No. You can read my argument above. It was that you didn't say anything that was even tangentially related to Benatar's argument.

I'm entirely certain that at least some people are happy that they exist. I consider myself one of them. However, I'm completely certain that I wouldn't mind not existing.

After having existed i do mind not having existed. Only then it makes sense to argue it.

The point i make is that existing with all its problems is a process that eventuality leads to the vast majority being happy. He argues that its better to not exist! WTF??? Not existing will fail to lead to states of immense happiness eventually for many more than myself and the ones before me. It is called the rise of man for a reason.

Nope. You cannot put the cart before the nonexistent horse.

Why haven't you had kids? They will be super pissed if you don't have them.

They dont exist yet so they cant be anything including pissed. Thats the point that the argument about non existence having any neutral value is bs. It has no value at all.


Do you agree with what he says that on the net existence is negative? He concludes something that is not valid for me. It could be valid and I am not realizing it but this is not what is happening. I am not some naive being. I certainly understand the universe and math way better than him.

That is correct. That actually is a huge part of his argument. You cannot take anything away from someone who doesn't exist.

Sure. It could be invalid for you if you are not subject to the human condition. I find no invalid arguments in his thesis. Finding it to be disagreeable is an entirely different thing.

The first half and the second half of that sentence are inconsistent. Also, not realizing that one could be actually wrong is an altogether amazingly awesome human weakness.

Sure you are. Even the wisest person who ever lived is naïve. Even ones who can put an extra dot above the "i" in naïve are naïve.

That is irrelevant. Baseball is all about universal laws and math and is certainly less complex, yet you aren't the starting pitcher for the Yankees. I imagine that you and I would both have quite a bit of difficulty building a cabin, despite understanding all of the physics and math that is required.

You're assuming that non-existence is a state of being. Under which you can "mind even the slightest bit".

There is always experience/existence. There is no non-existence.

I'm doing nothing of the sort.

To summarise your quote above:

If you didnt exist you wouldnt mind AND this is easy to prove.

How do you know "you" don't mind when there is no 'you'? And when there is no non-existence?

No you do not see what i said the right way. I always assume i can be wrong and then proceed to prove i am not if i can. I cant here the way that matters to the debate. I can still be wrong in general on anything not immediately provable but not in a way that the other side is correct here, in a way that we are both wrong because his way now is inferior to my way of thinking about the human condition. Maybe we are both missing something about the future that invalidates the optimism but he didnt establish it today.

The invalid thing he says is that he postulates a net negative without proving. What is the great suffering that exceeds the joy?

All it takes to demolish his argument that net existence is negative is to do what i already did, establish that i am a happy person and others have been and that it is not a delusion because i have never seen myself as suffering long term and having no way to improve the situation. I am trained to be objective. It has been beautiful to have lived and this is not some ego talking but a person that can offer you one thousands beautiful images of a life that most will agree are positive and make happy most people. I can describe my life in detail. I see my wisdom and your wisdom and everyone's wisdom including math and science as the gift of living to all of us. It is also the defense we have against misery and pain/suffering. A defense that gets stronger in time.

Then the next thing to complete demolition is to claim that the majority of people can become happy if we reorganize the world in a way that ultimately technology and science can create and which over time we have witnessed happens in advanced societies anyway. It is far more greater experience to live today than in 1300s AD or 5000 BC. Human life was not as protected and comforted by so many choices as it is today back then. And we got here by existing. So how can it be negative in a permanent manner and not evolving to be super positive locally hence from the start positive globally because it can ultimately create indefinite amount of happiness to many more future people.


I am naive yes on some things and what is to be learned is greater than what is known but not on things i know more than he does today and which are important to demolish his argument. I am not naive to be arguing things i have no idea about and yet he does that here.

I bolded earlier the stupid things he believes that make no sense. Many people exist that will admit that the day they will die and some suffering from illness eventually near that if unlucky is very nasty experience but it will never be enough to defeat the joy of living 10000 more beautiful days that would not have been possible without existing. Losing one's kids for example doesnt eliminate the experience of having them and the influence they had on the world if they lived well. Anyone that understands the laws of nature and probability will not take personal offense at a deep level at any loss endured in this world as long as they see solutions to it all. You can take away everything material from me but you cannot take away by memory of good things and my dreams of a better future and most importantly that i am correct even when dead and gone because my consequences and those of others in the correct direction that make a better world will live forever. You cannot take away my future victory that is built out of already established smaller victories none of which would exist if i never had lived and others that influenced me.

So i salute indeed 1000 generations and may the dream live forever and drive strength from the smiles of the immortal dead. All it takes is a new 9 year old every time.

How about that for knowing the ultimate secret of the human condition! Insane curiosity and faith in the power of the individual human spirit when standing on the shoulders of giants, the past generations. Logic and wisdom create virtue and virtue produces happiness.

He’s saying that we are horrible judges of wether or not life is indeed more positive on the whole. They talk about the end of life and if you ask someone if they had do it again, would they knowing all the pain they endured. Even if most people would say yes, that doesn’t take away his arguments according to him.

You cannot mind anything if you don't exist because there is no you to mind. That is the point. I'm fairly certain that I stated that fairly clearly.

He does not postulate a net negative at all.

If his argument had ANYTHING to do with existence being a net negative, then this would possibly be a valid argument. Since he NEVER argued that existence is a net negative, it is not a valid argument.

We can also lift the earth if we have a large enough lever. "If" doesn't matter. "Is" is what matters.

Also, none of this has anything to do with his argument.

It is naïve to think that math and physics have anything to do with the argument at all. "e=mc^2, therefore people should make babies" doesn't work. "By moving the fulcrum on a lever, you change the net happiness of existence" doesn't work.

None of that has anything to do with his argument.

None of that has anything to do with his argument.

Here is the "pinprick" thought experiment that possibly challenges Benatar's antinatalism argument:

What if this was a different world where the only pain ever suffered in human life was a single pinprick on our 1st birthday. Otherwise there is no suffering in life. In this world, should humans stop re-producing? Most reasonable people would say of course not. According to Benatar's antinatalism moral argument, pain avoidance is paramount, so this pinprick pain must be avoided and all of human life must stop procreating or we would all be immoral. Benatar would allow a single pinprick to cause humankind's extinction. Since this conclusion is absurd, his argument must be flawed.

It is absolutely flawed in that it doesn't apply to all possible universes.

If it were a Jeopardy category, I'll take over-thinking pain for 1000.

What is non-existence like? You're claiming to know this. You're claiming to know what 'nothing' is like.

No one knows this.

Importantly, no one can ever know this.

We can make assumptions.
You assume there is such a thing as non-existence. A state where nothing is minded because there's no one to perceive or experience anything. I assume this state does not subjectively exist. An infinite amount of time may go by and the exact same arrangement of matter upon my birth will have recurred, meaning that im born again. Subjectively, from my death and re-birth, no time will have passed. It is like seamlessly moving from one experience (death) to another (birth).

You may still argue that - during the inbetween time of your death and recurrence - that is the state in which nothing is minded. However, subjectively, this state does not exist. It's a seamless transition from one experience to another.

Something is always minded.

Yes. I am specifically claiming that things that don't exist aren't actual things that exist since existing is a required part of being a thing that exists.

It is also a brute fact that gravel (a thing that does exist from what I've been led to believe) doesn't write movie reviews.

Veedz seems to be disagreeing with the idea that existence is not a predicate

Possibly, but I think he is going a step further than that. He is giving an abstract object concrete characteristics.

I think, for the sake of argument, we can replace the non-existent being with any fictional character of our choice. I don't think there is any problem thinking about masque's non-existent child. We can even think about that non-existent child masque didn't have when he was 13 working really hard at the math and physics and getting a Nobel Prize by the age of 5 for his work on quantum teleportation of macro objects. I just imagined it and checked Wikipedia as proof that me imagining a fictional character doesn't make that fictional character exist.

Of course a fictional character doesn't exist. A part of the problem is the limitations of speech and language it restricts ideas being expressed correctly.

When talking I can only talk about something from this location and this unique perspective. I can't be there in non-existence and look back to confirm what it's like and then tell you here and now because I exist. It's like dialing your own number and wondering why you can't get through.

People can have new ideas. At least one person came up with the idea of determinism out of the blue. Probably a lot more than one. You make the same mistake over and over in so many different frameworks.

All possible or imagined things are actual things - things that exist in the same sense that rocks or people exist.

Otherwise there are no true modal statements.

When I say that it's possible for Mitt Romney to have won the 2012 election i am saying something that is true. It is possible. However, not only is it true, it is reflective of an actual universe where that actually happened. A universe more correspondent to ours than one where Trump ran in 2012 and won. The correspondence theory of truth provides the grounding for the truth of modal statements - statements about possibility and necessity.

However, the grounding of the truth of modal statements also requires that these imagined possibilities are actualities - much like how true modal statements about the past or the future require that the past and the future are real.

It's a bulky ontology I understand. But tis the way it is.

P.s. There's much more to this than I've briefly outlined here but previous efforts to discuss metaphysics in this forum have not been met too openly, so I hesitate to elaborate further than whats necessary.

Holy cr#p how easy it is to demolish Benatar's positions. I am into 30min of the discussion and i have seen unreal number of holes exactly as i imagined always.

Of course he is postulating that existing is bad. He views even the slightest harm as terribly important. He is completely unable to imagine that a net happy life can exist where the person is not deluding themselves that they are happy because they have to endure the world they were forced to exist in and only a positive attitude can reduce the tormented existence. No, true objective joy can exist without the necessity of beautification in order to survive existence.

He is unable to see how wrong he is. There are people that are super-happy to sacrifice even die or live a life of some partial adversity knowing that others after them will be happy and eternally successful most of their time, with the ratio of good to bad time improving constantly. That brings to their life meaning and unimaginable joy that may even exceed the joy of the ones that actually realize that dream world. You can ask such people if they would have preferred an easy going life or this life with some adversity that makes this future joy, justice, wisdom whatever beauty, possible and they wouldn't hesitate to choose this more difficult life. And those are all wrong? Only they arent because it is because of these dreamers that life is more beautiful with more possibilities today. They have finally won today. But they already knew that!

Bringing other people to the vision and appreciation for the game played in this universe gives me immense pleasure actually for example. I view the appreciation of the logic and possibilities of interesting complexity in the universe as a joy bigger than sex and certainly something more meaningful. Continued improving wisdom is the source of this joy. Wisdom requires existence to happen and some struggle/effort even. Sex after all is only a fraction of the giant game one can design, the convergence in time of the chemical master-plan of nature to ensure survival of the species. Sex is something most people find highly pleasurable anyway. So that should tell you something because i too find it exceptionally pleasurable, probably more than most of them (higher imagination and respect/empathy for the other side makes things always more intriguing so you better believe it that good sex correlates well with intelligence when lucky to have both). You can substitute for sex also other joys like a great meal or a beautiful trip with surprises or a stream of lucky occurrences of rare events or meetings of others that bring intense activation of your brain's creativity. I can offer eg synthesis of music or art etc as examples of that creativity. Tell me an artist or music composer is not absolutely in high heaven the moment of synthesis when it works well or after the completion of their work.

For every superficial difficulty that exists in this world, that Benatar uses to argue its terrible, there are solutions that exist only because people put effort into thinking and materializing them eventually. That is his mistake. That to get to the solutions maybe some suffering is necessary. Because one of the most important things is the process of creation of wisdom. The experimentation is not always enjoyable but the fruits of the wisdom acquired can lead to unimaginably more potent pleasure.

The guy is unable to see that with every unimaginably cruel news story of eg young children being abused and even killed under extremely intolerable conditions of living (some of the things that eg disturb me the most when i read about them), the desire of sensible well educated people to bring to existence a world of only happy children is strengthened. The desire to produce that world increases its probability by making their work more meaningful and informed as they move away from the intolerable torturing example and the roots of its making.

For every Hitler that ever existed there is an amazingly more potent response to the lesson that is precisely why we get better. It is indeed the rise of Man. And he wants to see that existence that makes this thing possible as bad. No, his brain and understanding of the world is bad. I will now proceed to listen to the other 1h25 m and still hope that at some point he can show hints he can be cured from this false direction.

We define "new" differently, I suspect. Perhaps I'm mistaken in thinking that "new to the world" is the synthesis or recombination of the old. It deserves credit every time, of course. But "new" in my view, isn't created out of a vacuum.

I just imagined that your 157-year-old imaginary brother broke into my house 5 minutes ago and ate all of the pork roast that my woman made for dinner.

Just checked the kitchen and it appears that he hasn't eaten said pork roast.