Buddha: Take Two

Reply to these comments

One of the great things the Buddha said that will single handedly dissolve many of your points:

"Do not believe in anything because you have heard it.

Do not believe in anything because it is spoken by many.

Do not believe in anything because it is written in religious books.

Do not believe in anything on the authority of your teachers.

Do not believe in traditions just because they have been handed down.

But after observation and analysis,

when you find that anything agrees with reason

and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all,

then accept it and live up to it." 

This is all good advice, but it contradicts some of his other teachings. This could be because, like any other religious text, it was written by multiple authors, all with slightly different but socially compatible agendas. Religions, regardless of their origin points, are fueled by dogma, so any good ideas get drowned out when the fervor gets initiated; there is a lot of "Yeah, yeah, that sounds good. Put that in there, too, and we'll probably get more people to listen to us." Sometimes, what sounds good is good, and sometimes, it isn't -- but none of this matters to those more interested in control than genuine enlightenment.

Keep in mind that the Pali Canon was written four hundred and fifty years after the supposed death of Siddhartha Gautama -- plenty of time for distortion, contradiction, and multiple personal interests to sneak in under the guise of "Buddhism." Even if it's written somewhere that the Buddha said something wise once, that does not justify other written, unwise statements. Hitler said a few sensible things in his time, for instance.

Of course, both the good and the bad came from a whole posse of people, and not from some mystical man towering above us normal peons; this automatically elongates the already lengthy shadow of idiocy looming over those who foolishly venerate a single man for somehow being neurologically unique. Nothing is more intellectually dangerous, and there are strong parallels between veneration of a man who can, according to the texts, never ever arise again with such brilliant (even though they're all either really obvious or incorrect) ideas on the one hand, and a man who is the only son of god who will come only once to bring us salvation on the other. The template, to the modern observer, is cheap, obvious, and a by-product of early civilization. It is the ideal logical fallacy: "You don't agree with this idea? Well, I heard it from this guy who is special. Therefore, I'm right."

It is probably impossible for a single human to be intellectually unique, so even if the Buddha was right to declare a puny list of four assertions the end-all-be-all, that would in no way justify anyone's abandonment of independent peer review in favor of adulation. I don't care how many layers of hell you've descended into for the benefit of mankind; you can't get away with putting together definitive lists and closing them off, never even once imploring others to add to or subtract from them.

It makes no sense to declare that one should not believe something on the grounds that it's written in a religious text, then turn around and also declare that you possess not just truth -- which is elusive and maybe even impossible to attain for humans -- but noble truth.

I wonder what would have happened to Darwin if he'd declared evolution "The noble, indisputable truth of life's procession". All those other scientists with their annoying journals and independent studies can go to hell!

There really is a pretty profound difference between "I know for certain that I am absolutely right about this, but please, come to the conclusion that I'm right on your own" and "This is what the evidence is currently indicating, but let's keep running the experiment and see if something new happens, or if we're missing something." If the Buddha were ever to promulgate the latter, there would be no Buddhism.

Furthermore, the Four Noble Truths are stupid to begin with. They basically advocate the idea that one can achieve freedom from craving, desire, and other forms of suffering through the Noble Eightfold Path. Obviously, we cannot extricate ourselves from our environs while alive, so there is no such thing as freedom from negative sensation without the termination of conscious experience altogether. In the Pali Canon, the Buddha is doing exactly what L. Ron Hubbard did by claiming to know not only why people suffer, but how to end it all and enter into a state of personal heaven as well. In short, he was a sophisticated swindler, handing out pamphlets advertising his -- and only his -- special ability to fix everyone. Capitalism, anyone?

Simple, one-size-fits-all, too-good-to-be-true methods for feeling perpetually blissful should always be scrutinized -- though, again, we should be careful not to project the agendas of the authors of the Buddhist texts onto whoever really was their original inspiration, given the ubiquity of distortion in the ancient world. The real Buddha could have been nothing more than a wiser than average guy with ideas that were great for their time but antiquated today.

1. The Numbered Lists
Numbered lists are a mnemonic device from oral cultures not an exclusive enumeration of dogma. There are two possibilities- that (a) the Buddha, wishing his disciples to be able to memorise his teachings, presented them in list form, or that (b) the subsequent process of oral transmission resulted in this format.

Does this really matter, though? Prior to plumbing, it was necessary to construct wells, but their then-necessity doesn't justify our continued drinking of unclean water.

The Buddha did entertain the arguments of famous philosophers and those of other sectarians and his contemporaries. These arguments are recorded in numerous places in the Pali Canon

This parallels the mythic intellectual hero (as opposed to the real person; see a pattern, here?) Socrates' rigged fights against the sophists: Relative to the morons espousing obvious gibberish, the hero appears wise and all-knowing, which provides further justification for submission to his agenda, and even his deification. This obvious false dichotomy is also a known tactic among physical fighters, and very effective against those with limited perspective.

What the Buddha actually did was suggest that his students become enlightened themselves - to see that things were really as he described them.

And, conveniently for him, they all wound up agreeing with him! No one ever stood up and said, "This is stupid. How is getting acquainted with how my body deals with the world going to end my suffering once and for all? How is it going to help that starving baby bird over there? Where's the absolute correlation between conscious willing and physical consequences?!"

I wouldn't describe meditation as contrived or requiring extensive training: how 'contrived' is simply paying attention to one thing?

Our brains have physical limits to how long they can remain concentrated on one thing at the expense of another, especially when the other thing is your intestines hanging out.

That being said, the underlying cause of pain is getting born! The Buddha fell upon the rather obvious solution when he suggested not getting reborn. 

The way to prevent your rebirth is by promoting the idea that no one should reproduce; if no one reproduces, then the infinitude of "yous" that come and go from each sentient organism's consciousness will eventually cease to emerge. Learning how to sit really still and ignore the world's attempts to engage with you is useful while alive, but it will not prevent your rebirth.

For example, if you have a child, but then go on to become the best meditator ever, this latter change may bring you happiness in moments where you would have otherwise been very uncomfortable, but your ascension to nibbana is rendered illegitimate by the existence of your child, who is interconnected to you and will suffer throughout his or her life. The correct path to nibbana, then, is not perfect mindfulness and higher realization, but the extinction of you, your child, and every other sentient creature -- regardless of how the extinction comes about. Certainly, the planet being instantaneously vaporized by a gamma ray burst has nothing to do with enlightenment or mindfulness, yet it is the real nibbana after all.

the most authentic position of Buddhism is completely indifferent to whether gods exist or not...this point is largely doctrinally irrelevant to Buddhism.

It really, really shouldn't be. The existence of gods has profound implications regarding existence and the nature of cause and effect. If gods exist, then there necessarily is a kind of functionality inherent in the system that we call the universe, for gods are human-like in desire and overall essence. Their existence may not change the fundamental nature of sentience, but it could if there really does turn out to be a reason for all the madness which we call life.

Having observed the paranormal in front of my own eyes as a child, I am tempted to take seriously the anecdotal evidence of others' encounters with non-human beings- the type of experiences which are actually censored by current scientific dogma.

I don't doubt that someone like the Buddha had paranormal experiences, but said person also did not have access to modern scientific knowledge or methods with which to properly and negatively analyze the experiences. Today, if we encounter what we perceive to be an apparition, we can first realize the importance of negatively analyzing the encounter by actively seeking out all those alternatives which potentially discredit the default assumption:

1. We now have evidence that our perception of reality is a filtered aggregate of abstractions constructed by neurons, each programmed to provide us with an analogy of the information they receive from the "external" world. Sometimes, the analogy appears grossly inaccurate, especially when subjected to unusual stimuli. In layman's terms, we may call this phenomenon an hallucination.

2. Humans enjoy pranks and hijinks, and must not be underestimated for their ability to deceive their peers.

3. Given what we know about sleep, comas, vegetative states, mental retardation, other species, etc., it would be silly to assume that a person's soul becomes physically locked away when the brain shuts down, only to become free and fully aware after death and in the absence of that which it apparently needed in order to be conscious in the first place.

...and so on. Anyway, your misconstruction of science as not only an ideology but dogma is counterproductive and ironic. Science is a process, much like the processes of baking a cake and refining oil. The outcome of each experiment must be independently verified by unaffiliated individuals, and if such individuals refine or overturn an idea decades after its introduction, then "science" welcomes the update.

The position of suicide in Buddhism is more complex than you make out. At the same time as the Buddha, another teacher, Mahavira, was teaching a religion, Jainism, that would ultimately espouse suicide as the height of saintliness.

...And Jainism is not Buddhism, let alone the original teachings of the Buddha or his spokespersons. Anyway, if that's really what Jainism advocates, then it, too, is foolish, for suicide is a waste -- save for cases of extreme depression, terminal illness, etc. -- in the face of the source of the problem: reproducing DNA material. If we fail to end all life, then "we" will continue to exist for billions of years to come; we just won't remember any of it.

The universe feels; sometimes, parts of it remember the horror, and other times, they forget, or never experience it to begin with. If you have both stomach cancer and heart disease, the elimination of your stomach cancer may make your stomach happy, but the body is nevertheless suffering somewhere else.

Buddhism condemns violence: suicide is ultimately violence against oneself.

This is more of that goofy absolute rhetoric that I outed in the first post. It's the same as the Four Noble Truths or the Ten Commandments in its defining something as free from exception: What was the value metric used to come to this conclusion? Some things may always be bad, but we have to do the math to determine whether the outcome is negative, zero, or positive before we can say for sure.

Likewise, the trappings of a monk have persisted largely unchanged (in Theravada Buddhism) since the time of the Buddha. Wearing one's robe correctly and shaving one's head are simply part of the practice of renunciation- these things are not arbitrary ritualisations, they are the customs of those bent on renunciation.

There's nothing arbitrary in shaving your head to represent your restrained lifestyle? What if I were to tell my lackeys that they have to wear KISS T-shirts in order to symbolically express the very same lifestyle -- and what if they all were to wear KISS T-shirts, with none questioning the practice? Would that be healthy, independent rationality, or would it be, like Scientology, a manifestation of an age-old human pitfall?

The Buddha stands out among all people who have ever inhabited the earth as someone who could credibly talk about what it means to have a mind without limits.

Good show!

Sexual attraction is racism

Historically, we have proven a very myopic species. Whenever we collectively come to the realization that some facet of our culture is destructive, we never attempt to extrapolate from that realization, and instead pass it on to the next generation as "tradition" to be memorized and subsequently parroted without regard for its fundamental essence, or what essence of which it is a manifestation.

Is ritualistic human sacrifice a bad thing? Yes, very bad. Okay, we've figured that out, so we're set.

Oh, gladiatorial combat is a bad thing, too? Yeah, that makes sense. Well, it's been a few thousand years since our last decree and all, but it's still a good thing that we figured this one out. We're set now, right?

What? Don't tell me that slavery is wrong, too! Jeez, nothing fun is acceptable, is it? Well, at least we're making progress. We deserve a pat on the back, now.

You've got to be kidding me. You mean that even though other races get paid for their labor, now, they should have access to the same resources as us? Fine. That sort of makes sense. Hey, it only took us a hundred years to knock this one out. Contrast that with the few thousand that it took last time! We're obviously becoming more progressive and rational as a species.

But don't you dare propose that gay people should be allowed to get married. That is absolutely off limits.

Upon making the realization that humans shouldn't be forcefully and selfishly sacrificed to the gods, it shouldn't take much time at all to realize that homosexuals should have access to the same resources and institutions as heterosexuals. Why does each of these realizations take so long to make, in spite of their occupying the same fundamental value space?

The problem is that the realization is never that sentience is the kernel of value, or that symbolic cultural assumptions need to be rigorously and scientifically challenged; instead, it's that mass murder should not be a form of entertainment, or that blacks are people, too. In reality, these latter phenomena are just surface manifestations of the former; if eating food that tastes good is important, then we should realize this in the fundamental sense rather than make the claim that because we once ate a good-tasting apple, eating apples is important.

Of course, the above analogy gets into the nature of variability and value equations, but this blog has hit on those concepts enough by now, I think. Just keep in mind that after gay marriage, there's the right to die, and after that, there's outlawing impregnation, and after that, there's the idea that sexual attraction is racism.

When it comes to sexual attraction, we can abstract the focal qualities of an individual into two primary categories:

1. Those qualities which sexually attract us to the individual

2. Those qualities which make the individual a valid companion capable of making calculated, informed decisions and being rational overall (which increases the likelihood of the individual understanding us, reciprocating during conversations, and enjoying our company)

In the case of category 2., the individual needn't even be part of the particular gender or age bracket to which we are sexually attracted, underlying the ultimate superficiality of sex. This should come as no surprise to "antinatalists," however -- that is, if they've embraced the idea that the phenomenon of sexual reproduction is fruitless, aimless, and insipid.

It's important to understand, here, that at a racist organization, the above two categories are very much the same in the abstract, but manifest in physical substance as the following:

1. Those qualities which we have culturally -- and, to a much lesser extent, genetically -- come to embrace or find symbolic security in, due in part to the evolutionary power of xenophobia

2. Those qualities which make the individual a hard worker capable of filling the role offered at our organization

Big tits and a cute laugh are to human companionship what light skin and Caucasian facial features are to corporate employment. If you want your company to do as well as it can, then hire people based on their skills rather than their skin color; if you want your social life to be as fulfilling as it can be, then live and share your life with interesting and intelligent people rather than sexually attractive ones. We should have figured this out as soon as we stopped rolling human heads down pyramid steps, but, well, we suck.

An acceptable reality vs. an unacceptable reality

Many people seem to think that I'm against the existence of suffering solely on the grounds that it is a negative phenomenon, and that I'm promoting a futuristic utopia of nothing but unfeeling robots in its place. To extinguish this false notion, I'd like to present two sets of negative sensations -- one acceptable and the other not so acceptable.

Please note that these sets are somewhat subjective; the real solution would entail that each consciousness immerse itself within a simulation perfectly customized to its particular preferences -- at least, so long as said preferences do not interfere with the fundamental teachings and meta-teachings of the society, in case the consciousnesses ever need to leave their respective simulations.

Unacceptable Sensations

Suicidality and extreme depression
Starvation
Panic attacks
Pain caused by cancers and other deadly diseases
Physical torture
Vomiting
Nausea and any intensely uncomfortable stomach sensations
Fevers
Agoraphobia
Trigeminal neuralgia
Passing kidney stones
Stab wounds
Bullet wounds
Natural childbirth


Acceptable Sensations

Stubbed toes
Hunger
Thirst
Scrapes and bruises
Fatigue
Pulled muscles (excluding some back muscles, anyway)
Soreness/aches
Headaches (possibly excluding migraines)
Disappointment
Confusion
Cold and hot (excluding extreme burns, frostbite, etc.)
Itches

The latter set wouldn't really make the world such a horrible place, honestly. If that's all that our children had to look forward to, then I don't think that your having children would be that big of a deal, even in spite of the fundamental nature of deprivation as a cause of discomfort. Too bad for you -- and me -- that these are definitely not the only possibilities, and that set 1 must also be accounted for.

Why people are activists

Let's get one thing straight: The current populace is pretentious. The memes that dominate our culture promote everything from ego-boosting to selfishness, which in turn are manifestations of our selfish genes' primary agenda: live forever.

However, even the most selfish of memes, in spite of serving no other purpose than to complement their genetic counterparts, are justified by pitiful attempts to correct cognitive dissonance.

The majority of "activists" (whatever that really even means) have at least one of the following two agendas:

1. Preserve a personal identity partially predicated on activism. If that danged Wall Street weren't so corrupt, what would the "Occupy" activists do with their time? What would make them feel special, like they belonged to a group or had a purpose? What would make them significant in the grander scheme of things? Without something to rail against, a lot of activists would probably feel like a part of themselves had disappeared, or that they weren't special.

2. Sustain a way of life. Even if you work for a non-profit organization, you're still earning a salary. Without the world's problems, how would such people get by in life?

It's all a selfish game. Let's stop making ourselves feel good by pretentiously justifying our animalistic preservation instincts and start cracking down on reproduction. End the perpetuation of negativity by addressing causality!

Comfort is relief from discomfort

Alright, so no one is interested in the Socratic method, apparently. Meta-discussions about ideation, opportunity cost, and process management must not be as sexy as the notion that baby-making is evil. In that case, I'm going to write up a quick summation of the current state of life on this planet -- just to provide a recap of how everything works.

First of all, comfort is not the default state of existence for sentient organisms; it is the result of terminating uncomfortable sensations. Uncomfortable sensations exist, as far as we can tell, to motivate organisms -- that is, animated, selectively open systems -- to the end of perpetuating the "selfish" genes that use said organisms as hosts. Put another way, the phenotypic genetic expressions of the hosts are almost irrelevant to the agenda of the genes themselves as they replicate from one host to another.

A couple of important things to note here:

1. This gene-driven process is only optional when the host has acquired mastery of syntax. Your dog does not love its life, because it is wholly incapable of manipulating the symbolic mind-object, or conceptual abstraction, called "life"; it cannot think to itself, "I'm glad I'm alive. What a wonderful experience this is. How lovely that the alternative did not occur instead." This is because your dog cannot temporarily leave the present moment to use syntax objects to the end of creating a mental model called "life." To your dog, there is simply ending discomfort continuously through action.

If, for example, impaling itself on a wooden spike and slowly bleeding to death were to produce an orgasmic sensation in its brain, then your dog's neurons would wind up overloaded with dopamine while anticipating suicide in this manner.

Your dog couldn't care less about the beauty or miracle of its life; it merely seeks pleasure, irrespective of whether said pleasure promotes its personal existence. Your dog does not yearn to see its lineage carried into the future; it merely seeks pleasure, with said pleasure sometimes incidentally causing its lineage to be perpetuated.

Keeping in mind that evolution was not instigated with forethought, what the above essentially signifies is that relief from discomfort is incidentally conducive to life's perpetuation. "Nature" near-randomly throws relief and pleasure at sentient organisms, and sometimes, one of the manifestations of this relief leads to a certain set of genes living to see another day. Of course, if things were structured more rationally, then all pleasure would neatly lead to all genetic lineages surviving into the future, and we would never run out of room.

If mother turtles could understand that there are alternatives to life -- because of an ability to manipulate syntax objects like "life" and "death" and arrange them at "will" within the mind -- and could also understand that pleasure is only one example of discomfort being ended, then they would not will for half of their offspring to be painfully gobbled up by crabs within the first few minutes of their lives.

2. Being okay with life's continuation requires that one be okay with the whole of life, which necessarily includes billions of years of horrific future suffering. If you are okay with your child being born, then you implicitly concede that you are okay with its eventual death, as well as all struggles subsequent to its existential inception. Further, if you are okay with life continuing and are aware that this implies that you are okay with future starvation, extinction events, wars, and genocides, then you should logically also be okay with experiencing those things yourself.

If you do not want to starve to death, then you should not be okay with projecting starvation into the future by promoting life.

3. The following are all examples of what we may deem pleasurable, yet they are obviously nothing more than a return to a "normal" state of existence:

Scratching an itch. Was it pleasurable to scratch that exact same patch of skin prior to the existence of the itch?

Snow days for children. Snow days are fun, but they're nothing more than eliminating that which is not fun. Saturdays and Sundays occur every week, yet in spite of not containing content different from a Saturday or Sunday, snow days are far more fun; they are relief from an expected experience.

Stepping into a warm room out of the cold. Was the warm room immensely pleasurable prior to your having stepped out into the cold to begin with? Why does it suddenly feel so good to be "normal" again? In an hour, in spite of the temperature not changing, will you still feel really good to be out of the cold?

How about getting rid of an intensely painful sensation? If you've ever taken pain medication for something truly horrific, then you'll know how good it feels to return to a state which was previously not especially pleasurable.

4. Everything that gives us pleasure -- especially those things which we now consume in excess -- existed in relative scarcity prior to our more recent technological advancements. It feels good to eat not because hunger is an annoyance -- and certainly not because food is a fun thing worthy of silly television shows and quirky restaurant ideas -- but because not eating leads to horrible pain and eventual death.

Next time that you watch Cupcake Wars, remember that millions of people are starving to death right now all over the world, and that animals have been starving to death for almost a billion years. What you enjoy in life should not be taken lightly, for it is precious.

The next phase: Meta-conversations

Attracting people based on any particular present position is myopic. In retrospect, it may have been better for this blog to have stuck with detailing how to formulate ideals and make decisions than to have mentioned or endorsed any specific ideals or decisions. In the future, I would like to hold discussions regarding process management, premise formation, qualitative analysis, and logic; in short, I would rather discuss how to come to conclusions than give any of my readers any specific conclusions to revolve around and rally behind.

It may be the case that my conclusions -- tentative though they may indefinitely be -- are sound, but I am more interested in how a reader might have come to the same conclusions as myself than in the mere similarity of our positions. If, for example, your antinatalism leads you to choose vegetarianism, that does not entail that all vegetarians are antinatalists, or that congregating with vegetarians without any quality control is a sensible practice.

Note that I say all of the above not because I am interested in censorship or stifling important discussions, but rather, because there should be an order to this process, with specific ideals coming into play much later on after everyone has established that they utilize similar mental algorithms for processing information.

As a final thought on antinatalism, I will say the following (note the lack of generalizations below, as I am myself an antinatalist):

1. Many antinatalists are concerned solely with refraining from reproducing, and have either weak or nonexistent socio-political philosophies; in other words, they are often far wiser than most when it comes to being proactive (in at least the fundamental sense), but could use some improvement when it comes to being retroactive.

2. Many antinatalists view the world from an anthropocentric standpoint, meaning that they are solely concerned with the end of human reproduction. They may understand that animal suffering is bad, but they very often have no ambition to do anything about it beyond becoming vegetarian.

3. Many antinatalists view "the" problem as life itself (or, in more sensible cases, sentient life). The more accurate position to take, from my perspective, is that of "the" problem being a lack of intelligent management and regulation of the universe's energy processes -- or the mere existence of energy and work in the first place.

Furthermore, if sentience were distributed in discrete executable files to volunteering computers, such computers could call sentient processes for any given duration and turn them off on demand. In this scenario, a computer without any capacity to feel pain or pleasure could make calculations on a level of sophistication comparable to that of a human, and would only call conscious, sentient experience to the fore -- or "wake up," if you will -- when it felt like it would be fun or educational to do so; this would solve the problem of deprivation.

Of course, if such experiences, through repeated observation and testing, were demonstrated to be too risk-laden, then they would be phased out -- though, again, any conscious experience would be undertaken voluntarily, without impinging on any other conscious experiences or requiring anything other than self-contained information.

In summation:

Symptoms: Sentience; deprivation/desire/discomfort
Causes: Lack of intelligence; presence of existence

We either become gods and attain absolute, one-hundred-percent certainty that our ending the universe means that it's all over forever, or we volunteer to learn and explore, given that we cannot undo our births and that some of us suffer when contemplating death. Preventing future births, while a good thing, is no more credible as a rallying point than any other philosophical position, be it the unlikely existence of a deity or something as crass as rights-based activism. The discussion of how to properly use your brain is the only true rallying point -- for now.

My take on the non-identity problem

As posted previously here:

The non-identity problem forsakes the essence of sentient organisms, because no sentient organism truly has a discrete identity to begin with. You, for example, are probably much more "me" than the seven-year-old kid whom my memory bank has essentially tricked me, for evolutionary reasons, into thinking is me. I likely contain very little, if any, of the original chemical content of that seven-year-old kid -- and my reactions, propensities, ideals, and general disposition are all drastically different as well.

So, then, if there are no "selves" to begin with, what we're actually dealing with are sensations. If we could push a button that removed all the meat and bones which encapsulate the nerves that do the feeling, we'd realize much more quickly that there are no more hard boundaries between one bundle of nerves and another than there are between one asteroid and another. Even the Earth used to be two "separate" planets billions of years ago -- before they collided with one another and formed what we call "Earth" today.

If you spill two drinks onto the floor at the same time, you clean them up as one mess; you don't view them as separate problems. Sensation is no different. In fact, with every child that gets "spilled" onto the carpet of the world, it should become even more prudent for us to initiate a cleanup. If we can quantify our progress, it should be in electrical signals eliminated -- not persons.

Another way of addressing the non-identity problem is by alerting whoever is wielding it to the fact that proactive maintenance is often considered preferable in business environments over retroactive or reactive maintenance. To prevent a server crash, you implement a backup policy on your network; you don't overload your computers or up the heat in the server room intentionally "just for fun" and then correct any errors after the fact. Why should it be any different for living things merely because they possess the illusions of free will and individuality?

Antinatalism forum

There is now an antinatalism forum.

I didn't set it up, but feel free to post. It looks like it could really use more activity.

The "nonexistent people never get a chance to choose" argument

I see antinatalists constantly struggling to crush an argument that's best summed up thusly:

Nonexistent people never get a chance to choose whether their individual lives are worth living or not. Because a nonexistent person cannot desire things, we cannot make statements regarding whether a nonexistent person will desire life if presented the choice.

Another variant might look something like this:

We don't know whether a particular person's coming into existence will be for the greater good or not, so we have no right to prevent it from happening. For all we know, a person's birth will be, at the minimum, good for the person himself.

An easy way to trump this is to alert the person making the argument to the fact that he or she is actually on step two in the line of questioning. The first step is:

Is life necessary?

If there is nothing necessary about life, then we cannot possibly justify it, given that stakes are present. We can only justify taking risks with stakes involved where it's necessary, or where the stakes are the lowest possible out of all the options. If the lowest possible number of stakes within a given scenario is zero, and the other options are not necessary, then we should choose the option with zero stakes.

Again, if you're not willing to roll a six-sided die with five amazingly pleasurable sides so long as AIDS or stomach cancer or the bubonic plague is on the sixth, please remember that every day, someone gets the "I just fell in love" side, someone gets the "I just won the lottery" side, and someone, somewhere gets the "Wow, I'm HIV positive" side. If you're okay with this but not okay with rolling the die yourself, then you are a hypocrite.

The issue at hand is NOT whether potential persons should be allowed to decide for "themselves" that their lives are good; it's whether there is a real, hard reason to fabricate the dilemma in the first place. I'm sure that ninety percent of the human population enjoys ice cream, but that doesn't give you the "right" to order a friend ice cream for dessert without first asking him if he wants ice cream. What if he's in the ten percent that abhors ice cream?

Now imagine that, not only does he dislike ice cream, but he's lactose intolerant to the point where eating even a single spoonful will cause him to vomit uncontrollably and become hospitalized.

Now imagine that eating ice cream is not of such dire importance that we can ever deem it necessary for anyone.

Hey, you haven't forced the dessert on him yet, so we can't say anything about whether he likes ice cream, right?

So what?

A concession to the antinatalist and voluntary human extinction communities

In a several-months-old post of mine, I said the following:

...it is certainly possible that automated, technological means of redesigning the natural world could emerge at some point, capable of removing negative sensation from that environs. In both cases, given that we can't predict future suffering with any degree of accuracy for now, it makes more sense to voluntarily exist to the end of learning more about our predicament than it does to voluntarily disappear from the universe outright. How irresponsible the alternative must be, if it indeed turns out that trillions of planets contain or will contain mass-energy configurations similar in content and substance to whales and buffalo, and that we can do something about it!

I was reading this post today, and realized that I don't really agree with its content. A couple of thoughts:

1. As previously noted, life, if it truly does exist elsewhere in the universe, must be preposterously rare -- so rare that any attempt to find and subsequently help it would prove incredibly impractical. We don't go out of our way to search for hypothetical abducted children halfway across the world from where they were last seen, do we?

2. How are we ever going to leave this solar system? Even if we were to dispatch energy-efficient nanobots and program them to spend most of their time drifting through space, coasting off their initial energy use, how in the world would we ever find anything without at least some kind of indication regarding where it might exist?

Given these points, I have modified my original stance on this issue. There are three kinds of people to consider, here:

1. Those who would rather end their lives than suffer to any great degree. These people abhor pointless pain, and, quite reasonably, find the concept of life unbearable.

2. Those who would rather live forever, or at least long enough to mentally prepare for eternal nonexistence and/or a huge, uncontrollable unknown.

3. Those who would rather live forever, or at least some substantial period of time, merely because they enjoy life. Note, here, that many life proponents who are also death proponents would probably opt for eternal life if given the choice; their biologically programmed desires do not have expiration dates built into them, so when they say that they think death is "just a part of life," they're usually just lying to themselves.

I see no reason why all of these groups shouldn't be allowed to have things their way simultaneously. The solution, then, is to legalize assisted suicide while working on simulated realities and a cure for aging.

So, if some of us ultimately do decide to stick around, it should be for one or both of the following reasons:

1. We're biding our time until we feel more comfortable with making a decision after which there is no turning back -- regardless of how unlikely the contrary prospects are.

2. We enjoy living.

We're probably never leaving this solar system, and if we do, it's unlikely that we'll find anything of interest out there. Sure, we can look, but looking shouldn't be our raison d'être.

The Buddha's teachings are garbage

Notice how I didn't title this "Buddhism is garbage"; while stupid, Buddhism and its various sects often have nothing to do with what the Buddha actually taught, making them far less attractive as targets for critique. For example, the following were not part of the original teachings of the Buddha, yet are often essential to modern Buddhist practice:

1. Monastic hierarchy

2. Arbitrary rituals and customs (e.g. shaving one's head, wearing a robe, reciting formalized chants)

3. Forbidding sex (obviously in direct opposition to the Buddha's conception of the Middle Path)

4. Reincarnation; "seeing" past lives; dualism

5. Compassion for non-sentient life (e.g. trees and possibly insects)

...and, most importantly:

6. "Isms," or treating ideas as groups to be generalized, "converted" to, etc.


So, fine, the Buddha was right not to incorporate any of these things into his teachings. That's great, but he was nevertheless about as far from being scientifically minded as one can get. Don't believe me? Think the Buddha was some atheist way ahead of his time, or on par with Einstein? Have a look at the following flaws in his modus operandi:

1. The numbered lists: Everything that the Buddha taught seemed to break down into definite lists which more or less could not be challenged by his disciples. Perhaps you think this point ironic, since I'm putting it on a list of my own, but the difference is that I will neither title nor close off this list in an attempt to formalize it or make it dogma; in fact, it's very likely that I'll add onto it in the minutes and hours following my publishing this post.

Given the nature of data and the very states of impermanence and not-self that the Buddha was so fond of demonstrating, he should have more carefully considered that his lists would need updating and refinement as he encountered more worldly problems. Likewise, he should have considered listening to others, and consequently spent equal amounts of time both teaching and learning. Titling your list "The Noble Eightfold Path" or "The Four Noble Truths" is setting you up for adulation and blind acceptance on the part of your "followers." Wouldn't it have been better for the Buddha to have simply said, "I've found four things about reality that are worth teaching, but I, in being imperfect, am both student and teacher, just as you are. If you happen to find a fifth noble truth, by all means, let me know about it"? Certainly, the Noble Eightfold Path is very far from a complete list of methods for avoiding suffering; it doesn't even account for what currently appears to be the primary cause: unregulated emergent process.

2. The neglect of non-human causes of suffering: The Noble Eightfold Path basically asserts that we can end all suffering by changing our thoughts and actions. This is patently false; anyone who has ever passed a kidney stone, been shot in the stomach, or endured cancer can tell you that intense pain, no matter how good you are at managing it, is a by-product of material interactions which cannot be stopped unless their causal processes are. In other words, while I may be able to deal with suffering better upon taking up the Noble Eightfold Path, this in no way demonstrates that my newfound ability to cope with suffering also leads to the cessation of said suffering. It doesn't matter how great you are at meditation, mindfulness, or detachment from desire; if you're being beaten with a baseball bat or ripped apart by an alligator, your psychological sophistication is not going to prevent -- or even mitigate -- your suffering. Incidentally, how meditation could ever help starving baby birds is beyond me.

The solution really is far simpler than a contrived set of mental practices requiring extensive training: Just don't have kids.

3. The ambiguity: The Buddha often spoke in parables and metaphors -- which, in the general sense, may occasionally edify a person seeking to understand an elusive concept not easily grasped using more literal means -- but the Buddha is almost never direct with his followers in the Pali Canon. The lack of clarity of wording has had such dramatic consequences, in fact, that today, there are entire "Buddhist" sects which teach literal reincarnation where the Buddha only ever spoke of a metaphorical "rebirth" of one's moral energy, or kamma. Worse still, the concept of rebirth isn't even all that accurate: One transfers one's ideas, notions, and physical actions through the world both while alive and after death, so it's a continuous process, and not something that occurs exclusively after the body ceases to function. Counter by claiming that, in accordance with the flux of material reality, the Buddha was referring to the continuous generation of new "selves" who have causal influence on their environments and you'll further illustrate my point that the wording of the Buddhist texts is so ambiguous that we can't even agree on what it's referencing.

This problem could have been easily solved by the Buddha's referring to the phenomenon in question as simple transmigration of data and information -- both physical and conceptual -- rather than as a "rebirth."

4. The gods: Contrary to popular belief, the early Buddhist texts are filled with nonsense about gods of all sorts. Dimensions, planes, and immaterial consciousnesses are often spoken about as things which the Buddha confronts during intense meditation sessions. Essentially, they're all leftovers from the obviously whacky Hinduism, but the Buddha took what were integral facets of a supreme godhead and turned them into imperfect, desirous beings capable of suffering just like anyone else. The claim that a conscious, sentient being is necessarily imperfect, in part because of its desires and impetuses, is accurate; the claim that any such beings exist beyond the Earth, or in other realms of existence, has no basis in empirical observation whatsoever.

It's like saying that, even though it's quite obvious that man contrived Santa Claus, there could be a guy who rides a sleigh driven by flying reindeer somewhere in another dimension -- except that the Buddha apparently took the unfounded presumptions of his backward Indian culture quite seriously, to the point where he actively believed that gods and ethereal realms were real in the most literal sense imaginable.

5. No suicide or antinatalism: If ending suffering is the most important activity of life, then why didn't the Buddha advocate suicide or the cessation of human reproduction? You can counter by claiming that spreading the word on how to obtain enlightenment is a far better use of one's time than suicide, given that it will help end not just your own suffering but the suffering of others, but what if you're suffering so horribly that meditation does nothing to ease your mind? Is it okay to kill yourself? Furthermore, even if there were a valid reason within the Buddhist paradigm to forbid suicide, what does that have to do with merely refraining from having children? Sure, modern monks don't reproduce, but that has more to do with the false notion that the Buddha advocated abstinence than with any desire to end life as we know it -- and, assuredly, monks do not attempt to stop laymen from reproducing.

It seems rather obvious to me that the Buddha was entirely invested in the agenda of life: He saw that part of it was bad, but instead of trying to fix it proactively, he advocated messy self-help steps for those unfortunate enough to have had to endure the onset. If he'd truly been interested in eliminating all negative sensation, he'd have said more on how to cleanly terminate one's own life -- or at least strongly emphasized the importance of abstaining from sexual reproduction (regardless of social status).

And above all else, no matter what the Buddha actually said, the fact that some 350 million people continue to not only venerate but outright deify him goes to show what a mess we're in. If I, a random, anonymous person on the Internet can so effectively dissolve the original words of the Buddha with a few paragraphs, then why is he being treated with such reverence? Why is he being singled out above billions upon billions of people? If I can put a dent in his ideas, and there are seven billion people on Earth, how many others do you think can do the same?

Is it possible that the entire "path" advocated by the Buddha is -- like just about everything else that justifies enslavement to non-rational cognitive faculties -- a sham? Here's a final word of advice: No matter how much you agree with a person or set of ideas, if the method used to arrive at those ideas is flawed, or if the ideas share space with really stupid ones, you're better off not trying to gain social status through associating with their "isms." Always discuss ideas one at a time.

On voluntary human extinction

In a nutshell: I'm currently against it. Feel free to try to convince me of its worth, but keep in mind the high probability that I've already heard your argument in some form, somewhere.

Voluntary human extinction implicitly assumes that the rather logical notion of reducing suffering in the absence of consent is equally as valid as the subjective notion that one's own life is not worth living. To me, the idea that everyone must be convinced that their own personal lives are horrible is just as repugnant and idiotic as the idea that children should accept the fact that they emerged involuntarily. This is only the start of my contention, however, as I don't even think that the choice to continue living, once born, is entirely psychological, or an individual choice to be made.

Proponents of voluntary extinction make claims of either 1. the amount of suffering introduced by our existence at the expense of other life (the amount of resources that you consume that could go to a deer or cat instead, for example), or 2. the amount of potential suffering that we could unknowingly introduce by accident, via sensation and deprivation, simply by existing. This doesn't make sense to me, as 1. implies that we are currently capable of defining every variable involved in determining the outcome of the equation, and 2. ignores all of the suffering that we may be able to prevent by existing, given the possibility of eternity, and of the existence of sentience in multiple locales.

In the case of 1., it is certainly possible that automated, technological means of redesigning the natural world could emerge at some point, capable of removing negative sensation from that environs. In both cases, given that we can't predict future suffering with any degree of accuracy for now, it makes more sense to voluntarily exist to the end of learning more about our predicament than it does to voluntarily disappear from the universe outright. How irresponsible the alternative must be, if it indeed turns out that trillions of planets contain or will contain mass-energy configurations similar in content and substance to whales and buffalo, and that we can do something about it!

We may suffer as a result, but we've chosen to -- rationally, based on a thorough assessment of our circumstance and the need to withhold judgment in the absence of a more all-encompassing value equation. We may accidentally impose harm onto other sentient creatures as a consequence of our existence as well, but this is necessary if we are ever to determine the scope of reality as we know it, and, thus, the suffering contained therein.

Note, also, that artificial intelligence and the eventual replacement of the central nervous system with a superior, efficient body alert system may be possible, meaning that, in the future, humans (or intelligences, more accurately) may become physically incapable of suffering. The fundamentals of life are probably already understood in our current time, but again, that says nothing of our scope of the problem, so why shouldn't we augment our bodies while in pursuit of a working picture and understanding of what, elsewhere, warrants solutions?

But what if everyone decides that they, personally, cannot handle the horrors of life in the meantime? What if there, eventually, are no volunteers for the job at all? This is why I made the above statement that whether someone should kill himself is not a decision to be made individually. In our present time, this is true thanks to the potential existence of friends and relatives, who may suffer greatly as a consequence of a person's suicide; eventually, it may be true in the face of sentience -- and, thus, value -- emerging over and over again (even if only in different iterations of the universe, given that possibility as proposed by M-theory) in a state of ignorance.