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I haven't existed for thousands of years that Homo Sapiens were populating this planet. I don't feel I was 'missing out' on anything for tens of thousands of years.
Right now I exist here but (well, presumably) not in any parallel universe or other planets and that doesn't seem to bother me either. How comes? Shouldn't it also be 'missing out' on all the potential experiences I could have had but will not as I'm only limited to this one life on this one planet for a few decades?
Why should I not regret not existing before my time or not existing simultaneously in other places but see these few decades I have today as something I would have been deprived of had I not been born?
Once I've realized that when you don't exist you can't possibly 'miss out' on anything, because you're unable to register it and thus, regret the fact, I've found the state (so to say, 'state') of not needing anything far preferable than any kind of existence.
Do you regret that you're not awake when you're asleep? Deep sleep that is, where you're not even watching 'cartoons'? Do you wake up feeling 'oh damn, what a horrible few hours of missing out, thank god i'm back'? Well, you might, actually, when something great is happening in your life and you don't really want to spend much time sleeping. I know the state of not wanting to go to bed when I'm really excited about some new creative project and I'd love to spend hours and days just doing that without attending to my physical body's needs, but..oh well, thats but one of the examples of the limitations we're under in this world that we've accepted and adapted to.
But the point stands, that to even regret you've been unconscious for some period of time and 'missed out' on some actual or potential great time in this world, you have to first become conscious again. You have to come to existence to be able to regret not existing. And you will never regret your non-existence if you never exist. So how can we even begin to talk of missing something out? They throw this phrase at you sometimes, to many childfree people they do, that 'well, if your parents thought like you, you wouldn't even exist'. Duh... So?
How often do you weep over the times you didn't exist?
Below is a tragic picture depicting most of the human history I wasn't a part of:
Whoever is a real author of this image, mopo.ca or bulletinboardforum.com, thank you! What a brilliant illustration of all the fun I've been deprived of for thousands of years! ;)
This post is an extention of the point I've made in my earlier post on antinatalism
More posts from this category: The cost of having children: selfish reasonsArtsybashev on Russian servility
Irina |
01-09-2012
Thanks, Zenner! And the illustration is really great, I love it)) I wouldn't bother to utter all this and risk making someone a bit unstable for a while if it weren't for their future offspring. Strange how some of us care for these kids more than their own future parents do... I'm talking about it also because I simply want to. Why should I censor my thoughts and pretend I like the king's new dress? I didn't choose to be here, the least I'm owed is a chance to express my true attitude. |
Zenner
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01-09-2012
True, soo true.
Besides, in our countries, stoning is not legal anymore... |
Irina |
01-09-2012
Which reminded me of this saying: |
AndrГЎs
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01-09-2012
It's nice to see I'm not the only one thinking along this line.
Apparently, people utter “if your parents thought like you, you wouldn't even exist” with the intent of shocking the other into silence. And with a perceptive observation of theirs to boot: that no children are born when people do not conceive them. Are you awed by our superior mental powers yet? Go and breed then. We need more human( resource)s. I wonder what would be an effective retort to that utterance. “And who do you think would miss me?” Or a sarcastic “oh, how many people do you miss who never were”? Though even the first one might give some of them a clue, it might make others a bit supportive, telling you not to be so negative, you are a nice person after all, somebody would surely miss you… At which point you start laughing uncontrollably, confusing and infuriating them thoroughly. |
Irina |
01-09-2012
I wonder what would be an effective retort to that utterance I prefer 'So?' I like to leave it to them to explain what is that they're trying to point out by their brilliant logical conclusion of 'you wouldn't even exist'. They begin trying to explain to you further what they mean in sheer astonishment of your unwillingness to take their 'you wouldn't even exist' line as a 'case closed'. - but you would not even be here to think that, or to talk, or to walk, there would be no you at all, do you understand? - yes, I do, I wouldn't have existed at all, so?? [a few more similar lines back and forth until they finally make a value judgement that my non-existence would have been smth bad] - oh you mean it would be bad for me not to exist? - yeah! - so you mean to say all those tens of thousands of years that humanity went without me were bad? for me? sorry, I can't remember that, i think that might be because I didn't exist all that time to record my non-existence into my memory. maybe for the rest of humanity it was bad that I wasn't with them? yes, I remember history books mentioning that in every century papers released a story about how an unborn Irina Uriupina is thoroughly being missed: 'oh god, we can't take it any longer, we miss that not yet born lady so much, we don't think we'll be able to wait much longer!' i don't have a brother. my parents don't miss him. i don't miss him. my friends don't call saying 'oh btw, when are your parents gonna have that son, we're really missing your brother'. you can't be missed before you're born, unless you're born. sure, if you're just a pack of muscles, maybe a slave owner can miss you not being born to join his work force. but he is incapable of missing you as a person. even parents didn't miss you as a person. they would have loved (or hated, or didn't care for (takes all kinds)) any person that originated in the consciousness they gave birth to. so nobody needed you as a personality either. some people might like you, some may fall in love with you as a person, but if it weren't you it would have been somebody else they liked and loved. and btw, how do you know you're not that somebody else instead of somebody more perfect for them? ;) is your head cracking yet? relax, take a deep breath, hold on to your sense of humour. because everyone else is in exactly the same situation as you are. so we can all have a good laugh and support each other in this crazy world)) |
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01-09-2012
Thank you again Irina. You really are a breath of fresh air. My Dad, a self-taught philosopher, felt aggrieved that he had no part in the biggest decisions of his life, namely whether to be born and whether to die. It has taken me nearly a lifetime to see the justice of his complaint.
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Irina |
01-09-2012
Thanks for the comment, David. Better late than never. Some people refuse to admit disappointing facts at all, even when they're in front of their very eyes. |
Karl
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25-09-2012
Very good entry, Irina. I think the whole 'but they're missing out on so much' is a standard reply of pronatalists when the idea that people shouldn't created is floated by. But proto-people who don't come into life aren't missing anything, in fact they're being spared a whole pile of crap. I wrote a blog entry recently along the same lines:
http://saynotolife.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/dont-mistake-compensations-for.html Unfortunately, most people are desperate to believe that the mere fact of being alive is a kind of triumph, a 'victory' in itself. They ignore quality of life and also most tend to spew out some variety of nature-worship to justify procreation. And what great poster! Would like to have it on my bedroom wall:-) |
Irina |
25-09-2012
Thanks, Karl! I usually enjoy your writing, and that new entry you mentioned is especially hitting the nail: compensating someone for the harm isn't a justification for causing that harm. most people are desperate to believe that the mere fact of being alive is a kind of triumph I actually think we develop some sort of a stockholm syndrome with regards to life. Believing it is some kind of a gift makes it easier for most of us. That no matter how much your life is a draggery that is accomplishing nothing, you're still lucky you have it, and you don't have to feel down. And what great poster! Would like to have it on my bedroom wall:-) I thought of editing that picture and putting arrows with 'here i am not existing, right here' to make it even more visual a depiction of 'missing out'. But I can't, it's somebody's creative work, they may not appreciate me rendering it in any way, much less in such an unpopular context. |
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07-10-2012
Very sound reasoning I love reading your entries here
Indeed so. We haven't existed for billions of years, so why should we regret that time? Do I regret not being there when the first molecule that led to this nightmare was assembled? Do I regret not being there when the universe (presumably) was created during the big bang? Do I regret not seeding life on Mars or billions (perhaps infinite) other galaxies out there? Do I regret that the infinity of potential existences did not have the experiences we had? Do we regret the infinity of potential experiences THEY could have had?! Its pure MADNESS if we follow that chain on and on. If we follow the common folks logic, then we should be regretful every waking moment of every day. Regretful about the things I outlined above, about the fact that we are wasting our potential experiences we could have had had we not made this or that choice or about us not being OTHER people with different set of experiences/personality, regretful about any combination of any variable that could have had any effect on our lives at all (gender, looks, parents, birthplace, genetics, etc). There really is no END to the things we could have regretted if we follow the common logic of "regret", but that would drive anyone insane in a second and isn't keeping sanity while alive at least somewhat important so we could spread the message of AN and stop the spreading of this curse of consciousness? I would hurtle back the "regret accusation" at anyone who says it because THEY robbed us of our peace of non-existence and therefore brought the POTENTIAL existence all the way from nothingness to "somethingness" and now the POTENTIAL for regret suddenly materialized in its infinite forms and its no longer peace but pure physical/mental carnage and warfare. There really are no redeeming qualities to life. I cannot justify life at all. All possible rationals are a failure. Life is an abbatoir that shreds any semblance of peace to small pieces and makes us yearn for non-existence that preceded any "need", any "desire", any "action". How's existence "allowed" to even exist?! The dumb molecule evolved all the way to us who cannot possibly comprehend this vast creation of the cosmos (that is incomprehensible to it since it did not evolve for that task) and now this aberration, this mistake of evolution is attempting to portray itself as a "gift", even though for all intents and purposes, conscious existence is a nightmare and looking at the cosmos is the only confirmation one needs at how utterly expendable and incomprehensibly small and pitiful we are as a species. Universe cannot possibly care about an evolutionary mistake and seizing the spread of this "deadly disease" is the only way to ensure things go back to the way they were before the molecule evolved - to the state of complete equilibrium, lack of any consciousness and the universal default. However the universe was born or however it will die, consciousness that suffers through its mistaken evolution and the subsequent distortion the species introduced on top of that grand miscalculation (i.e. capitalism and every other human folly) should have never been a part of that and its time for us to stop forcefully making consciousness aware of its accursed origin and demise and time to make it go back to the peacefulness of non-existence. |
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29-12-2012
When it comes to the things addressed in this post, whether it's better to have lived at all, I think about it from a neuroscience perspective. We live day to day, doing all that we do in hopes that the experiences that we have will make us feel happy. We want our brains to release these chemicals and we'll do just about anything to feel good inside. That makes me think of a thought experiment. Imagine if computer scientists eventually succeed in emulating thought and reasoning within machines, and robots are eventually able to do all the work of life for us. Then I further considered the possibility of placing the brain in a vat and constantly filling it with drugs that make you feel total bliss. And further imagine we have little nanorobots which repair the brain damage the drugs are doing to your brain. Your consciousness is shot into total euphoria. You think to yourself, "I love everything! I feel so wonderful inside!" And while you sit in a stupor, like a heroine addict who just shot up in the corner, the robots and advanced technology keep you alive. They also tend to all the everyday concerns of life on Earth. Sadly, that's the ultimate state of existence I could think of for a human being. The way we live now, we're forced to earn our happiness and release of reward chemicals in our brains. We have to struggle, oftentimes in vain, to find experiences and causes that make us feel alive and happy. But why bother with that whole process? Jump straight to happiness and the release of reward chemicals. We can't do that today because we'd die. And that brings us to the next point. You mention possibilities. We imagine all these different possibilities because we wonder if we'd have been happier had things gone differently. But in this case that no longer matters. We just sort of shift the toils of existence onto the robots and send our subjective consciousness elsewhere, or at least, dull it to reality. |
Irina |
29-12-2012
Interesting stuff. But I'm thinking, why is it that we're always thinking of ways to exist at all? We have this bias that sort of presupposes existence is preferable to non-existence, theat there's some necessity or intrinsic good in there being some organism capable of experiencing positive sensations and it experiencing those sensations. ...there's a bug sitting on my screen! hehe)) Ok, back to the subject. Why is having people in bliss preferable to there being no people who need bliss? Besides, we can't put infitnite number of people in that state. There are always going to be those never born, in non-existence. Today I think of non-existence as that nirvana buddhists dream about. Your personality is one with an absolute, you sort of dissolve in the cosmic nothing and you have no problems. Perhaps they see it differetly, but that's how it appears to me... |
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29-12-2012
You may run into a problem there though. We don't really understand why brain activity causes subjective feelings of consciousness. When you place food in your mouth, I could hook your brain up to a brain scanner, say a fMRI machine, and see all the electrical and metabolic activity going on. Thing is, I never experience you actually tasting the food you're eating. I never experience your taste of a glass of cola, or the pains you're going through if you have a headache. I just see little blips of electrical activity. While I may have no way of directly knowing whether or not you're conscious, I have faith that you are. Your brain is just like mine, and I know my brain is producing subjective feelings of existing, so yours almost certainly is as well. To me, that's the most important truth there is. Suffering and happiness of sentient beings. I kind of get a vibe that you feel the same way after watching your videos, and seeing your concern for the suffering of animals. When we die, I'm certain that both you and I as we know us, all our memories, hopes, dreams, desires, all gone. That's all in our brain and when we die, so long. I don't see how "I" could survive and go on to the afterlife as Jason. My memories are stored in the patterns and chemical bonds within my brain's neurons, and that all rots back to dirt. But, there is one possibility that could happen. You're supposing that that's the end. Eternal nonexistence. Maybe Irina's gone, and Jason's gone, but something could happen. What if you're reborn into this same universe? Or another universe? Maybe even back on Earth? You may shrug you head and say, "Eh', reincarnation? Really? No way." But hear me out. I'm not saying that will happen. I don't know. Nobody does. But I personally believe there is a chance, mainly because I was born. We so often focus on death and the brain and say, "Once the brain stops, that's the end of you." But we were also once born and the beginning of that processes started from random quantum fluctuations. Space-time is always jiggling and new universes can be born from it. As a physicist, I hear all the different cosmological theories about universes being born from the quantum vacuum, and parallel universes. It seems possible to me that matter in another universe could go through some evolutionary process, similar to what has happened in our universe, and sentient life could arise again. The same brutal struggle could continue on and on, and you may "wake up" in a place just like this one. Consciousness is hard to pin down. Take sleep for instance. When you go to sleep, during REM you have dreams. For about an hour and a half to two hours each night, you're living in a dream world, but you don't always remember it. I rarely remember my dreams. Francis Crick says this happens when our brain is undergoing a sort of maintenance, clearing out the old unused memories. As best I understand it, if you wake up during this period, your brain is caught in the middle of this cleaning process and hasn't wiped all the memories yet so you'll remember your dream. Time didn't even really flow as you know it now in this dream world, but you were existing in some weird way. Now I have to drop the new-agey bomb. *cringes* You may have lived past lives but not remember them, similar to how you've had dreams and consciously existed yet don't remember that experience either. In the end, I don't really know. It's all speculation, but it seems possible to me that I'll be reborn. It's also possible it'll be eternal rest, the sort of nirvana you're speaking of. But if we are reborn, we'll wake up instantly, similar to the feeling a person has when they were in a coma. They don't remember the months or even years they laid there unconscious. Waking up to a new life, we wouldn't remember anything at all. The final conclusion is that it might be impossible to not subjectively exist. I entertain the idea. |
Irina |
30-12-2012
It seems possible to me that matter in another universe could go through some evolutionary process, similar to what has happened in our universe, and sentient life could arise again. The same brutal struggle could continue on and on, and you may "wake up" in a place just like this one. I've heard this argument before. But that has nothing to do with us dealing with our problem here on Earth.
If we establish a really low standard of what we consider plausible we can fairly say that almost any bolony might be real. Maybe we've lived on the planet of the apes or smth, so what? We could take unfounded wild guesses like that endlessly. I don't think wild assumptions can be used as grounds for actions/inactions. For example, I wouldn't accept some religious nut saying 'I'm not gonna take my kid to the doctor becase I believ god will heal them'. Why should be take reincarnation beliefs any more seriously? The final conclusion is that it might be impossible to not subjectively exist. I suggest separating the two: whether it would be preferable/desirable/right thing to do and whether it would be possible/impossible. I've asked 'Why is having people in bliss preferable to there being no people who need bliss?' Then, whether it's possible is another matter. Because people can still agree smth is preferable and disagree on whether its feasible. Since I find it preferable, I'd argue that we should for graceful ways of implementing it. If we wake up somewhere again - we would have tried and failed, but we would have tried. Oh well, we might find out anyway if nucear war or smth like that takes place. It's just not going to be pleasant. |
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30-12-2012
I suppose it is a wild assumption, but there do seem to be times when these issues become very important. I'll address your main question as to whether it's preferable to have people living in bliss or nonexistence, but first maybe I can bring the problem of self-continuity more down to Earth? (though there's still speculation) Say we can build teleporters like you see in Star Trek, but they require us to destroy your body, store your information pattern in the computer, and then reassemble you at the other end. Your brain was destroyed and then you were rebuilt someplace else at a later time. Did you die and someone else wake up in your place? Or is that still "you"? Would using a machine like that be considered murder? What if we keep your information pattern in the computer for years and then finally reassemble you? How long before your subjective consciousness flys off? Say you're put under anaesthesia and are rendered unconscious. We then perform brain surgery. If we only slightly altered your brain, or repaired some damage, or removed a small tumor, everyone seems to agree the person who wakes up after the surgery is still them. But let's say your technology was very advanced and we could pretty much rewire the entire brain and rebuild them a new body. We program in a false set of memories, change their gender, and give them a different personality. Then we wake this new person up. Would that same subjective "self" "wake up" as this new person? Or would we be dealing with another person? How much can a person's brain and body be changed and them continue to be "them"? We do change day by day as we learn new things, having new experiences, etc. This leads to changes in our brains and somewhat even our bodies. But in this situation, the changes are not gradual, we're making the changes very abrupt. No self-continuity. BAM. You're this then you're that. You're put under, totally change everything, and then we wake you up. Can you do that? What does that mean? Let's take another possibility. Say you die and have long since rotted away, but we happen to have a backup of you from years ago. Your brain and body are physical things. We could, in theory, reassemble you. Would you then be resurrected but as a previous version of who you once were, as say a young teenager? What if we built two of your exact same brain and bodies. Which one would you wake up as? Maybe neither? Maybe as one or the other? It doesn't seem plausible to claim both. All of these seem to me to be the exact same problem. Maybe it will be a little easier if we assume that nobody dies or even goes unconscious? Say two people are put in an operating room and using nanotechnology we slowly begin to wire their brains together. Both of them remain wide awake throughout the whole operation. At what point do they become a single organism, a single consciousness? How would we define that? How much information sharing do they have to have before they're just one organism? Or take split brain patients. Their corpus callosum is split and we nearly have two brains pretty much working on their own. Are there two different subjective consciousnesses living in that person's head? Whether consciousness can reside in different mediums is yet another question to consider. If we build advanced computers which are built with principles similar to our brain's design, processing information in the same sort of ways but are made of metal and silicon, might they too be conscious? Should they be treated as sentient beings? Or are these robots just a hunks of metal acting similar to a human or animal? You make a great point though. Just like in religion, this stuff opens up the door to almost limitless speculation and lot of baloney, without any real hard evidence or method to pin down what the truth is. I personally hate it. Believing that the other people around me are sentient and alive, having subjective conscious experiences just like I am, is one of the most important tenants of my personal philosophy. Since they're conscious and can suffer, ethics and morality become important. But I can't observe this consciousness in any way. I have to believe it exists. But once I try to ask myself when it's there and when it isn't, it's really difficult. Like should I worry about the suffering of a worm or an insect? Now I'll move on to your question. "Why is having people in bliss preferable to there being no people who need bliss." I don't know. This sort of goes back to what I said in the beginning -- life holds out this carrot in front of us and we have to chase what makes us feel happy. I came to the conclusion that it'd be preferable if people were always feeling happy, and in order to ensure that, I went with a solution in which happiness wasn't based on chasing anything or dependent upon any conditions. A constant stream of happiness for all alive. You're going a step further. No conscious awareness of this existence at all. No trying to improve it. No changes. I get the impression you want to totally unplug and never wake up. It's a heavy question. I can try to add some thoughts. Can you actually compare something with nothing? What could something have in common with nothingness? I don't know what we could relate it to? To say something is preferable to something else, it has to be put against some objective standard. We'd need some sort of rule, and then we'd need to show why that rule is more important than any other rule or scale anyone else can come up with. Others will say, "Why should I care about this scale you've came up with? Life is a good thing. I'm pretty happy. I don't like your conclusions." I see most people responding to this conversation in that way. Once you came up with this ultimate rule, which condemns all existence as we know it, and maybe all possible forms of existence, we'd need to measure this world and assume that every life lived has a negative score. I don't really believe that would prove that non-existence is always preferable to being alive, but it's an interesting question. It'd be a very dark and pessmistic scale, but I'd be curious to hear about anything anyone is able to come up with. If we deal with the less difficult question of the ethics of assisted suicide, we could talk about quality of life issues and how it's unethical to make people endure life when they have so little to look forward to. |
Irina |
30-12-2012
You make your points very clear, really, one example would suffice as well What you call a 'subjective conciousness' I guess could be also called a 'self' or a personality or identity. I've spent quite some time thinking sbout it as well. And my conclusion is - we are basically computers with a slightly different wiring. We are not born with a personality, we develop it, it's a product of us interacting with the world. We are the sum of our experiences + how they are processed through our wiring (our brain 'compilation', our genetical predispositions, our hormones etc). We are only born sentient beings, that's all. There's no soul that jumps into the physical body. So I wouldn't care of preserving some 'me'. Also, that means that we do reincarnate in a sense that sentient beings are constantly being created over and over. So what if they like different music and subscribe to different views, they're all essentially us, just us being in different circumstances. There is no self, there's just a machine that adjusts to the environment. That's all we've been set out to do here as the rest of the species - adjust and survive to reproduce. Then, sentience can exist without a personality or self-awareness. As far as we know animals lack self-awareness, at least on our level, but we can see them feeling pain (screaming, running away, perhaps pupils narrowing too?), pleasure (purring, closing their eyes, moving towards you if you pet them). They don't have a personality we develop but that doesn't mean their experiences are thus not important. Human children don't have it, they're practically like animals during the first couple of years, but nobody would argue that therefore what happens to them shouldn't be taken into account. So it's not a problem of self at all, I don't know why you bring it up with regards to existence/non-existence. It doesn't matter whether identities exist or not, what matters is whether somebody who can suffer exists or not and whether they are suffering. I came to the conclusion that it'd be preferable if people were always feeling happy At first I aslo did. But then I said who the hell needs euphoria? Only a needy organism that's unhappy otherwise. I think we're conditioned to be within this duality of pleasure vs pain and we have troubles imagining why there needs to be that carrot anyway. To imagine an un-needy state. Where you're just fine. You need - nothing. Nada. You're where you want to be. I get the impression you want to totally unplug and never wake up. Well, yeah, as I wrote here, all this time humans were fussing on this piece of rock I wans't here and I never missed it for all I know. Now that I am here I have all these needs that I never had before that I have to satisfy. So I first get a '-' (minus), I get a deprivation, and then when and if I satisfy my needs I get a '+'(pleasure) just to undo that negative state, that deprivation. I get back to '0'. What's in it for me? I'm just caught up like a squirrel in a wheel. Can you actually compare something with nothing? What could something have in common with nothingness? Well, we do. When we euthanize people. When we perform mercy killings. When we say a child should not be born into starvation, abuse, etc. That is all comparing smth to nothing. Nothing is by definition nothing. There is nobody there to experience nothingness. But that also mean there's nobody there to be deprived of anything. It's a realm of no needs and no suffering. No fun and pleasure either, but then there's nobody there to regret that absence of pleasure. The closest to non-existence, the one you mentiones yourself - deep sleep. Are you deprived of anything then? I don't think you are. And if you never wake up from it you're never going to feel like you've been deprived. |
Loved the illustration (very illustrative, indeed), and even more enchanted by the comment under it (ahaha)!
Even though I have little hope of ever seeing people realise how scarce and limited "the pleasures they would be missing out" are... (and peak pleasurable moments exist, admittedly) and, therefore, even though I know most of them will always defend the fun they're having to the point of exhaustion... (and we know why, don't we?), well, I cant'help fighting to my point of exhaustion too!
Obviously, I wouldn't bother to utter all this and risk making someone a bit unstable for a while if it weren't for their future offspring. Strange how some of us care for these kids more than their own future parents do...