If there's bacteria in our galaxy, there's sentient life in the universe.

Yeah. On planet Earth. We know this. Thank you.

Pretty sure you just did.

Pretty sure telling someone not to have kids is literally the exact opposite of killing someone.

No you're not. We've found bacteria.

Oh wow, I didn't know bacteria was sentient!

And the fact that you're advocating killing all life in the universe is disgusting.

Good thing I'm actually not doing that.

you get a zero out of fucking zero

because all you can get is a fucking zero

Consensus among scientists is that it's probably infinite. I can provide sourcing if you'd like.

Please do.

That's literally an unattainable goal for humanity at anything near our level of advancement. If you want to clear the entire universe up, you have to retain some agents to, well, do the cleaning.

Hence the cancer patient analogy. I don't care much for this all-or-nothing mentality.

No, you're supposed to realize that even though your philosophy may be right, now is not the right time to enact it on  a widespread level.

When there's a single iota of definitive evidence for the existence of sentient extraterrestrial life, I'll concede to that. So, basically, not in my lifetime. A lot of people get all emotional if I even suggest the possibility that we're alone in the universe--but I'm simply applying Occam's razor, nothing more.

what's it like being perpetually twelve

then i guess, by your own standard, you weren't beaten enough, either

Thankfully I have great parents. No, I wouldn't want that. I'd still like to be alive, though.

Not everyone is born with great parents. Very few people are.

You bring kids into the world because that's what we do. It's how we're here, it's how you're here complaining about being born.

I'm not complaining about being born. I'm rather content with my life. I'm still able to recognize that having children is wrong, though.

Because you have no attachments?

I have many attachments. I just recognize that they all have no intrinsic value--it's all in my head. That's how it is for everyone. Difference is, I don't act like life is worth living just because I was fortuitous enough to have been born with my life, rather than the life of someone who... was disemboweled at age ten, or some shit.

How are you going to ask somebody for permission when they don't exist.

you can't, which is why it's an imposition, which is why it's wrong
there is no paradox

just because they don't exist yet does not erase the fact that you still didn't get consent
you will never get consent, so it is never okay to have kids

very few people have trouble with this logic
only you and kupo

Not to mention the majority of people you ask would rather be alive than not existing.

that's because the majority of people are religious kooks who don't know any better
and they have their earthly desires and attachments that they cleave

and i would argue that most atheists are crypto-religious

humor me--how do you suspect i have come to this conclusion that life should cease to exist?
how have i been able to stray so far from the majority

>using extensions
>ever

it doesn't matter

naoto

middle schooler

Quote from: Noodles on February 03, 2015, 09:44:16 PM

Quote from: Tyger on February 03, 2015, 09:28:43 PM

Quote from: Noodles on February 03, 2015, 08:36:26 PM

I have perfected my technique, let's play!

Battle me

Ready

get online

Did this ever happen?

Not my fault you can't read into WHY I said that to you.

You dismiss my philosophy as "emo edge cringe"--meaningless Internet buzzwords.
Shows your young age. Maybe you'll grow up some day, kid.

Quote from: Verbatim on February 03, 2015, 12:12:07 PM

I'm gonna step out for awhile. I've been sitting here for five hours.

Good grief.

Get a life.

Yeah, because you've never sat in one place for an extended period of time in your entire life.
What did you think I meant by that statement, anyway? I was "getting a life", you munchkin.

A better question is why you're so afraid of suffering.

I'm not afraid of it so much as I recognize its lack of rational function in any decently constructed universe. A reality where suffering exists is a shitty reality, period. I reject it entirely, and I find it disgusting that people will make glib statements like this. If you're going to say something like, "suffering isn't bad," then I hope you get the worst suffering ever. You're not even fucking thirty, and you're gonna tell me that suffering is okay? Just wait. I hope you get the very worst of it, and then come back and tell me that life is still worth it. I'll get a nice laugh out of it.

I think the best explanation as to why people haven't taken up the stance is simply a lack of care, or rather understanding of the suffering everyone is collectively going through.

*COUGH* naoto *COUGH*

They're glib cunts. You hit the nail on the head. They act like they understand, but they DON'T understand. The only way they'll understand is if they keep playing the game some more. They can sit through World War III and they'll still glibly say, "Yup, life is still worth it, because these fucking Doritos taste too delicious" or whatever the flying fuck it is you think makes life worth living. It's all ego crap, by the way. Everything you think makes your life worth it is all ego desire. And if it makes you happy, go for it. I'm just saying, Lamborghinis, sex, and winning the World Series--what do all of these things have in common?

They all have no intrinsic value.

I have no plans of ever having children for as long as I live. Does that automatically make me an antinatalist?

Spoiler

serious

Of course not. You're only an anti-natalist if you concede the simple argument that having kids is wrong, which you haven't done. Once you do that, and you start becoming an advocate for, essentially, human extinction, well, then you're an anti-natalist.

Reasoning from the personal sense like some deranged ape wouldn't change that.

I don't even know what that means, but whatever, I guess. It obviously is pragmatic, and I'd just argue that the only reason you don't find it pragmatic is because you like it here too much, and as explained earlier, what you like in your life doesn't justify a hangnail on a treesloth, let alone the fucking slave labor put into the creation of all the things you likely take for granted in your life.

All disutility, to the anti-natalists, is equal in magnitude and moral "transgression".

Well, not really. Obviously, two broken legs is worse than one broken leg, and so forth. The idea, as you've been forced to repeat ad nauseam to the ignorant, is that all disutility in accumulation tends to outweigh decisively all that could be considered utility in the world. Because all life is is a zero-sum game. There is no goal one could possibly contrive that would make life ultimately worth continuing, in my eyes, by any wild stretch of the imagination. Not immortality, not utopia--nothing.

You can't do a dance so cool that it justifies the holocaust, metaphorically speaking. So no, there's still some nuance, which is really the whole idea. The bad apples are more poisonous than the good apples are pure.

Also, you used the plural there--how many other anti-natalists other than myself have you spoken to? Or read the works of?

This, seems to me, to be false. It is worth quantifying disutility into at least two categories: significant disutility, and standard disutility.

I would have a lot more than that, but you know, I see where you're going, and I certainly don't contest it. To be honest, I don't know where you got the idea that all disutility is equal in magnitude from, but it couldn't have been from me.

My argument relies on the fundamental premise that the abolition of significant disutility is possible, via technology.

This assumes that, after we've finally augmented our lives to such an extent that we'll never suffer to any excruciating or gratuitous degree, that life is still something that ought to be experienced by everyone. Not to mention, it's extremely vague--you'd have to outline how to prevent literally every type of significant disutility in order to show that it all can be prevented, because right now, the very notion seems kind of... if not bogus, then totally unfeasible. I just have to ask--what, precisely, will make it worth it in the end? It's not enough to prevent bad shit, you realize. It's good--but now your task lies with justifying the imposition.

Why should we continue to keep pulling the unborn from the perfect, sublime, comfy realm that is nonexistence? Because it doesn't suck here anymore? Okay... what makes it good, though?

In such an instance whereby significant disutility is not a potentiality, yet both kinds of utility are potentialities, it actually becomes more moral to strive for the continuation of the species with the expressed goal of eliminated significant disutility.

I disagree, for pretty much the reasons stated above. After you get significant disutility out of the picture (however it is we manage that), that's not going to remove all the conflict and the bullshit in the world. Do you think I wanna live on a planet where a bunch of numbnut fuckwits disregard my ideas, for instance, based on some physical quality that I have? Or is that sort of thing considered significant disutility, and that wouldn't even happen? See, the fact that I can ask questions like that, muddying up your scale, shows that your scale for utility lacks function. I like the idea of quantifying levels of comfort/discomfort, but you need more than two parameters.

So, we have this fundamental disagreement where you believe all significant disutility is preventable if we just continue to improve technology (which we will, of course), but I remain skeptical--for, even if it ended up being the case, there's nothing about life, even without its follies, that should compel anyone to want to live it, and the question of "was it worth it" still needs to be answered. You gotta be talking about some crazily advanced technology--practically science fiction.