You say “dismissing”, I say “contextualizing”. To re-use an analogy, if a blind person told me that vision was a delusion and everyone was blind, I would disagree - but that doesn’t mean that that person isn’t blind; they are, and are explaining the world within the context of how they experience it.
Earlier you wrote that “joy is just a distraction from the horrors of existence, the illusion of the self, the meaninglessness of our existence.” I’m willing to concede that this may be true for you - but not for everyone. For me, suffering is a distraction from the joy of existence; the “self” refers to my individual body, which is real; and the meaningless of existence is a pro, not a con (as noted earlier, and the question remains: what is this much-valued “meaningfulness” that you’re seeking?).
As to the specifics of his book, I haven’t read it, and thus can’t speak to his claims, evidence, etc. If you wish to present some of his arguments, we can get to the point of refuting it (or not, depends on what it is, of course).
No, but’s it’s always due to a physiological change in brain function.
Thinking on it, I’m not sure we should use the value of life in the equation at all. I come to this conclusion on the basis of the theoretical question, ‘why does any mating couple ever spend a single second not pregnant or trying to become pregnant?’
There are some couples who keep trying to have kids as often as possible and as long as possible. However, this is not the norm. At some point many couples choose not to have more kids. Or should I say, they brutally and viciously rip the opportunity for life away from all their as-yet-theoretical progeny!
If that sounds hyperbolic to you, then you don’t believe that the opportunity for life is of paramount value. In fact we can come of for a rough estimate for the value of a theoretical descendant’s life by examining the reasons why people choose to not have a child, or not to have another child. And from my admittedly limited experience, those reasons sometimes boil down to simple issues to time, money, or even mere convenience.
This tells me that the value of a potential life is way, way lower than the value of an actual life. Which is pretty obvious - we don’t consider failing to get pregnant to be a crime equivalent to murder, even though the two both result in one less life.
This tells me that it’s incorrect to use any analysis of the value of an existing life when determining whether having a kid is selfish. Personally, I think there is only one unselfish reason to have a child - if you believe that there are a set number of souls waiting to be born and a hard time limit for them to be born in and that if they don’t get born in time then some sadistic entity will torture them or otherwise punish them for their failure to get born despite it clearly not having been their fault. This is the only situation where your action of having a child is sparing an existing entity from suffering. In all other situations people have children for their own reasons, which are all selfish.
Also I’m an atheist, so yeah. Having a child is something people do for their own benefit - they want a child of their own loins, and so they have one (or try to). Selfish. However I don’t consider selfishness to be inherently harmful, so as long as you treat the kids decent once you have them, birth away.
And the appeal to authority sounds right. I think that because there are reviews that are over 500 words in the five star and four star that it makes him right.
4 and 5 star ratings don’t prove a damn thing except that there are some people who agree with the author’s point of view. Nobody here disputes that there are people who agree with him. Doesn’t mean they are right. The man is not a scientist, not a doctor, not a neurologist or sociologist. He’s a book writer. You don’t require any special qualifications to write books and doing so doesn’t automatically make you the undisputed authority on the subject about which you’re writing.
You’re grasping at straws in an effort to deny that nihilism and anhedonia are often symptoms of depression - a real neurological condition which can directly impact the way you think and view the world. No-one questions that your experience seems REAL TO YOU. Everyone challenges your insistence that your personal experience MUST BE REAL FOR EVERYBODY.
Do you get that? Please address whether you understand and acknowledge the error in your thinking without linking to an irrelevant cite that lacks authority and avoids answering the question.
I know another author, with whose work I am intimately familiar, who arrives at very different conclusions. His primary work has over 3,500 reviews, 83% of them of the 5-star variety. Since we’re just appealing to authority as an acceptable rhetorical tactic, evidently…
The book is wrong, in my case and in the case of the majority of other people. If most of my life is happy and some of it is suffering, then it is meaningless to say that the suffering is real and the joy is “just” a distraction. If you look at a red brick wall where one of the bricks is gray, do you say that the wall is really gray?
Sure it does.
If the premise is “any amount of suffering outweighs any amount of joy” then the experience of the majority who find that the amount of joy in their lives does outweigh the suffering invalidates the premise. And if you reasonably expect that your children will agree with you that the joy in their lives will outweigh the suffering, then it is moral to have children.
I understand that you are miserable, and I am sorry for that.
You are claiming that amazon reviews mean this guy is correct? And not only that the star rating is relevant, but that the number of words written means something? And you don’t see how absurd that is?
Perhaps we could return to:
This malformed and incoherent sentence was what you finally produced after multiple requests for what it would mean to live a “meaningful” life.
Please try again. Can you write a short paragraph about what the alternative is to the meaningless existence you see?
I don’t know about ‘selfish’. Don’t really like that word. Don’t think selfish is such a bad thing.
I think though that is despicable to have children when you can provide them with a better lifestyle. An example is my African family who have enough money to move to a developed country but stay in East Africa. What’s worse is they had another child.
I think for example black people who live in the West and have an opportunity to make their child ‘more beautiful’ (marrying someone not of their race; caucasian or asian) and choose not to do so could be considered selfish. Same as those who raise their choose to bring their children in traditional, strict, religious households (when they can choose something better).
I know my former psychiatrist was previously married to a man but seeing as her son was feminine and she discovered that he needed a more nurturing parent, she divorced her husband (who she already had quite some problems with aside from his parenting) and married a lesbian. Her son who had quite some major emotional issues and diagnosed as autistic is now performing quite well and even above average.
Met her son in a computer class…clicked with him as a friend and then he told me that his mother was a psychiatrist and her name so obviously I knew.
I had finished appointments with her and was formally discharged from the day clinic I attended two years and a half back so I don’t think there were any patient-therapist conflicts.
She told me a bit more but her son was the one who told me the main story once I got connected with them.
But what about the millions who live in poverty? Those in the developed world don’t really outnumber all of them? Not to mention how we tend to cause the majority of our suffering to ourselves.
First, there is ample evidence from psychological research that (most) people are prone to an optimism bias and are subject to other psychological traits that lead them to underestimate the amount of bad in life [4]. We thus have excellent reason for distrusting most people’s cheery assessments of how well their lives are going.
Second, when we look closely we notice just how much suffering there is. Consider, for example, the millions living in poverty or subjected to violence or the threat thereof. Psychological distress and disturbance is widespread. Rates of depression are high. Everybody suffers frustrations and bereavements. Life is often punctuated by periods of ill-health. Some of these pass without enduring effects but others have long-term sequelae. In poorer parts of the world, infectious diseases account for most of the burden of disease. However, those in the developed world are not exempt from appalling diseases. They suffer from strokes, from various degenerative diseases and from cancer.
Third, even if one thought that the best of human lives were good (enough), to procreate is to inflict, on the being you create, unacceptable risks of grotesque suffering, even if that occurs at the end of life. For example, 40% of men and 37% of women in Britain develop cancer at some point. Those are just terrible odds. To inflict them on another person by bringing him into existence is reckless. Rust Cohle expresses this idea when he says that he thinks “about the hubris it must take to yank a soul out of nonexistence into this … Force a life into this thresher …” [5] (His talk of souls should obviously be taken metaphorically.)