Re: Pessimists - What Keeps You Going?
 

I'm not James.

Given an understanding of the potential conscious realities of the options in the example I gave, only one of the options would be a rational choice. If a philosophical world-view suggests that the other choice is better, or that it makes no difference, then there's a problem with the philosophy.

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Terribly sorry about that; scrolling thru this on a mobile device, small screen, reading diagonally it seems.

"If you choose the least rational of two options, your philosophy is wrong" ( if i may thus paraphrase your statement)- that does not explain what makes the one choice more rational, only repeats the claim that it is.

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"Given an understanding of the potential conscious realities" does explain what makes one choice rational. Reasons to act are dependent on knowledge of qualities of conscious experience. A philosophy that claimed it's not rational to prevent unnecessary suffering would be denying what suffering is, or denying the reality of how there are reasons to act.

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One can center an ethics -- and a general evaluative view of life -- on the bad reality of pain for sentient beings. Whether ethics should be so simply pain-centered is another argument. But, in any case, there is more to a philosophical world-view (in that it is a world-view) than an evaluative view of life based on conscious experience. I assume that there is a reality outside our consciousness, and that the nature of that reality, as we understand it, would have much to do with whatever our philosophical world-view would be. And I do not assume that the qualities of our conscious experience itself necessarily tell us much about the nature of cosmic reality. Obviously cosmic reality is such that it can contain such conscious beings as ourselves and other animals. But aside from that, what can the qualities of our conscious experience necessarily tell us about the cosmos? That our knowledge of the pain/pleasure qualities of our own conscious experience is not something we'd likely suspect to be fallible indicates little about how fallible our overall philosophical world-view might be. The cosmos is much harder to have reasonably certain knowledge of.

Our overall philosophical world-view might or might not be relevant to our ethical decisions about pain/pleasure (there is much in the cosmos, and hence much in our ideas about the cosmos, that has nothing to do with such decisions), so that one wouldn't necessarily be able to use the ethics of decisions about pain to judge whether "there's a problem with the philosophy."

Your notion of rationality appears to be simply derived from your ethics. This makes it easy for you to argue that your ethics are rational; of course your ethics are rational by the definition of rationality you have derived from those very same ethics.

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Unecessary suffering is not a quality of conscious experience. If it were, we'd all know it simply by existing, making the hypothetical choice you offer a moot point, while at the same time proving my assertion that acting on that particular knowledge means acting on knowledge of practical reality & not on (necessarily imperfect) speculation.

Not to mention that, although it is quite absurd to think we can know all potentential conscious realities ( which in summary is my original point), if we did know them, and came to have understanding of them, there is the potentiality that we would also understand the conscious reality of the denial of how there are reasons to act.

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I gave the example comparing suffering to enjoyment for the purpose of supporting a view of what ethics should be based on.

There are questions about which it is difficult or impossible to be certain about the answers.

Philosophical pessimism was one of the world-views that was mentioned, which is an evaluative world-view. The other world-view that was mentioned was theism. The probability would be very low that something arbitrarily imagined would by chance match anything in reality, which means if a world-view is based on a belief in something without a rational reason to believe it, the world-view is most likely false. That is reason to be an atheist rather than an agnostic.

One would be able to judge that there would be a problem with the evaluative part of the world-view, and that would indicate that there would probably be unjustified beliefs that the evaluative part is built on.

My notion of rationality applies to ethics, but it does not derive from ethics. Subjects other than ethics can also be thought about rationally. Rational thinking can be a means of discovering a truth. Our reasons to try to discover a truth (or to try to do anything else) are dependent on knowledge of qualities of conscious experience.

Suffering is a quality of conscious experience. The suffering is unnecessary if it's caused without justification, and a justification is dependent on knowledge of qualities of conscious experience (causing a lesser harm could be justified if doing so prevents a greater harm).

I don't see the relevance of that.

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So if i torture you, i do not cause you unnecessary suffering as long as the justification for my acts is "dependent upon knowledge of qualities of conscious experience?"

What is this "knowledge of qualities of conscious experience" you seem to end most sentences with, anyway?

Because you argumentation always seems to contain an iteration of your first position (if not wholly to consist of it), i am forced to restate mine; if suffering is a qualitative property of conscious existence, then knowledge of suffering is also inherent in existence, hence the choice between your options would not be made on the basis of any reasoning or extrapolation but on practical knowledge of physical reality. It remains my contention there may be considerations which extend beyond the materially knowable.

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However, the opposite choice, aversion to the "no experience" option, would also not be out of irrational subjective bias; it would be a result of recognizing the degree to which the comparative qualities of these degrees of horror or enjoyment may outweigh one another relative to one's temperament or disposition. A disposition may be irrational and subjective, but a rational assessment of what is more appropriate to this disposition is not.

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Your example followed immediately after you said, "I also think there can be reasonable certainty about whether a philosophical world-view is true or false. It is possible to avoid being hopelessly subjective and fallible." For that reason, it seemed that you gave your example for the purpose of arguing against fallibilism about philosophical world-views.

One could agree entirely with your analysis of our knowledge of pain and still not agree that ethics should be centered on suffering. There are other possible criteria for ethics, and there are other possible criteria for even a pessimistic ethics. Your focus on pain enables you to display an axiomatic rigor in your arguments, but this will not necessarily be persuasive to those (even other pessimists) who think that other ethical criteria are important as well.

Mystical approaches to theism are just as focused on careful discernment of qualities of experience as your ethic of suffering is. I'm not a mystical theist because I don't think internal states tell us much about the world. But all thinking about theism is not "arbitrarily imagined" or "without a rational reason to believe it."

For the same reason that I'm not a mystical theist (I don't think internal states tell us much about the world), I don't think ethics based on evaluation of qualities of our experience would have to be "built on" our beliefs about the world or would indicate that our beliefs about the world are unjustified. The hermetic formula "As above, so below" is not necessarily true of a secular world-view, either.

So our reasons to be rational are dependent on the same thing your ethics is dependent on, and you carefully describe both in the same words: "knowledge of qualities of conscious experience." If such knowledge of qualities of conscious experience is the criterion by which we are to judge whether we are using our rationality reasonably, then you have assumed your ethics in your description of rationality.

It's the basis for both his ethics and his notion of rationality simultaneously!

Re: Pessimists - What Keeps You Going?
 

What keeps my wetback pessimism going is that I am waiting to be proven right, which is another way to anticipate Godot.Your Vladimir for my Estragon.

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The love of family. Much more secondarily, relationships, romantic and friendly. Then film and literature, paintings and what have you.

Like some other folks on here, I have to admit to a sort of comfort that came for me when I traded in armchair optimism and belief/identity for the more abrasive arrangement of reality that really just seems to be the truth. I'm getting away from the larger discussions about god and existence for a moment, and simply talking about these minor processions of anxiety and loss that constitute most lives, big or small, celebrity or pauper, writer or bricklayer. I get, from the best of art, from Aickman particularly, but from a handful of other artists as well, the impression that the best you can do is to understand that you are blindfolded in a maze with no entrance or exit. Or, as Becker put it so eloquently:

“Take stock of those around you and you will … hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to them having ideas on the matter. But start to analyse those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas to this reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his “ideas” are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality."

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I have felt very suicidal today. Can't get through to my doctor until Tuesday and am home alone for a few weeks.

I keep going at these times purely due to instinct. I certainly have no conscious desire to be here a second longer.

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It would be unnecessary suffering. You would be demonstrating that the knowledge hadn't informed your choice of actions rationally.

Knowledge of how it feels to suffer, for example.

If knowledge is inherent in existence, then so is reasoning and extrapolation. All three are functions of intelligence.

Temperament and disposition would be trivial factors in the context of a choice involving the worst and best experiences in the world.

Yes, it was also that. The example was supportive to some views about what ethics should be based on and unsupportive to others, so it's also an example of a means of determining whether some evaluative world-views are true or false.

If someone says there is something that is ethically important independent of how it affects qualitative experiences, then, though they might say otherwise, the basis for their ethics would be what they desire. And desire is a feeling, the qualities of which can be compared to other feelings. If humans were soon going to die out, and some people thought it was ethically important to preserve some art to last for a lot longer than there would be humans, maybe it would in fact be ethically important to the extent that such a project affects how some humans feel while they exist, but if an unpredicted meteor destroyed the art shortly after human extinction, clearly there would be no value significance to the destruction.

There are explanations for how the experiences they call mystical happen that are more parsimonious than theistic explanations. I think the wide-spread difference in what people think about mystical claims about reality and schizophrenic claims about reality is because the people making mystical claims often function better socially. Do you apply agnostic reasoning to schizophrenics who claim that their experiences tell them about the existence of something specific outside of their experiences, for which there is no other evidence?

If someone knew suffering, yet they claimed unjustified suffering wasn't bad, I'd have to conclude that their evaluation of suffering was influenced by some other part of their world-view which was not about the quality of suffering.

You're conflating a means of doing something with a reason for doing something. Thinking rationally is a means of discovering what is true. The capacity of sentient beings to have qualitative experiences gives us reason to act. An action is rational if it is in accordance with that reality.

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Apparently i have been inveigled into this discussion by someone who believes that knowledge has personhood. (How, i beg, can 'knowledge' act 'rationally'?)

"It would be unnecessary suffering. You would be demonstrating that the knowledge hadn't informed your choice of actions rationally."

By the very same token, though, i could claim that the quote above demonstrates that you have not properly understood what rationality entails; yet that does not mean i have proved my claim, nor have you, yours.

But let's not focus so much on the example of suffering , the relevance of which example to our subject is dubious anyway, and return to my original assertion, which is that i might very well be wrong about despairing at the apparent meaninglessness of existence, given that my subjectivity may prevent me from taking into account the full ramifications of a universe and an existence which do, by their very nature, extend beyond my person, experience and the limited reach of human reason.

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Then again, if I am proved wrong in my pessimism, well...I rest my case.Joseph K just left the Castle.

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That doesn't follow from what I said. Are you denying that there's a distinction between informed and uninformed actions?

You've argued against all means of determining what is true, yet you say "very well be", which suggests a probability. Through what means are you trying to determine the probability of your being wrong?

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"That doesn't follow from what i said. Are you denying that there's a distinction between informed and uninformed actions?"
Oh, it follows. You propose that knowledge can 'rationally inform' something, & thus has reason, as if it were a sentient being.

But, to answer your question: I am not denying or affirming that there's such a distinction as you mention; what i affirm is that however informed an action might be, it might still, because of the limits of human comprehension, fall short of a full understanding of all considerations pertaining to that action, its consequences and reasons, in regards to the non-human aspects of that equation (which aspects are significant, seeing that there simply is more Cosmos than there is Man). What i deny is that an action that is uninformed by or divergent from your personal description of 'truth', 'reality' or 'reason' must perforce be an irrational act.

Further: "You've argued against all means of determining what is true, yet you say "very well be", which suggests a probability. Through what means are you trying to determine the probability of your being wrong?"
All that i have argued against is the reasoning you employ to try and prove that reality, truth and reason conform themselves to your description of them; and i am not trying to determine the probability of my being wrong, i am merely suggesting that neither of us need to rest uneasy should we turn out to be wrong about anything; it is, after all, only human.

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Thoughts and feelings happen in human minds, yes, even when these thoughts and feelings are about events outside of anyone's mind. Your example is apparently meant to illustrate that states of affairs outside of the mind are ultimately irrelevant to ethical judgment as long as no one feels harm in his conscious experience.

If we evaluate situations entirely in terms of conscious experience, eliminating external referents of our thinking, then ethics could be about the one thing you wish it to be about, suffering. You don't even have to argue that concerns external to our minds should have no ethical weight except as they affect experience; you can just rule them out of bounds of your conception of ethics. This is motivated by a wish to leave pain-centered ethics with no rivals, I suspect, but even if my suspicion is untrue, I would like to bring up situations for which your ethics would be useless.

If an unconscious person is sexually molested by a psychopath who does not evaluate his actions as harmful, and the unconscious person has no physical injury or evidence or memory of it later, did anything unethical occur? I think by your ethics you would have to answer no. No harm was consciously experienced by anyone.

With technologies that are near fruition or already here, acts that most would now consider horrible could occur on a large scale without being judged unethical by your criteria. Conscious experience could be manipulated by electrical stimulation of the brain and by virtual reality technology. People could be completely controlled while having no awareness that they are being controlled (rendering lack of choice unharmful in your terms), and they could feel nothing but delight the whole time. All of this could be administered, and even originally set up, by computers. Is this unethical?

Brain-in-a-vat redescription of the experience of sentient beings in the world may seem useful to a pain-centered ethics, but such a redescription renders humans helpless in confronting near-future technologies. If ethics only applies to matters of conscious experience, then what objection could there be to seeing ethics and rationality themselves as simply matters of conscious experience, experience that can be manipulated? If redescribing ethics and rationality in this way is an inaccurate description of judgment and thought, who cares? If no one cares in his conscious experience that ethics and rationality have been reduced to seeming, it doesn't matter. I don't think you intend to subjectivize ethics and rationality, but you have left yourself no ethical ground to object if ethics and rationality are manipulated into subjective seeming, or even if the very ideas of ethics and rationality are lost entirely, as long as no one feels harm.

I agree that there are more parsimonious explanations for mystical experiences than theism.

The difference between, say, Plotinus, Eckhart, et al. and a schizophrenic, or someone with temporal-lobe epilepsy, involves more than better social functioning. They are also much better at reflecting on and describing their experiences and rationalizing and articulating their ideas in their writings.

What I am agnostic about is not specific theistic claims (which I don't believe) but the question of whether mystical experience and related speculation can ever reveal anything about reality. I doubt it, and it plays no part in my own thinking, but I don't think it is entirely a closed question.

I am not conflating means of doing something with a reason for doing something; I am pointing out your conflation of rationality with ethical success. Thanks for stating it again! Your statements indicate that you judge actions as rational if they are in accordance with your ethical evaluation of experiential reality. It is an ethical evaluation because it involves "discovering what is true" about qualitative experiences, by which you apparently mean seeing what is the proper value (good or bad) of those experiences. Your last sentence could be restated, "An action is rational if it is in accordance with proper good or bad valuations of experience." "Rational" here does not just apply to the means of discovery; it is an approbatory adjective you apply to the action. An action is rational if it is ethical in your judgment. This is why I said in an earlier post that you have assumed your ethics in your description of rationality.

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If I responded to that with, "You claimed actions have personhood by saying they can be informed", that response would make as much sense as your claim that I was saying knowledge has personhood. It's a word game.

I should not eliminate external referents from my thinking, given that many of them do affect conscious experience.

It would be unethical. You're wrongly assuming that harm-based ethics means harm must be caused directly for it to matter. My conception of ethics does not negate the harmful significance of psychologies, or the importance of having rules. To use a hypothetical that doesn't have the implications connected to those factors, consider an alien species that had evolved in such a way that non-consensual sex was never experientially negative or associated with any negative experiences. It probably would not be relevant to their ethics regarding their own species.

I'm not sure that there could be positive experiences without there first being deprivation, but if I assume for the sake of argument that there could be, and if I assume that the scenario of how the people got into the virtual reality was not experientially negative, then I'd see no reason to think the virtual reality scenario would be bad, though the virtual reality could be better than just producing a feeling of delight.

For some individuals, being deluded about some things might make those individuals happy, but people's ignorance or denial of facts is a cause of a lot of harm in societies and the world, and the psychological willingness to lie or deny what is true is in most instances a harmful quality of the character of a person, even if some particular instance of it doesn't cause harm directly (it could still be a step in the development of a harmful personality). But there can be instances where discovering what is true is bad. For example, I don't want humans to discover how to make feeling, sentient AI, because I don't have certainty that there wouldn't be a risk of an AI experiencing unimaginably horrific suffering.

Rationality could not be manipulated to be "subjective seeming". If someone used the word to refer to "subjective seeming", they would not be talking about the same concept. You don't seem to make a distinction between the question of why one should try to discover a truth, and the question of through what means it's possible to discover a truth (that is why I said you were conflating a means with a reason). Or else you're saying it's inherently valuable to discover what is true.

Ethics could not possibly be a comprehensible concept if no one was capable of having qualitative experiences. You've argued against ethics being rational. The view that ethics should be about whatever people think it should be about subjectivizes ethics. My view is a moral realist view in opposition to that. I think nonexistence would be at the highest peaks of Sam Harris' moral landscape concept, and I doubt he would agree with that, but otherwise I mostly agree with his arguments for moral realism.

I'm not conflating rationality with ethical success. I'm saying that rationality can be applied to ethics, because there are truths about what ought to be done. And I'm saying that the reality of there being qualitative experiences gives us all our reasons to act, including our reasons to discover what is true. Even if I were only to talk about motivation, rather than prescription, our trying to discover what is true is still dependent on qualitative experiences. Feelings are the fundamental drive that gives humans and all other sentient animals a motivation to act. A drive for behavior appears to be the evolutionary function of feelings.

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This dead horse is bruised enough.

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It's an interesting discussion to me, and I think some progress has been made. Yes, it should end soon. I hope it hasn't permanently sidetracked this thread. I'm sure you'll be delighted to hear that I have a few comments and points to make in response to Gray House's latest post. Is anyone else interested in this discussion? Should it be moved to a different thread or just dropped at this point?

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Well, i think it's great fun, and edifying, and not all too off-topic. Personally i was greatly amused to see my general remark that i might in fact be wrong about some things (as might all of us) become an incentive for Gray House to prove me wrong, thereby apparently trying to prove me right; it is delightfully absurd. As to the charge of indulging in mere wordplay- i entered into this discussion not without a sense of the ludic, because that seems to me the civil thing to do; i wish to convert no-one to anything. But i'd be interested in reading the points you have to make, gveranon. Slightly more to the point: is James allright since his last mention here of feeling suicidal?

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I'd say keep the discussion going. I see no need for a new thread. Good stuff.

James has posted since the post Ibrahim refers to and he showed a healthy sense of humor in replying to a post of mine.

Pokemon is the Devil Himself, I say.

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By all means, let the discussion continue. I apologize for coming off like a prick, everyone.

Ibrahim, James seems to be hanging in there last I spoke to him.

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I understand that harm could be indirect and still experienced. The point of my example is, if there is no one who is ever even aware of harm, how could it be considered harmful? Harmful to whom? If your harm-based ethics is actually a deontological ethics, the norms of which pertain to harms, that wasn't clear from your previous posts, in which judgments of harm seemed always to inhere in conscious experience.

I'm not sure why you mention the "harmful significance of psychologies," unless you are distinguishing this from conscious experience. If this is your meaning, I would agree that the notion of experienced harm should not be limited to consciously-experienced harm. The impact of the unconscious mind shouldn't be overlooked.

I think you should see the electrical brain stimulation/VR scenario as bad, even if, in your words, "the scenario of how the people got into the virtual reality was not experientially negative." I would not choose to be controlled by stimulation/VR myself, but I could conceivably be put into that circumstance while unaware of what was happening or without any negative experience involved (say, while under anesthetic). Your ethic seems utterly immersed in felt qualities of experience again. If you think there should be rules, wouldn't there be a rule against doing something so drastic to someone without his permission, even if he never feels harm at any time in the process? My suspicion that harm-centered ethics could be misused in monstrous ways is confirmed.

Here you seem to me to be on firmer ground again. I think you should be clearer as to whether your ethical judgments inhere in qualities of experience or whether other considerations should be brought to bear. But if you're going to allow for considerations outside of particular individuals' experiences, then I think you should recognize that possible criteria for ethics other than suffering have to be argued for or against rather than simply being dismissed by an utter focus on qualities of conscious experience.

My wording there failed to articulate what I was trying to say. I meant to suggest that, with sophisticated electrical stimuation and VR, a person could be led to experience a kind of as-if rationality or ethics, in which thoughts seemed to him to be rational or ethical even though they weren't. A spoofing of rationality or ethics, so to speak. Feeling is not just a matter of sensation; feelings of rightness can attach to thoughts. There is a cognitive psych book titled On Being Certain that talks about "the feeling of knowing." My point was, if all that matters in your ethics is qualities of conscious experience, how can ethical thinking itself escape being seen as just another instance of conscious experience, which could not be judged bad even if it were a manipulated, false semblance of ethical thinking, as long as no one cares or feels any harm?

I understand that distinction. But from your wording it seems that you are judging reasons to act, reasons to discover the truth as being rational or not rational depending on whether they are in line with your ethical understanding of the situation that gave rise to the reasons to act. In an earlier post, you wrote, "The capacity of sentient beings to have qualitative experiences gives us reason to act. An action is rational if it is in accordance with that reality." (I.e., an action is "rational" if it is an accordance with the way that your ethics assesses that reality.) In this usage, "rational" is a term of approval that assumes your ethical depiction of human situations (as being simply a matter of good or bad experiences), and this seems tendentious rather than descriptive to me.

I agree that "ethics could not possibly be a comprehensible concept if no one was capable of having qualitative experiences."

I'm in favor of a rational approach to ethics, but think we should be wary of using "rational" as a term to indicate consonance with polemical claims, however rational those claims are thought to be by the one making them. The question of what is rational for particular agents in particular situations is often surprisingly complicated, often involves trade-offs, and can be looked at in a variety of ways.

In the "Antinatalists, Attack!" thread a couple of years ago, I said this about Sam Harris:

"In his moral philosophy, Sam Harris shares this emphasis on alleviation of suffering, except Harris is more optimistic: He envisions a future society in which suffering is minimized by means of a scientific utilitarianism. Because Harris has this overriding concern with suffering, the movement of his moral thinking can be simple and axiomatic. Similarly, antinatalist argument tends to be simple and axiomatic, based on an overriding concern with suffering. If Harris ever loses faith in his scientific utilitarian vision and becomes pessimistic, I believe he could very easily become an antinatalist, without changing anything else in this thought. He already has the moral focus on suffering, and the tendency toward axiomatic moralizing derived therefrom."

Finally, something I wanted to go back to from previous posts: the contention that being correct or incorrect about a particular thing is supportive or unsupportive of the overall philosophical world-view. I don't think one should make this assumption too easily. It depends on how particular conclusions relate (or don't relate: philosophies aren't always consistent) to larger views, and it often depends on contexts that have little or no connection with larger views. And it is easier to be sound about small matters than comprehensive portrayals. Many of the systematic, world-building philosophers of the past still seem insightful and perspicacious about immediate, everyday matters, while their overall world-views are bizarre museum-pieces (though still entertaining and sometimes worth re-considering in some of their aspects).

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Re: word games
And this isn't?
So, do we accept all your arguments since this post as invalid since part of your chain of reasoning is built upon word games?

Also, in the instance of perceived word games on my part you cited, you will see, when reading carefully, that my response merely respected your chosen nomenclature in order to (hopefully) elucidate something for you; if you would argue i was wrong in using the phrase 'informed action,' you'd be conceding that you, too, were wrong in using it. Either way, the gist of the argument i was making there would be unchanged.

All admission of playfulness aside, i do sincerely believe that much hinges on thoughtful use of language: in the absence of a creator, it's the most holy thing we have in this world, the nearest to sacral in a secular realm.

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I feel a little better today. Meds are kicking in again. Am outside with a cold beer in the sun listening to a reading of The Turn of the Screw. Henry James' convoluted verbiage adds to the uncomfortable spiralling murk.

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If I were a nihilist I would distract myself from the utter meaninglessness of all action by making slippers out of Schopenhauer’s poodles and highlighting typos in Gale Group publications with a luminous black sharpie.

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A failsafe mood-booster for me:
1. Go to local big box bookstore
2. Find Self-help section
3. Pull out a random selection from shelf
4. Fart on said selection
5. Return said selection to shelf
6. Flee

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In an intense bout of melancholy I really needed a good laugh.

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I wasn't saying you were wrong to use the phrase, "informed action". I was pointing out that the phrase doesn't imply actions have personhood.

It's not necessarily wrong to be uncertain about something, but ideas about the unreliability of means of acquiring knowledge can be taken too far.

Other considerations should be brought to bear, but not independently of the context of a system that affects qualities of experience. Human actions do not happen in isolation from human psychologies and their future impact on the world. Recreationally mutilating a dead body, for example, would be bad because it's an action that requires a harmful type of psychology. And it would be predictive that the person could find it psychologically acceptable to commit acts in the future that cause experiential harms. My ethics are ultimately consequentialist, but I don't limit the category of consequences to being so immediate as to eliminate the importance of people following principles that don't necessarily cause experiential harm in every instance, because having rules that are consistently followed is often consequentially an overall good.

Yes, I agree with that. But I would add that harms to the unconscious mind are harms because they have an impact on consciously experienced harms in the future.

I agree that consent is important, but only in a context of experiential harms. I'm assuming the entire human race would go into VR at the same time. Also, the human race going into VR would prevent all the non-consensual acts that would otherwise cause real experienced harm, while the "wrong" of the human race going into VR would be a concept which no one would believe, since they wouldn't know they had gone into VR.

If someone was in VR and it was certain they would never leave VR, there could be a belief in ethics, but the ethics wouldn't really matter. Playing violent video games can only be bad if it negatively affects a person's psychology and manifests as behavior impacting real people or animals. There has to be harms or potential harms for ethics to have a real purpose, and it would be wrong to ensure that there would be risks of real harm just so people could act ethically to stop the harm. That would be making the problem in order to fix it.

Some people use "rational action" to refer to someone's acting in their own self-interest. If an action can be called rational in respect to one's own interests, an action's impact on the interests of others should factor in determining if it's rational.

It does depend on how particular conclusions relate or don't relate to larger views.

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Not the best example. To be clear, I'm not anti-autopsy.

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Good. Thank you. I have no ideas about the unreliability of means of acquiring knowledge, but i keep an open mind as to the possibility of there being knowledge outside the purview of the available means. This, as a qualification of the knowledge, not of the means. The fish is not unreliable for not being able to breathe on land, or not being able to walk. The environment simply excludes any abilities of the fish from being applied to navigating said environment.

Re: Pessimists - What Keeps You Going?
 

Harm-based pessimism, as you depict it, seems so reductive as to be a misdescription of human life. The focus is on the primal level of qualities of experience, but this is not the conceptual level of typical human experience most of the time. Typical human experience isn't even conceptualized as experience most of the time (varieties of acting, goal-seeking, and reflecting are more frequent conceptualizations), and other valuations are often more relevant than whether it feels good or bad. For these reasons, I find approaches to pessimism pursued by Schopenhauer, Cioran, Zapffe, and Ligotti to be more compelling than harm-based pessimism. Those authors are keenly aware of qualities of experience, of course, but they are also concerned, however negatively, with conceptual realms of activity and meaning. If most humans don't usually experience life in terms of harm-based consequentialism, then harm-based consequentialism (a philosophy relentlessly focused on experience) doesn't speak accurately about human experience.

It's unlikely that the entire human race would go into VR at the same time. New technologies are always adopted gradually. Early, crude VR is already being used here and there. Also, as with other technologies, VR will be used for the usual aims, money and power. If VR can be used to exploit others for these ends, it will be. Harm-based ethics, if it becomes influential, could help to provide cover for this exploitation ("Hey, no one was harmed!"). Your points about indirect harm would be lost; humans are good at ignoring indirect harms, and have to be in order for ordinary life to continue (a reason for pessimism, yes). But you assume that the whole human race will enter VR at the same time. For you, this dispenses with the problem of consent, as long as no harm is experienced. Individuals can be destroyed, as long as no harm is experienced. Again, my suspicion that harm-centered ethics can be misused in monstrous ways is confirmed.

Good point about ethics needing to have a purpose, which it presumably wouldn't in VR. No, I don't think it would be good to make problems in order to have problems to fix. But the loss of legitimate ethical thinking in VR would mean that the VR setup itself could not be challenged from within the VR setup. That's beyond Orwellian or Huxleyan or Foucauldian, into a type of total control that doesn't yet have a name, as far as I know. But a name won't be needed if the entire human race is in VR!

But the "rational" self-interest of an individual and the interests of others are often in conflict. And, at least in most situations, it is impossible to determine the interest of the whole, because individuals within the whole want and need different things. Your ethics tends in the direction of a ruthless collectivism, which, I suppose, is appropriate: Extinction is collective by definition (though nothingness isn't).

Re: Pessimists - What Keeps You Going?
 

The music of Kanye West has kept me going today. People tend to think I'm joking with my Kanye love, but I honestly think he'll be looked back on as among the only pop music figures of this age who was doing anything remotely interesting. He has a terrible ego, but so did Poe and Aickman.

If Poe had Twitter, he'd be scrapping with everybody.

Re: Pessimists - What Keeps You Going?
 

Re: Pessimists - What Keeps You Going?
 

Consciously acting, goal-seeking, reflecting, and everything else that happens in consciousness is some combination of feeling and thought. Thought would be evaluatively irrelevant without connection to feelings.

Their reasons for wanting what they want and the costs in harms can be compared.

Re: Pessimists - What Keeps You Going?
 

Apples 'n oranges.

Re: Pessimists - What Keeps You Going?
 

Moral nihilism/subjectivism is too stupid.

Re: Pessimists - What Keeps You Going?
 

Once Scott Nicolay said he thought the petition to stop Kanye from doing a Bowie tribute album was completely racist. I thought that was completely absurd (unless the petition text used racist language or something). Loads of people think Kanye is a douche, even his own fans. Doing a Bowie tribute album at that time stinks of opportunism and I think most musicians would be criticized for it.

I recently saw a Romesh Ranganathan interview in which he said he's a fan but wanted to kill Kanye (in answer to a joke question about "which celebrity would you kill?") for having a show where an alien voice tells him that he's the brightest star in the universe. Kanye West created a show where an alien tells him that he's the brightest star in the universe.