@ImperfectIdea

> _“Not sure how we can say nonexistence "feels" better than existence, when it's the absence of feeling”_

Don't get hung up on words. We can judge states of the world even when we don't feel anything directly ourselves. eg, an accident that maims someone in the other side of the world is objectively worse than no accident happening. Even if that person doesn't manifest their suffering, or if I never get to know them or hear from them.

@tripu
We can judge them because all of those situations involve conscious beings. Is it better to be a rock or a human? I think this a category-error question, because there's no such thing as "being a rock".

@ImperfectIdea

Again, I think you get to absurd situations if you refuse to compare existence with non-existence, or consciousness with no consciousness.

Several ways to see that:

For rhetorical purposes there _is_ such a thing as “being a rock”. It means having zero consciousness. It is almost equivalent to “being a corpse”. Someone with a sledgehammer could easily turn you into the functional equivalent of a rock right now. Are you indifferent towards that proposition, since you can't compare consciousness with “being a rock”?

Is there such a thing as “being an amoeba”? Or “being a nematode”? Consciousness is pretty much a continuum. If you don't accept “being a rock” as a hypothetical, I guess you won't accept “being a protozoo”, either. Unless you are drawing a line somewhere, you can't consider “being an elephant” or “being that brown-haired person across the street”, either. How could you possible _be that other person_? You can only be you. And yet intuitively you know that you have to compare what _is_ against what _could be_, all the time. You know that a sterile, rocky planet “is worse” than a planet teeming with creatures living in permanent bliss.

Beings that could plausibly exist in the future are not “conscious beings” either. Like rocks. Isn't that a problem, if you refuse to consider them at all because they don't exist? Why care about your great-nephew at all, then?

@tripu
Yes, I think we're not talking about the same thing. I'm not indifferent to losing consciousness, I just meant we can't talk about the experience of nonexistence.

@ImperfectIdea

OK, not the _experience_ of nonexistence, which is impossible by definition. We don't need to use those verbs you keep on fussing about: “feel”, “experience”.

I want us to agree that we can evaluate those states of the world, and compare them. Even when in some scenarios some creatures don't exist and in others they do.

@tripu
Yes, I agree we can try to badly guess counterfactuals in which different people exist or don't exist.

@ImperfectIdea

I'd say many of those guesses aren't bad at all. Many counterfactuals involving creatures existing one hour from now, or not existing at all, are straightforward, and sometimes hugely consequential.

@ImperfectIdea

> _“We need to compare conscious feelings; non-conscious beings don't have those”_

Thought experiment #1:

You are starving in the woods. You stumble upon an animal hibernating on top of some edible plant. You can either kill the animal instantly and painlessly and eat it, or eat the plant. Assume both options will provide the exact same nutritional value and taste equally good to you. Since there's no suffering involved, and because according to you you can't compare sentience (the animal) with non-sentience (the plant), the decision is a coin toss. Even if it's a hundred little slumbering animals you have to kill to guarantee your survival vs. a single very fruitful plant, it'll still be a coin toss.

Thought experiment #2:

You give someone a drug that instantly puts them in a vegetative state for life. Defending yourself in front of the judge and the jury, you tell them that the current state of that person (absence of feeling) is no worse than their previous state (feeling). The judge counters that it's not in your power to decide that on behalf of the victim. You then correct the judge: your defence is not even based on a subjective preference; it is simply impossible to compare those states, therefore nobody can prove that you did anything wrong at all. It doesn't matter how the jury _feels_.

Do you agree? If not, why?

@tripu
I think you misunderstood what I meant by "not comparable". I meant the subjective experience of living can't be compared with the subjective experience of death, because there's no such thing as the latter (as far as we know). To say that people that have never been born are better off, is nonsensical to me. I thought that's what antinatalism is about.

@ImperfectIdea

If “people that have never been born” (yet) don't count, why worry about the future at all?

What would stop you from setting a ticking bomb that would destroy the entire planet in a thousand years from now, _out of sheer boredom_, if you knew that all conscious creatures that do exist today will be dead by then?

@tripu
I never said they don't count, did I? 🤔😀

@tripu
You're the antinatalist, not me! 😄

@ImperfectIdea

But I'm not.

I'm just sympathetic towards those arguments, more open to them than most people. And I think more people would make better decisions if they considered antinatalist ideas.

@tripu
Oh ok 😄 maybe I misunderstand the arguments. And what better decisions with what ideas?

@ImperfectIdea

Ideas: the ones I'm defending in this discussion 😆

Decisions:

If more people were more thoughtful about the lives their descendants are likely to lead, we'd see fewer broken homes, fewer children dying of famine, fewer childless couples in prosperous nations, and more people adopting instead of having natural children.

If more people were more thoughtful about the asymmetry between suffering and pleasure, #suicide would carry less of a stigma, and would be easier to communicate, plan and execute.

Overpopulation and lack of natural resources would be less of a problem.

Discussions about public health and demographic changes would be easier. eg, people now assume that it's just bad when population shrinks (often for no good reasons), or that incurable diseases and painful chronic conditions deserve huge attention and resources (when a utilitarian calculus would say otherwise).

Our attachment to life would be more rational, in general.

@tripu
Ah okay, I am on board with most of those ideas, I just didn't see them as antinatalist, simply good decision making. I thought antinatalism regards all procreation as morally wrong.

@ImperfectIdea

You said that it is nonsensical “to say that people that have never been born are better off”. I assume it'd be equally absurd to you to say that they are worse off.

Since you can't say whether any life is worth creating in the first place or not, what would stop you from setting the world for destruction in the near future, so that all possible future lives never occur? What arguments are left against (or in favour of) instant and painless sterilisation of all creatures?

Or the opposite: since those comparisons are nonsensical to you, how could you argue _against_ bringing _many more_ children into the world? What's wrong with encouraging women to have more kids, and putting all those children in hospices?

You refuse to admit that it is A Good Thing that the happiest person who ever lived, indeed _lived_. Or that it is bad when people living in hell (famine, disease, war), have (often many) children who will very likely face the same hardships and have short and miserable lives.

In that sense I meant that it seems to me that “people that have never been born” (yet) don’t count at all for you.

@tripu
I meant it's nonsensical “to say that people that have never been born *are* better off” because those people *aren't* at all, so they can't *be* anything. That's all.

And I honestly don't know when I have refused to admit those things...

@ImperfectIdea

> _“A suicidal person simply wants to stop feeling... bad. Why is not-feeling the only other option?”_

Who says it's the only option? Of course it isn't. Most people try lots of other things to improve their situation, or simply resign to live. Suicide is rare.

@ImperfectIdea

> _“I suspect parents that abort fetuses do it more for selfish reasons - perhaps the child would have claimed life was wonderful”_

So, according to you, the most resourceful, generous and selfless parents, those who would not mind sacrificing for the rest of their lives to care for a child living in agony, those people would have no tools, no arguments, to inform their decision to abort or not. Since they can't possibly compare the (conscious) life of their child against the (non-existent) child who is never born in the first place, it'll be a coin toss. Right?

Notice that you don't have to get to the extreme (misery and pain for life) to hit _reductio ad absurdum_: you can play the game with any expectation of a future life, and according to your “division by zero theory” you are hopeless in trying to decide as a parent whether that child should exist or not. Turn the dial to “life barely worth living” or “moderate unhappiness in the aggregate” or any other level, and you have no arguments against or in favour of terminating that pregnancy (or getting pregnant in the first place). Isn't that weird?

@tripu
Not sure I understand your point. If they don't mind sacrificing everything for their child's life, then they will probably not abort, obviously. That's the decision of many extreme christian parents, and they take it quite happily.

I meant I think most parents decide to abort because they think a child with a birth defect will be more hassle and less enjoyable for them, and the worth of the child's life is an excuse, since they can't ask the child and they're simply assuming.

@ImperfectIdea

Yes, I don't deny that prospective parents will consider their own well-being, too.

But I think you're minimising the extent to which that decision (to abort or not) will be made thinking of the well-being (or lack thereof) of that child who could be born.

To me, fundamentalist Christians who would not abort under any circumstances, and 100% selfish parents who would terminate pregnancy when faced with the tiniest of inconveniences, are equally morally wrong, because both fail to compare the two scenarios for that child (existence vs non-existence).

@tripu
Agreed, there are states in which it's probably better for a being not to try to keep it alive, and to force it out of zealotry is morally wrong. I'm not talking about the parents that abort in those situations.