It's just that any philosophy which allows for justifying genocide... tends to go that way.

If only some people dont suffer so much that their entire life is not worth repeating or even beginning.

Its not that easy, some lives are absolutely nightmarish and should never even start, if we could prevent it.

Suffering is only "bearable" if it doesnt destroy someone's life, which for some unlucky victims, it does, horrifically.

and left because bad luck is not genocide.

Well said.

MacAskill’s book has spurned a lot of interest recently.

I think we are obviously tangibly tethered to the future as far as our lives will be effected by it and our offspring will be too. As that generational relay team race steps ever forward in time.

I’ve heard people signal for years, “it not just IQ but people that plan for the long term future that achieve more and have a better lifelong outcomes,” curiously from alt-right people I grew up with who are fighting the now wars.

Often the long term ism, is not just oriented for 100 years from now but mid term and even short duration as well yield declines in this problems that some people would prefer to hand wave away as insoluble. The issue is that if people can’t make it day to day, you will never convince them to invest in the future. This is what I call the conditional statement of being liberal in the first place. In the old model which leans conservative you fight like an animal for survival. Once we take you out of this state of being, you can attempt to view some i thing like liberal rights, free speech as universal in a long term ism way that’s twice removed 10x in laws of bigger numbers and evaluations. Otherwise it’s all just hand to mouth and gun in hand.

Take a solution to retirement as an example. If we gave every child born from today on out, 10k that’s invested into a Janus fund or whatever, then by the age 65 they would have over a million in retirement (think it’s potentially much more with average historical yield’s). Though, now who is going to see a need to solve a problem that takes 65 years to show the results? But it’s the old small time thinking that has us stuck in the present situation with many problems.

We can’t fix it all either, since we can’t predict it all. Flexibility is an important feature of a government. Much division and bureaucracy slows one’s ability to be malleable but have their own valuable purpose as well.

I would think someone that disputes this, is more a fan of Cioran and practices more nihilistic behaviors. The only catch is I don’t mind if you go back to the organic man on your own, but your not taking any of the abstract man with you. But how can one decide to be an unevolved monkey after already being apart of it? In the end it’s just self validation for one’s independent experience that would destroy all the gains for the masses past peoples worked so hard for us to ameliorate.

I am not trying to school you on anything tbh. I don't care enough to do so. It is your mischaracterization that I was pointing to. But again, I don't care enough about furthering this discussion.

I wasn't claiming that ""liberation from worldly suffering"" was the only aspect of nondualism. In case you forgot, I was responding to you being unaware of anyone that explicitly promotes the idea of being free from suffering. Now you are attempting to school me on something that you were unaware of, after I brought it to your attention.. Hilarious.. 😂😂😂

>make it ok to sacrifice some people for the many, even if the victims strongly protest it.

Hitler has entered the chat...

Lol now you downvote me before replying. I won't even bother reading your crap. Bye.

"Are you being willfully obtuse?" was a serious question, and phrased quite innocuously. On the list of potentially "derogatory" words, "obtuse" ranks right up there with "meany head". I can gather why someone might be offended by the underlying suggestion, but "derogatory language"? Give me a break.

Though I believe I can surmise the answer: Yes, you are being willfully obtuse. That is, you knew exactly what I meant, and you asked only because you were seeking a foundation for some straw-man or feckless equivocation, to aid in defense of religion or the existence of the supernatural.

I could be wrong, but judging from your initial comment deriding redditors for anti-theism, in concert with this? Seems unlikely...

>overall seems to believe you've figured life already

No, what I've "figured out" is simply what I said. Religious folks, particularly religious leaders - who "seem to believe they've figured [out] life already" - are either intentional liars or deluded fools. Nobody has those answers, and they are lying whenever they say they do.

"The question I would pose is, is it still necessary for religion to be the basis for uniting people?" - This question presupposes that united people weren't the basis for religion.

The obstacle is the way.

Vedanta literally means "end of the Vedas" (Veda + anta (means "the end of")).

To suggest that Advaitic philosophy, which is embodied for the most part in the Principal Upanishads and the Brahmasutras, is about "liberation from worldly suffering" is to mischaracterize some of the core themes of the philosophical system.

Advaitic philosophy, among other things, pays particular attention to the impermanence of "the Self" and posits an immanent ontology in which the complex relationality between the Brahman, the Atman, the Jiva, the Jivatman plays out.

Some useful insights into this complex and multivaried philosophical system may be found in the works of Deutsch & van Buitenen (1971), Isaeva (1995), Comans (2000), Sarma (2007), among others.

For dialogue to happen both sides need to be willing to listen. Your use of derogatory words for no reason says you're not ready to and overall seems to believe you've figured life already.

As much as I grow tired of philosophy that is layered in centuries of not even arguments, but like systems and methods of discourse of a few dudes that you need to be a graduate student to parse... if this is the alternative, we'll, it's obvious why we continually need to validate "philosophy" as a valuable endeavor.

Although, of course, if one were to successfully do just that, it'd put people in the philosophy industrial complex out of work so maybe that's the unspoken rule???

"CAN SUFFERING BE RELIEVED? Absolutely! Yes! It happens through an intuitive recognition that we’re not independent. Rather we are essentially linked to something vastly bigger." https://www.advaita.org/

Can you name something that exists outside of the physical material world and also tell me how you know it exists.

Also would you agree that religion should have no role in medicine because medicine is in the material physical world.

"Vedanta is a systematic unfoldment of the teachings of the Upanishads. It deals with the question of self-identity and liberation from worldly suffering." https://www.unbrokenself.com/what-is-advaita-vedanta/

FYI Vedanta is the path/method to Advaita.

>"I don't really know of anyone explicitly promoting an attempt to live free of suffering either"

>As far as I'm aware Nondualism, or Advaita (in Hinduism and Buddhism) does this.

I am not sure I would agree with this. Can you point to any Advaitic philosophy sources that supports this?

Mainly you have to abandon the idea that suffering is of no value. It's not pleasant, by definition, and we generally do not seek it out, but a life entirely without suffering may be worse than one that had some.

I hope that's not true. Lies, especially lies that hurt people, should be allowed to die.

religious beliefs will never go away. they are ingrained into humanity.

>But I care about the general moral.

Whether the thumb is a finger is not really any different than whether a hot dog is a sandwich. With all due respect for Kripke, if formal systems of any kind whatsoever could resolve such things, they would have been resolved long ago, whether by Kripke himself or by Aristotle or by someone in the interim.

>Could the authorities conclude that green isn’t a color?

Green isn't a color. Green is an experience of perceiving a frequency of electromagnetic radiation that opsin molecules most sensitive to ~535 nanometer wavelengths respond to. So the authorities say.

> Suppose physicists announced that. I think I want to say they could be wrong.

It seems like you are reticent to confess that, as if physicists, biologists, or scientists in general are priests with the blessing of God who must not be contradicted. This is scientificism, not science.

>The fact that the authorities announce a classification doesn’t make it automatically right. But could it be right?

Ay, there's the rub.

"Could" is something we mere mortals must deal with. Scientists (and analytic philosophers like Aristotle or Kripke) should stick with "is", and we should ignore them when they don't, because they are not priests providing divine revelations.

The meaning of words (like "finger" or "sandwich") does not derive from being codes for logically precise and consistent categories. Socrates was [mistaken ]( >But I care about the general moral.

Whether the thumb is a finger is not really any different than whether a hot dog is a sandwich. With all due respect for Kripke, if formal systems of any kind whatsoever could resolve such things, they would have been resolved long ago, whether by Kripke himself or by Aristotle or by someone in the interim.

>Could the authorities conclude that green isn’t a color?

Green isn't a color. Green is an experience of perceiving a frequency of electromagnetic radiation that opsin molecules most sensitive to ~535 nanometer wavelengths respond to. So the authorities say.

> Suppose physicists announced that. I think I want to say they could be wrong.

It seems like you are reticent to confess that, as if physicists, biologists, or scientists in general are priests with the blessing of God who must not be contradicted. This is scientificism, not science.

>The fact that the authorities announce a classification doesn’t make it automatically right. But could it be right?

Ay, there's the rub.

"Could" is something we mere mortals must deal with. Scientists (and analytic philosophers like Aristotle or Kripke) should stick with "is", and we should ignore them when they don't, because they are not priests providing divine revelations.

The meaning of words (like "finger" or "sandwich") does not derive from being codes for logically precise and consistent categories. Socrates was mistaken when he said that in order to know if virtue can be taught we must first define it. Substitute 'wisdom' or 'knowledge' or 'sandwich' for "virtue" it makes no difference. The definition of a word depends, innately, inherently, and intrinsically, on context. Whether a thumb is a finger or a hot dog is a sandwich depends on why you are using the word "finger" or "sandwich", not on the physical (or historical, or "conceptual") properties of fingers, thumbs, wieners, or food.

Conventional philosophy includes a supposedly unavoidable premise that words (or "concepts", a word invented to avoid dealing with this very issue/truth) cannot have communicative value in this fashion: they must be codes or else they are meaningless. Nothing could be further from the truth. (I mean that literally, not just figuratively.) Your intuition may tell you (since you have been taught according to this convention) that this informal/non-categorical/illogical method of words and language would result in incomprehensibility: that words would be unintelligible if their definitions were entirely derived from context rather than "authority". But the truth is, this is how words have always worked, since humankind first started using them. And it is worth pointing out that we started using them long before we realized we were doing so, and came up with the word "word" to identify and describe them, let alone before analytic philosophers started insisting they'd work better if they were a formal and logical system of codes.

So the reality (and I mean that, again, literally rather than rhetorically) is that scientists are authorities on science, which is about quantities and formulas, not words or reality. There are ways (contexts) in which a thumb is a finger, there are other ways it is not. It isn't really that confusing unless you want it to be. Your brain might be nothing more than an organic computer programmed by natural selection and operant conditioning, but your mind is independent of that, and is all about self-determination, reasoning, morality, and ignoring as much of what you've been taught as you need to in order to do better than those who taught you.

Thanks for your time. Hope it helps.

"life's inevitable suffering" noooo! i am throwing tomatoes

You don't have to "deal" with the Absurd. You can just accept it as absurd, as crazy as that sounds.

That being said, I appreciate this article

Philosophy inevitably leads to suffering.