Interesting in this context is completely divorced from morally good/bad. Could be any group from any area at any time in history. I’ll start with a few, followers of the cult of pythagoras, contemporary black Hebrew Israelites, antiracist skinheads and the Amish (neo-luddites in general). Don’t be racist or a prick to other people discussing.
Seems the ones I’ve run into were both, particularly on their subreddit. The point still kind of stands. If one believes they ought not have been born then there are solutions to their dilemma and if they truly believe that then they are free to act upon that, particularly in locations with legal assisted suicide.
Now as to the morality of the act of having children. It really does depend on some axioms. The first one that comes to mind is whether or not we have free will, what was the state of a mind (if any) before being born, what is the overall state of reality. In a circumstance like samsara being or not being birthed as a human on this earth isn’t really going to change the overall circumstance, same kind of situation with pansychism in many versions. These are all things once again no one has any answers to either way so the best course is an agnostic take. Maybe having kids is immoral, maybe not, no one really knows and it’s okay that we don’t know right now.
I think it is actually important to draw the distinction between antinatalism and efilisim. Antinatalisim at its core has the strong idea of how an individual should be able to choose for themselves. That is their whole justification for the thought, that they do not want to have kids, since the kids cannot choose that for themselves. That high value being assigned to personal choice, then, is in direct opposition with the dark goal, where the efilist ideology on the other hand seems to almost unavoidably lead: the idea, that everything should die, and that it should be helped to happen.
Personally I am probably a bit too nihilistic, and perceive, that we humans just tend to assign too much value on thoughts, that only exist in the human experience of reality. Antinatalism sounds like a valid ideology, if you care the most about individual’s right to choose for themself. But there are other things, that people might value more, depending on what they care about.
I get you, it’s just that if you follow the implications of antinatalism it bleeds into efilism. You’re explaining why they view birth as unethical but it leads to conclusions that work against the concept of personal choice as reasoned above. Now to add to the issue at hand i would imagine such individuals are more than willing to limit personal choice in other contexts. Like we should stop people from murdering even if that’s their personal choice and we should imprison them even if it’s their personal choice to be free. Absolute personal choice is a messy concept to get behind.
I do respect your time and appreciate our discussion. I get that you’re not in that corner so to speak. I guess I’m more of a non-dualistic unified reality nihilist, not only does it not matter but division between one thing and another is more so a perspective or illusion of domain than an actual aspect of the true nature of reality. Here is maybe a better explanation. Everything is one, Brahman fell asleep and everything is just incarnations of Brahman in the same way when you dream everything is just you, incarnations of your mind. You see a tree while sleeping, well that’s just your mind in the form of a tree.
Oh yes, I cannot claim I am in any way an expert on antinatalism, nor do I follow their ideology (I mean, I cannot have children, so I guess I technically do…?). I just take their side against efilism, as the latter can be extremely harmless, and I would rather have the still life-respecting antinatalists dominate the discussions about the subjects in question, than let edgy anti-lifers, to gain more visibility and support.
I also appreciate your views, it is an interesting perspective to hear. Would you classify it as panpsycism, or does that focus too much on the consciousness part, in comparison?
I lean more towards just the weird metaphysical ideas, and coil that way to that another side of nihilistic views, where I just do not trust human perception of reality. Everything that exists to us, might be completely flawed, and what we perceive as absolute truths or assign as existing things and concepts (like math, or the concept of a mindl), might not be anything else than our delusions - we are unable to know, anyway. This of course leads to all the problems of impossibility of real knowledge and all that, but as we cannot exist outside our own perceived realities - be it separate beings, or all just one - we are just forced to live in that uncertainty. Everything that exists might be just physical things, our thoughts nothing but electric impulses, and we are just having the perception of them being something else… or maybe that is just delusion as well, too, and we just cannot comprehend what form of existence the reality is, as to us it, is how it is. This way nothing really matters, or more like mattering itself is just a human concept - yet everything inside human perspection still matters, to us.
Yeah I get you, there’s enough death cults trying to end the world already. I mean one can take it in different ways. In the most grounded sense it’s physically true. Like there’s not actually a gap between physics, chemistry, biology, sociology and so on, it’s one singular continuous reality. There’s no actual barrier between your body and everything else, that’s just a perception mainly due to a limited awareness.
Of course one can take it in a pansychism manner and I often do. It’s not too difficult to get there for a more rigid materially minded individual. As you already have one just has to make a trip through epistemology first. Like classic arguments such as Descartes demon, Plato’s cave, Chung Tzu’s butterfly, Boltzmann brains, and last Thursdayism. That is the most grounded science based version of reality isn’t as concrete as most minds would prefer it to be. If you don’t know those epistemological arguments I highly suggest looking them up.
I agree, a human mind’s version is likely limited. Like we’re aware of the limited perception of ants and chimps yet often assume we are not similarly limited. Another one I play with is causality. Like if it’s always true then everything in this moment was caused by something in a previous and those by something previous and so on until infinity or something happened that was not caused or causality and human thought isn’t capable of capturing reality as it is.
All the fun stories aside I always come back to base faith. That is it doesn’t matter if I’m a Boltzmann brain and reality just came into being a moment ago, the goal is to reduce needless and avoidable suffering for all minds whenever and wherever I can. Of course I suck at doing that sometimes (a lot of the time) but try not to dwell on the failures beyond the learning experience they can provide.
Like Ram Dass likes to say, be love now. If nothing matters I can still enjoy internally and externally manifesting the waking sensation of love all the same.
Luckily I know at least some philosophical basics, so I do think I understand your talking points. (And essentially Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, lead me on this extreme path of epistemological masochism.)
Infinity is actually a very good example I think, that shows us we are perceiving something weirdly. There exist no measurable, conrete infinity in the physical universe, as far as we know; even the space itself has its limits. Yet we understand the concept of infinity, so it exists in some form, in the reality we are perceiving. But then, we can have infinities that are bigger and smaller than each other… the way we are perceiving this is quite paradoxal! Or, at least it appears to us as such.
And be love now, really is a wonderful line of thinking. I fully agree, that it really does not matter, what is the Real Truth or if it exists at all, since all we have is ourselves, right now. If we all focused more on loving and less on all the bad shit, our human realities would definitely improve in multiple ways… but we are flawed beings, so sometimes we can only try… the path towards Good is a difficult one, that I also often struggle with.