experience, that life IS more than worth living, in spite of any and all drawbacks, clearly outnumber those people that don’t AND make up the gene pool that survives. My hypothesis is that this is the result of a higher order of imagination being selected for.
With regard to pain… it is highly subjective. A skilled hypnotist can, if put together with a highly dissociatable person passing a kidney stone, giving birth or having root canal, use what is essentially the patients imagination to, in some cases, totally remove all discomfort. So, who is to say how much of a roll imagination plays in over all satisfaction with life let alone perception of what is painful?
We have recently learned that the EXACT same brain centers light up on an FMRI when a subject is exposed to physical pain OR a photograph of a loved one who has recently broken up with them. So…. perhaps antinatalists have an increased capacity to feel pain or a decreased capacity to withstand it…?
But, I’m sticking with the decreased ability to imagine.
2011-03-29 at 23:16:37 |
“My hypothesis is that this is the result of a higher order of imagination being selected for.”
And I disagreed above, based on the fact that there’s a profound difference between continuous pain (where signals might come one after another without any “good” signals in between, sometimes for hours on end) and intermittent pain (the kind of pain that most people are familiar with). Having a vivid imagination is meaningless when your brain is in a state wholly incapable of imagining anything at all as a result of being in so much pain; for this reason, I suspect that people who love life and think it’s worth perpetuating are that way not because of some genetic trait by itself, but ALSO because their life experiences, which happen to be more positive than the average (or the majority), do not include continuous, intense pain or fear. This leads to a faulty argument from personal experience in favor of an underestimation of how bad life can get.
Most beliefs and predilections are the consequence of conditioning, which is why, for example, suicide is far higher in Japan and the United States than in, say, Somalia or Vietnam. Do you honestly think it’s because the Vietnamese are so much more imaginative than — and genetically distinct from — the Japanese?
Incidentally, “imagination” is itself greatly shaped by the environment. For example, people who are abused as children often turn out less imaginative than their counterparts, or less interested in socializing, playing, creating games, etc. Basically, the more of the bad parts of life that you’re exposed to, the worse your imagination will be.
“So, who is to say how much of a roll imagination plays in over all satisfaction with life let alone perception of what is painful?”
I think it plays a huge role. I, for example, am excellent at imagining countless horrific scenarios that I’d never want to participate in, even though my own life isn’t all that bad. For most people, though, imagination isn’t nearly that pronounced, and since the average person relies so heavily on his own experiences (which, in Western society, don’t start out as badly as they do in the majority of the world), he never becomes an “antinatalist.” Basically, since his imagination sucks, and since his life is good, he keeps “thinking positively.” It’s the people who can imagine what something other than their own lives is like who are generally more empathetic and, in extreme cases, attracted to the idea that life is a huge gamble.
“So…. perhaps antinatalists have an increased capacity to feel pain or a decreased capacity to withstand it…?”
Or an increased capacity to imagine experiences far worse than their own, since most “antinatalists” aren’t starving in Africa or being gased in concentration camps.
“But, I’m sticking with the decreased ability to imagine.”
A good imagination might help someone in an impoverished situation to get through the bad parts of life, but it’s irrelevant to someone in a relatively better position who also gets through those bad parts. The ones who don’t stick it out until the end don’t lack imagination; they’ve just endured horrible suffering, unlike most people, and aren’t so busy with their farms or eight children that they don’t have the time to contemplate existential matters like these.
2011-03-29 at 23:23:54 |
Something I should also clarify: There are four main points that I made above.
1. Some people have horrible lives, and as a result, poor imaginations. Most of these people are uneducated, poor, and incapable of thinking much about the universe beyond perhaps a very basic set of cultural/religious presumptions.
2. Some people have relatively good lives, and as a result, great imaginations, but they use those imaginations for things that reinforce their false perception that everyone else’s life is like theirs.
3. Some people have relatively good lives, and as a result, great imaginations, but a few experiences or stories over the years have caused them to realize that life isn’t a necessity of the universe, and isn’t worth the risk.
4. Some people just have bad experiences — perhaps later in life after their imaginations developed during childhood — which eventually lead them to want to commit suicide. These people are usually in a position where the inevitability of death and suffering is something that can be thought about for hours on end, since their social structures encourage free time.
2011-03-29 at 23:48:52 |
LS… Pain is subjective.
Excuse me, but, I can’t make any sense of this at all. [..."The ones who don’t stick it out until the end don’t lack imagination; they’ve just endured horrible suffering, unlike most people, and aren’t so busy with their farms or eight children that they don’t have the time to contemplate existential matters like these."...]
Are you saying that being “busy” is an aid to survival and a satisfying life? If so I would suggest that you stop “imagining horrible things” and have 8 kids and live on a farm.
You write… [.."Having a vivid imagination is meaningless when your brain is in a state wholly incapable of imagining anything at all as a result of being in so much pain;"...]
First, pain is subjective and, Second, you keep jumping from physical pain to existential pain to anticipated pain. They are by no stretch of the “imagination” synonymous.
[Case in point] If it were possible for two people to experience the exact same amount of pain and one of them (a fundamentalist christian) felt each stab as one step closer to Jesus and total bliss… I submit to you that persons pain would indeed be more acceptable than a person who had nothing good to look forward to. Do you see what I am getting at?
I submit that it is no coincidence that highly religious people are also highly suggestible and dissociatable people. Again…. highly imaginative. Since all hypnosis is self hypnosis and all pain is subjective I don’t see how you can escape the conclusion that imagination can and often does trump pain. You may indeed be a very imaginative person as you claim, but, I submit that if all you can imagine is BAD outcomes…. Perhaps you are in need of a tune up.
2011-03-30 at 00:37:06 |
“Are you saying that being ‘busy’ is an aid to survival and a satisfying life? If so I would suggest that you stop ‘imagining horrible things’ and have 8 kids and live on a farm.”
I’d seriously look into taking these things up if it weren’t for the fact that my life isn’t about making myself happy; it’s about doing my part and helping others in any way that I can. Distracting myself would almost definitely make me happier, but why would I want to be happier at the expense of everyone else? That’s just selfish.
In any case, I’m already quite happy, but that has nothing to do with the issue, which is that thousands of people kill themselves every year and millions more are on antidepressants. Meanwhile, billions of animals with no say one way or the other have popped into existence against their will and suffered horrible fates.
“First, pain is subjective and”
Are you basing this on the study that demonstrated that both pleasure and pain occur in the same region of the brain? That’s like saying that breathing and swallowing food are the same activities because they occur in the same part of the body. Of course sensations will be grouped together in the same brain region; it’s good organization.
I don’t know what you mean by this, really. It’s not pain that’s “subjective”; it’s how one interprets pain (suppression, embracement, fighting it, etc.).
So what, though? Does this justify serial killers, since, hey, maybe some of their victims enjoy the experience? After all, pain is subjective. Most people won’t enjoy being brutally murdered, but SOME might, since it’s all subjective, so therefore we can’t say that the serial killer is wrong.
Having children is the same thing, in substance, because we can’t say whether the person being born will enjoy living, and millions don’t. What horrific aspect of existence does creating life without its consent negate that would warrant taking the risk?
“Second, you keep jumping from physical pain to existential pain to anticipated pain. They are by no stretch of the ‘imagination’ synonymous.”
I’m not jumping to any of those things, because only one of them — physical pain — is a real type of pain; the rest look like made-up categories for the sake of having categories for simplistic confinement and obfuscation. “Existential pain” would have to be the consequence of physical and/or emotional pain (with emotional pain ultimately also being chemically based), while “anticipated pain” is a bit of a misnomer, since, if you’re suffering just by thinking about suffering, the suffering is no longer anticipated — it’s already happening (in the form of fear).
“I submit that it is no coincidence that highly religious people are also highly suggestible and dissociatable people. Again…. highly imaginative.”
Dissociation isn’t the only end result of imagination. Being imaginative for your own selfish reasons and being imaginative with regard to what it could be like to live another life are both entirely possible outcomes of being imaginative.
“I don’t see how you can escape the conclusion that imagination can and often does trump pain.”
I’ve always agreed with this conclusion; I’m just saying that it’s not the primary reason for why people want to continue living. For the most part, people have comfy lives and dull imaginations, leading to what I can only describe as individualistic immersion. However, even where someone has a great imagination (strongly believes in God, let’s say), I find it unlikely that extreme states of prolonged torture over large periods of time would be so easily brushed aside as “part of God’s plan.” I suppose it does happen from time to time, but with the continuous pain bit, I was mostly addressing imagined things like fantasy worlds that AREN’T actually believed in — not heavens and gods. In other words, I was interpreting that line of yours as having to do with raw imagining (whether of fictitious phenomena or some general notion of things being “better”) rather than religious beliefs, which don’t really require a vivid imagination so much as they require emotional frailty. Scientists, for example, are often far more imaginative than religious people, but that’s getting away from the main argument.
“You may indeed be a very imaginative person as you claim, but, I submit that if all you can imagine is BAD outcomes…. Perhaps you are in need of a tune up.”
I’m not sure if it’s even possible to imagine only bad outcomes. My stance isn’t that everything sucks; it’s that the things that suck shouldn’t be forced on anyone against their will. That’s all.
2011-03-30 at 01:16:29 |
One more thing to add and then I should have all of my possible thoughts on this matter out here:
On the eight kids and farm bit, no, I wouldn’t want that. I wasn’t saying that living that way makes you happy — just that, if your life is full of personal problems related to disease and sustenance, you won’t be able to think about bigger, existential matters to the point of even formulating an opinion one way or the other regarding whether they’re good or bad. The point was that people with eight kids whose total daily income is five dollars have so much wrong with their lives that they don’t even have time to entertain suicide, since they’re on autopilot and have so much to fix around them.
2011-03-30 at 01:27:59 |
I’m sorry LS, but, I do find you a bit hard to follow. Perhaps we can leave it at this.
Imagine a hat with a dial on the front. Lets call it a “Happyometer Hat”. On the left end of the dial is a (P) that stands for pessimist, on the right side a (O) for optimist. Between the two extremes there are degrees marked. Placing the hat on your head registers your world view, or, “reality”.
Lets say you put the hat on and register clearly a (P) and I put the hat on and burry the needle all the way over in the (O).
By what right would you deny me the wonder and pleasure that is my life? And PLEASE don’t give me the malarky that, not being born, I would not miss something I never had. Assuming the right to deny ALL pleasure simply because YOU are not capable of feeling it in the intensity that I and the majority of other humans can and do is pure hubris and the ultimate in “If I can’t have it I will see to it that NOBODY does.”. It’s saying that MY reality is the ONLY important reality and as a result… “I have the RIGHT to pull the plug on life.”
[You write] ..”I’d seriously look into taking these things up if it weren’t for the fact that my life isn’t about making myself happy; it’s about doing my part and helping others in any way that I can. Distracting myself would almost definitely make me happier, but why would I want to be happier at the expense of everyone else? That’s just selfish.”…
Freud would call that self loathing and your view of reality merely “projection”.
2011-03-30 at 16:47:39 |
“By what right would you deny me the wonder and pleasure that is my life?”
You seem to have an inability to divorce what’s actually been said from your own feelings of self-interest, and so misinterpret and conflate across the board. Enjoy your life; nobody’s stopping you.
“Assuming the right to deny ALL pleasure simply because YOU are not capable of feeling it in the intensity that I and the majority of other humans can and do is pure hubris and the ultimate in “If I can’t have it I will see to it that NOBODY does.”. It’s saying that MY reality is the ONLY important reality and as a result… “I have the RIGHT to pull the plug on life.”
No, the hubris comes in the automatic assumption that another life will feel the same way about things that you do. And if they don’t *shrug* they can always go commit suicide. Oh, and pulling a plug is a meaningless metaphor if there’s no water in the tub.
2011-03-30 at 01:57:37 |
“By what right would you deny me the wonder and pleasure that is my life?”
I’m not sure where I indicated that I would do such a thing. If I did, I didn’t mean it.
If you’re referring to a void of nothingness being deprived of your life, well, voids aren’t capable of feeling anything, let alone deprivation.
Males have millions of sperm that get wasted in one way or another, often deliberately. What right do men have to deprive all of those poor, tortured people the right to come into existence? What right do you have to deprive anyone that could be conceived sexually at any arbitrary moment in time such a right? What right do you have to deprive the kid that you would have created ten minutes earlier with one sperm cell by creating another kid with another sperm cell ten minutes later? That hardly seems fair to the first kid, who only never got a chance to be born because his sperm cell moved around a little in the testicle in the ten minutes where you decided not to have sex.
There are an infinite number of children that you could have had but never created. Are they suffering because of your actions? Why don’t you try to save as many of them as you can by having thirty or more children in your lifetime?
Things that don’t exist can’t care about anything, so such a pursuit would mean nothing. Your life CURRENTLY means something, but before you were born, it didn’t matter to you. The fact that it means something now in no way changes the fact that it didn’t mean anything several decades ago, during the time when there was no you to feel deprived of existing. You wouldn’t have missed out on anything by not being born, because your entire sphere of experience is contained within your life, and cannot in any way extend beyond it.
Of course, none of this would matter if it weren’t for the fact that people who are born very often wish they hadn’t been. When having kids, you don’t seriously think, “Junior is going to be really thankful that I pulled him out of his state of nonexistence,” do you? By birthing someone, you don’t end their suffering; all that you do is introduce a grouping of chemicals that will continually be just uncomfortable enough to be motivated to chase comforting things.
In some cases, the grouping of chemicals gets exhausted by this neverending, fruitless attempt to remove itself from its imposed (by you) state of discomfort, so it kills itself.
Are you aware that, by existing, the food and other resources that you consume are NOT going to someone else — who may need them very badly? There’s nothing that we can do about it now, but if you were to actually exist in some prenatal, conscious state where you could decide whether or not to be born, would you really want to be born knowing that the thousands of dollars worth of raw materials and resources that would be required to sustain your life wouldn’t be going to people in need? Would you, in not existing, really suffer as the resources that would have gone to you went to poor people instead? I don’t think so.
2011-03-30 at 02:12:11 |
“Freud would call that self loathing and your view of reality merely ‘projection’.”
Really? What would you call it? I didn’t know Sigmund Freud was leaving comments on this blog. Hi, Sigmund!
If Freud wants to call selfless activism self loathing, I can’t help him with his inaccurate definitions. I never said that I don’t desire to be happy; it’s simply not my raison d’être.
I’m not sure that I understand what a dead person has to do with philosophical ideals, though. Does mentioning him make your argument more empirically testable or something?
2011-03-30 at 02:39:42 |
I think LS that optimists and pessimists speak a different and mutually incomprehensible language. We reside at opposite ends of what is probably some kind of Bell curve. Your reality seems to be primarily external, while mine is primarily internal. In point of fact I don’t think reality is an “out there” rather than an “in here” thing at all. Never have. I consider even the idea of it deadly…. and I’m positive that you have no idea what I actually “mean” with those words. I think that just comes with the territory. I’m equally positive that I fail to grasp your meaning. Astounding, actually, and all within the same species!
2011-03-30 at 15:20:47
Beyond this… I wish to register a complaint.
Since Metawhatever refuses to address the utter absurdity of naming a website… “ANTINATALISM- The Greatest Taboo”… but, instead erases any comment drawing his attention to it, as if THAT somehow counteracts the ridiculousness of it all, and blames it on the commenter (What a coward) I have no choice but to seek satisfaction elsewhere.
Incest and cannibalism are taboos. Antinatalism is a curiosity and a self limiting one at that. In the interest of honesty the name of the site should be changed to… something like…
ANTINATALISM- “Staying OUT of your way, one baby at a time”
(or) ANTINATALISM- “As if anybody gives a shit if I reproduce”
(or) ANTINATALISM- “One of me is one too many”
Thank you
Mrs. N
But… “The Greatest Taboo”? The term “fart in a wind storm” comes to mind.
2011-03-30 at 17:03:23
Sure, antinatalism is not the greatest taboo. It’s just a motherfucking tagline. If you have trouble appreciating the absurdity of it, why don’t you just imagine it away?
2011-03-30 at 17:30:31
He’s forced to concentrate on the trivial, since that’s all he’s got.
2011-03-30 at 16:18:24 |
Good post, tim.
For the sake of truth, I suppose I should mention that while mrsneutronsgarage criticizes me for no longer allowing his barrage of puerile banter to clog up my comment threads, he in fact has enabled comment moderation on his own blog to weed out substantive commenters such as filrabat from calling him on his bullshit. On top of everything else, it appears that he is inured to his own hypocrisy.
That said, I’m simply marking his nonsense as spam; if he continues, eventually the software should pick up on his pattern and start marking him automatically. Of course, if he’s a really determined troll he’ll find ways to bypass this process, but I’m hoping that eventually a man of his years and station might feel a bit of shame creeping in and relent with the antics. Then again, shame requires a degree of maturity, so we’ll just have to wait and see.
2011-03-30 at 16:22:37 |
Great title, btw! Ah, those ubiquitous Simpsons!
2011-03-30 at 17:12:12 |
This wasn’t intentional; I only realized it this morning when I saw that Simpsons post of yours again. :-)
2011-03-31 at 10:04:22 |
…”Sure, antinatalism is not the greatest taboo. It’s just a motherfucking tagline. If you have trouble appreciating the absurdity of it, why don’t you just imagine it away?”…
Rather than having trouble appreciating it… I pointed it out for you to appreciate.
Saw this today at {Arts & Letters Daily]
http://newhumanist.org.uk/2533/natural-history-of-the-soul
Thought you might find it interesting.
2011-03-31 at 10:42:06 |
I did, thank you.
2011-03-31 at 18:51:02 |
I’ve always found the hard problem of consciousness a little insipid. It seems a bit off-topic here, but I’ve responded to the article at this link: http://nobadmemes.blogspot.com/2011/03/hard-problem-of-consciousness-is-pretty.html
2011-03-31 at 19:32:08 |
I thought the Strawson review was enlightening. He’s a good philosopher who’s written some really great stuff on free will. You can find some of his stuff over at naturalism.org.
John Searle has also chimed in on the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, likening it to the ‘hard problem’ of digestion…hehehe. There’s a podcast of his, actually a whole college course, listed in the bottom right-hand margin of my blog. A lot of what he has to say Jibes with what Strawson’s critique.
2011-04-01 at 18:57:19
Thanks for the sites. I’m not familiar with either, and I’m short on interesting podcasts, so I’ll give Philosophy of Mind a listen.
2011-04-01 at 10:58:13 |
Do you follow this blog at all?
http://whoistheabsurdman.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2011-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-05%3A00&updated-max=2012-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-05%3A00&max-results=9
2011-04-01 at 11:59:26 |
I don’t. Why do you ask?
2011-04-01 at 12:23:56
Habit mostly. I suppose I was just curious. Beyond that, I thought you might find it interesting. I have followed it for quite a while and always find it thought provoking.