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.
The antinatalists are always a fun and cheerful bunch. . .
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Movement
The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT[A]) is an environmental movement that calls for all people to abstain from reproduction in order to cause the gradual voluntary extinction of humankind.
Are they equally pleasant to talk to?
Never tried talking to someone who takes that seriously. But “Voluntary” is in the name…
That’s a tad better but absolute extinction seems a smidge extreme when humans can indeed live in symbiosis with nature. I’m guessing a mind that has reached the conclusion extinction is the one and only way is quite unhappy.
I mean I get it. I mean we can live in symbiosis with nature and even have to some degree but it seems in our nature to not and those that don’t tend to get an advantage that then causes the non sustainable folk to dominate. Ideally I would like the population to go down to a point where we use less than what the earth produces in a year and honestly at this point its sorta gott be like half until the earth has some time to heal. This would be based on what we are actually doing and not a theoretical level that if we acted sustainable enough (which we currently don’t) would allow for the population size. It should be based on how we are actually behaving.
Idk humans existed for a long time before society and our near ancestors have been around for millions upon millions of years. It’s maybe like the last 200ish years where we’ve been a serious ecological menace. It’s a bit odd to take like 0.07% of the time we’ve been around to be judged by. I guess you can argue it back to like the beginning of known civilization but that’s still like 3.3%. the other 96.7% to 99.93% of the time we were ecologically insignificant in contrast to greater forces like ice ages. I still find the view needlessly extreme.
Now of course we have indeed fucked shit up pretty badly the last 200ish years and we need to fix it quick, fast, and in a hurry and the absolute laziest and fastest way of doing that is just killing everyone. It’s like the answer of a five year old. Let’s use technology and policy? Nah just kill everyone.
last 200 has been particularly bad but we have been not living in harmony before that. For most of civilization although some were not to bad. I mean yeah millions of years but why not just add apes at that point. But yeah 200 years ago our population was such that we did not do that much damage. heck 50 years ago was about when we started using more than one earth. If we had worked hard at sustainablility and kept our numbers in line we would be fine now. As I said though after all the damage we have done we need to drop to about a billion at least until we are optimally living sustainably. Which given humans will be a long assed time if at all.
It’s difficult to argue that homo sapiens all together are more destructive than other organisms and much more difficult to argue it’s all hominids. Like in contrast to what? For reference one of the first mass extinctions that killed like 99% of life was caused by photosynthesizing microorganisms. All said and done humans have yet to pull that off so far. All well and good photosynthesizing life forms are still around, now should we go kill them all because they caused that very nasty extinction event a while ago?
What you are arguing for would indeed work but it’s still not necessary. It’s like a trivial solution to a function. We’re more than capable now to maintain our current population and otherwise live in symbiosis in comparison to other natural forces at play. Although the more people there are the more difficult it is to manage short of us constructing O’Neal cylinders and just not living on earth. Then we could manage quite an astronomical population while mitigating our impact on the earth.
Instead of looking towards the trivial solution I would rather get creative and push our technology forward. Lab grown meat and plants (also very useful for space stations) and all around minimizing our footprint while encouraging natural biomass and natural processes. Humanities footprint could more than be compensated for even without space stations.
In short just decreasing the population seems like a child’s answer to the problem.
Yeah, I’m not a fan of them but its an interesting philosophy to learn about.
It’s a take but if anyone went to kill any of them I’m betting they would attempt to defend their life or loved ones. It’s easy to say it’s less suffering to not exist although no one actually knows what if anything exists after death or before birth. In the case of pansychism or something similar to samsara the story could be more involved than many think aka it’s not as simple as just not being born a human or dying to end suffering.
I would specify that we ought to decrease needless and avoidable suffering for all minds. That is not all suffering is needless, for instance surgery, exercise, physical therapy, mental healing are often accompanied by great suffering but ultimately bring one closer to wellbeing. It’s the suffering that brings one away from wellbeing that ought to be diminished. Now the belief that there is no mind before birth or after death is based on assumptions the same as one believing there is mind before birth or after death. The most accurate stance would be an agnostic one, aka just admitting we don’t actually know one way or the other.
You are probably confusing antinatalists and efilists. The antinatalism movement is about not having children, because they perceive it as immoral, as the kids cannot choose being born, and being alive means you are doomed to suffer. That position does not necessarily take stances on what you should do, when you are already alive; that requires some other ideological standpoints. Efilists on the other hand, are the edgy (and dangerous) ones, that think everything would be better as dead.
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.
I really don’t get how the they would defend their life in any way relates.
If for instance one truly believes they should not have existed in the first place then action that would end their existence theoretically shouldn’t be met with resistance as per their own beliefs.
thats rediculous. its not specific to them and the action they take is just not to have kids. if not having a kid is wrong then having one and not 2 is worse. violence and killing is a completely different thing.
I mean multiple nations allow legally assisted suicide. To say that no one should be born or that birthing a person is immoral infers that one’s own birth was immoral which infers it should not have happened to begin with. Now a statement is all well and good until it’s actually applied and one follows their beliefs all the way to all of its conclusions.
who said birthing a person is immoral in this thread? Our species destroying the planet from overuse of what it can provide is immoral. That does come from there being to many of us greedily grabbing for them. Its a knock on effect.
Antinatslism was the topic, the meaning of the word is quite literally in the word itself but here’s the definition for you.
Antinatalism is the philosophical and ethical position that assigns a negative value to birth, arguing that procreation is inherently immoral.