An Argument for Anti-Natalism

[@almusquotch9872]

Are we reaching the point where Kane has finally made every possible video on philosophy?

[@rebeccar25]

I certainly have a sense of dread about this channel existing forever .

[@Moley1Moleo]

And yet, it seems odd to pick any particular day and wish that it stopped existing at that point.

[@graysonhall5548]

Why wouldn’t we just argue that the ideal life ends not at a year number, but once certain things are obtained, or a certain standard of living is lost, that seems like a reasonable thing to argue for

[@davejacob5208]

also thought of certain rows of events, like some sort of heroes journey or whatever leads to a cohesive narrative with a happy ending.

[@robertfabiny6294]

The main argument in this video can be summarized as a constructive dilemma in the following way: 1. Either immortality is ideal, or a finite lifespan is ideal, or non-existence is ideal. 2. If immortality is ideal, then endless life with continuous good experiences would be desirable. 3. However, people often find the idea of immortality unsettling or undesirable, so immortality is not ideal. 4. If a finite lifespan is ideal, then there should be an objective way to determine the perfect length for a life. However, any finite lifespan seems arbitrarily chosen and lacks a rational basis, making it hard to justify any specific lifespan as ideal. 5. Therefore, if neither immortality nor a finite lifespan is ideal, then non-existence (never coming into existence) is the only remaining ideal option. Thus, the constructive dilemma leads to the conclusion that non-existence is the ideal choice, which supports (though does not strictly argue for) an antinatalist perspective. A rough critique can be outlined as follows: 1. The ideal lifespan could be finite, not defined by years but by the capacity for fulfilling experiences. 2. Due to hedonic adaptation, repeated experiences provide diminishing pleasure over time. Individuals have access to only a limited number of unique, meaningful experiences. 3. Once all fulfilling experiences have been exhausted, continued life may lose its ideal quality. This suggests that a finite lifespan can be ideal when it aligns with an individual's full range of satisfying experiences. 4. Therefore, a finite lifespan isn’t "arbitrary" and can counter the argument that non-existence is the only ideal. Example: falling in love may loose it's meaningfulness after the hundredth time.

[@lorenzreiher1407]

What I had in mind is to ask why the non-zero life span is ideal for the infinitist or the arbitrist (?). Presumably because it proves the most conducive to deep human interests or valuable human experiences. But from that angle any not-fully completed set of valuable experiences is preferable to no valuable experiences at all, given that the pain from not completing the set is not big enough to outnumber them (So the anti-natalist and the natalist seem to use ideal in a different way). Moreover, for any human there must be an individual ideal life-span at which they maximise their share of valuable experiences in relation to the ennui of having nothing more to do. Seems more or less like what you wrote. Personally I would set my ideal life span at somewhere between 500 to 800 years.

[@davejacob5208]

the first obvious issue i see is that 4 is simply flatout wrong: a specific span being the idea does not mean that this ideal can be determined by humans. thing x having trait y does not necessarily mean that the y-ness of x can be determined by observers etc.

[@resiknoiro7506]

I don't think that it is possible to "exhaust" all experiences to the point at which they become dull. 1: Look at your own life. There are so many routines you do every day but you never get bored of them even after many years. it's very non trivial to assume that those will even get boring at all, even after almost infinite time. (for example eating, sleeping, reading, etc) 2: Memory. You will have forgotten some things so you can do them again, almost as if it was the first time. For example: If you sit down and watch every movie ever made, then by the time you're finished, you will have forgotten the plot of the first one. So a finite collection of movies could very likely entertain you for an infinite amount of time.

[@tomparke2407]

This is a category error, no? How much food would be in the perfect meal if we were eating purely for pleasure? Imagine we have an endless stomach and won't get sick eating. Any amount we say will be arbitrary, one bite? A thousand bites? Oh well I guess then we may as well not eat at all.

[@FridgemaxxedHybridoreanL-wi6rg]

Couldn't you just as easily say might as well never stop eating? You literally never stop getting something out of it.

[@Uryvichk]

Perhaps the ideal lifespan is negative: Not only do you never come into existence, your nonexistence somehow removes other things from existence.

[@gmodrules123456789]

Terminator goes back in time, kills Sarah Conner. John Conner is never born, never leads the revolution against the machines, and humanity ends up going extinct once SkyNet has no use for them.

[@jonathanmitchell8698]

Better yet: imaginary But if you go that route, you better make sure not to have a real component, or else your life will just be complex

[@Elisha_the_bald_headed_prophet]

​@@jonathanmitchell8698 Just don't go that root.

[@KaneBaker420]

“Any proposed ideal lifespan is arbitrary” is not the same claim as “There is no non-zero ideal lifespan”

[@josephm7447]

Not only that, his detractors will simply deny the arbitrariness. Interested to see what the response would be to defend the arbitrariness.

[@gontlemanggeneral-segolodi5222]

It is the same.

[@squeaksquawk4255]

@@gontlemanggeneral-segolodi5222 How?

[@tudormarginean4776]

You're my favorite KZbinr, and once I stabilize financially I'm going to support you on Patreon, but please don't quit

[@TheYenaldooshi]

Ce draguț

[@DeadEndFrog]

No matter what, kane b will as always be the best philosophy youtuber

[@samuelmelton8353]

You do realise he's not actually immortal, right?

[@DeadEndFrog]

@samuelmelton8353 damn i just now realized

[@Steven-lg3zk]

That's because academic philosophers spend most of their time teaching, researching, and writing instead of filming

[@tobeh_kko2730]

This 'ideal life' is clearly an infinitely long one, wherein you constantly feel maximum euphoria. If we are without constraint this is undeniably the ideal life. If we don't allow for an infinite lifetime for some reason, then yes, it would be strange to arbitrarily cut short this euphoria at any one point. But that doesn't mean that a lifespan of 0 would be better, it just means there is no ideal lifespan, just as there isn't a 'biggest number'.

[@Critisismsoldier999]

Perhaps the ideal life is an infinitely useful or generative one, instead of an infinitely pleasurable one. Just pointing out that it may not be that clear depending on what you value. You could argue that perhaps someone gains pleasure from being "useful," and, therefore, still fits your model. Though i didn't intuit that as being what you meant.

[@philosophicalmixedmedia]

Thanks!

[@jolssoni2499]

I had a similar idea couple years back when I was reading the literature on wrongful life cases. Basically assuming that it would be better not to come into existence in a wrongful life scenario, in order for natalism to go through there would have to be a limit at which a prospectful life turns permissible to create, but for Sorites-style reasons there is no such limit.

[@lljkgktudjlrsmygilug]

Finally a video on the belief that is constantly a punching bag for very silly reasons that highlight one's own unwillingness to see things come to an end, and their projection of themselves and what they value especially coming to an end.

[@SouthPark333Gaming]

That's probably the worst argument for anti-natalism I've ever heard, and I'm an antinatalist.

[@KaneB]

I told you upfront that it was a bad argument.

[@SouthPark333Gaming]

@@KaneB Yep, and I am agreeing with you.

[@aetqo3u6]

I dunno. First you were talking about the ''ideal life,'' but then said that not-existing would be the ''ideal option,'' which just seems to be switching between different senses of ideal. Obviously, not-existing wouldn't be the ideal life, since there's no life.

[@KaneB]

We can ignore my sloppy phrasing and just frame the argument in terms of what would be the "ideal option".

[@aetqo3u6]

@@KaneB I don't have the time to think about this super thoroughly, but here's a few considerations (not exactly objections): 1. The term ''ideal'' might need to be specified. Ideal option in relation to what goal? Or is this framed as some kind of ''absolute'' sense of ideal? I don't know if I can make sense of the latter, and if it's the former, then there's some discussion to be had about the goal. 2. Is ''ideal'' construed in terms of objective value? Or does something being ideal depend on some individual's stance? Maybe it isn't the case that the second option (finite life) is *objectionably* arbitrary, it could just be arbitrary. What might be an ideal life for you might not be ideal for me. Maybe there's no fact of the matter. 3. I understand you're going for a process-of-elimination approach. But I don't know if it follows that if no existing life could be ideal, that then non-existence must be ideal. It could be that none of the options are ideal. Maybe ''ideal,'' in this context, might require a subject for whom it is the ideal option for - in that case, that could exclude non-existence as an option, since there won't be a subject in such a case.

[@KaneB]

@@aetqo3u6 I think the argument rests on an "absolute" sense of ideal. By comparison, when a classical utilitarian claims that pleasure is good, they don't intend to claim that it's good relative to some goal or other -- it's just good in itself. From that point of view, the ideal option would be an eternity of the most intense pleasure. Perhaps this idea doesn't make sense, but if it doesn't make sense, I think that's going to raise trouble for a wide range of moral theories.

[@aetqo3u6]

@@KaneB Yeah, I get intrinsic/instrumental value. I was just hesitant in the case of ''ideal,'' since I usually (implicitly) index it towards some goal or other value, i.e., X is the ideal option for Y. But this isn't my main problem with the use of ''ideal'' here. Here's a rough outline of my thoughts, which are gonna be pretty bad responses lol: You can have person-affecting and impersonal versions of utilitarianism. In the case of Pleasure (P), there is presumably something that exists - (P) - that has a property of intrinsic (impersonal) value, even absent of any subjects. On a person-affecting view, pleasure is intrinsically good, but this is indexed to some individual or persons - what it means for P to be intrinsically good, is just for it to be intrinsically good for someone. In the case of non-existence (nX), metaphysically, it is the absence of anything, and thereby the absence of any properties. So nX is never impersonally or absolutely ideal, nor not ideal - I think it goes out of the equation. It neither has personal value for any being that fails to exist, because in that case, there is no ''someone'' for whom it would be valuable or ideal for. You could say that an extant might intrinsically value nX as some sort of abstract concept, so it could have value in that sense, but then this turns on subjectivity - and if your objection on ''finite life'' is that it turns out to be objectionably arbitrary, it seems similarly arbitrary to value nX. So it's either objectionable in both, or neither. Unless I've misunderstood your objection, of course, which is possible!

[@FactsCountdown]

If Life is beautiful and ideal then would natalist want to stay immortal if not that then it's proves that life is not beautiful and natalist also want exit life at some point.

[@lovethyneibor22736]

honestly the most misunderstood and underrated philosophy

[@TheFettuck]

Most people who call themselves "antinatalists" do not even understand the philosophy. They continue to rely on procreated humans even when they don't want (more) procreated humans to exist.

[@Uteria_888]

Fr

[@lovethyneibor22736]

@@Uteria_888 hi

[@samuelmelton8353]

How did you upload this from the aether?

[@samuelmelton8353]

inb4 ethernet cable

[@tzakman8697]

Please make a tier list for agruments for moral anti-realism.

[@simongotborg3866]

As someone who always has more to say, and struggle to put my ideas out there, there is something very impressive to me about running out of things to say. It's an odd compliment, but I mean it sincerely.

[@jackkeightley5788]

How about an infinite life that you could choose to end at any time?

[@kw8274]

What happened to your discord ? Is it a permanent shutdown ? I really enjoy reading there.

[@91722854]

to a kid at 13, they would think their 8 years old birthday when they received xbox 360 was the peak of their life and would have no remorse in dying the day after this realisation, to an elderly living into their 90s, one day encountering aliens that say they could extend their life further to go visit other planets, those elderlies would think their peak in life has yet to be reached and want more out of it and to extend it indefinitely until, the novelty wears out

[@A3Kr0n]

Arthur Schopenhauer said the most moral position someone can take is to not to willingly have children. Since that's not going to happen, enjoy art and music while you're suffering on this planet. I'm paraphrasing here.

[@gmodrules123456789]

Really goes to show just how arbitrary the moral systems they studied actually were.

[@testacals]

@@gmodrules123456789 How does that make the moral system arbitrary ?

[@gmodrules123456789]

@@testacals Its constructed for highly contextual reasons, yet it claims some kind of universality. 1820 was a long time ago, whatever they thought was right or wrong doesn't matter anymore.

[@seanmuniz4651]

With the second video in a row implying the end of the channel I'm getting scared. I love your philosophy. Take a break or make videos less regularly if you need to, but please don't nuke the channel cause that would make me sad :(

[@mauvaisepoire]

actually you can devise countless similar arguments for AN where I live about 1 in 10 child falls victim to some form of incest (probably more), which prompts the question: what's the "acceptability threshold"? arguably it admits of two "non-arbitrary" answers: 1) 100% [whatever the frequency, it is always perfectly okay to procreate/celebrate pregnancies] and 2) 0% [as long as there's even the tiniest chance that any future child will experience this, procreating is impermissible] any other answer would be unjustifiably arbitrary etc etc

[@perplexedon9834]

Idk, not an antinatalist but it seems pretty obvious to me that you could plot the wellbeing/min over time, we'd expect itd go up and up as you gain novel positive experiences, then begin going down once you've seen most of the positive things life has to offer until life is mostly suffering. You can therefore plot the cumulative wellbeing up to some age, and at some stage after life becomes mostly suffering, the cumulative wellbeing will peak and then irreversible descend until eventually it is negative. You can simply say that the best possible life is one of the length corresponding to that peak on the cumulative wellbeing function.

[@KaneB]

@@perplexedon9834 We're asking what the ideal option would be without constraint. So presumably, there would be no increase in suffering over time. That only happens in non-ideal circumstances, due to contingent features of human biology/psychology. For instance, remove the capacity for boredom, and then it doesn't matter if you run out of novel experiences.

[@perplexedon9834]

@KaneB It seems pretty clear to me that most people would consider the relevant "ideal" to be "ideal for a human being". After all, that's what's relevant for the question of anti-natalism. I also think that my argument applies to any conscious agent with the property that re-experiencing something the nth time (for some large n) is less enjoyable than experiencing it the first time. The only lives that would have a non-decreasing wellbeing would be ones that identically revisit an earlier mental state (eg. an infinite life of: play your favourite video game, enter a memory-wipe machine, repeat). I suppose though you could have an exponential decay of enjoyment on repeat experiences, but one that never actually crosses into negative experiences. An infinite life of grumbling along at the slimmest possible margin of enjoyment. A life of moments just *barely* worth living

[@KaneB]

@@perplexedon9834 But "ideal for a human being" isn't what's relevant to this argument, nor in my view need that be what's relevant to anti-natalism (it depends on the argument for anti-natalism. For instance, Benatar's asymmetry argument concerns any sentient being capable of negative experiences, not just humans.) The point of my argument is that when we consider the ideal option, out of all possible options, unconstrained by contingent features of human biology, we see that the ideal is never coming into existence. Given that this is the best of all possible options, it's also going to be better than bringing a human specifically into existence.

[@BenStowell]

@@KaneB But isn't the point that the ideal is coming into existence for the ideal length of time?

[@samuelmelton8353]

​@@BenStowell He did say it wasn't a very good argument to be fair.

[@Cernunus]

Hello Kane, I'm from Latin America and I wonder if you may put the Spanish subtitles for all of us who don't have a good level of English. Thanks for read❤

[@meeksource4047]

I'm no philosopher, but I can give my thoughts on one particular point. One of the arguments was something like, "If I'm enjoying myself, then it seems odd to say that this is the end of your ideal life. Therefore, there's something odd about the idea that an ideal life would be any finite length." If we're speaking in a hypothetical in which one's ideal life length can be assessed, does that not imply we know that, once we reach the end of said length, there is some malus or downside to continuing to live? Why assume that you'd be enjoying yourself without downside after the end of an ideal life?

[@TheGlenn8]

The ideal lifespan is immortality with the choice of ending it whenever you want.

[@VocalsOfTheReturningOne]

The ideal life for me would be The ability to do and be anything i desire

[@low3242]

So is this the end of this channel? What are you going to do Kane? Are you doing okay brother?

[@conradlistman1481]

If you are out of ideas, cover my favorite paper from Michael Huemer, "A Paradox for Weak Deontology". It will be worth it, promise!

[@hasanalharaz7454]

Even if it is arbitrary I think most people still assume some time even a random amount of time is better then no time just like how they have an intuition against immortality. It’s a logical leap to say a want for some random amount of time is the same as no time being the ideal. If anything this just leans towards saying that somewhere between the 2 extremes (immortality and non existence) is the ideal

[@dflat4887]

Hey Kane how do I join your Discord server? The link in community doesn't seem to be valid anymore

[@Sui_Generis0]

He nuked it

[@EdgarQer]

​@@Sui_Generis0why?

[@testacals]

@@Sui_Generis0 why ?

[@TheAmazingMooCow2]

I dont seem to feel the same existential dread at living forever that most people do - in fact I feel much more dread at the idea of not living forever. I guess I have objections at having to exist on my own after the rest of humanity has died off, but I even see people worry about hypotheticals where this is explicitly said not to happen

[@Elisha_the_bald_headed_prophet]

I'd have no issue with eternity, as long as I don't have perfect memory. It would pain me to remember time and time again that embarrassing episode from primary school.

[@Critisismsoldier999]

Any answer i could give relies upon my making some kind of assumption. Is anything clear? Isn't it more absurd to demand perfect clarity? Clarity in judgement, clarity in perception, etc. I personally have embraced a position that relies less on rationality for that reason. The only conclusion i can come to is that it *appears* that there are things that appear to stream into my "consciousness" (whatever that is) and there *appears* to be some amount of processes that continue that and others that *appear* to arrest that for creatures that *appear* to be similar to me in some ways. Now if i were to find that i were in an asylum and i *appeared* to myself to be peculiar because i were the only sane person there... i would perhaps be better served by embracing the idea that my judgement is clouded and i am in fact also insane. In a similar but opposite way, if i found myself in an emvironment filled with every other type of life on the planet, and i found that i were the only organism that appears to commit intentional self-termination. I would once again assume that my judgement were probably wrong, before assuming that all the other animals aren't behaving properly. So perhaps the answer then is to behave more as the animals do. That was my calculus anyway.

[@hegelsmonster5521]

To the idea of the ideal life span: what if we could choose as we live our lives when to stop our lives? To think ahead is very hard because you don't know what your life projects will be and how much fun you will have (and so on). But I think I would know when I'm a certain age that I don't want to live any longer but would be quite happy with the lived life.

[@xx_amongus_xx6987]

If your life is good, why would you want it to end?

[@hegelsmonster5521]

@@xx_amongus_xx6987 well that is a good question. If you had played the story of a good video game that is worth to play it again, but after you finish it, you still (mostly) don't want it to play it again, even if you think that the story was really good and even if you think that the game would be worthy to play through again. I think that you could also perceive your life in such a way. There is nothing in the future that would bring your life story in any interesting way further and then you may decide to end your life, even you're quite happy with your lived life.

[@xx_amongus_xx6987]

@@hegelsmonster5521 I understand the example you're mentioning but I just can't see it translated to real life in the same way. I can get bored of my favorite game every once in a while, but then I do something else for a little while under the impression that I will go back to my favorite game eventually. Death is permanent, you'll never get to go back. I can also understand someone being satisfied with their life and possibly bored at the end, but is that enough to give up everything if you had the choice? You'd give up living because you're accomplished and bored? These are momentary feelings that are controllable within your mind and by the situations you put yourself in. I like doing certain stuff in my life. If I die, then I won't be able to do that stuff anymore and everything I experienced will vanish. I still fail to understand why anyone with a decent life would want this.

[@huyhoang6617]

Maybe the ideal life is that where you have done anything that could be done ( from small things to significant things, moral to immoral things, etc ), gone everywhere in the universe without any stones left unturned. Wait, why does this sound like samsara and infinite reincarnation ?

[@dreyri2736]

What do you think about self-abnegation?

[@kartik9892]

The one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of children is not to bring them into this world of diseases, crimes, wars, accidents, natural disasters, old age, death, and all the unknown evils the future holds. ☮

[@jackeasling3294]

This reminds me of what Sean Carroll said about there being only 3 simple (read: nonarbitrary) numbers: 0, 1, infinity. Except in our case, given that we are dealing with an arbitrary unit (a year i.e. the duration some planet takes to orbit some star), even 1 is arbitrary and so we're left with 0 and infinity i.e. non-existence and immortality. But given that the former can't even count as a life at all, ipso facto it cannot count as an ideal life. Ergo the immortal life is the ideal life and we should reject the rejection of most mortals' rejection of infinite as just being due to the mortal limitations, lack of imagination, including imagination for the transformative experience of the change in their desires were they to become immortal, or perhaps due to their failure to imagine the stipulation of perfection due to their contingent circumstances of various pains and sufferings and so on. For that Carroll thing see this kzbin.infoSPrPU9eBAj8

[@unwono]

Does it really matter if non-existence doesn't count as an ideal life? We are comparing which is preferable. Who cares if non-existence cannot be life because to define an ideal life, there needs to be life. It's still an option.

[@jackeasling3294]

@unwono How is non-existence an option? I understood how choosing not to procreate would be an option. By the former do you mean the latter?

[@InventiveHarvest]

The ideal lifespan ends when the benefits of living no longer exceed the costs of living. Obviously, this will be different for each individual. Once again, the philosophical ponderies are easily solved with economics.

[@GodelsLaw]

Here's an uniformed thought: There is also the possibility that what you are arguing could be taken as a reductio ad absurdum towards the incoherence of making "global" value judgements about living. You present three cases about the value of a global property of life: it's total length. Those cases are infinite length, finite length, and zero length. You argue that there is no coherent value in the cases of infinite and any finite length. You then indicate a knowledge of such arguments for zero length. Plainly, it is not difficult to come up with arguments that there is no coherent value that can be applied to a length zero life. The output of this would seem to be that there is no coherent value system that applies to the length of life, a global property. It is also not hard to imagine similar arguments about other global properties of life such as total distance traveled or maximum physical size. Whether those arguments remain robust under the change of setting is another matter. But what this doesn't address is local properties of life. It is still possible in light of these arguments that properties that apply to momentary, present being have a coherent sense of value. Such as theories of the value of the pleasures of slow careful observation of art or nature, or in during chronic pain. Animal existence, in other words. At least one objection to this local over global value preference is that local theories of value correspond to global theories. If one says that momentary pain is bad and pleasure is good, then a good life might be one with the least total pain and the most total pleasure. But this assumes that one can total or integrate local properties into global properties, which I would challenge. There seems to be a fundamental experiential quality to local properties that global properties don't seem to have. If there were a way of integrating local properties into global properties which were then fit for value theories, one might expect those global properties to have an experiential quality that derive from the experiential quality of the local properties. But this is not the case.

[@dioc8699]

I would love to see ur commentary on current events from a moral error theorist perspective.

[@IntegralDeLinha]

Maybe they think evergrowing boredom is inevitable, so that a life is necessarily good only if it is finite. But if you need ideas for new videos, how about you tell us about your interpretation of Gareth Evans argument against metaphysical indeterminacy? What does it really tell us? Does it preclude indeterminate futures?

[@IntegralDeLinha]

Btw, he says something like: 1. It's indeterminate whether A is B (premise) 2. If (A is B) and (It's indeterminate whether A is B), then It's indeterminate whether A is A (principle of substitution) 3. But it's false that It's indeterminate whether A is A. 4. So 1 must be false for any A and any B. The argument is supposed to be valid for both identity and attribution and, although it should fail when the indeterminacy is semantic or empistemic, it should hold if it is metaphysical, as when, for instance, you have the objective property, independent of mind and discourse, of being indeterminately tall (as a redundant way of saying that it is metaphysically indeterminate whether or not you are tall).

[@lukahadziegric5982]

I have to ask, why do we care? This seems like one of those grammatically correct questions that don't make much sense, like "what's the color of Beethoven's 5th symphony"? Like, sure. We can entertain that question as an exercise and come to an answer like "you convert it to a numerical representation, average out the numbers and read it as a hex color value". But I think nobody expect a "real answer". However, it seems to me that there's a class of questions that we don't immediately recognize as senseless, even though they are, and so we waste a lot of time on them. Perhaps a good discussion would be about how to recognize such senseless questions?

[@squeaksquawk4255]

Arguments like in this video are basically why I think that immortality, assuming a good life, is a good thing. When you say at 5:45 when you say it's odd that an ideal life would be any finite length, that's basically where I'd add "Therefore it doesn't have a finite length". If I'm having a good life, I would always rather live one more day than to not, because if I wanted to die now then I wouldn't be having a good life. If at every point of an ideal life I would rather prefer to continue living than not continue living, then my ideal life would not end, because to cut short time I would rather have lived makes the life less than ideal. To paraphrase CGP Grey, you might think that at some point in the future you would want to die, old and with a life fully lived, perhaps ever so slightly bored, and ready. Now you might think that, but when that time comes it is not in the future, because you do not live in the future, you always live in the now. And thus you always die now. In an ideal life you never want to die now, always in the future, and thus in an ideal life you never die.

[@petrusboniatus]

When people think about immortality as undesirable because of repetition I think they miss that actuall immortality requires that there is no repetitions in your mental state. That's why immortality is impossible in this universe as there are a finite number of states in our part of the obserbable universe. It would require the ability to both your brain and the universe to grow more complex over time with no stop. I don't think that's undesirable but imposible to imagine what it is like.

[@himmyplush45]

i cant join ur discord ;~;

[@ironbutterflyrusted]

When you are old. The life that you have had so far has been "ideal". Because you have lived longer than so many unfortunate others. And that is your reality. You sound like you are on the precipice of change.

[@anthonyspencer766]

Look, I wanted to have a go at you for baiting views with antinatalism in your title, given what this turns out to be. But that's just humor. This is clearly relevant to antinatalism. Also, don't stop making videos. Inspiration is seasonal/periodic. Dry spells are a feature of the creative game, not a bug. Licherally, you are the best creator on the platform in the philosophy space. I am not just blowing smoke. One idea you might consider is branching out. Imagine beginning to invite more people on for discussions. Instead of always feeling a need to find something you think is interesting, let other people bring their concerns, interests, and problems to you. You seem capable of charitably reflecting on almost anything. A mind like yours can be a dispassionate surgical tool applied to other people's philosophical conundrums. Alternatively, you could let your audience take a more active role in determining the content. "Hey Kane, I really enjoy this topic but I think it results in tensions when taken with [whatever other thought, position, committment]." Anyway, I am going to respond to the argument in a separate comment.

[@OnePlusOneEqualTwo.000]

Humans should try to be humane with each other

[@junebug4823]

If desire is the criteria why focus on the particular subject of that desire at all? If I desire that my life be as it is and not desire it change in any respect. If there is an inadequate quantity of things wanted to be as they are. That inadequacy by this standard would be a want of a greater quantity of things or want for difference and so that wouldn't be the ideal. In order to acheive this ideal life, existence would have to not originate desire that something be different in me and also originate desire for it as it is. I think that this state has been acheived for durations of my life largely in absentminded enjoyment or play. In this view most things are conditionally bad, or originate an undesired life only in certain contexts. I could see life as it exists now being tragic in this view, or such a state as life and the things therein only as wanted being not the way things are. If it is desire contingent this would not excluse or include children inherently. I think the best argument for human circumstances now is that there may be no ideal life which includes the experience of childbirth. And that there is no requirement that children be included in the ideal life.

[@junebug4823]

If I am alive and I don't desire anything to change I also don't desire to die but at the same time I don't mind death however if the concern of ethics is those actions which eventuate a good life there'd be no reason to die

[@qualia765]

i hear by declare 1 = 0 because compared to 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000, 1 is practically 0

[@dflat4887]

I think that the premise against immortality is a pretty weak one. I'd probably just bite the bullet and enjoy a life of endless pleasure and fulfillment. The sense of dread that you mention wouldn't be part of it, as it would only be felt by outside onlookers who aren't living an ideal life.

[@Moley1Moleo]

But is it ideal to inflict that dread on others, and to apparently be unaware or unempathetic to it (since mirroring that dread would be dread for yourself, which, by stipulation, you do not feel).

[@farzad228]

I think it will be 80 years or 200 years.

[@A3Kr0n]

There's an anti-natalist on Soft White Underbelly channel if you want to hear her side of the story.

[@A-bl1dy]

who?

[@tudormarginean4776]

Also, I think your argument is good

[@FarhanAnsari-bv6fv]

perfect timing

[@samuelmelton8353]

Were you about to bring someone into existence?

[@siddhartacrowley]

​@@samuelmelton8353 Thats nuts

[@Nasir_3.]

@@samuelmelton8353😂

[@jhonklan3794]

You are the best argument against anti-natalism hbbi

[@EfilistGoines]

An argument is I can't off ya, nor create ya if never boon. The bad and good news is there's close to 8 billion people who can control ya'll and other species that have the potential as well. Even the solar system owns ya life.

[@philosophicalmixedmedia]

Relative Immortality as apposed to absolute immortality entails conscious existence relative to the heat death of the universe might be a relative good if and only if in a "technological mature condition" where the person might not have to deal with noise pollution as industry causes accusative bad outcomes for an increasingly amount of sentient lifeforms so as to give a quality of life for a minority of billionaires who have the luxury of constructing a never ending set of interesting experiences like tripping off the Jupiter to bath in one of the ponds in high orbit of a constructed asteroid that allows for zero gravity anti aging process to be rebooted so the journey could continue to the next star system.

[@jonstewart464]

I think the ideal life would be something like being humanely reared for meat. If you're born, given everything you like on a plate because that's beneficial to those who run the system (tastier and more marketable meat from happy, healthy livestock), and then you're suddenly and painlessly snuffed out of existence, that would just be ace. For humans, since we're very good at conceptualising the future, there would have to be some sophisticated deception involved, but I think that would be achievable by a more advanced species than ourselves. More generally, the ideal lifespan is one that has the right kind of story arc. As humans, we learn, age and get bored at a particular rate. Things have to keep changing along the right kind of narrative for us to feel like life is okay, and the aging of the body is the clock that tells us where we are in that narrative. If you take away the clock by granting indefinite vitality, then the narrative is gone and my guess is we would just succumb to despair and disorientation in a timeless, directionless void. In other words, the ideal lifespan ends when your body packs up, you look in the mirror and feel really really old, and you know inside it's time to toddle off.

[@xx_amongus_xx6987]

This is only the ideal life for some people. Other people, myself included, would rather live forever

[@jonstewart464]

@xx_amongus_xx6987 I can't really get on board with the idea of immortality, I'd have to know many of the practicalities before signing up. Do you stay the same or change? If you stay the same, then you're not having any experience or gaining memories, so that's like being dead. But then if you change, how? What do you end up being like after a few thousand years? After long enough you're not going to be anything like you are now, so how can you know that's what you want? Or are some memories getting erased while new ones form so it's like a treadmill, kind of "staying the same but different"? I suppose you could be on loop? What happens to other people? I can't come up with a coherent way of imagining living for significantly longer than a natural lifetime.

[@krunkle5136]

Interesting, but humans also make things like music and comics, not just meat that tastes like pork.

[@xx_amongus_xx6987]

@@jonstewart464 It'd be pretty hard to imagine all of the stuff you're talking about because it's pretty much a repaint of Theseus's ship, which I'm going to assume you know of. I wouldn't focus too much on the practicality of it because it's impossible to know how exactly it would function, but it probably wouldn't be something so drastic. I can't imagine anyone would stay the same through time. But even through time, I still think at our core we would be the same people (assuming something intense didn't occur to us between now and then). Even if you are a "completely different person", it is still you, and you are the changed part of yourself- the present and most important version. I would also imagine other people would have the same ability as you to become immortal. A way to think about all of this in a more digestible way: look at your age now, and then think about how you will be when you are ~80 years old. You may be a completely different person, but will that stop you from wanting to live till a ripe age?

[@jonstewart464]

@@krunkle5136 We could still do our art and science on the farm (for our own amusement).

[@italogiardina8183]

A little birdie told me philosophy is a dead end job if and only if the job entails arguments for anti-Natalism given the birdie was obsessed with building its nest. Though if the purpose for species in general is a drive to replicate then the argument might turn to anti-replicationism and that turns to the core argument against modernisation where machines do the replications. So there is that. To that end even a philosophy channel with all the subtle arguments for and against could be replicated and so the theory of anti-Natalism is refuted by the very nature that in a infinite machine future the argument will be replicated infinitum absurdum as speed produces qualitative variations that bring about collectives that inflate and deflate simultaneously.

[@anthonyspencer766]

If there is something that will truly weaken this argument, I can approach it with two statements. (1) People have awful metaphysical intuitions about time, especially on very lrg or small scales. (2) Any question you ask about intervals of time that are very large or very small that seem to get a lot of 'yes' or 'no' answers can usually be flipped so as to evince an equally strong counter-intuition. Per (1), I think folk notions of infinity are hopeless. For that matter, I think professional positions on infinity are pretty hopeless. See the debates about past-infinite sequences and Benardette paradoxes. Most of the proposals about infinite or transfinite temporal sequences strike me as very confused. (Honestly, I am slowly leaning toward antirealism re: time). Per (2), instead of asking people about whether they would want to live eternally, ask them when they want to end (to cease to be). Rather than inferring that the ideal situation would be not to exist (based on the difficulty of answering these sorts of questions), we might instead think that temporal considerations such as extensiveness won't form the right criteria. "Being able to" (do something general or particular) might be a better option. So, you could ask someone, "Suppose you knew you were going to be capable of successfully achieving the most meaningful possible thing. Would it be worthwhile to live if you could do that?" Something that strikes me here is that neither the quality of life (say, in terms of pain versus pleasure) nor the longevity one has is as relevant as the sense of meaning a person has or could have. There is a way of being 'dialed in' that most of us experience at one time or another that doesn't really tend to respect some absolute condition (you are this rich, or that handsome, or whatever). You can have a lot of pain in your life and still be 'dialed in.' When people worry about living forever, I think their retiscence stems from an intuition about boredom and the impossibility of being 'dialed in' when one has infinite moments to traverse.

[@obeidshariff4307]

This video should offend everyone born

[@bystanderprod]

The ideal life ends in the womb. You never know anything, love anyone, need anything, lose anything. It's over before anything can be unideal.

[@howtoappearincompletely9739]

I'd happily take life everlasting as long as I can "opt out" (to use a You[Tube]phemism) at will. I sure hope this isn't your way of saying "bye" to us all.

[@krunkle5136]

Those who love life will propagate it and instill copes that work for them.

[@BenStowell]

Is 555 videos the optimal number of philosophy videos to have on a channel? 😁 seems arbitrary; why not have an unlimited number of philosophy videos? Or none? The anti-immortality folks should say the ideal is to live for as long as possible until living becomes not worth it, and it happens to be the case that living forever at some point becomes not worth it. It's not arbitrary to live exactly 87,651 years if doing so gives you 1,000 net flourishing while living for 87,652+ years gives you

[@mihai3529]

you didn t lie, it s a horrible argument

[@bizzee1]

Very creative. I'll give it a best of the worst arguments for antinatalism award.

[@handsafter]

i don't understand this masturbation about the preferability of some kind of well-being, no one has ever needed well-being, why should it be preferable in any form to non-being?

[@thelevelbeyondhuman]

Everyone’s been making anti natalism arguments for years now. I’m more interested in some potential arguments AGAINST anti natalism. Some videos on that would be cool.

[@dflat4887]

FYI Kane did a video on pronatalism few months ago in case you've missed it.

[@testacals]

You can go to the street and hear anti anti natalist arguments. Pronatalist are more common than anti natalism

[@gmodrules123456789]

I mean, any argument for it is going to suck. Antinatalism isn't real, in the sense that it comes from anything actually existing. Its more or less a thought experiment from ancient times, and the context which spawned it no longer exists. Its very hard to argue in favor of an idealist position which has no relationship to anything material.

[@naturalisted1714]

We all already didn't exist yet that didn't stop a life from being imposed. Therefore, not existing cannot stop a life from being imposed. Therefore, had this life (the one reading this) not been the one to do the imposition, then some other life (one that did come to exist) would have been the one to do the imposition. It's scientifically true that not existing is incapable of stopping a life from doing the imposition of a life... The evidence is that every single being that has ever existed, and exists right now, and will exist, at a point in time didn't exist, yet a life still did the imposition of a life. So why do antinatalists insist to deny the science and claim that not being born can somehow be better, or ideal or preferable? Without there being a conscious state that appreciates not existing, there's no "better" to speak of... Rendering Benatarian antinatalism absolutely absurd and, quite frankly, dumb AF.

[@dard1515]

The ideal lifespan is undefined, and to be determined by personal circumstances. Which I think means it's inherently arbitrary for a philosophers argumentation. My argument against anti-natalism is that it's better to exist and try, even if you only fail.

[@EfilistGoines]

You might as well fail on purpose and save a lot of energy, but if you like you can dig a hole to China with a spoon.

[@Steven-lg3zk]

Ideally, its better to exist than not exist.

[@RealAICCl]

If you are pro bringing life into this world why are you not pro taking it out of this world, be consistent or shutup.

[@chickencikchicklet599]

Because of the spillover effect, the effect taking someones life has on other people. People have already established preferences and denying those preferences is immoral, a unborn life doesn’t have those some prerogatives

[@RealAICCl]

@@chickencikchicklet599 An unborn life is not a real thing. So your argument is like describing the anatomy of a unicorn, pointless.

[@Kentrosauruses]

those things are opposites

[@chickencikchicklet599]

@@RealAICCl We can’t discuss Potential things? So if an engineer discusses the hypothetical event of a bridge collapsing under a given weight, you would say that’s ridiculous because the event has not occurred?

[@RealAICCl]

@ this is the approach taken with climate and oil, population etc, so why not?

[@phillipmitchell2254]

Be careful not to verge into eugenics on this

[@vermin5367]

What is wrong with eugenics? If the majority of mankind was more rational, would not eugenics serve as a tool for sustainability? Perhaps the question is unreasonable, given how prejudiced humanity is by nature.

[@testacals]

"Everyone should have 10 children regardless of the consequences or if they are born with genetic illness"