Do I get to mess with my creations, with my face appearing on pieces of toast and whatnot?
Exactly
Sorry, you can only appear on Pringles
I don’t know. The survival instinct pulls me into thinking virtually any life, no matter how shitty, is better than nothing. But on the whole I can’t really say if the good outweighs the bad. I have a lot of things going for me (I live in a society on the tail end of 300+ years of constant compounding advances in wealth, medicine, social/political reform, etc) and my life isn’t that great.
I don’t know. A hundred years from now, yeah. Life will likely be great in 100 years when we understand a lot more about the brain and how our emotions work. So no idea.
If I did think life was worth living it would be because life generally gets better over time both individually and collectively. Fifty years from now things will be better in many ways.
Easy. Life is good when compared to the alternative.
There’s not enough data yet.
The human experiment is nowhere near completion. We stand today at the very dawn of mankind - who knows what we may achieve? Even if humanity has been a net negative to date (which is not something I necessarily agree with) why should we deny ourselves the possibility of thousands or millions of years of happiness in the future?
- Alessan, incorrigible optimist.
This is just me philosophizing, but I think existence is a constant struggle against suffering. So for this reason, it is hard for me to say “Life is good.” Life just is. And I can’t believe that “Life is good” for everyone. I would only be able to make a statement about my life and how I feel about it. Once I step out of my own experience and start speaking about life in general, I can only speculate.
I don’t think the OP is a bad one, but it’s really hard to answer. Even for many people experiencing lives that seem like they would be absolutely horrible (chronic pain, disfiguring disabilities, victimization of abuse and oppression, abject poverty), you’ll find that they have adjusted and coped enough so that they aren’t feeling the hell that you think they’d be feeling. There’s that initial shock of “OMG, THIS IS HORRIBLE!” but I suppose you can become habituated to anything after awhile and even find happiness through the midst of it all. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe even if your life is okay 90% of the time, the 10% of the time that it isn’t is enough for you to think your life absolutely sucks and you just want to give up. I know there are some times when this happens to me. I don’t give up not because I remember how wonderful life is, but because something always holds me back. Perhaps fear, guilt, shame. But never lust for life.
Overall, I think the human experience comes out neutral. Just think about the process of giving birth. A woman goes through some much agony through labor (not to mention the stress of the previous nine months), and in some cases can come pretty close to death. But in the end, she feels joy when that baby is placed in her arms. She might feel, at that moment, that all that pain was worth it. So in that time period, the pain and the joy cancel each other out.
Like I said, I can’t speak on the human experience. I can only speak about mine. And even for me, it’s hard to say if I’ve had more pleasure than pain. I think my life just is. It’s a life that works, that does, that creates, that experiences, that learns, that grows. That’s all I can say about it.
Life just is. It is neither good nor bad because you don’t have an alternative to compare it to. If you think life is bad, that is your reaction. If you think it is good, fine. But none of it changes the fact life just is.
Can we dispense with these meaningless platitudes?
Yes, from the “point of view” of the universe, there is no good or bad.
But from our point of view, as self-aware creatures who can experience pain, we designate as “bad” those events which lead other self-aware creatures to experience pain or suffering.
Or are you saying that if you shoot someone in the eye in front of their kid, and they lay there bleeding and in pain for five hours, with no one close by able to help them, screaming in agony, and eventually dying in front of their kid, that we cannot designate that as a “bad” thing, since “life just is, it is neither good or bad”?
It’s one thing if sentient creatures in our universe experience these painful states, since we don’t have much control in stopping these from happening, but it’s another if we deliberately create a universe in which these painful states will occur as frequently as they do in our world.
In the above scenario of the person bleeding to death in front of their kid, if it happens in our universe, at least you weren’t responsible for the creation of this universe. If it happens in the universe that you created, you bear responsibility for that suffering.
I dunno. I’m agnostic as they come and have a hard time reconciling a loving God with a world full of suffering, but I think there’s a weakness in this post.
Let’s say you are the head of the household of a family of four. You do your best to situate the family in the safest neighborhood, with the best schools and the nicest neighbors. You get a good job so that every want and need is met. You and your spouse show loving-kindness at every moment.
But Johnny, your oldest, is insane in the membrane. One day he takes a steak knife and stabs your youngest kid with it. She dies.
You did your best. You created the loving home. You did everything “right”. And still things fell apart. Why? Because there’s chaos inherent in nature. There’s always “noise” that we cannot control. Johnny may have looked perfect and you may have raised him perfectly, but one cannot control the trillions of synapses in one’s own brain, let alone someone else’s brain. So, you cannot be held responsible for the suffering in your home. Shit just happens.
To go back to your laboratory universe, I do not think it’s possible to create a universe without chaos. And without chaos, there would be no change; everything would be at equilibrium with its environment. Thus, there would be no life. So if chaos is a given, then we must accept that life will suck for some and be wonderful for others. Or that it will suck sometimes and be wonderful at other times. Now to get at the heart of your question–whether life can be said to be positive or negative overall–well, I think you’d have to be an objective observer to be able to really answer this question. You can’t ask the lab rat to draw conclusions about the experiment its being subjected to because it only knows its reality and doesn’t really know how it fairs compared to others. So you can’t ask people that question either and expect to get anything more than “life just is.”
Given the above assumptions about this laboratory universe, you still have the option to not create it. So, you have the following options: (1) create it and also create suffering (in addition to happiness), or (2) don’t create it, and thus avoid creating any self-aware entities that will suffer.
I think your decision to create it or not is a way to quantify whether you think life, “on average”/overall, is “worth it”.
I probably wouldn’t create it because I couldn’t be arsed to actually do all the work involved.
If I had to create a universe (let’s say, for a homework assignment), I would make sure that it was the best universe possible. Just like the parent example I gave above. I’m not sure what this universe would look like, but apparently in my understanding of creating universes, I would have the knowledge of what variables to throw in to optimize everything. But even then, as I said before, there would be properties that would emerge that I just would not be able to control if my universe operated under the same laws of physics that this one does. I might play around with various scenarios, jiggering with this variable or inserting that constant, so as to increase optimization. But I would still have a universe that would be ultimately unpredictable. One with suffering. One with unequal distribution of goodness and badness.
I would be a dispassionate scientist, just as I was when I was in graduate school and performed toxicological experiments on everything from rotifers to shrimp. I would watch them writhe and suffer and then die, and then record my observations before flushing them down the drain. So it probably wouldn’t matter to me what those little bitty humans were feeling at any particular moment. I would only care about, as you say, the “average” result, and making sure that everything “evens out” in the end. Dispassionate and heartless you say? Well, that’s why I have beef with the concept of a loving God (because unlike me, God can throw the whole concept of chaos out of the window and also make his presence known so that you don’t have to have faith to know him).
But if God is just a curious entity playing with an art farm, then everything makes more sense.
Poppycock. Emotional states play a huge role in the human mating process, in the social interactions among humans, in how active and productive a given member of the species will be, in the decision on if and how the young will be nurtured, etc.
Even if we assume a completely mechanistic universe, emotions play a huge role in understanding the behavior of homo sapiens.
It looks that you need to spend a lifetime formulating the question. Hopefully, sometime along the path you will come to your own conclusion and realize that question cannot be even comprehended for scientific purposes.
However, some of the best attempts at the answer can only be provided by great works of literature. So far, from what I’ve read, the man is always at a loss.
I’m going to let my pal, G. K. Chesterton, answer this question:
But you’ve actually been offered this choice, and in reality you chose to create human life three times. You did this knowing your children would suffer and eventually die. So why did you make the choice to create actual human life, when you’d refuse to create a human-equivalent species?
Well, depending on what you mean by “worth it”, but taking it as I think you mean it, then yes.
I think one of the biggest assumptions that a lot of people make that I fundamentally disagree with is that there is such a thing as positive and negative experiences. If that’s true then when summed and weighted, one can calculate a total value of those experiences and determine that, if it’s overall positive, it’s worth it, and if it’s overall negative, it’s not. Frankly, that makes no sense to me.
Instead, I would argue that all experiences there is no such thing as a negative experience (or positive, for that matter) and assigning positive and negative values to various experiences is more or less arbitrary. What adds value to an experience isn’t how pleasant or unpleasant it is, but rather, how much is gained (based upon some goal) from that experience.
Now, what makes it worth while depends upon what that goal is. IMO, that goal, whether by divine intention or through emergence (for those who aren’t theists), is to grow and learn and, thus, the lowest value any particular experience can have is zero, but virtually every experience will have some non-zero value, even if it’s low. As such, it has to be worthwhile. Or if one chooses survival and procreation, since our population is still growing, that’s also obviously “worth it” from that perspective.
Now, I suppose there are some goals where that’s not true, like overall pleasure, one could potentially come to a negative value, but that particular goal doesn’t seem realistic. Afterall, how many people REALLY set their life goal as experiencing as much pleasure as possible, certainly not anything close to a majority. The only other goal I can really see one might suggest is that there is no goal, but then the value of any experience is zero, which sort of makes the whole question moot.