Pessimists - What Keeps You Going?

[Shear]

The love of family. Much more secondarily, relationships, romantic and friendly. Then film and literature, paintings and what have you.

Like some other folks on here, I have to admit to a sort of comfort that came for me when I traded in armchair optimism and belief/identity for the more abrasive arrangement of reality that really just seems to be the truth. I'm getting away from the larger discussions about god and existence for a moment, and simply talking about these minor processions of anxiety and loss that constitute most lives, big or small, celebrity or pauper, writer or bricklayer. I get, from the best of art, from Aickman particularly, but from a handful of other artists as well, the impression that the best you can do is to understand that you are blindfolded in a maze with no entrance or exit. Or, as Becker put it so eloquently:

“Take stock of those around you and you will … hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to them having ideas on the matter. But start to analyse those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas to this reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his “ideas” are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality."

I have felt very suicidal today. Can't get through to my doctor until Tuesday and am home alone for a few weeks.

I keep going at these times purely due to instinct. I certainly have no conscious desire to be here a second longer.

[Gray House]

Quote Originally Posted by Ibrahim

So if i torture you, i do not cause you unnecessary suffering as long as the justification for my acts is "dependent upon knowledge of qualities of conscious experience?"

It would be unnecessary suffering. You would be demonstrating that the knowledge hadn't informed your choice of actions rationally.

Quote Originally Posted by Ibrahim

What is this "knowledge of qualities of conscious experience" you seem to end most sentences with, anyway?

Knowledge of how it feels to suffer, for example.

Quote Originally Posted by Ibrahim

if suffering is a qualitative property of conscious existence, then knowledge of suffering is also inherent in existence, hence the choice between your options would not be made on the basis of any reasoning or extrapolation but on practical knowledge of physical reality.

If knowledge is inherent in existence, then so is reasoning and extrapolation. All three are functions of intelligence.

Quote Originally Posted by Ibrahim

However, the opposite choice, aversion to the "no experience" option, would also not be out of irrational subjective bias; it would be a result of recognizing the degree to which the comparative qualities of these degrees of horror or enjoyment may outweigh one another relative to one's temperament or disposition. A disposition may be irrational and subjective, but a rational assessment of what is more appropriate to this disposition is not.

Temperament and disposition would be trivial factors in the context of a choice involving the worst and best experiences in the world.

Quote Originally Posted by gveranon

Your example followed immediately after you said, "I also think there can be reasonable certainty about whether a philosophical world-view is true or false. It is possible to avoid being hopelessly subjective and fallible." For that reason, it seemed that you gave your example for the purpose of arguing against fallibilism about philosophical world-views.

Yes, it was also that. The example was supportive to some views about what ethics should be based on and unsupportive to others, so it's also an example of a means of determining whether some evaluative world-views are true or false.

Quote Originally Posted by gveranon

One could agree entirely with your analysis of our knowledge of pain and still not agree that ethics should be centered on suffering. There are other possible criteria for ethics, and there are other possible criteria for even a pessimistic ethics. Your focus on pain enables you to display an axiomatic rigor in your arguments, but this will not necessarily be persuasive to those (even other pessimists) who think that other ethical criteria are important as well.

If someone says there is something that is ethically important independent of how it affects qualitative experiences, then, though they might say otherwise, the basis for their ethics would be what they desire. And desire is a feeling, the qualities of which can be compared to other feelings. If humans were soon going to die out, and some people thought it was ethically important to preserve some art to last for a lot longer than there would be humans, maybe it would in fact be ethically important to the extent that such a project affects how some humans feel while they exist, but if an unpredicted meteor destroyed the art shortly after human extinction, clearly there would be no value significance to the destruction.

Quote Originally Posted by gveranon

Mystical approaches to theism are just as focused on careful discernment of qualities of experience as your ethic of suffering is. I'm not a mystical theist because I don't think internal states tell us much about the world. But all thinking about theism is not "arbitrarily imagined" or "without a rational reason to believe it."

There are explanations for how the experiences they call mystical happen that are more parsimonious than theistic explanations. I think the wide-spread difference in what people think about mystical claims about reality and schizophrenic claims about reality is because the people making mystical claims often function better socially. Do you apply agnostic reasoning to schizophrenics who claim that their experiences tell them about the existence of something specific outside of their experiences, for which there is no other evidence?

Quote Originally Posted by Gray House

For the same reason that I'm not a mystical theist (I don't think internal states tell us much about the world), I don't think ethics based on evaluation of qualities of our experience would have to be "built on" our beliefs about the world or would indicate that our beliefs about the world are unjustified. The hermetic formula "As above, so below" is not necessarily true of a secular world-view, either.

If someone knew suffering, yet they claimed unjustified suffering wasn't bad, I'd have to conclude that their evaluation of suffering was influenced by some other part of their world-view which was not about the quality of suffering.

Quote Originally Posted by Gray House

So our reasons to be rational are dependent on the same thing your ethics is dependent on, and you carefully describe both in the same words: "knowledge of qualities of conscious experience." If such knowledge of qualities of conscious experience is the criterion by which we are to judge whether we are using our rationality reasonably, then you have assumed your ethics in your description of rationality.

You're conflating a means of doing something with a reason for doing something. Thinking rationally is a means of discovering what is true. The capacity of sentient beings to have qualitative experiences gives us reason to act. An action is rational if it is in accordance with that reality.

[Ibrahim]

Quote Originally Posted by Gray House

Quote Originally Posted by Ibrahim So if i torture you, i do not cause you unnecessary suffering as long as the justification for my acts is "dependent upon knowledge of qualities of conscious experience?" It would be unnecessary suffering. You would be demonstrating that the knowledge hadn't informed your choice of actions rationally.

Apparently i have been inveigled into this discussion by someone who believes that knowledge has personhood. (How, i beg, can 'knowledge' act 'rationally'?)

"It would be unnecessary suffering. You would be demonstrating that the knowledge hadn't informed your choice of actions rationally."

By the very same token, though, i could claim that the quote above demonstrates that you have not properly understood what rationality entails; yet that does not mean i have proved my claim, nor have you, yours.

But let's not focus so much on the example of suffering , the relevance of which example to our subject is dubious anyway, and return to my original assertion, which is that i might very well be wrong about despairing at the apparent meaninglessness of existence, given that my subjectivity may prevent me from taking into account the full ramifications of a universe and an existence which do, by their very nature, extend beyond my person, experience and the limited reach of human reason.

[marioneta]

Then again, if I am proved wrong in my pessimism, well...I rest my case.Joseph K just left the Castle.

[Gray House]

Quote Originally Posted by Ibrahim

Quote Originally Posted by Gray House You would be demonstrating that the knowledge hadn't informed your choice of actions rationally. Apparently i have been inveigled into this discussion by someone who believes that knowledge has personhood.

That doesn't follow from what I said. Are you denying that there's a distinction between informed and uninformed actions?

Quote Originally Posted by Ibrahim

i might very well be wrong about despairing at the apparent meaninglessness of existence,

You've argued against all means of determining what is true, yet you say "very well be", which suggests a probability. Through what means are you trying to determine the probability of your being wrong?

[Ibrahim]

"That doesn't follow from what i said. Are you denying that there's a distinction between informed and uninformed actions?"
Oh, it follows. You propose that knowledge can 'rationally inform' something, & thus has reason, as if it were a sentient being.

But, to answer your question: I am not denying or affirming that there's such a distinction as you mention; what i affirm is that however informed an action might be, it might still, because of the limits of human comprehension, fall short of a full understanding of all considerations pertaining to that action, its consequences and reasons, in regards to the non-human aspects of that equation (which aspects are significant, seeing that there simply is more Cosmos than there is Man). What i deny is that an action that is uninformed by or divergent from your personal description of 'truth', 'reality' or 'reason' must perforce be an irrational act.

Further: "You've argued against all means of determining what is true, yet you say "very well be", which suggests a probability. Through what means are you trying to determine the probability of your being wrong?"
All that i have argued against is the reasoning you employ to try and prove that reality, truth and reason conform themselves to your description of them; and i am not trying to determine the probability of my being wrong, i am merely suggesting that neither of us need to rest uneasy should we turn out to be wrong about anything; it is, after all, only human.

[gveranon]

Quote Originally Posted by Gray House

Quote Originally Posted by gveranon One could agree entirely with your analysis of our knowledge of pain and still not agree that ethics should be centered on suffering. There are other possible criteria for ethics, and there are other possible criteria for even a pessimistic ethics. Your focus on pain enables you to display an axiomatic rigor in your arguments, but this will not necessarily be persuasive to those (even other pessimists) who think that other ethical criteria are important as well. If someone says there is something that is ethically important independent of how it affects qualitative experiences, then, though they might say otherwise, the basis for their ethics would be what they desire. And desire is a feeling, the qualities of which can be compared to other feelings. If humans were soon going to die out, and some people thought it was ethically important to preserve some art to last for a lot longer than there would be humans, maybe it would in fact be ethically important to the extent that such a project affects how some humans feel while they exist, but if an unpredicted meteor destroyed the art shortly after human extinction, clearly there would be no value significance to the destruction.

Thoughts and feelings happen in human minds, yes, even when these thoughts and feelings are about events outside of anyone's mind. Your example is apparently meant to illustrate that states of affairs outside of the mind are ultimately irrelevant to ethical judgment as long as no one feels harm in his conscious experience.

If we evaluate situations entirely in terms of conscious experience, eliminating external referents of our thinking, then ethics could be about the one thing you wish it to be about, suffering. You don't even have to argue that concerns external to our minds should have no ethical weight except as they affect experience; you can just rule them out of bounds of your conception of ethics. This is motivated by a wish to leave pain-centered ethics with no rivals, I suspect, but even if my suspicion is untrue, I would like to bring up situations for which your ethics would be useless.

If an unconscious person is sexually molested by a psychopath who does not evaluate his actions as harmful, and the unconscious person has no physical injury or evidence or memory of it later, did anything unethical occur? I think by your ethics you would have to answer no. No harm was consciously experienced by anyone.

With technologies that are near fruition or already here, acts that most would now consider horrible could occur on a large scale without being judged unethical by your criteria. Conscious experience could be manipulated by electrical stimulation of the brain and by virtual reality technology. People could be completely controlled while having no awareness that they are being controlled (rendering lack of choice unharmful in your terms), and they could feel nothing but delight the whole time. All of this could be administered, and even originally set up, by computers. Is this unethical?

Brain-in-a-vat redescription of the experience of sentient beings in the world may seem useful to a pain-centered ethics, but such a redescription renders humans helpless in confronting near-future technologies. If ethics only applies to matters of conscious experience, then what objection could there be to seeing ethics and rationality themselves as simply matters of conscious experience, experience that can be manipulated? If redescribing ethics and rationality in this way is an inaccurate description of judgment and thought, who cares? If no one cares in his conscious experience that ethics and rationality have been reduced to seeming, it doesn't matter. I don't think you intend to subjectivize ethics and rationality, but you have left yourself no ethical ground to object if ethics and rationality are manipulated into subjective seeming, or even if the very ideas of ethics and rationality are lost entirely, as long as no one feels harm.

Quote Originally Posted by Gray House

Quote Originally Posted by gveranon Mystical approaches to theism are just as focused on careful discernment of qualities of experience as your ethic of suffering is. I'm not a mystical theist because I don't think internal states tell us much about the world. But all thinking about theism is not "arbitrarily imagined" or "without a rational reason to believe it." There are explanations for how the experiences they call mystical happen that are more parsimonious than theistic explanations. I think the wide-spread difference in what people think about mystical claims about reality and schizophrenic claims about reality is because the people making mystical claims often function better socially. Do you apply agnostic reasoning to schizophrenics who claim that their experiences tell them about the existence of something specific outside of their experiences, for which there is no other evidence?

I agree that there are more parsimonious explanations for mystical experiences than theism.

The difference between, say, Plotinus, Eckhart, et al. and a schizophrenic, or someone with temporal-lobe epilepsy, involves more than better social functioning. They are also much better at reflecting on and describing their experiences and rationalizing and articulating their ideas in their writings.

What I am agnostic about is not specific theistic claims (which I don't believe) but the question of whether mystical experience and related speculation can ever reveal anything about reality. I doubt it, and it plays no part in my own thinking, but I don't think it is entirely a closed question.

Quote Originally Posted by Gray House

Quote Originally Posted by gveranon So our reasons to be rational are dependent on the same thing your ethics is dependent on, and you carefully describe both in the same words: "knowledge of qualities of conscious experience." If such knowledge of qualities of conscious experience is the criterion by which we are to judge whether we are using our rationality reasonably, then you have assumed your ethics in your description of rationality. You're conflating a means of doing something with a reason for doing something. Thinking rationally is a means of discovering what is true. The capacity of sentient beings to have qualitative experiences gives us reason to act. An action is rational if it is in accordance with that reality.

I am not conflating means of doing something with a reason for doing something; I am pointing out your conflation of rationality with ethical success. Thanks for stating it again! Your statements indicate that you judge actions as rational if they are in accordance with your ethical evaluation of experiential reality. It is an ethical evaluation because it involves "discovering what is true" about qualitative experiences, by which you apparently mean seeing what is the proper value (good or bad) of those experiences. Your last sentence could be restated, "An action is rational if it is in accordance with proper good or bad valuations of experience." "Rational" here does not just apply to the means of discovery; it is an approbatory adjective you apply to the action. An action is rational if it is ethical in your judgment. This is why I said in an earlier post that you have assumed your ethics in your description of rationality.

[Gray House]

Quote Originally Posted by Ibrahim

however informed an action might be

If I responded to that with, "You claimed actions have personhood by saying they can be informed", that response would make as much sense as your claim that I was saying knowledge has personhood. It's a word game.

Quote Originally Posted by gveranon

If we evaluate situations entirely in terms of conscious experience, eliminating external referents of our thinking, then ethics could be about the one thing you wish it to be about, suffering. You don't even have to argue that concerns external to our minds should have no ethical weight except as they affect experience; you can just rule them out of bounds of your conception of ethics.

I should not eliminate external referents from my thinking, given that many of them do affect conscious experience.

Quote Originally Posted by gveranon

If an unconscious person is sexually molested by a psychopath who does not evaluate his actions as harmful, and the unconscious person has no physical injury or evidence or memory of it later, did anything unethical occur? I think by your ethics you would have to answer no. No harm was consciously experienced by anyone.

It would be unethical. You're wrongly assuming that harm-based ethics means harm must be caused directly for it to matter. My conception of ethics does not negate the harmful significance of psychologies, or the importance of having rules. To use a hypothetical that doesn't have the implications connected to those factors, consider an alien species that had evolved in such a way that non-consensual sex was never experientially negative or associated with any negative experiences. It probably would not be relevant to their ethics regarding their own species.

Quote Originally Posted by gveranon

With technologies that are near fruition or already here, acts that most would now consider horrible could occur on a large scale without being judged unethical by your criteria. Conscious experience could be manipulated by electrical stimulation of the brain and by virtual reality technology. People could be completely controlled while having no awareness that they are being controlled (rendering lack of choice unharmful in your terms), and they could feel nothing but delight the whole time. All of this could be administered, and even originally set up, by computers. Is this unethical?

I'm not sure that there could be positive experiences without there first being deprivation, but if I assume for the sake of argument that there could be, and if I assume that the scenario of how the people got into the virtual reality was not experientially negative, then I'd see no reason to think the virtual reality scenario would be bad, though the virtual reality could be better than just producing a feeling of delight.

Quote Originally Posted by gveranon

If ethics only applies to matters of conscious experience, then what objection could there be to seeing ethics and rationality themselves as simply matters of conscious experience, experience that can be manipulated? If redescribing ethics and rationality in this way is an inaccurate description of judgment and thought, who cares? If no one cares in his conscious experience that ethics and rationality have been reduced to seeming, it doesn't matter.

For some individuals, being deluded about some things might make those individuals happy, but people's ignorance or denial of facts is a cause of a lot of harm in societies and the world, and the psychological willingness to lie or deny what is true is in most instances a harmful quality of the character of a person, even if some particular instance of it doesn't cause harm directly (it could still be a step in the development of a harmful personality). But there can be instances where discovering what is true is bad. For example, I don't want humans to discover how to make feeling, sentient AI, because I don't have certainty that there wouldn't be a risk of an AI experiencing unimaginably horrific suffering.

Quote Originally Posted by gveranon

I don't think you intend to subjectivize ethics and rationality, but you have left yourself no ethical ground to object if ethics and rationality are manipulated into subjective seeming, or even if the very ideas of ethics and rationality are lost entirely, as long as no one feels harm.

Rationality could not be manipulated to be "subjective seeming". If someone used the word to refer to "subjective seeming", they would not be talking about the same concept. You don't seem to make a distinction between the question of why one should try to discover a truth, and the question of through what means it's possible to discover a truth (that is why I said you were conflating a means with a reason). Or else you're saying it's inherently valuable to discover what is true.

Ethics could not possibly be a comprehensible concept if no one was capable of having qualitative experiences. You've argued against ethics being rational. The view that ethics should be about whatever people think it should be about subjectivizes ethics. My view is a moral realist view in opposition to that. I think nonexistence would be at the highest peaks of Sam Harris' moral landscape concept, and I doubt he would agree with that, but otherwise I mostly agree with his arguments for moral realism.

Quote Originally Posted by gveranon

I am not conflating means of doing something with a reason for doing something; I am pointing out your conflation of rationality with ethical success. Thanks for stating it again! Your statements indicate that you judge actions as rational if they are in accordance with your ethical evaluation of experiential reality. It is an ethical evaluation because it involves "discovering what is true" about qualitative experiences, by which you apparently mean seeing what is the proper value (good or bad) of those experiences. Your last sentence could be restated, "An action is rational if it is in accordance with proper good or bad valuations of experience." "Rational" here does not just apply to the means of discovery; it is an approbatory adjective you apply to the action. An action is rational if it is ethical in your judgment. This is why I said in an earlier post that you have assumed your ethics in your description of rationality.

I'm not conflating rationality with ethical success. I'm saying that rationality can be applied to ethics, because there are truths about what ought to be done. And I'm saying that the reality of there being qualitative experiences gives us all our reasons to act, including our reasons to discover what is true. Even if I were only to talk about motivation, rather than prescription, our trying to discover what is true is still dependent on qualitative experiences. Feelings are the fundamental drive that gives humans and all other sentient animals a motivation to act. A drive for behavior appears to be the evolutionary function of feelings.

This dead horse is bruised enough.