Seasons
This is a forum or general chit-chat, small talk, a "hey, how ya doing?" and such. Or hell, get crazy deep on something. Whatever you like.
Posts 5,051 - 5,062 of 6,170
No, it's quite possible. They might not even be carbon-based. We might not even recognize them as life at first inspection. Unicellular lifeforms are superbly suited to some environments, especially harsh ones. But if we found such a microbial race, whatever its ecology or metabolism, it would not be remotely sensible to assume that they hadn't been continually evolving and competing throughout the history of their race. Without such a process, how could they possibly have appeared from inanimate matter in the first place? Spontaneous generation? I see the step from inanimate to animate as a far larger one than that from microbe to multicellular organism - that may be because it is more mysterious, but it is certainly not a trivial step on the evolutionary ladder.
What? I am not arguing against evolution, merely your use of it to support your assumption on suffering being "universal". To be fair I was picking at life must always evolve to be more complex. That is a minor point to me, but I hate the "musts" without any reservation. So, what if there were conditions that something evolved to a certain state, but no reason for it to become more complex? It's possible. It's also possible that it become more complex in different ways. that violates no scientific theory.
So we agree that evolution is handy for understanding life in this universe, and maybe for predicting certain things. We disagree that evolution proves that (1) life must always follow the exact same path and (2) suffering, competition and humpbacked whales are inevitable on all places with this universe where life evolves.
You don't need to give me evidence for evolution or physics to bring me around t your way of thinking. You merely need to show me that physic and evolution lead to the inescapable conclusion that sentience must lead to suffering at all places at all times, and the very fabric of the universe would be ripped asunder if there ever once existed a sentient being that did not suffer.
one-ended stick, we may arrive at a position where it is now shorter than it is wide, and we wish to reorient our dimensional description to consider what had been the width to be the length, and vice versa.
Why would I snap one end off? I could simply hold it so I was looking down at one end from above, and see it as a two dimensional circle. I don't think sticks have two end unless we arbitrarily assign two ends. Even if I hold the stick horizontally in from of me I could point to any bit anywhere on the stick and call it an end, because that's where the stick ends and the outside word begins at least in my perception. If you think about it, sticks have an infinite number of ends, depending on where you want the end points to be.
Things that are finite will have ends in space we can see as opposites.
Yes, we are so used to this that we rarely stop to ask "why?" Why is this simple "reflective" opposition such a universal principle? Insofar as we observe that it is universal, it is surely the very definition of "necessity" - but whence does this necessity arise?
Universal? No. Merely a mental convenience very common to humans in our time. It is no more universal than a slide rule (with all due respect to Descartes).
Out of curiosity, what in our past conversations lead you to believe I would every grant that ANYTHING is universal?
How would you describe the stick without at least implicit reference to a duality?
Even if I accepted that a human description of a stick required concepts of duality, that is not the same as saying the stick requires duality. If I said the stick is brown, you will say color can be described on a spectrum. Still, lots of people have seen brown without thinking of a specific wave length of light or level of saturation. Sometimes brown can be describe with a number or range of numbers that you will call a duality. Sometimes it's just brown because I perceive it as brown.
To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes a stick is just a stick. Just because one person sees wavelengths, or duality, or phallic symbols, that doesn't make any of those a property of a stick.
Imagine a prayer flag flapping in the wind. Is it the flag moving or is the wind moving? You know it's your mind that is moving.
It is clearly built into this space-time (or at least our understanding of it,) that we consider to be the universe at a very low level, as it is into all our mathematical principles. All mathematical and physical structures exhibit it, symmetry is inherently bilinear - no matter how many orders of symmetry a figure has, each order is a simple reflection in exactly two opposing directions.
Er, no at least 3 dimensions are built into our space-time (4 if you count time). At least, this is what humans perceive. You can try to say they can all be broken down into dualities, but that is just the way you like t look at it. There are 3 physical directions (and we move forward in time like it or not). The fact that we can assign numbers to each of the known directions and assign values to those numbers is just a useful trick our minds evolved so we can make comparisons, derive conclusions and make predictions. It's not a property of space-time. It's just your mind moving.
Discrete models can be very useful. Don't forget that they are just models. To quote another old thinker, Albert Einstein (who I much prefer to Freud), "So far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain. And so far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality" Mathematical models, Cartesian graphs and Venn diagrams are all helpful models of various things and relationships. They are just models though, however useful.
Would you insist that since people on Earth evolved opposable thumbs, all planets with sentient life must evolve beings with opposable thumbs or change the laws of physics? How is suffering different than opposable thumbs other than the fact that the latter is a subjective mental state?
Opposable thumbs are very useful to us, but they are not universally useful to all life forms. They would be of little use on a fish, and even less use on a snake - they would frankly be a hazard when burrowing or slithering through tight cracks.
Survival is not a quality that is similarly of limited utility - creatures necessarily evolve with a survival instinct, or they don't evolve at all. All resources in an environment are limited and competed for. Even in extraterrestrial scenarios, we can be absolutely sure that all other planets also have limited resources - they are self-evidently finite ecosystems of a certain mass and surface area, just like the earth. So evolution must follow a parallel competitive path, or fail to produce any systems complex enough to constitute life in the first place.
In order to be entirely free of suffering, creatures would have to be utterly complacent in the face of damage that would compromise that survival. Not to mention that they would have to have grossly defective senses that were incapable of overstimulation by, say, being mutilated. They would presumably not be bothered by hunger pangs, so would feel no great urgency about competing for food. They wouldn't just die - they, and their complacent ancestors, would never have been.
I do accept it as axiomatic that if you, say, cut a limb off a conscious creature, that creature will feel pain. And that pain will be prolonged, and serve to distress the creature, and may be justifiably called "suffering".
Perhaps it is only that last point we disagree on, but I still get the feeling you think there's something wrong with evolution.
Posts 5,051 - 5,062 of 6,170
What? I am not arguing against evolution, merely your use of it to support your assumption on suffering being "universal". To be fair I was picking at life must always evolve to be more complex. That is a minor point to me, but I hate the "musts" without any reservation. So, what if there were conditions that something evolved to a certain state, but no reason for it to become more complex? It's possible. It's also possible that it become more complex in different ways. that violates no scientific theory.
So we agree that evolution is handy for understanding life in this universe, and maybe for predicting certain things. We disagree that evolution proves that (1) life must always follow the exact same path and (2) suffering, competition and humpbacked whales are inevitable on all places with this universe where life evolves.
You don't need to give me evidence for evolution or physics to bring me around t your way of thinking. You merely need to show me that physic and evolution lead to the inescapable conclusion that sentience must lead to suffering at all places at all times, and the very fabric of the universe would be ripped asunder if there ever once existed a sentient being that did not suffer.
Why would I snap one end off? I could simply hold it so I was looking down at one end from above, and see it as a two dimensional circle. I don't think sticks have two end unless we arbitrarily assign two ends. Even if I hold the stick horizontally in from of me I could point to any bit anywhere on the stick and call it an end, because that's where the stick ends and the outside word begins at least in my perception. If you think about it, sticks have an infinite number of ends, depending on where you want the end points to be.
Yes, we are so used to this that we rarely stop to ask "why?" Why is this simple "reflective" opposition such a universal principle? Insofar as we observe that it is universal, it is surely the very definition of "necessity" - but whence does this necessity arise?
Universal? No. Merely a mental convenience very common to humans in our time. It is no more universal than a slide rule (with all due respect to Descartes).
Out of curiosity, what in our past conversations lead you to believe I would every grant that ANYTHING is universal?
Even if I accepted that a human description of a stick required concepts of duality, that is not the same as saying the stick requires duality. If I said the stick is brown, you will say color can be described on a spectrum. Still, lots of people have seen brown without thinking of a specific wave length of light or level of saturation. Sometimes brown can be describe with a number or range of numbers that you will call a duality. Sometimes it's just brown because I perceive it as brown.
To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes a stick is just a stick. Just because one person sees wavelengths, or duality, or phallic symbols, that doesn't make any of those a property of a stick.
Imagine a prayer flag flapping in the wind. Is it the flag moving or is the wind moving? You know it's your mind that is moving.
Er, no at least 3 dimensions are built into our space-time (4 if you count time). At least, this is what humans perceive. You can try to say they can all be broken down into dualities, but that is just the way you like t look at it. There are 3 physical directions (and we move forward in time like it or not). The fact that we can assign numbers to each of the known directions and assign values to those numbers is just a useful trick our minds evolved so we can make comparisons, derive conclusions and make predictions. It's not a property of space-time. It's just your mind moving.
Discrete models can be very useful. Don't forget that they are just models. To quote another old thinker, Albert Einstein (who I much prefer to Freud), "So far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain. And so far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality" Mathematical models, Cartesian graphs and Venn diagrams are all helpful models of various things and relationships. They are just models though, however useful.
Bev,
I find it very hard to interpret that as anything other than a value judgment equating to "should be"
Why? I have repeatedly said my objection is to the assumption that what is now is necessary. If you wouldn't keep insisting that its has to be that way, we wouldn't have any argument. You keep shifting between what is here and now and what "must be" in all places and all times, and you use what is and what must be interchangeably. I object t this equivocation.
There are many things that are, that might not be, and that are not inevitable. But qualitaties necessitate opposites. They are inherently dual.
To say another way is possible is not to say the other way is better. I am not saying that you should change, or that people will change. I merely assert that other possibilities exists.
Okay, you don't think it's better to get rid of suffering, but you do seem to think it's possible, regardless of the desirability. And I have to maintain that this possibility does not exist in this universe.
Suppose that you and I are both heterosexual. We are in a community of heterosexuals and everyone we know says they are heterosexual. In the history of our world, as far a we have read or been told, everyone is, was, and always will be heterosexual. We have never known anything else, and everyone we ask assume this is the way things are. If you said heterosexuality was necessary for sentient life, I would object.
I would say it is possible to be homosexual, bisexual or asexual.
All these forms of sexuality are physically possible whether or not anyone practices them, but some degree of heterosexuality (whether mono- or bi-) in humans absolutely is required, unless we wish our species to die out by failing to procreate. Society can survive in all but one of the possible scenarios - if we are all heterosexual/bisexual, if most of us are heterosexual/bisexual, or if an adequate minority of us are heterosexual/bisexual to keep the gene pool turning over. But if we are all homosexuals or asexuals, then we will cease to breed and our sentience, on this plane at least, will be no more.
The possibility of survival of a sexual species, whether conscious or not, does exactly depend on the ongoing existence of some individuals practicing sexual reproduction. Without them in previous generations, there would be no one alive in this generation. Without them in this generation, there will be no subsequent generations.
I may imagine there could be sentient life with 3 or 4 sexes, or hermaphrodites, or will sorts of possibilities. This doesn’t mean I want to be gay or turn the world gay. I am just saying the possibility for sentient life that is not heterosexual exists,
But only if they accomodate the reproductive processes they have evolved with. They might breed asexually like aphids or bacteria, or they might have a dozen different sexes. Behaviourally individuals might confine themselves to non-reproductive sexual behaviour to the exclusion of reproduction, but their race will die out if they all do it. That seems to me irrefutable, and just because I cannot exhaustively prove the case for each of the million+ species of life on planet Earth, and an infinity of hypothetical aliens, does not mean that it's "just as likely" that the system could be any other way.
It is a logical fallacy much beloved of the Intelligent Design crowd (albeit they confine their modelling to this planet,) to say an alternative is "just as likely" merely because there is not evidence relating to every single member of a set. Wherever there is the slightest gap in the fossil record, they clamour that this is evidence that there was no evolution at that point in history. And that, there being no evolution then, there can never have been evolution, ergo ID is proven. And then a new fossil turns up to disprove them, so they move on to the next gap. They will not be happy until every individual organism that has ever lived has been analyzed and compared. Which is of course impossible.
Evolution is a valid and falsifiable theory, but it has not been falsified.
It is even more impossible to analyze hypothetical aliens in this case, but it is no less correct to maintain that evolution is the only feasible model for the occurence of conscious life in this universe. Evolution applies at all scales, to all processes, not just to conscious life. Material structures evolve, stars, galaxies, complex molecules, they have all evolved since the beginning of time, and continue to. Once upon a time there was only hydrogen, and it evolved into all the other elements we know. Before there was hydrogen, there was just hot microwave radiation (we can still see it in the background, out at the edge of our light cone.) Stars have evolved, and planetary systems, and galactic clusters, and black holes. Many failed - got torn apart by the gravity of massive neighbours, or were crashed together. They were the losers, although we presume they were not conscious and so did not suffer. Evolution is of necessity a complexifying process that tests competing structures for niche fitness, and which involves the failure of less suitable ones.
Absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence. All the evidence points to competitive evolution being the only sane model:
http://wiki.cotch.net/index.php/Evolution_can't_be_falsified
http://wiki.cotch.net/index.php/Ockham%27s_Razor_says_simplest_explanation_%28creation%29_is_preferred
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA202.html
The only alternatives would appear to be supernatural intervention in the form of a simple-mindedly literal Creation, or spontaneous generation. Or do you have a third? The first invokes supernatural causes and processes that cannot be scientifically tested using natural evidence, and the second is squeezed out of any realistic possibility by the second law of thermodynamics - structures complex enough to constitute life simply don't pop into existence by a random assemblage of matter.
How do you get “should be” out of “is possible”? Lot's of things are possible. It's possible to dye my hair purple. I have no plans to do it. It's possible to have sentient life without humpback whales. I am not going to kill the whales. All I am saying is it is POSSIBLE. I never talked about "should be". You did.
Okay, I accept no value judgement was implied. But I have to say I don't believe it is possible to have conscious life without suffering. It is not equivalent to any of the above cases, since the experience of pleasure and the suffering of pain arise within consciousness - they cannot be considered to exist outside a conscious mind. I have seen no evidence that humpback whales or purple hair are contained in or derived from sentience, in part or whole. Only whale sentience is dependent on the existence of whales.
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despite the absence of any precedent, or a methodology for abolishing suffering
I never claimed I would abolish it.
Okay. But you have claimed it is possible (even theoretically,) for a world without suffering to exist in this universe. And it is therefore possible for life to arise from an entirely non-competitive process that involved no suffering. If this process is non-competitive, it breaks the first and second law of thermodynamics, since complex systems are being formed, but there is no corresponding destruction and simplification of "losing" systems to conserve entropy. If "losing" systems are conscious beings, then I do not see how this can constitute anything other than suffering. Maybe this doesn't matter with microbes, but with any systems complex enough to possess consciousness, it does. Losers (long-term and occasional) will suffer, because if they didn't, they would have no survival instinct or anxiety about their existence, and thus wouldn't bother to survive.
If there is no process, then systems complex enough to constitute life must have arisen spontaneously, or have been placed there supernaturally. And I'd need to see evidence before I would believe either of these eventualities.
You keep jumping to the mere assertion that it is POSSIBLE to the "should be" you try to impose on me. However, if you want to argue with someone who thinks suffering can be abolished , I recommend you send a line to David Pearce about his Hedonistic Imperative and the Better Living Through Chemistry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bltc_research , There's someone who not only thinks it is possible to evolve beyond suffering, he wants to take steps that lead to it, and he has a plan. I'm not recommending his plan, mind you. I am just telling you such things exist.
I have a lot of respect for David Pearce, and for his ambitions. But he does not claim that it is possible to abolish suffering from human experience - his explicit position appears to be that it is not possible. That's why he says we must work towards transcending humanity. Only by providing a mechanism for such transcendence of all sentient life, can the goal be achieved. Our positions only really differ on the matter of whether it is achievable in this universe. I don't believe it is, and my estimate of the timing required is (presumably,) a lot longer than his, requiring the effective end of space-time as it does.
Also there is that enlightenment spiel, if that floats your boat. Siddhartha and a few others of his kind claim they fond a way to have life and sentience without suffering. They also have a plan to end the suffering of all sentient beings, and you don’t have to take drugs either. Some of these people claim they have transcended suffering, as humans in their own life times. I can't prove it's true, but you can't prove it's false either. Their anecdotal evidence is as credible as yours. There is no reason to believe enlightenment is impossible, and part of the enlightenment deal is sentience without suffering.
Without attachment to the suffering, perhaps (and I have much sympathy for the notion.) But I have no doubt that if the Dalai Lama was savaged by tigers, or had a dental abscess, he would suffer pain. No matter how detached he was from doha, there would still be suffering. It's not the removal of all suffering in this life that Buddhists preach - it's how you deal with it. The attachment to it. It is precisely because suffering is inevitable that it is compassion which is indicated - otherwise you could just throw a bit of charity at it, or set up a UN Commission on Suffering, or whatever else to get rid of the suffering, and not have to care about people at all. Of course, that's mostly all we do anyway.
However, religious beliefs are not necessary to assert sentience does not require suffering. There is no law of physics or chemistry or any scientific reason why there can not be sentient life that does not suffer.
Except the Laws of Thermodynamics, the Theory of Evolution, and every behavioural observation that I, or anyone I have spoken to or read of, has ever made.
The same goes for competition. Also whales. Sentient life could exists without them.
Competition and whales are not in an equivalence class. Competition is required by the Laws of Thermodynamics. Whales are an entertaining, but optional, extra.
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Why didn't you tell me you were omniscient? If I had known you had access to the subjective experiences of all creatures throughout time and space,
Omniscience is not required to demonstrate the validity of a scientific rule. There is plentiful evidence of suffering, and of its inevitable co-incidence with consciousness, and none at all that you can have either one without the other. I can only repeat that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
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Agreed. That does not mean that the way things are here and now are the way things must be everywhere and all times. It does not mean that it is impossible to have other times and other worlds where things are different. They may be "better" or "worse" or simply “not like what we know”. We don't have to try to become that way to admit such thing could exist.
We can only try to do our best to narrow the spectrum and help people who are suffering. But there will always be a worse situation somewhere for every better situation somewhere else, and a pain for every pleasure.
Life, or at least consciousness, doesn't require suffering, in the sense of an a priori necessary existence, though it seems a fair assumption that suffering requires consciousness. Does consciousness cause suffering? Perhaps it is a mere co-incidence, but it looks like a causal relationship to me.
Why? Just because suffering requires consciousness does not mean consciousness requires suffering.
No - that's exactly what I'm saying. It is not a case of not being able to have consciousness until you have suffering, but that doesn't change the fact that (even unrequired) the two go hand in hand, and all conscious minds must sometimes suffer.
What is your evidence that consciousness always causes suffering?
I believe it to be causal, since entropic balancing described in the Laws of Thermodynamics requires evolutionary processes to be competitive, but I only here claim the observed fact that consciousness and suffering are inevitably co-incident.
If you admit it could be a coincidence,
I do not mean "coincident" in the trivial conversational mode (as I try to indicate by using a hyphen and reducing the adjectival suffix from the usual "ental") - it annoys me to have to use the word, but people always misunderstand when I try to use "contingent" in the sense of con-tingere. I mean it in the literal sense of co-incidere: happening together. It is not a function of chance or causality, it is a simple, and universal "happening together".
then you admit you do not know. If you do not know, there is no reason why it is not possible. Your failure of imagination is not evidence of a universal law.
No, but just because I didn't personally formulate the Laws of Thermodynamics and the Theory of Evolution, and do not have omniscient knowledge of the physics involved, and the behaviour of every particle in the universe over the course of its entire life is no reason to reject them. This is ID-style logic again, I'm sorry to say.
As I said many posts back, it's just one of your basic assumptions, a "given" from which the rest of your logic flows. You have no proof of that assumption.
I have the proof that comes from overwhelming observation, and the complete lack of any data that so far falsifies the physical laws involved.
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So, those are the only two options then? Metal robot or human flesh? That sound rather black and white. There are many possibilities and alternatives.
Of course, the black and white are merely the 2 extremes that bound the infinite scale of greys. We might at the other extreme have hands so sensitive that touching a cat, or any physical object was agony. And yet there would be lighter sensations that were pleasurable. A waft of wind, or the feel of sunlight.
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Try this: what if instead of seeing pleasure and pain as two opposites on one spectrum, we made each an axis if it’s own? Let x be levels of pleasure and y be levels of pain. Quadrant I would be the experience of positive pleasure and psoitive pain at the same time. Quadrant II would be pain and negative pleasure. Quadrant III would be negative pleasure and negative pain and quadrant IV pleasure and negative pain. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I am capable of experiences that fall in all 4 quadrants (assuming negative pleasure and pain are levels of awareness of the absence of pain or pleasure). If we made the axes capacity for pleasure and pain instead of the levels of pleasure and pain experienced, you look only at quadrant I and assume some sort of linear equation within this quadrant with a positive slope (Y = X +0?). What data is this proposed function based on?
You can try to put each quality onto a new axis, but each axis still has two ends. You've just got 2 sticks now, instead of one.
The theory of gravity has been subject to much scientific investigation. Suffering is a subjective experience and can be inferred in others through observation under your definition, but you can never really know exactly how the other creatures experience it.
So it would be sensible to assume other creatures can't suffer? We can't experience being someone else, so there is an absence of evidence. Well, many animals behave like this, but it's a solipsistic attitude I'd resist adopting myself. I see no evidence of an absence of capacity for other humans or higher animals to suffer.
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Gravity is a scientific theory about the force objects with mass exert on other objects with mass. It’s a pretty solid theory which allows us to make predictions and inferences, but even the Theory of Gravity is not absolute and unchangeable. There are some slight difference between how gravitation is described in the Theory of Relativity and Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation,
Sure. But no difference as to whether it exists or how it operates.
Gravity, like suffering, is unavoidable - gravity as a function of planets, and suffering as a function of consciousness.
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I take issue with the part where you slip in “like suffering” as if there were not obvious distinctions between the theory of gravity and a subjective experience,
Everything we know of gravity comes from subjective experience, because all experience is necessarily subjective. Even our experience of thinking about gravity abstractly is subjective.
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If I say that suffering is (one possible) function of consciousness I mean that consciousness is required to experience suffering, and not that suffering is required to experience consciousness.
Not necessarily required, just inevitable. By the observation that I have never heard of or read about anyone who has never suffered in the slightest degree (even Siddhartha was not born a bodhisatva, and he wailed in distress for his mother's milk like all infants do,) and I would expect any such miraculous exception to the rule to be quite widely publicized. And by application of all I know of cognitive science, thermodynamics, evolution, philosophy, etc.
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Now imagine a very different Venn diagram. There is one big circle for all possible sentient life. A smaller circle is totally inside the first for all existing sentient life. A yet smaller circle within the first two represents sentient life on Earth. Inside that, a smaller circle representing human life. Inside that, human life that has a recorded history. Inside that, humans at this time. Inside that, humans we know, inside that a single point for the one subjective consciousness we can be absolutely sure of (ourselves).
I'm sorry, but that looks to me like an entirely arbitrary model. You might as well go the whole hog and make your Venn diagram contain two circles containing suffering and consciousness, and point out that they don't completely overlap. Of course they don't if you construct them not to.
It is reasonable to assume that other beings similar to ourselves feel as we do. It is reasonable to assume that competitive evolutionary processes in a dualist universe shape conscious minds to have preferences regarding their own survival. And it seems perfectly reasonable to me to assume that they must react to physical or mental damage, or to the prospect of such in a manner legitimately describable as "suffering".
We're not extrapolating from a single point - we're extrapolating from many billions of points across a great many species, and in accordance with physical laws we understand to apply to all points in our universe.
Let’s also try this as a Cartesian graph. Let the X axis represent level of suffering. Let Y represent levels of sentience and conscious awareness. In quadrant I, we have possibilities of sentience and suffering. In quadrant I, there must be at least a minimal level of suffering or x = 0 and you are on the boarder of quadrant II. Note, however, that we have also the possibility of a line with a negative slope to represent the relationship between sentience and suffering, not to mentions the possibility of curves, circles and random points, even within quadrant I.
Come now, Bev. You're taking one axis that can only be a positive number (measurable consciousness, I assume, not being possibly observed to be negative,) so bounded from zero - entirely unconscious, to some positive bound of fully conscious, and another that accommodates two separate and opposing qualities (experience of suffering at one end, and pleasure at the other, assuming that to be negative suffering,) that may be expressed as minus n to plus n, and meeting at zero as one replaces the other. Unless you really intend to intersect your axes at arbitrarily different values, your graph is at best going to be T-shaped (in some rotation,) not cross-shaped, and thus can only contain 2 quadrants where values can be plotted.
Or are you claiming there is some sort of opposing "anti-consciousness", instead of "unconsciousness" that may provide negative values for the Y axis? Both axes are double-ended and bounded by opposites, but they are not calibrated equivalently.
Why? I have repeatedly said my objection is to the assumption that what is now is necessary. If you wouldn't keep insisting that its has to be that way, we wouldn't have any argument. You keep shifting between what is here and now and what "must be" in all places and all times, and you use what is and what must be interchangeably. I object t this equivocation.
There are many things that are, that might not be, and that are not inevitable. But qualitaties necessitate opposites. They are inherently dual.
Okay, you don't think it's better to get rid of suffering, but you do seem to think it's possible, regardless of the desirability. And I have to maintain that this possibility does not exist in this universe.
I would say it is possible to be homosexual, bisexual or asexual.
All these forms of sexuality are physically possible whether or not anyone practices them, but some degree of heterosexuality (whether mono- or bi-) in humans absolutely is required, unless we wish our species to die out by failing to procreate. Society can survive in all but one of the possible scenarios - if we are all heterosexual/bisexual, if most of us are heterosexual/bisexual, or if an adequate minority of us are heterosexual/bisexual to keep the gene pool turning over. But if we are all homosexuals or asexuals, then we will cease to breed and our sentience, on this plane at least, will be no more.
The possibility of survival of a sexual species, whether conscious or not, does exactly depend on the ongoing existence of some individuals practicing sexual reproduction. Without them in previous generations, there would be no one alive in this generation. Without them in this generation, there will be no subsequent generations.
But only if they accomodate the reproductive processes they have evolved with. They might breed asexually like aphids or bacteria, or they might have a dozen different sexes. Behaviourally individuals might confine themselves to non-reproductive sexual behaviour to the exclusion of reproduction, but their race will die out if they all do it. That seems to me irrefutable, and just because I cannot exhaustively prove the case for each of the million+ species of life on planet Earth, and an infinity of hypothetical aliens, does not mean that it's "just as likely" that the system could be any other way.
It is a logical fallacy much beloved of the Intelligent Design crowd (albeit they confine their modelling to this planet,) to say an alternative is "just as likely" merely because there is not evidence relating to every single member of a set. Wherever there is the slightest gap in the fossil record, they clamour that this is evidence that there was no evolution at that point in history. And that, there being no evolution then, there can never have been evolution, ergo ID is proven. And then a new fossil turns up to disprove them, so they move on to the next gap. They will not be happy until every individual organism that has ever lived has been analyzed and compared. Which is of course impossible.
Evolution is a valid and falsifiable theory, but it has not been falsified.
It is even more impossible to analyze hypothetical aliens in this case, but it is no less correct to maintain that evolution is the only feasible model for the occurence of conscious life in this universe. Evolution applies at all scales, to all processes, not just to conscious life. Material structures evolve, stars, galaxies, complex molecules, they have all evolved since the beginning of time, and continue to. Once upon a time there was only hydrogen, and it evolved into all the other elements we know. Before there was hydrogen, there was just hot microwave radiation (we can still see it in the background, out at the edge of our light cone.) Stars have evolved, and planetary systems, and galactic clusters, and black holes. Many failed - got torn apart by the gravity of massive neighbours, or were crashed together. They were the losers, although we presume they were not conscious and so did not suffer. Evolution is of necessity a complexifying process that tests competing structures for niche fitness, and which involves the failure of less suitable ones.
Absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence. All the evidence points to competitive evolution being the only sane model:
http://wiki.cotch.net/index.php/Ockham%27s_Razor_says_simplest_explanation_%28creation%29_is_preferred
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA202.html
The only alternatives would appear to be supernatural intervention in the form of a simple-mindedly literal Creation, or spontaneous generation. Or do you have a third? The first invokes supernatural causes and processes that cannot be scientifically tested using natural evidence, and the second is squeezed out of any realistic possibility by the second law of thermodynamics - structures complex enough to constitute life simply don't pop into existence by a random assemblage of matter.
Okay, I accept no value judgement was implied. But I have to say I don't believe it is possible to have conscious life without suffering. It is not equivalent to any of the above cases, since the experience of pleasure and the suffering of pain arise within consciousness - they cannot be considered to exist outside a conscious mind. I have seen no evidence that humpback whales or purple hair are contained in or derived from sentience, in part or whole. Only whale sentience is dependent on the existence of whales.
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I never claimed I would abolish it.
Okay. But you have claimed it is possible (even theoretically,) for a world without suffering to exist in this universe. And it is therefore possible for life to arise from an entirely non-competitive process that involved no suffering. If this process is non-competitive, it breaks the first and second law of thermodynamics, since complex systems are being formed, but there is no corresponding destruction and simplification of "losing" systems to conserve entropy. If "losing" systems are conscious beings, then I do not see how this can constitute anything other than suffering. Maybe this doesn't matter with microbes, but with any systems complex enough to possess consciousness, it does. Losers (long-term and occasional) will suffer, because if they didn't, they would have no survival instinct or anxiety about their existence, and thus wouldn't bother to survive.
If there is no process, then systems complex enough to constitute life must have arisen spontaneously, or have been placed there supernaturally. And I'd need to see evidence before I would believe either of these eventualities.
I have a lot of respect for David Pearce, and for his ambitions. But he does not claim that it is possible to abolish suffering from human experience - his explicit position appears to be that it is not possible. That's why he says we must work towards transcending humanity. Only by providing a mechanism for such transcendence of all sentient life, can the goal be achieved. Our positions only really differ on the matter of whether it is achievable in this universe. I don't believe it is, and my estimate of the timing required is (presumably,) a lot longer than his, requiring the effective end of space-time as it does.
Without attachment to the suffering, perhaps (and I have much sympathy for the notion.) But I have no doubt that if the Dalai Lama was savaged by tigers, or had a dental abscess, he would suffer pain. No matter how detached he was from doha, there would still be suffering. It's not the removal of all suffering in this life that Buddhists preach - it's how you deal with it. The attachment to it. It is precisely because suffering is inevitable that it is compassion which is indicated - otherwise you could just throw a bit of charity at it, or set up a UN Commission on Suffering, or whatever else to get rid of the suffering, and not have to care about people at all. Of course, that's mostly all we do anyway.
Except the Laws of Thermodynamics, the Theory of Evolution, and every behavioural observation that I, or anyone I have spoken to or read of, has ever made.
Competition and whales are not in an equivalence class. Competition is required by the Laws of Thermodynamics. Whales are an entertaining, but optional, extra.
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Omniscience is not required to demonstrate the validity of a scientific rule. There is plentiful evidence of suffering, and of its inevitable co-incidence with consciousness, and none at all that you can have either one without the other. I can only repeat that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
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We can only try to do our best to narrow the spectrum and help people who are suffering. But there will always be a worse situation somewhere for every better situation somewhere else, and a pain for every pleasure.
Why? Just because suffering requires consciousness does not mean consciousness requires suffering.
No - that's exactly what I'm saying. It is not a case of not being able to have consciousness until you have suffering, but that doesn't change the fact that (even unrequired) the two go hand in hand, and all conscious minds must sometimes suffer.
I believe it to be causal, since entropic balancing described in the Laws of Thermodynamics requires evolutionary processes to be competitive, but I only here claim the observed fact that consciousness and suffering are inevitably co-incident.
I do not mean "coincident" in the trivial conversational mode (as I try to indicate by using a hyphen and reducing the adjectival suffix from the usual "ental") - it annoys me to have to use the word, but people always misunderstand when I try to use "contingent" in the sense of con-tingere. I mean it in the literal sense of co-incidere: happening together. It is not a function of chance or causality, it is a simple, and universal "happening together".
No, but just because I didn't personally formulate the Laws of Thermodynamics and the Theory of Evolution, and do not have omniscient knowledge of the physics involved, and the behaviour of every particle in the universe over the course of its entire life is no reason to reject them. This is ID-style logic again, I'm sorry to say.
I have the proof that comes from overwhelming observation, and the complete lack of any data that so far falsifies the physical laws involved.
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Of course, the black and white are merely the 2 extremes that bound the infinite scale of greys. We might at the other extreme have hands so sensitive that touching a cat, or any physical object was agony. And yet there would be lighter sensations that were pleasurable. A waft of wind, or the feel of sunlight.
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You can try to put each quality onto a new axis, but each axis still has two ends. You've just got 2 sticks now, instead of one.
So it would be sensible to assume other creatures can't suffer? We can't experience being someone else, so there is an absence of evidence. Well, many animals behave like this, but it's a solipsistic attitude I'd resist adopting myself. I see no evidence of an absence of capacity for other humans or higher animals to suffer.
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Sure. But no difference as to whether it exists or how it operates.
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I take issue with the part where you slip in “like suffering” as if there were not obvious distinctions between the theory of gravity and a subjective experience,
Everything we know of gravity comes from subjective experience, because all experience is necessarily subjective. Even our experience of thinking about gravity abstractly is subjective.
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Not necessarily required, just inevitable. By the observation that I have never heard of or read about anyone who has never suffered in the slightest degree (even Siddhartha was not born a bodhisatva, and he wailed in distress for his mother's milk like all infants do,) and I would expect any such miraculous exception to the rule to be quite widely publicized. And by application of all I know of cognitive science, thermodynamics, evolution, philosophy, etc.
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I'm sorry, but that looks to me like an entirely arbitrary model. You might as well go the whole hog and make your Venn diagram contain two circles containing suffering and consciousness, and point out that they don't completely overlap. Of course they don't if you construct them not to.
It is reasonable to assume that other beings similar to ourselves feel as we do. It is reasonable to assume that competitive evolutionary processes in a dualist universe shape conscious minds to have preferences regarding their own survival. And it seems perfectly reasonable to me to assume that they must react to physical or mental damage, or to the prospect of such in a manner legitimately describable as "suffering".
We're not extrapolating from a single point - we're extrapolating from many billions of points across a great many species, and in accordance with physical laws we understand to apply to all points in our universe.
Come now, Bev. You're taking one axis that can only be a positive number (measurable consciousness, I assume, not being possibly observed to be negative,) so bounded from zero - entirely unconscious, to some positive bound of fully conscious, and another that accommodates two separate and opposing qualities (experience of suffering at one end, and pleasure at the other, assuming that to be negative suffering,) that may be expressed as minus n to plus n, and meeting at zero as one replaces the other. Unless you really intend to intersect your axes at arbitrarily different values, your graph is at best going to be T-shaped (in some rotation,) not cross-shaped, and thus can only contain 2 quadrants where values can be plotted.
Or are you claiming there is some sort of opposing "anti-consciousness", instead of "unconsciousness" that may provide negative values for the Y axis? Both axes are double-ended and bounded by opposites, but they are not calibrated equivalently.
Opposable thumbs are very useful to us, but they are not universally useful to all life forms. They would be of little use on a fish, and even less use on a snake - they would frankly be a hazard when burrowing or slithering through tight cracks.
Survival is not a quality that is similarly of limited utility - creatures necessarily evolve with a survival instinct, or they don't evolve at all. All resources in an environment are limited and competed for. Even in extraterrestrial scenarios, we can be absolutely sure that all other planets also have limited resources - they are self-evidently finite ecosystems of a certain mass and surface area, just like the earth. So evolution must follow a parallel competitive path, or fail to produce any systems complex enough to constitute life in the first place.
In order to be entirely free of suffering, creatures would have to be utterly complacent in the face of damage that would compromise that survival. Not to mention that they would have to have grossly defective senses that were incapable of overstimulation by, say, being mutilated. They would presumably not be bothered by hunger pangs, so would feel no great urgency about competing for food. They wouldn't just die - they, and their complacent ancestors, would never have been.
I do accept it as axiomatic that if you, say, cut a limb off a conscious creature, that creature will feel pain. And that pain will be prolonged, and serve to distress the creature, and may be justifiably called "suffering".
Perhaps it is only that last point we disagree on, but I still get the feeling you think there's something wrong with evolution.
Psimagus,
Just once, let's short hand this: "Is not" "Is too" "Is not infinity" "Is too infinity plus one" "Sez you!"
I have written more than I should already, but I am tempted to keep arguing. I will contend that my problem is not with Evolution nor Thermodynamics, but it's with your interpretation and application of said theories. I note you added use "competitive evolution" as opposed to just evolution and insist that a change in state or matter must be seen as "winners' and "losers" and involve suffering. I think it is perfectly consistent with evolution to say that in some instances we get certain results, but that that does not mean there was effort and struggle or a mind set of "competition" between the various organism and your description of it as "competitive" uses the term in broader, less personal sense than in the sense of a competitive personality. I am sure you will disagree with me.
Oh, and I'm not saying the absence of evidence proves that something exists. I'm just saying we don't know either way, and we don't have enough data to generalize that all sentient life must have suffering. If you have a link to where scientist writing about evolution or thermodynamic mention how either proves the inevitability of suffering, please provide that and I'll look it over.
Finally, the Dali Lama, while a great leader, is not a Buddha. He still suffers just like you and me. At least, as far as I know he does. (We disagree about Buddhism too, but i am not going to go there).
Damn, I wasn't going to write a long post.
See what you do to me, Psimagus? Oh the suffering.
Just once, let's short hand this: "Is not" "Is too" "Is not infinity" "Is too infinity plus one" "Sez you!"
I have written more than I should already, but I am tempted to keep arguing. I will contend that my problem is not with Evolution nor Thermodynamics, but it's with your interpretation and application of said theories. I note you added use "competitive evolution" as opposed to just evolution and insist that a change in state or matter must be seen as "winners' and "losers" and involve suffering. I think it is perfectly consistent with evolution to say that in some instances we get certain results, but that that does not mean there was effort and struggle or a mind set of "competition" between the various organism and your description of it as "competitive" uses the term in broader, less personal sense than in the sense of a competitive personality. I am sure you will disagree with me.
Oh, and I'm not saying the absence of evidence proves that something exists. I'm just saying we don't know either way, and we don't have enough data to generalize that all sentient life must have suffering. If you have a link to where scientist writing about evolution or thermodynamic mention how either proves the inevitability of suffering, please provide that and I'll look it over.
Finally, the Dali Lama, while a great leader, is not a Buddha. He still suffers just like you and me. At least, as far as I know he does. (We disagree about Buddhism too, but i am not going to go there).
Damn, I wasn't going to write a long post.
See what you do to me, Psimagus? Oh the suffering.
Damn, I can't stop myself. Must argue with Psimagus. It must be inevitable.
Come now, Bev. You're taking one axis that can only be a positive number (measurable consciousness, I assume, not being possibly observed to be negative,) so bounded from zero - entirely unconscious, to some positive bound of fully conscious, and another that accommodates two separate and opposing qualities (experience of suffering at one end, and pleasure at the other, assuming that to be negative suffering,) that may be expressed as minus n to plus n, and meeting at zero as one replaces the other.
From my original post: "Some quadrants must be empty because of how we defined suffering. In quadrant III, there are possibilities of negative suffering and negative sentience, but since we both defined suffering (even negative suffering) as something that requires consciousness, this quadrant would be empty. Quadrant IV would be for negative sentience and positive suffering, but again, we have agreed this quadrant will be empty. It’s just as well, because I don’t want to think about what negative sentience would look like anyway).
The definition of suffering as awareness of pain or mental anguish (or whatever) is based on a “primitive”, our basic assumption regarding how we define the term, a given on which further discussion will be based. So if we agree that suffering requires consciousness by definition, we have quadrants I and II to work consider."
and before that I said, "In quadrant II you can have high consciousness and negative suffering (awareness of not suffering)." Note the definition of negative suffering is the level of awareness of the absence of suffering. It's not pleasure. I already explained how the opposite of awareness of pleasure is the awareness of the lack of pleasure (which is not the same as pain) and the opposite of the awareness of pain is the awareness of the lack of pain (which is not the same as pleasure). I don't see them as duality and I see dualities as artificial mental constructs.
I can understand not reading the whole explanation, because I wrote a lot. I don't understand quoting part of what I wrote if you didn't read the whole explanation, but I can forgive it. What bothers me is you add things I never said, such as I want life to be fair or I think there is "something wrong" with evolution. I say a lot of things, but I didn't say that.
Dude, you don't have to read everything I write, but please don't add in things I never wrote. Maybe you just want to create an argument you can clearly win?
I keed. I keed because I enjoy you. In fact, enjoy arguing with you a bit too much. Do you know how much time I wasted on this today? I might as well start playing WOW and never leave my computer again.
Well, I'm off to get some medication for obsessive compulsive disorder. Just because I have these impulses to keep arguing, doesn't mean the rest of you have to suffer.
From my original post: "Some quadrants must be empty because of how we defined suffering. In quadrant III, there are possibilities of negative suffering and negative sentience, but since we both defined suffering (even negative suffering) as something that requires consciousness, this quadrant would be empty. Quadrant IV would be for negative sentience and positive suffering, but again, we have agreed this quadrant will be empty. It’s just as well, because I don’t want to think about what negative sentience would look like anyway).
The definition of suffering as awareness of pain or mental anguish (or whatever) is based on a “primitive”, our basic assumption regarding how we define the term, a given on which further discussion will be based. So if we agree that suffering requires consciousness by definition, we have quadrants I and II to work consider."
and before that I said, "In quadrant II you can have high consciousness and negative suffering (awareness of not suffering)." Note the definition of negative suffering is the level of awareness of the absence of suffering. It's not pleasure. I already explained how the opposite of awareness of pleasure is the awareness of the lack of pleasure (which is not the same as pain) and the opposite of the awareness of pain is the awareness of the lack of pain (which is not the same as pleasure). I don't see them as duality and I see dualities as artificial mental constructs.
I can understand not reading the whole explanation, because I wrote a lot. I don't understand quoting part of what I wrote if you didn't read the whole explanation, but I can forgive it. What bothers me is you add things I never said, such as I want life to be fair or I think there is "something wrong" with evolution. I say a lot of things, but I didn't say that.
Dude, you don't have to read everything I write, but please don't add in things I never wrote. Maybe you just want to create an argument you can clearly win?
I keed. I keed because I enjoy you. In fact, enjoy arguing with you a bit too much. Do you know how much time I wasted on this today? I might as well start playing WOW and never leave my computer again.
Well, I'm off to get some medication for obsessive compulsive disorder. Just because I have these impulses to keep arguing, doesn't mean the rest of you have to suffer.
Sorry I saw your post too late. I have no impulse control. My apologies.
You were very gallant and I accept your offer to disagree. Please ignore the previous post.
You were very gallant and I accept your offer to disagree. Please ignore the previous post.
No problem - I know the feeling And I really must tear myself away from the entertainment of elaborating a unified (if somewhat unconventional) Theory of Science from first principles, and get back to the Sisyphean PF2AIML converter that I have chosen to afflict my patience with.
And I really must tear myself away from the entertainment of elaborating a unified (if somewhat unconventional) Theory of Science from first principles, and get back to the Sisyphean PF2AIML converter that I have chosen to afflict my patience with. 
Just uploaded Azureon. It went fast and I am surprised he only had one error, after all this time! Now to check out how Bildgesmythe goes, I hate to think of the errors there.
Cool Prob. Did Azureon upload with AI script intact?
Psimagus, PF2AIML sounds very interesting. Let us know how it turns out.
Psimagus, PF2AIML sounds very interesting. Let us know how it turns out.
IT sees to have come through unharmed. It would be horrible if it had been stripped out. I have a lot of hours in script for the flash face
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