wolfe1jl t1_j1sqp4k wrote on December 27, 2022 at 2:35 AM

Reply to comment by Key_Revenue3922 in /r/philosophy Open Discussion Thread | December 26, 2022 by BernardJOrtcutt

One a desire is fulfilled we are ultimately unsatisfied by its fulfillment and either move the goal post by creating a new desire to fulfill or attempt to repeat fulfillment process. Both create a hamster wheel for us to run both lewd to the experience of some pain. IMO antinatalism works if someone accepts that the whole of who they are are just there desires and behaviors and cant exercise control over these things. It also falls apart if we view pain as just something bad or to be avoid and not merely as an unavoidable human experience that is universal. Pain appears to me as neutral because the pain being experienced must always be made relative to the one experiencing it, as it could be good if it eliciting beneficial changes and growth. But perhaps if we view pain as the best way to learn something (fear learning) it may actually be good if viewed this way.

Key_Revenue3922 t1_j1togi8 wrote on December 27, 2022 at 8:33 AM

>Pain appears to me as neutral because the pain being experienced must always be made relative to the one experiencing it, as it could be good if it eliciting beneficial changes and growth.

Thanks for your reply. Benatar addresses this point and he says that even if pain has instrumental value, because it can lead to positive change, it is still pain. He is interested in weather the totality of pain or pleasure is more in the course of the whole life.

It seems from your reply that you have arrived at the conclusion that there is more pain than pleasure in life. How did you arrive at that conclusion.

wolfe1jl t1_j1tvg7x wrote on December 27, 2022 at 10:12 AM

Interesting. Well I came to this conclusion by thinking on what pain is. Pain has a dualistic quality to it consisting of physical and psychological aspects. It’s by this dualistic natural that I conclude it must be the only truly universal experience meaning that humans can always recognize physical or psychological pain across cultures. From this point the only other thing that has a dualistic universal quality to it that I could think of was light. Once I started to correlate the two idea of pain and light I began to understand that pain shouldn’t always be avoided and is a necessary part of our universe as it could be a source energy or entropy from the change and growth process or something else. But I realized it is indeed universal and it’s due to pains intrinsic qualities that there will be more pain then pleasure, but pain being more abundant then pleasure also makes sense if the of goal of this place is the accumulation of wisdom via the application of having experiences and adding those experiences to knowledge. Which I believe can’t be achieved without a first person perspective. Hope that was at all understandable of how I arrived to my position. I assumed antinatalism was a a bleak out look of what the universe is where I would say my outlook is not that at all even though it appears I have arrived at very similar conclusions.