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Post by cupcakes on Feb 4, 2018 5:37:37 GMT
tpfkar Sorry, "harm" doesn't require "experience" of it, regardless of how you babble so on it and the Objective you believe in. Of course not giving the distraught loaded revolvers, upset teenagers ligature lessons, or the deranged poisons is just basic sense & empathy, regardless of the thoughts of the unhinged of the murderous and comical sort. And you can make your nonsense assertions all day long, but the metaphysical of "get it while you can" is about as real physical as you can get to and not hung up on extreme, overwrought, absurd valuations nor quests for perfection with great longings for an afterlife. And what you "feel" generally makes about as much sense as what you post other than as a preface for somehow getting even more wild-eyed in your Ada-assertions. No "forcibly contravening" of the wishes of the patient free from the for of the illness, unlike your fantasies of contravening the unencumbered wishes of women re their reproductive tracts and the contravention of the lives of the masses you dream of murdering in your cult's apocalypse. If true, then it is cute, cuddly, fuzzy and multicultural because Muslims are (mostly) brown. That takes precedence over any moral concern.Well what equation would you use to weigh up the 'harm' that supposedly exists without the 'harmed' ever experiencing it, against 'harm' that is acutely experienced over an extended period of time? Since you can't qualitatively describe the 'harm' of being dead without having ever processed feelings of being harmed in transitioning from life to death, then it's fair to question whether or not it would count as 'harm', let alone the idea that when this transition is explicitly requested that it is somehow worse than any combined intensity and duration of consciously experienced harm. I'm asking you to justify why the the unexperienced harm is worse than the harm that is acutely experienced over an extended period of time, and all you can say is that you find it more important to prevent the unexperienced 'harm', even when such would be consistent with the explicit wishes of the alleged harmed. Would you personally rather live out another 30 years with severe depression with absolutely no reprieve, or die in your sleep one night without realising it? Nobody is allowed to be assisted to die in most nations, and if it ever becomes known that anyone is thinking of suicide, then they are taken away to be confined in a mental institution. And those who do attempt suicide covertly often fail, even with a well thought out plan. The only rights that I'm wanting to contravene are the ones that involve someone else's wellbeing being put in jeopardy over the course of a lifetime. Just like you would want the police to contravene someone else's freedom to assault you with a baseball bat. By the definition of harm. I know you think that if you sneak up behind someone and put a bullet in their head you say you aren't harming them if they never know it. But just that's enough to highlight you extreme derangement. Would you rather be a hammer or a nail? A will-o'-wisp or a Tinkerbell? People are allowed to be assisted if they are terminal. And no, people aren't confined indefinitely for suicide ideation unless they are pressing it, in which case they are acting out or are mentally incompetent. And you wish to deeply violate women's reproductive rights via forced sterilization even, and contravene the lives of the masses you dream of murdering. You of course silly dreaming of wielding the "baseball bat" on women's privies and masses of lives. And if society wants the fairest possible state of affairs, that would mean no humans and no society.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 4, 2018 5:38:51 GMT
The other organisms that they're competing against also don't have the capacity for suffering, so there are a multitude of other ways that don't involve suffering. They do respond to environmental stresses, but are not sophisticated enough for conscious experiences of distress to be one of those responses. When an organism evolves to the point where it does become capable of conscious experience, then that's an adaptive mechanism which forces them to behave in certain ways in order to avoid suffering. I asked you HOW they survive against competition when no suffering is involved. You didn't answer that. Just any old thing you type doesn't count as an answer. An answer would say something about how it's accomplished. That question is far too broad, because there is a very diverse array of different non-sentient life on Earth, and I am not a biology expert so I gave a vague response. But when conscious experience comes into the equation, that is a way of motivating individual animals to avoid harmful experiences, which happens to be what is beneficial to both the survival of their species and own genetic lineage.
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Post by Terrapin Station on Feb 4, 2018 5:42:08 GMT
I asked you HOW they survive against competition when no suffering is involved. You didn't answer that. Just any old thing you type doesn't count as an answer. An answer would say something about how it's accomplished. That question is far too broad, because there is a very diverse array of different non-sentient life on Earth, and I am not a biology expert so I gave a vague response. But when conscious experience comes into the equation, that is a way of motivating individual animals to avoid harmful experiences, which happens to be what is beneficial to both the survival of their species and own genetic lineage. Just give an example of how survival against competition is accomplished in lieu of suffering, or even just speculate how you believe it might be done in some example. If you're going to be making claims about this sort of stuff, you need to be able to answer a question like this.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 4, 2018 5:44:59 GMT
tpfkar Well what equation would you use to weigh up the 'harm' that supposedly exists without the 'harmed' ever experiencing it, against 'harm' that is acutely experienced over an extended period of time? Since you can't qualitatively describe the 'harm' of being dead without having ever processed feelings of being harmed in transitioning from life to death, then it's fair to question whether or not it would count as 'harm', let alone the idea that when this transition is explicitly requested that it is somehow worse than any combined intensity and duration of consciously experienced harm. I'm asking you to justify why the the unexperienced harm is worse than the harm that is acutely experienced over an extended period of time, and all you can say is that you find it more important to prevent the unexperienced 'harm', even when such would be consistent with the explicit wishes of the alleged harmed. Would you personally rather live out another 30 years with severe depression with absolutely no reprieve, or die in your sleep one night without realising it? Nobody is allowed to be assisted to die in most nations, and if it ever becomes known that anyone is thinking of suicide, then they are taken away to be confined in a mental institution. And those who do attempt suicide covertly often fail, even with a well thought out plan. The only rights that I'm wanting to contravene are the ones that involve someone else's wellbeing being put in jeopardy over the course of a lifetime. Just like you would want the police to contravene someone else's freedom to assault you with a baseball bat. By the definition of harm. I know you think that if you sneak up behind someone and put a bullet in their head you say you aren't harming them if they never know it. But just that's enough to highlight you extreme derangement. Would you rather be a hammer or a nail? A will-o'-wisp or a Tinkerbell? People are allowed to be assisted if they are terminal. And no, people aren't confined indefinitely for suicide ideation unless they are pressing it, in which case they are acting out or are mentally incompetent. And you wish to deeply violate women's reproductive rights via forced sterilization even, and contravene the lives of the masses you dream of murdering. You of course silly dreaming of wielding the "baseball bat" on women's privies and masses of lives. And if society wants the fairest possible state of affairs, that would mean no humans and no society.Well surely you're not disputing that mental illness is harmful; in which case you've got one 'harm' pitted against another harm, and I'm asking you to justify why the unexperienced 'harm' is worse than the harm that is consciously experienced for an extended period of time (often an entire lifetime). And shooting someone in the head likely would cause them to feel harmed, because it is possible for that to fail to kill them instantly, if at all. And unless part of some greater agenda to prevent future suffering, there's no good reason not to presume that most people want to continue living, and plenty of reasons not to kill someone in an arbitrary fashion such as that (such as the harm and fear that would be caused for others). In most jurisdictions, people are not allowed to be assisted to die, even if they are terminally ill. 'Reproductive right' is a right to transpose your problems of not feeling satisfied enough with your life onto someone else who will potentially have to endure a lifetime of being harmed. There should be no such right. People should only have rights in as far as they don't cause undue harm to others via imposition or risk.
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Post by cupcakes on Feb 4, 2018 5:47:16 GMT
tpfkar Nothing is risk-free, regardless of your silly "senses". People are killed unnecessarily who could have subsequently recovered via what you call "brainwashing". But if they were competent enough to actually make such a call and had actually decided, then they could trivially accomplish the physical act themselves. I don't know what extremes some might take in any of your extreme dreams, and the Netherlands and Belgium don't have your "30 year plan" but in fact a stack of irregularities and abuses including the holding down of at least one patient struggling not to be killed even after sedative, but that doesn't yield institutionalizing factory processing much less your desire for death kits in drugstores. Neuroscience and Free Will Are Rethinking Their DivorceThere's no harm in them not experiencing their (unlikely in most cases) subsequent recovery. Counterfactual scenarios carry no moral weight unless there is an actual person or animal being deprived. The people being assisted to die due to a mental illness in the Netherlands and Belgium would have needed to have been suffering severely for a certain period, and would need to have tried a range of treatments which would have failed to ameliorate the symptoms to any satisfactory degree. As far as the case (often cited by Christian pro life sites) of the woman who was restrained, she had submitted an advance directive to request euthanasia in the event that she lost her wits, and there's no evidence that she understood at the time of being restrained that she was going to be euthanised, but was likely just exhibiting an instinctual aversion to the needle being used. And I'm not aware of any cases in which the patient was indisputably cognisant of what was going on, of the patient still being forcibly restrained and euthanised against their protestations. Sure there is, they were unnecessarily doomed. Which by your deranged valuations would be great benefit, not harm, I know. And regardless of you prattles, many many people have recovered after wanting to die and lived very long lives, regardless whether you think they were "brainwashed". The cases in the Netherlands and Belgium have had many who zipped right through without much of anything, as is the case when these things get institutionalized and go on autopilot. And now the Washington Post and the Netherlands regulatory bodies are "Christian pro life", eh? And "indisputably cognizant" . She wasn't trying to refuse and fighting a nice bath. And the regulatory body, not "Christian pro life sites" is what had problems with it. Moreover, it may be possible to spray a chemical in the world's air, or add something to the water supply that would prevent women from becoming pregnant. It wouldn't be necessary to ban sex. Alternatively, we could develop an AI that would peacefully and swiftly wipe out all sentient organisms on Earth, perhaps by releasing some kind of toxin into the air.
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Post by cupcakes on Feb 4, 2018 6:06:57 GMT
tpfkar By the definition of harm. I know you think that if you sneak up behind someone and put a bullet in their head you say you aren't harming them if they never know it. But just that's enough to highlight you extreme derangement. Would you rather be a hammer or a nail? A will-o'-wisp or a Tinkerbell? People are allowed to be assisted if they are terminal. And no, people aren't confined indefinitely for suicide ideation unless they are pressing it, in which case they are acting out or are mentally incompetent. And you wish to deeply violate women's reproductive rights via forced sterilization even, and contravene the lives of the masses you dream of murdering. You of course silly dreaming of wielding the "baseball bat" on women's privies and masses of lives. And if society wants the fairest possible state of affairs, that would mean no humans and no society.Well surely you're not disputing that mental illness is harmful; in which case you've got one 'harm' pitted against another harm, and I'm asking you to justify why the unexperienced 'harm' is worse than the harm that is consciously experienced for an extended period of time (often an entire lifetime). And shooting someone in the head likely would cause them to feel harmed, because it is possible for that to fail to kill them instantly, if at all. And unless part of some greater agenda to prevent future suffering, there's no good reason not to presume that most people want to continue living, and plenty of reasons not to kill someone in an arbitrary fashion such as that (such as the harm and fear that would be caused for others). In most jurisdictions, people are not allowed to be assisted to die, even if they are terminally ill. 'Reproductive right' is a right to transpose your problems of not feeling satisfied enough with your life onto someone else who will potentially have to endure a lifetime of being harmed. There should be no such right. People should only have rights in as far as they don't cause undue harm to others via imposition or risk. Are you asking doctors to inflict "mental illness" now? And you're once again doing your patent gibbering. Read "if they never know it" again. And I'm not grading different harms; one is intentionally caused by people and one not, the critical distinction, and you've been peddling the silly tripe that harm has to be cognitively experienced by the one being harmed in order to qualify as harm. Right to be assisted when terminal is unrelated to what you've been sludging; if somebody's going down imminently, normal peeps can see helping that happen better. Very different from offing the mentally ill because they haven't been treated successfully as yet, regardless of your constant appeals to whatever freely-conjectured outlier you wish to fling at any given moment. And "imposition of risk" is still a great gas. Almost as funny as your actual advocated "impositions" of sterilization and mass murder. On that note, you've also called me "deranged", which is the mental illness equivalent of "n*****"
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Post by Deleted on Feb 4, 2018 6:17:05 GMT
That question is far too broad, because there is a very diverse array of different non-sentient life on Earth, and I am not a biology expert so I gave a vague response. But when conscious experience comes into the equation, that is a way of motivating individual animals to avoid harmful experiences, which happens to be what is beneficial to both the survival of their species and own genetic lineage. Just give an example of how survival against competition is accomplished in lieu of suffering, or even just speculate how you believe it might be done in some example. If you're going to be making claims about this sort of stuff, you need to be able to answer a question like this. Things like evolving thorns or evolving to be poisonous. In terms of non-sentient organisms, they do not suffer if these evolved mechanisms of protection fail.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 4, 2018 6:22:30 GMT
tpfkar There's no harm in them not experiencing their (unlikely in most cases) subsequent recovery. Counterfactual scenarios carry no moral weight unless there is an actual person or animal being deprived. The people being assisted to die due to a mental illness in the Netherlands and Belgium would have needed to have been suffering severely for a certain period, and would need to have tried a range of treatments which would have failed to ameliorate the symptoms to any satisfactory degree. As far as the case (often cited by Christian pro life sites) of the woman who was restrained, she had submitted an advance directive to request euthanasia in the event that she lost her wits, and there's no evidence that she understood at the time of being restrained that she was going to be euthanised, but was likely just exhibiting an instinctual aversion to the needle being used. And I'm not aware of any cases in which the patient was indisputably cognisant of what was going on, of the patient still being forcibly restrained and euthanised against their protestations. Sure there is, they were unnecessarily doomed. Which by your deranged valuations would be great benefit, not harm, I know. And regardless of you prattles, many many people have recovered after wanting to die and lived very long lives, regardless whether you think they were "brainwashed". The cases in the Netherlands and Belgium have had many who zipped right through without much of anything, as is the case when these things get institutionalized and go on autopilot. And now the Washington Post and the Netherlands regulatory bodies are "Christian pro life", eh? And "indisputably cognizant" . She wasn't trying to refuse and fighting a nice bath. And the regulatory body, not "Christian pro life sites" is what had problems with it. Moreover, it may be possible to spray a chemical in the world's air, or add something to the water supply that would prevent women from becoming pregnant. It wouldn't be necessary to ban sex. Alternatively, we could develop an AI that would peacefully and swiftly wipe out all sentient organisms on Earth, perhaps by releasing some kind of toxin into the air."Doomed" is just emotive language to conceal the fact that there's no actual trespass against the person. Nobody suffers after the fact from not having lived a very long life; and in the cases of the people asking for assisted suicide, it would be more likely that their very long life would be characterised by 90 years of suffering with scarcely an hour's reprieve. As far as I'm aware, the Netherlands' regulatory body wanted to investigate the case, but hasn't ultimately found that there was any wrongdoing. It was merely referred. People in the advanced stages dementia fight against all kinds of things, including nutrition and hygienic intervention. And your own children probably had an aversion to being vaccinated via a needle, even if told that it was for their benefit. The woman being euthanised would have been far less compos mentis than a young child being vaccinated.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 4, 2018 6:26:19 GMT
tpfkar Well surely you're not disputing that mental illness is harmful; in which case you've got one 'harm' pitted against another harm, and I'm asking you to justify why the unexperienced 'harm' is worse than the harm that is consciously experienced for an extended period of time (often an entire lifetime). And shooting someone in the head likely would cause them to feel harmed, because it is possible for that to fail to kill them instantly, if at all. And unless part of some greater agenda to prevent future suffering, there's no good reason not to presume that most people want to continue living, and plenty of reasons not to kill someone in an arbitrary fashion such as that (such as the harm and fear that would be caused for others). In most jurisdictions, people are not allowed to be assisted to die, even if they are terminally ill. 'Reproductive right' is a right to transpose your problems of not feeling satisfied enough with your life onto someone else who will potentially have to endure a lifetime of being harmed. There should be no such right. People should only have rights in as far as they don't cause undue harm to others via imposition or risk. Are you asking doctors to inflict "mental illness" now? And you're once again doing your patent gibbering. Read "if they never know it" again. And I'm not grading different harms; one is intentionally caused by people and one not, the critical distinction, and you've been peddling the silly tripe that harm has to be cognitively experienced by the one being harmed in order to qualify as harm. Right to be assisted when terminal is unrelated to what you've been sludging; if somebody's going down imminently, normal peeps can see helping that happen better. Very different from offing the mentally ill because they haven't been treated successfully as yet, regardless of your constant appeals to whatever freely-conjectured outlier you wish to fling at any given moment. And "imposition of risk" is still a great gas. Almost as funny as your actual advocated "impositions" of sterilization and mass murder. On that note, you've also called me "deranged", which is the mental illness equivalent of "n*****"One is a requested intervention that is only carried out with the patient's request and consent, and the other is something that the person suffers with due to misfortune that could happen to anybody. For how long is the person who is assisted to die 'harmed'? Since non-existence is eternal, do you reckon that the person is being eternally harmed, even though they would have scarcely experienced a fleeting moment of being harmed during the procedure itself, and never again afterwards? How can we pronounce that someone is harmed if there are no signs of distress and no way of inferring that they have an aversion to their current state?
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Post by cupcakes on Feb 4, 2018 6:30:13 GMT
tpfkar Sure there is, they were unnecessarily doomed. Which by your deranged valuations would be great benefit, not harm, I know. And regardless of you prattles, many many people have recovered after wanting to die and lived very long lives, regardless whether you think they were "brainwashed". The cases in the Netherlands and Belgium have had many who zipped right through without much of anything, as is the case when these things get institutionalized and go on autopilot. And now the Washington Post and the Netherlands regulatory bodies are "Christian pro life", eh? And "indisputably cognizant" . She wasn't trying to refuse and fighting a nice bath. And the regulatory body, not "Christian pro life sites" is what had problems with it. Moreover, it may be possible to spray a chemical in the world's air, or add something to the water supply that would prevent women from becoming pregnant. It wouldn't be necessary to ban sex. Alternatively, we could develop an AI that would peacefully and swiftly wipe out all sentient organisms on Earth, perhaps by releasing some kind of toxin into the air."Doomed" is just emotive language to conceal the fact that there's no actual trespass against the person. Nobody suffers after the fact from not having lived a very long life; and in the cases of the people asking for assisted suicide, it would be more likely that their very long life would be characterised by 90 years of suffering with scarcely an hour's reprieve. As far as I'm aware, the Netherlands' regulatory body wanted to investigate the case, but hasn't ultimately found that there was any wrongdoing. It was merely referred. People in the advanced stages dementia fight against all kinds of things, including nutrition and hygienic intervention. And your own children probably had an aversion to being vaccinated via a needle, even if told that it was for their benefit. The woman being euthanised would have been far less compos mentis than a young child being vaccinated. Harr, you speaking of "emotive language", with all of your overwrought lugubriousness and then even following it up with another of your freely-given imaginary "90 years of suffering with scarcely an hour's reprieve". Nobody suffers when you sneak up behind them and put a bullet in their brainpan killing them instantly, all the considerations of wannabe mass-murderers in search of their religious perfection and afterlife. "As far as I'm aware" from you goes about as far as your various "I feel"s. And you can excuse away anything and everything you like, but your characterization strictly shows the lengths you'll go. Harvard Professor Steven Pinker on Why We Refuse to See the Bright Side, Even Though We Should
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Post by cupcakes on Feb 4, 2018 6:35:40 GMT
tpfkar Are you asking doctors to inflict "mental illness" now? And you're once again doing your patent gibbering. Read "if they never know it" again. And I'm not grading different harms; one is intentionally caused by people and one not, the critical distinction, and you've been peddling the silly tripe that harm has to be cognitively experienced by the one being harmed in order to qualify as harm. Right to be assisted when terminal is unrelated to what you've been sludging; if somebody's going down imminently, normal peeps can see helping that happen better. Very different from offing the mentally ill because they haven't been treated successfully as yet, regardless of your constant appeals to whatever freely-conjectured outlier you wish to fling at any given moment. And "imposition of risk" is still a great gas. Almost as funny as your actual advocated "impositions" of sterilization and mass murder. On that note, you've also called me "deranged", which is the mental illness equivalent of "n*****"One is a requested intervention that is only carried out with the patient's request and consent, and the other is something that the person suffers with due to misfortune that could happen to anybody. For how long is the person who is assisted to die 'harmed'? Since non-existence is eternal, do you reckon that the person is being eternally harmed, even though they would have scarcely experienced a fleeting moment of being harmed during the procedure itself, and never again afterwards? How can we pronounce that someone is harmed if there are no signs of distress and no way of inferring that they have an aversion to their current state? All right now, is it length of time they were harmed? Or whether if they don't know it's not harm? And they shouldn't be expected to pay the price of everyone else's joy. Especially if nobody would be deprived of that joy in a universe with no sentient life.
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Post by goz on Feb 4, 2018 6:41:25 GMT
I just told you that there's absolutely no motivation to evolution. I didn't claim that there was any motivation. I merely mentioned what the results have inevitably been. Absolutely not, in fact the opposite.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 4, 2018 7:22:48 GMT
tpfkar One is a requested intervention that is only carried out with the patient's request and consent, and the other is something that the person suffers with due to misfortune that could happen to anybody. For how long is the person who is assisted to die 'harmed'? Since non-existence is eternal, do you reckon that the person is being eternally harmed, even though they would have scarcely experienced a fleeting moment of being harmed during the procedure itself, and never again afterwards? How can we pronounce that someone is harmed if there are no signs of distress and no way of inferring that they have an aversion to their current state? All right now, is it length of time they were harmed? Or whether if they don't know it's not harm? And they shouldn't be expected to pay the price of everyone else's joy. Especially if nobody would be deprived of that joy in a universe with no sentient life.I'm asking for you to give some kind of dimensions for this 'harm' which is alleged to be inflicted by respecting the wishes of people who have asked to be helped to die. If you can't tell me any dimensions of the harm from the perspective of the person allegedly being harmed, then it's conceptual 'harm' that exists only in the mind of other people. Someone isn't harmed just because you have a concept in your head of them being harmed, they have to actually feel harmed.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 4, 2018 7:25:14 GMT
I didn't claim that there was any motivation. I merely mentioned what the results have inevitably been. Absolutely not, in fact the opposite. Right, so you think that the default state of a sentient creature that never actively does anything at all (even feed or shelter itself) would be a state of perpetual bliss and freedom from harm? There aren't any kind of natural cues such as hunger, pain, cold, etc which motivate animals and humans to do something in order to stave off harm or deprivation?
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Post by goz on Feb 4, 2018 7:30:19 GMT
Absolutely not, in fact the opposite. Right, so you think that the default state of a sentient creature that never actively does anything at all (even feed or shelter itself) would be a state of perpetual bliss and freedom from harm? There aren't any kind of natural cues such as hunger, pain, cold, etc which motivate animals and humans to do something in order to stave off harm or deprivation? No, living creatures positively strive to stay alive and minimise harm. ie the exact opposite to what you claim. The proof is in the numbers still alive and the success of evolution. What you are proposing is anti-evolutionary and therefor null and void as an argument.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 4, 2018 7:37:30 GMT
Right, so you think that the default state of a sentient creature that never actively does anything at all (even feed or shelter itself) would be a state of perpetual bliss and freedom from harm? There aren't any kind of natural cues such as hunger, pain, cold, etc which motivate animals and humans to do something in order to stave off harm or deprivation? No, living creatures positively strive to stay alive and minimise harm. ie the exact opposite to what you claim. The proof is in the numbers still alive and the success of evolution. What you are proposing is anti-evolutionary and therefor null and void as an argument. They strive to stay alive because if they don't do those things, they will be harmed. Other species of animal probably have no sense in which they think that life is a wonderful thing and every life is sacred; it's only humans that give meaning to the struggle because we have the awareness of our own mortality. Sentient animals have evolved this carrot and stick mechanism which is adaptive for helping the species to thrive. Animals that just have the lowest level of sentient awareness aren't eating and sheltering themselves from the cold because they have intellectually weighed up life's benefits and debits and come to the conclusion that life is a wonderful thing and must be prolonged so that they can experience all the myriad wonders and miracles on offer (even the vast majority of humans don't do this, going by all evidence). No, they eat and shelter themselves from the cold and protect themselves from being endangered by other animals because they will experience great suffering and harm if they don't, and because of basic instincts that have been evolved.
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Post by Terrapin Station on Feb 4, 2018 12:25:36 GMT
Just give an example of how survival against competition is accomplished in lieu of suffering, or even just speculate how you believe it might be done in some example. If you're going to be making claims about this sort of stuff, you need to be able to answer a question like this. Things like evolving thorns or evolving to be poisonous. In terms of non-sentient organisms, they do not suffer if these evolved mechanisms of protection fail. You're not getting this. Part of your argument (or perhaps the whole of your argument) for the supposed ubiquity of suffering in sentient creatures is that suffering is necessary (I'm not sure if you're actually saying it's necessary of if you're just claiming that it's contingently the case) for "evolutionary success"-- in other words, for the continued survival of that species, via adaptations, in the face of competition, environmental stressors, etc. But that's clearly not the case. And you agree that it's clearly not the case. Because the vast majority of organisms have no suffering at all. Clearly suffering is not necessary for evolutionary success. Evolutionary success obtains just fine with no need whatsoever for suffering. So your argument is apparently that once sentience develops, there's a need for suffering for evolutionary success. But that's not clear at all. In fact, it's a non sequitur from a logical standpoint, and from an empirical standpoint, you have no evidence of it (as you've done no research project to support it from an empirical standpoint). Logically, it's possible for the mechanisms by which evolution "works" for non-sentient creatures to continue working for sentient creatures, where sentience has no bearing on it whatsoever. Again we know that sentience is not at all required for it to work. So it's logically possible for evolution to produce creatures that, say, are only capable of being happy all the time, no matter what, and for them to have evolutionary success via just the same sorts of mechanisms via which the vast majority of non sentient creatures have evolutionary success. Logically, no particular mental state is necessary, even when sentience obtains. This is a fortiori the case because logically, sentience is not at all necessary period. So no particular sentient state is going to be necessary. There's no reason to believe that particular sentient states aren't completely irrelevant to evolution.
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Post by Terrapin Station on Feb 4, 2018 12:29:51 GMT
No, living creatures positively strive to stay alive and minimise harm. ie the exact opposite to what you claim. The proof is in the numbers still alive and the success of evolution. What you are proposing is anti-evolutionary and therefor null and void as an argument. They strive to stay alive because if they don't do those things, they will be harmed. Other species of animal probably have no sense in which they think that life is a wonderful thing and every life is sacred; it's only humans that give meaning to the struggle because we have the awareness of our own mortality. Sentient animals have evolved this carrot and stick mechanism which is adaptive for helping the species to thrive. Animals that just have the lowest level of sentient awareness aren't eating and sheltering themselves from the cold because they have intellectually weighed up life's benefits and debits and come to the conclusion that life is a wonderful thing and must be prolonged so that they can experience all the myriad wonders and miracles on offer (even the vast majority of humans don't do this, going by all evidence). No, they eat and shelter themselves from the cold and protect themselves from being endangered by other animals because they will experience great suffering and harm if they don't, and because of basic instincts that have been evolved. See here, for example, you're seeing striving as necessary, but clearly it's not. The vast majority of living things do not strive at all, yet many of those ving things experience evolutionary success as defined above. Evolution works via means that do not at all require striving.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 4, 2018 13:13:19 GMT
(@graham ) as well) Reproductive fertility has no other practical use other than entering someone else into a dangerous lottery that they can't consent to. Therefore since they could only use that ability to commit a moral trespass against someone else, then it would be akin to saying that if I want your money, you're committing a violation against me by refusing to provide me with your bank details. Your misconstruing the facts doesn't really alter them. Reproductive rights are correctly regarded as a critical component of bodily autonomy, and you are not going to be permitted to take them away from people by any means whatsoever. That's really the end of the discussion.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 4, 2018 13:17:01 GMT
So you're half way to negating your own argument already, since you're arguing for a valueless universe. Fortunate then that we don't live in such a universe; you have it backwards, it's the "bad" which really only consists in temporarily staving off the "bad". Thanks for that. Of course I want a valueless universe Yes. And as such, you've put your argument into a bad place. We've been through this. Your fantasy in which everyone secretly wants to commit suicide simply reveals your own desire for attention. Meanwhile the actual reality of life is that most people are not suffering for most of the time. The default state is one of contentment.
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