coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
Let’s suppose that Jews do indeed have the greatest past history of genocide, and that this makes them the most liable to be genocided again, and that as a consequence they ought to be first in line for a homeland. I can follow this line of thinking. What I fail to see is why any white person would be persuaded to abstain from forming their own homeland. It is reasonable to think as follows: genocides are the worst event that can happen to you; genocided nations eagerly wish to create a majority homeland; history tells us that 90% of genocides cannot be predicted (imo); without an influential and wealthy diaspora, it is difficult to create a homeland post-genocide. Given this, why would anyone abstain from forming a majority homeland? Genocides can happen to white people, history tells us they are hard to predict, and they are the worst thing that can happen. So, it’s entirely reasonable to hedge against an apocalyptic threat that can happen to your people.
Such a plan would be very destructive to human freedom and well-being
But, as in the case of Israel, this is justified on the grounds of protection against genocide. Let us say that Israel has an 80% chance of protecting against a 500-year-storm genocide. Well, white people have no way to know their own risk of genocide because “gradual minority status” is new to them. Certainly, South Africa doesn’t look too good. I would say that a homeland is justified even if protects against a 5% chance in a 500-year period. After all, it’s the worst thing that can happen to a population. So I fail to see why Israel’s uniquely strong interest in a homeland in any way negates white people’s very apparent interest in a homeland. A starving man should get food, and he should get food first, but this has nothing to do with my interest in eating for my nutritional needs.
furthermore, even if it had been accomplished fifty years ago and every ethnic group had their own country, the division between ethnicities is not a constant throughout history.
Sure, but this applies to Israel as well. Perhaps in a century, some subsection of Israeli Jewish society will no longer be considered Jewish. It’s hard to predict this stuff. What if DNA finds a hiccup in the maternal line?
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
The principle “usually, it is not justifiable to take coercive measures to keep certain ethnicities in the majority” has a big exclusion for “unless it prevents genocide”. Just a cursory look through the annals of history shows that every group which lacks dominance over a territory risks genocide, and that these happen at mostly unpredictable times. Therefore, it is justifiable to take coercive measures to keep an ethnic group in the majority of some territory (or subsection thereof) to prevent its genocide, as this is the best way to protect against genocide. To reiterate my original point, it’s silly to only have a principle in place for when a genocide is currently ongoing, because at that point annihilation has the greatest odds, and surely our interest is in reducing the amount and extent of genocide in total. With all this said, there are ways to reduce the amount of coercion involved in majority-fying a territory, like with payments and subsidities. Additionally, we frequently supersede the right to property when there is a distinct majority interest as in the case of eminent domain, and there is no majority interest greater than not being genocided.
”It’s reasonable, then, for every group to desire a clear majority territory in order to decrease their risk of being genocided.” No, because not every group has the same risk
If Jews have the greatest risk of genocide, it doesn’t follow that we should ignore the 90%+ of genocides which will happen to other groups (going by history). There’s so much randomness that it’s impossible to divine who will face genocide. Who would have guessed that Anatolian Greeks would have been genocided, or the Armenians? The Iraqi Turkmen had no expectation of genocide by ISIS, or the Darfuri people. You can’t go by pure “number or recency of past genocides” because this has little predictive value. For instance, it’s only recently that white people have lived alongside other people in racially-blind democracies, so the absence of past white genocides doesn’t tell us about the future. South Africa does not exactly paint an optimistic future of what happens if they become a minority.
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that "Because this group has been subjected repeatedly to genocidal and lesser persecutions[…]”
This is an argument for why, if we had to pick one group to give a homeland to, we should all pick Jews getting one. But this is not an argument for why other groups should not get a homeland. Because again, if you look at a list of genocides in history, the vast majority of genocides happen unpredictably to formerly safe populations which aren’t Jewish. If we only protected Jews from genocide, going by history we would be allowing 90%+ of genocides. Shouldn’t our interest be in reducing genocides down to 0%?
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
I agree that Jews should have a majority state, but I don’t think it follows that other groups should be prevented from such a state. The list of genocides in history is long and the subjects are totally random. The unifying theme is that groups that fall out of dominance are at risk of genocide. It’s reasonable, then, for every group to desire a clear majority territory in order to decrease their risk of being genocided. It’s unreasonable to say, “because this group has already been subject to genocide, they should have an eternal homeland”, because that’s an arbitrary rule that favors the groups that happen to survive the genocide. It arbitrarily hurts the groups who are totally eliminated (now or in the future), or who lack the global capital and political pull to demand an ethnostate post-genocide. (It’s not as if former genocided peoples have commiseration for other genocided peoples; Israel refuses to recognize the Armenian genocide last I checked). Ironically, this standard favors the groups that are least likely to be genocided in total, because only an already-influential group can demand an ethnostate and then supply the necessary funds to establish it. (Eg, the richest family in the world supplied the funds for Zionism). If our wish is to decrease the number of genocides, then a preventative approach is better than a survivorship bias approach.
From what I recall reading, there was a high amount of conversions from Judaism to Islam (and before that Christianity) because Rabbinical Judaism pushed literacy to fully participate in the religion. It’s difficult to be a pastoral and agricultural society and have everyone be literate. Not before the printing press. This means that the ancient Jews who were excluded from the literacy-centric benefits of rabbinical judaism were pressured to convert to alternative religious systems. So the masses of “ancient Jews” stayed in their homeland and became Christian and Muslim, whereas the upper-class rabbinical Jews (descendants of the scribal Pharisees) migrated to urban centers to utilize their literacy skills in trade and moneylending. If this is true, then there’s an interesting class dimension to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the privileged classes of ancient Judaism returned home to supplant the working classes of ancient Judaism.
Zvi Eckstein has papers on this. From Farmers to Merchants: A Human Capital Interpretation of Jewish Economic History writes —
The transition of the Jews away from agriculture into crafts, trade, and finance occurred in the eighth century mainly in Mesopotamia and the entire Muslim empire, and later in western Europe where the Jews migrated […] The Jewish religion made primary education mandatory for boys in the first century when the high priest Joshua ben Gamala (64 CE) issued an ordinance that "teachers had to be appointed in each district and every city and that boys of the age of six or seven should be sent." In the first century CE, the Jewish warrior and writer Josephus underlined that children's education was the principal care among the Jews […] From the second to the sixth century, Jewish leaders promoted further the learning and reading of the Torah and the recently redacted Mishna and Talmud by degrading the status of those who remained illiterate ("am ha-aretz"). The compulsory education for boys and the reading of the Torah, Mishna, and Talmud became the essence of Judaism. The monumental work of Goitein (1967-1988) from the documents of the Cairo Geniza provides extensive evidence of the full implementation of mandatory primary schooling for boys in the Jewish communities in the Mediterranean at the turn of the millennium.
The model's other important implication is that the cost of children's education for farmers makes a certain proportion of Jewish farmers convert to non-Jewish religions in each generation. The question is whether historically these conversions were significant. According to historians (Baron 1952, 210; 1971) and demographers (DellaPergola 2001), the key demographic fact in the first millennium was the sharp decrease in the world Jewry from about 4.5 million in the first century to about 1-1.5 million in the sixth century. This is the period when Jews worldwide were still farmers and, yet, education became the center of the Jewish religion. At the same time, Christianity emerged as a segment of Judaism that did not assign the same importance to literacy and education. Historical sources indicate that about one million Jews lost their lives during the revolts against the Romans in Judaea (70 and 135 CE) and in Egypt (115 CE). There is also evidence of some forced conversions to Christianity, but the description of these episodes of conversions from the fourth to the sixth century cannot account for the remaining reduction (2 million) of the Jewish population. The model's prediction of a slow process of decrease in the Jewish low-educated population due to conversions is supported by the historical evidence.
The model's prediction regarding migrations is that Jewish farmers with high preference for Judaism would migrate to centers of Jewish life if in their own country economic conditions deteriorate. The large migrations from Egypt and Palestine to Babylon in the second and third centuries provide evidence in favor of this prediction. Another prediction related to migration is that once Jews become merchants (as they did in Mesopotamia where about 70 percent of the world Jewry lived in the second half of the millennium), they would have an incentive to migrate to new urban cities where crafts, trade, and finance provide high returns to their high human capital. The fast migration of Jews during the ninth and the tenth centuries to western Europe and the high standard of living acquired by them in these locations is consistent with this prediction.
All this evidence supports Result 3 (i-iii) that uneducated Jewish farmers with very low levels of attachment to Judaism converted to Christianity (and later to Islam). Other uneducated Jewish farmers did not convert and remained within Judaism, but they became the ammei ha-aretz outcast within the Jewish communities under the influence of rabbinic Judaism from the second century on. The Jewish leaders were not concerned about conversions of the ammei ha-aretz to other religions because they wanted them out of the Jewish fold. Consistent with Result 3 (v-vi) the historical evidence indicates that conversion from Judaism into non-Jewish religions was a slow but significant process that mainly occurred when Jews were farmers, but almost stopped when they became merchants.
I was originally interested in this topic because it has cool implications for ancient Christianity. (Been meaning to write a post about Scott’s last two posts about ancient Christianity…). There’s a theory that an obscure sect of ancient Jews called the “Essenes” influenced Christianity, and this group was at odds with the Pharisees (precursors to rabbinical Judaism), Sadducees (priestly class of ancient Judaism who just sort of… disappeared), and of course Samaritans (surprisingly still around). The Essenes are linked to the Dead Sea community (Qumran etc) and their scroll cache. This is what Josephus has to say about the Essenes:
The Essenes are Jews by birth, and seem to have a greater affection for one another than the other sects have. These Essenes reject pleasures as an evil, but esteem abstinence, and the conquest over our passions, to be virtue. They do not marry, but choose out other peoples’ children, while they are pliable, and fit for learning, and judge them to be their family, and form them according to their own manners. […] These men despise riches and hold their property in common as raises our admiration. Nor is there any one to be found among them who has more than another; for it is a law among them, that those who come to them must let what they have be common to the whole order […] They do not buy or sell anything to one another; but every one of them gives what he has to him that wants it, and receives from him in return what he wants; and although they do not pay, they are fully allowed to take what they want from whomsoever they please […] They condemn the miseries of life, and are above pain…. And as for death, if it will be for their glory, they esteem it better than living always; and indeed our war with the Romans gave abundant evidence what great souls they had in their trials, since, although they were tortured and distorted, burnt and torn to pieces, and went through all kinds of instruments of torment, that they might be forced either to blaspheme their legislator, or to eat what was forbidden them, they could not be made to do either of these things … or to shed a tear; but they smiled in their very pains, and laughed to scorn those who inflicted the torments upon them, and resigned up their souls with great willingness, since they expected to receive them again […] There are also those among them who foretell the future by reading the holy books, and using several sorts of purifications, and being perpetually conversant in the discourses of the prophets; and their predictions are seldom wrong.
That such an interesting group of ancient Jews, known to Josephus in the first century, is omitted by the gospel and first Christians is striking. But it would make sense if the Essene community is what influenced or even created the Christian religion; there’s no need for Christ to have a discourse with the Essenes if he is the Essenes. Note that the desert sea scrolls are known for their emphasis on the “teacher of righteousness”, and how closely the above passage by Josephus vibes with what we know about Christ’s actual blood relatives. Anyway, an Essene-origin theory of Christianity would explain why they critiqued the Pharisees and scribes, while elevating the status of the poor and ignorant. We begin to see a divorce between the lower/middle class Jews and the upper class Jews. There’s the economically universal religion and then an exclusive, literacy-focused religion. When Islam came around, they took on this “universal religion” aspect of Christianity which would result in even more conversions.
As a last point, Eckstein’s theory is kind of an argument against the authenticity of Zionism. If literate Jews willingly left the holy land to accrue wealth in foreign lands, serving foreign kings, then how much did they really value the holy land? The historical evidence does not support the story that every Jew was exiled from the ancient lands of Israel and forbidden from returning or anything like that. If you willingly sell your land and move overseas to make more money, the revealed preference is that you’re not actually attached to your old land. Ironically, the continuing Palestinian presence indicates a greater affection to their homeland. And the agrarian Palestinian lifestyle has much more in common with the ancient Jewish lifestyle: Noah, David, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph were all agrarian workers and pastoralists. Agrarian metaphors are the universal language of the Old Testament.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
Adoption is mostly an American phenomenon though, so that may be more cultural than evolutionary. For instance, only 4k adoptions for all of India’s 1.4 billion. If humans somehow evolved an evolutionary drive to care for kids who weren’t their own, then that evolutionary drive would have disappeared somewhere in our distant past, due to decreased gene proliferation
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
You can’t. Also, you probably don’t want to. The closest thing is probably Gwern? You probably don’t want to be Gwern. How many Gwerns does the world need? Even Gwern himself, for all his knowledge, does not provide any societal benefit except for his collation of information.
Ray Peat
I am very suspicious of this (newly popular) health trend. Bill Gates and Trump have ridiculous diets, Steve Jobs had a ridiculous diet in the other direction, and Jordan Peterson has a yet more ridiculous diet. Yet all top in their respective fields. Meanwhile the average fad diet-ist is a loser, relatively speaking. The only things that I think are probably true is that we need more greens, fibers, and a lower glycemic load for meals (unless you’re working out), and also that consistency of diet is a uniquely beneficial independent variable in health because our body adapts to patterns. When I looked into the diet of top university students it was just like: consistent three meals per day, carbs, more fruit and vegetables. That was the best study I could think of for this question (how do top performing students eat), we should see the best habits rise to top there (or it just doesn’t matter).
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
It’s more than just the architectural style, it’s the lighting and shadows and saturation. I don’t know how to articulate it but it’s kind of like this. I was watching the HL2 documentary and the artists talked about spending years finding real life material for the game models, visiting abandoned areas etc, and that definitely rubs off in the aesthetic dimension that is different from other shooters that try to be “gritty”. There’s something dreamy and interesting about source engine aesthetic
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
There is nearly no interesting discussion on Reddit now, the vanishingly rare interesting post on 4chan is extinct (and will probably be posted on X anyway), substack is fine but most blogs are found and marketed on X and the comment system sucks (impossible to determine which comments may be valuable on ACT, for instance), tik tok is probably interesting for viewing memetic culture but obviously has no discursive value…
For quality discussion on popular sites, this just leaves X, then?
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
IMO the problem with low fertility isn’t that humanity goes extinct, it’s that the more centralized and authoritarian countries figure out how to retain a high population before the West, and then they dominate us through greater manpower and industrial capability. China’s TFR is low right now, but China is authoritarian, centralized, and vaguely Han-supremacist. They will eventually realize that they can enhance fertility through cultural and economic change, and the day after that realization they can instantly implement laws to transform Chinese cultural and educational norms. America has no such capability because we aren’t centralized and authoritarian and we have the feminist fifth column which will make a big deal about schools switching to teaching/propagating women how to be mothers and excluding them from high stress professions entirely.
There are other issues at play:
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4B disrupts the fertility of somewhat intelligent and conformist women, the kind of genes we want in a civilization;
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Our consumer capitalist system demands a steady supply of immigrants, meaning the domestic fertility rate can steadily decrease without affecting business, so the government has little incentive in solving the problem unless there is an essentially racist pressure applied to it;
I also disagree that evolution will figure out the solution on its own. The evolutionary drive to form families is the sexual drive. There is no other drive. Humans may have a vague drive to care for a little cute creature, but that interest can be cheaply satisfied with pets, neopets, squishes and genshin impact. If you have an outlet for the sexual drive, which modern culture has, then an entire human population can gradually go extinct and evolution may not have the time to fix this.
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
The art style of Half-Life (and CS:S) is so much more interesting than the more photorealistic styles in today’s games.
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
IMO the better explanation is that the music culture itself led to the antisocial behavior. It valued short term gratification and the expression of rage, reinforced through catchy songs and interesting music videos. Once you find that “cool” as a kid, it’s only a matter of time before there’s temptation to imitate that behavior. What better place to do than then the live performance of the band? Social ills don’t have to factor in at all, and in fact we can see the social ills as also being a product of the culture at the time, which includes music culture. Kids look up to their favorite artist, and they love imitating people they up to, and music is the best way to communicate an emotional state. So it shouldn’t be surprising if they internalize the emotional state that they spend hundreds of hours listening to, and if that’s an aggressive state then they will behave aggressively.
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
It would be very funny if the Republican nomination was a contest between Vance (married to a Hindu with a child named Vivek) and Gabbard (Hindu), with Vivek Ramaswamy (Hindu) noticably gaining support.
coffee_enjoyer
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8d ago
The relationship between optics and efficacy isn’t clear for the “alt right”. Nick Fuentes’ extremist rant led him to collaborate with Adin Ross and debate Destiny; Adin Ross was mentioned by name during Trump’s victory speech, and Trump was interviewed by Ross under the influence of Barron. Andrew Tate gained influence solely due to his outrageous takes. Trump’s early outrageous remarks are what led 4chan to back him deadly in his first election.
The alt right is increasingly influential and popular; if optics are so important then how did that happen? Maybe it comes down to a “great man theory” of political persuasion, with Elon and Tucker responsible for the big cultural change, I don’t know.
coffee_enjoyer
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9d ago
I question whether there’s a difference between addiction to drugs and addiction to gambling. If gambling induces an endogenous release of dopamine at a level commensurate to the release of dopamine from cocaine, then there is literally no reason to treat cocaine as “more addictive” than gambling. It’s the same addictiveness. One involves cognition, but that doesn’t alter the addictiveness.
what are the major culture war angles on digital addiction? For kids
Every child allowed to play a modern video game is being trained for a life of gambling by way of lootbox mechanics. It’s really the ultimate disproof of liberalism. We shouldn’t give people free choice where (1) they lack wisdom to discern the complicated costs and benefits, (2) their instincts overrides rationality. That’s because the choice is not actually free. It’s either coerced by an illusion or coerced by an animalistic instinct.
coffee_enjoyer
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10d ago
It’s fear of death + hubris IMO, and has bad policy consequences because funds that could be used to improve general health are spent researching ways to stave off the inevitable decline of the old. Humans are designed to die, and that’s fine. If you want the keys to eternal life, try contemplating how your identity can also be found in the greater part of humanity; behold, the immortal part of yourself. At the very least, invest your identity into a young human so you know a part of you lives on. How amazing that you have the opportunity to double your identity’s lifespan by creating a child with someone you love? Your identity is combined with your lover’s and it gets to be a kid again. That’s awesome.
coffee_enjoyer
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11d ago
Muslims have their own edgy streamers, like someone named “Sneako”. Fuentes say “Christ is King” way too much for a devout Muslim audience
coffee_enjoyer
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12d ago
The boys are gloating to the liberal girls that their team won. They are doing this by inverting the liberal catch phrase (“my body my choice”) to indicate ownership and victory. Ownership, or dominance, is such a mainstay of young male speech that I don’t think it needs an example, but “you got own’d” is the most hilariously explicit version. “Sonning” or “been adopted” is what the teens are using to indicate that you’ve become the loser’s father, at least last I’ve checked. In the gaming days of old, players would simulate raping the dead enemy’s body and talk about the other team “getting raped”.
Kamala’s loss has given young boys the ultimate opportunity to boast. Her own catchphrase can be expertly inverted to indicate that the boys’ team won using a clear, in vogue signal of dominance (“I own you” + “get bodied” = “I own your body”). When I first saw Nick’s tweet I literally laughed, and I still can’t read the controversy without smiling, because it’s so decidedly non-serious. There’s no serious policy prescription to attach to the tweet. There’s no actual interest in controlling a woman’s body. It’s simple, childish making fun of the other gender’s party. The fact that it has 80 million views on Twitter and teachers are talking about their kids saying it is… sorry, it is very funny. It is infinitely more childish than whatever the news is saying about it to instill a moral panic.
Note that Nick’s audience is separate from the groups that actually successfully control women’s bodies, which are all the conservative religious groups, especially Muslims. Nick is not a cleric in charge of your local Salafi mosque (a group that no liberal will ever consider protesting), he’s a dude making edgy commentary to teenagers. He is against abortion because he wants a conservative sexual culture where men and women marry early. That isn’t anti-woman as he wants virginity for both men and women.
coffee_enjoyer
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12d ago
Investigators learned of the plot against Trump while interviewing Shakeri
Shakeri remains at large living in Iran
This sets off alarm bells. Shakeri, after his confession, was allowed to travel back to Iran? He would be on more surveillance than anyone in the world. Are we sure Shakeri isn’t just some agent pretending to be an Iranian while undercover in prison? I don’t think Iran would ever consider assassinating a US President because it would guarantee direct American and probably European involvement in a war against Iran. That is not in Iran’s interest, and it’s not in America’s interest.
coffee_enjoyer
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13d ago
To further ignite your AI epistemic crisis, I would suggest Egon Cholakian and reading about John Westbrook / Daphne Westbrook on the 4chan archive.
coffee_enjoyer
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14d ago
It’s not a transfer payment if the funds are legally declared to not belong to you, but in any case, would you support “transfer payments” if it didn’t affect the efficiency of businesses? In other words, all things being equal and having no bad consequences, Bill Gates winds up with less money and 1000 middle class families have more. If you don’t support that, then how have you calculated the balance of today’s transfer payments, or are you resolutely against the wealthiest paying more in taxes?
coffee_enjoyer
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14d ago
I don’t see why Trump would believe that these politicians are likely to be loyal. All of them have previously demonstrated an unusual amount of defiance to the party that employed them. You don’t pick dispositionally defiant, independent thinkers as loyalists, especially not when they have their own micro-base to return to. If RFK doesn’t implement the changes Trump wants, RFK will “burn him”, so RFK’s continued support is contingent on policy alignment. And that’s just politics in sum, no loyalty required. If Trump merely wanted a collection of loyalists then he would pick totally unknown conservatives, because they would only have him to thank for their position and their reputation would be contingent on Trump.
There’s always been debate about whether Donald Trump is anti-establishment or a member of the establishment. Since he is a billionaire, does he relate more to the billionaire class? Because he’s a Republican, will he always conform to Republican pressure? Because there’s photos of him with Epstein and Hillary, is his anti-establishment ethos just a larp?
His prospective appointments suggests that he is anti-establishment now. The appointees include:
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Robert F Kennedy, one the most vocal critics against the pharmaceutical and processed food industries. His statements include: “the principal objective of the FDA today is to serve the mercantile interests of pharmaceutical” and “get President Trump back in the White House and me to DC so we can ban pharmaceutical advertising”. He has called for the regulation of unhealthy food, the banning of fluoride in tap water and the legalization of psychedelics. In Trump’s victory speech, Trump proudly stated that RFK will “go wild” with his blessing provided he doesn’t touch fracking or the oil industry. Many say his uncle was killed by the deep state.
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Tulsi Gabbard, who has disputed the American account of Assad’s chemical weapon use, argued against the American funding of Ukraine, and argued against sanctions on Russia. She was placed on a heightened TSA terrorist watch list.
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Rumors of Thomas Massie being tapped for agricultural secretary. He has the most controversial foreign policy view of any Republican politician. He wants the legalization of raw milk and more freedom involving small farms selling their produce. His stance is anti-corporate.
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A possible link up with Ron Paul, the foremost anti establishment candidate of the late 00s.
If he goes through with these appointments — and to be fair, that’s a weighty if — I think it would make him the most anti-establishment president since Andrew Jackson.
coffee_enjoyer
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15d ago
Bernie Sanders put out a statement
It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they're right. […]
Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not. In the coming weeks and months those of us concerned about grassroots democracy and economic justice need to have some very serious political discussions. Stay tuned.
coffee_enjoyer
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15d ago
All 8k h1bs that Amazon brought in just last year are “A players”? How do you see two people doing the work of one “dragging down the A players”?
Are you trying to find the path to some sort of optimal equanamity or state of elation? I just want to make sure I understand the root interest.
I don’t think this is the case as described. I can believe that there is a euphoric experience that is obtained through meditation, and I’ve experienced something like that approximately twice, so maybe brain scans show a meditative euphoria. But claiming that the euphoric experience can be had without a “come down” period is the psychological equivalent of belief in a perpetual motion machine. Euphoria is the experience of an unusual amount of pleasure, and an experience which provides euphoria will eventually provide “mere pleasantness” when repeated. And if repeated long enough it will provide “mere baseline”. The experience of euphoria is relative to the experience of non-euphoria, so even without getting into neuroscience, how is it possible to continually experience euphoria without experiencing something less-preferred to relate it to?
Let’s suppose you could self-administer euphoria on command. This would be similar to heroin addiction. What would be your incentive to fulfill the hours of necessary daily tasks to maintain health, if you could summon euphoria at will? Once you exit that state of euphoria you would feel abysmal because now your body has to utilize so much energy and effort to, like, get groceries while in a state of displeasure. It’s questionable whether you would even continue to participate in society, as socializing is a requirement for the pursuit of contingent rewards which you apparently can summon in your mind whenever you want.
I don’t think you are treating these eastern spiritual claims with enough skepticism. The idea that a human can experience an eternally preferable state (a bliss) without the experience of a negative emotional state to refer back to is illogical. The idea that we can train our brain to treat endogenous opiate release differently is unfounded. And finally, the idea that this would be preferable to how we are designed is unevidenced. Re the last point: let’s say a new form of fentanyl was invented that lacked any come down. You could take it forever and experience bliss forever. (Suspend belief in neuroscience). Well, if you decide to enter into this bliss, you will immediately lack any interest in: basis human activity like walking and eating, learning any new information, socializing, morality. You would be in a permanent vegetative state. Is this actually preferable, even if it is bliss? Clearly no. There’s some higher order part of ourself that finds this repulsive and actually demands the necessity of pain in order to adapt to biological, external, and social reality.
If it’s the case that humans habituate to pleasures and pains and can never maintain a steady supply of pleasure, and that we have a higher “moral pleasure” which justifies (and requires) the existence of pain and painful experience in order to maximize our cognitive and physical adaption to physical reality, then the greatest path to an optimal emotional state isn’t meditative practices or stoic practices but a philosophy that promotes the most adaption (pleasure, pain and all).. That is, a philosophy that doesn’t try to maximize pleasure or reduce pain, but instead tries to maximize the things which we intuitively find right regardless of pleasure and pain. Even though pleasure cannot actually be pursued in such a way that we obtain it indefinitely, and all shortcuts fail, humans seem to be designed to find certain things right and preferable regardless of pleasure and pain (participating in reality is “more right” than seeing someone in an opium den, even if opium lacked a come-down in an imagined world; experiencing pain for loved ones is “right” despite its obvious pain; beautiful nature is “right”; a purposeful but painful life is “more right” than pleasure; etc).
Okay, so which moral system promotes “acknowledging we must experience pain in order to pursue a higher feeling of rightness which is pleasure-ambivalent, because that’s actually greater than the pursuit of pleasure”? My vote is Christianity right now, as the central figure is someone being tortured and dying for his purpose despite feeling forsaken. That’s a handy way to at least remember our underlying moral principle. Maybe there are some other ones.
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