Interesting in this context is completely divorced from morally good/bad. Could be any group from any area at any time in history. I’ll start with a few, followers of the cult of pythagoras, contemporary black Hebrew Israelites, antiracist skinheads and the Amish (neo-luddites in general). Don’t be racist or a prick to other people discussing.
It’s a take but if anyone went to kill any of them I’m betting they would attempt to defend their life or loved ones. It’s easy to say it’s less suffering to not exist although no one actually knows what if anything exists after death or before birth. In the case of pansychism or something similar to samsara the story could be more involved than many think aka it’s not as simple as just not being born a human or dying to end suffering.
I would specify that we ought to decrease needless and avoidable suffering for all minds. That is not all suffering is needless, for instance surgery, exercise, physical therapy, mental healing are often accompanied by great suffering but ultimately bring one closer to wellbeing. It’s the suffering that brings one away from wellbeing that ought to be diminished. Now the belief that there is no mind before birth or after death is based on assumptions the same as one believing there is mind before birth or after death. The most accurate stance would be an agnostic one, aka just admitting we don’t actually know one way or the other.
You are probably confusing antinatalists and efilists. The antinatalism movement is about not having children, because they perceive it as immoral, as the kids cannot choose being born, and being alive means you are doomed to suffer. That position does not necessarily take stances on what you should do, when you are already alive; that requires some other ideological standpoints. Efilists on the other hand, are the edgy (and dangerous) ones, that think everything would be better as dead.
Seems the ones I’ve run into were both, particularly on their subreddit. The point still kind of stands. If one believes they ought not have been born then there are solutions to their dilemma and if they truly believe that then they are free to act upon that, particularly in locations with legal assisted suicide.
Now as to the morality of the act of having children. It really does depend on some axioms. The first one that comes to mind is whether or not we have free will, what was the state of a mind (if any) before being born, what is the overall state of reality. In a circumstance like samsara being or not being birthed as a human on this earth isn’t really going to change the overall circumstance, same kind of situation with pansychism in many versions. These are all things once again no one has any answers to either way so the best course is an agnostic take. Maybe having kids is immoral, maybe not, no one really knows and it’s okay that we don’t know right now.
I think it is actually important to draw the distinction between antinatalism and efilisim. Antinatalisim at its core has the strong idea of how an individual should be able to choose for themselves. That is their whole justification for the thought, that they do not want to have kids, since the kids cannot choose that for themselves. That high value being assigned to personal choice, then, is in direct opposition with the dark goal, where the efilist ideology on the other hand seems to almost unavoidably lead: the idea, that everything should die, and that it should be helped to happen.
Personally I am probably a bit too nihilistic, and perceive, that we humans just tend to assign too much value on thoughts, that only exist in the human experience of reality. Antinatalism sounds like a valid ideology, if you care the most about individual’s right to choose for themself. But there are other things, that people might value more, depending on what they care about.
I get you, it’s just that if you follow the implications of antinatalism it bleeds into efilism. You’re explaining why they view birth as unethical but it leads to conclusions that work against the concept of personal choice as reasoned above. Now to add to the issue at hand i would imagine such individuals are more than willing to limit personal choice in other contexts. Like we should stop people from murdering even if that’s their personal choice and we should imprison them even if it’s their personal choice to be free. Absolute personal choice is a messy concept to get behind.
I do respect your time and appreciate our discussion. I get that you’re not in that corner so to speak. I guess I’m more of a non-dualistic unified reality nihilist, not only does it not matter but division between one thing and another is more so a perspective or illusion of domain than an actual aspect of the true nature of reality. Here is maybe a better explanation. Everything is one, Brahman fell asleep and everything is just incarnations of Brahman in the same way when you dream everything is just you, incarnations of your mind. You see a tree while sleeping, well that’s just your mind in the form of a tree.
Oh yes, I cannot claim I am in any way an expert on antinatalism, nor do I follow their ideology (I mean, I cannot have children, so I guess I technically do…?). I just take their side against efilism, as the latter can be extremely harmless, and I would rather have the still life-respecting antinatalists dominate the discussions about the subjects in question, than let edgy anti-lifers, to gain more visibility and support.
I also appreciate your views, it is an interesting perspective to hear. Would you classify it as panpsycism, or does that focus too much on the consciousness part, in comparison?
I lean more towards just the weird metaphysical ideas, and coil that way to that another side of nihilistic views, where I just do not trust human perception of reality. Everything that exists to us, might be completely flawed, and what we perceive as absolute truths or assign as existing things and concepts (like math, or the concept of a mindl), might not be anything else than our delusions - we are unable to know, anyway. This of course leads to all the problems of impossibility of real knowledge and all that, but as we cannot exist outside our own perceived realities - be it separate beings, or all just one - we are just forced to live in that uncertainty. Everything that exists might be just physical things, our thoughts nothing but electric impulses, and we are just having the perception of them being something else… or maybe that is just delusion as well, too, and we just cannot comprehend what form of existence the reality is, as to us it, is how it is. This way nothing really matters, or more like mattering itself is just a human concept - yet everything inside human perspection still matters, to us.
Yeah I get you, there’s enough death cults trying to end the world already. I mean one can take it in different ways. In the most grounded sense it’s physically true. Like there’s not actually a gap between physics, chemistry, biology, sociology and so on, it’s one singular continuous reality. There’s no actual barrier between your body and everything else, that’s just a perception mainly due to a limited awareness.
Of course one can take it in a pansychism manner and I often do. It’s not too difficult to get there for a more rigid materially minded individual. As you already have one just has to make a trip through epistemology first. Like classic arguments such as Descartes demon, Plato’s cave, Chung Tzu’s butterfly, Boltzmann brains, and last Thursdayism. That is the most grounded science based version of reality isn’t as concrete as most minds would prefer it to be. If you don’t know those epistemological arguments I highly suggest looking them up.
I agree, a human mind’s version is likely limited. Like we’re aware of the limited perception of ants and chimps yet often assume we are not similarly limited. Another one I play with is causality. Like if it’s always true then everything in this moment was caused by something in a previous and those by something previous and so on until infinity or something happened that was not caused or causality and human thought isn’t capable of capturing reality as it is.
All the fun stories aside I always come back to base faith. That is it doesn’t matter if I’m a Boltzmann brain and reality just came into being a moment ago, the goal is to reduce needless and avoidable suffering for all minds whenever and wherever I can. Of course I suck at doing that sometimes (a lot of the time) but try not to dwell on the failures beyond the learning experience they can provide.
Like Ram Dass likes to say, be love now. If nothing matters I can still enjoy internally and externally manifesting the waking sensation of love all the same.
Luckily I know at least some philosophical basics, so I do think I understand your talking points. (And essentially Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, lead me on this extreme path of epistemological masochism.)
Infinity is actually a very good example I think, that shows us we are perceiving something weirdly. There exist no measurable, conrete infinity in the physical universe, as far as we know; even the space itself has its limits. Yet we understand the concept of infinity, so it exists in some form, in the reality we are perceiving. But then, we can have infinities that are bigger and smaller than each other… the way we are perceiving this is quite paradoxal! Or, at least it appears to us as such.
And be love now, really is a wonderful line of thinking. I fully agree, that it really does not matter, what is the Real Truth or if it exists at all, since all we have is ourselves, right now. If we all focused more on loving and less on all the bad shit, our human realities would definitely improve in multiple ways… but we are flawed beings, so sometimes we can only try… the path towards Good is a difficult one, that I also often struggle with.
That’s to say most people start with a very grounded sense of reality until they encounter something that model can’t deal with such as those epistemological arguments. Science like everything else is built from assumptions, things that seem true but we can’t prove. Stuff like didn’t the past actually happen. It’s typically when one notices reality is stranger than science can manage that one allows themselves to entertain other concepts.
Just a quick quip, it may literally be the case the universe is indeed physically infinite. We don’t know if it is or isn’t. That said, yeah we can indeed create mental constructs that don’t have to obey reality. Linguistically I can create contradictions. I can say on a flat plane there is a square with five sides which is even mathematically impossible yet I can put the words together, create the idea of it. Also yeah Cantor and the scale of infinities is fun. It may be the case we discovered the mathematics for something we’ve yet to discover in reality which happens from time to time.
As they say if it’s worth while it’s probably not easy, if its easy it’s probably not worthwhile. Hate and resentment are easy, forgiveness and peace is difficult. Until one’s enemy is their friend the war is never over. The best war is won without ever taking a single shot. Many things turn into this multivariate balancing act where there really isn’t an ultimate good option, something will have to give here or there, but as you said the intention and the attempt alone are commendable.
I really don’t get how the they would defend their life in any way relates.
If for instance one truly believes they should not have existed in the first place then action that would end their existence theoretically shouldn’t be met with resistance as per their own beliefs.
thats rediculous. its not specific to them and the action they take is just not to have kids. if not having a kid is wrong then having one and not 2 is worse. violence and killing is a completely different thing.
I mean multiple nations allow legally assisted suicide. To say that no one should be born or that birthing a person is immoral infers that one’s own birth was immoral which infers it should not have happened to begin with. Now a statement is all well and good until it’s actually applied and one follows their beliefs all the way to all of its conclusions.
who said birthing a person is immoral in this thread? Our species destroying the planet from overuse of what it can provide is immoral. That does come from there being to many of us greedily grabbing for them. Its a knock on effect.
Antinatslism was the topic, the meaning of the word is quite literally in the word itself but here’s the definition for you.
Antinatalism is the philosophical and ethical position that assigns a negative value to birth, arguing that procreation is inherently immoral.
Yeah but I never came in and said I was anti natalist. Just that I got it. And by that I did not mean I got the idea more the way one would use it in conversation. Like I get it. I see why they would feel that way.