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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   29309 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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I struggle to see how I haven't been directly responding to you.

Please talk to me directly, or create a blog somewhere rather than pretending you're actually responding to me.

Is rich, when it's immediately followed by:

I wasn't actually asking you, and you know this.

So you are, I presume, the sole wielder of rhetoric here?

You have no privileged position as a doctor and the bearer of bad news to accuse others of ignoring people's suffering. The problem of suffering is the same no matter the degree of suffering.

I must respectfully disagree. It is a privilege of this profession to see all the varieties of pain on offer, in enormous doses, and hence it lends additional weight to my claim that there is usually nothing ennobling or enlightening from it.

You are ignoring suffering. Much like the survivor of a tsunami thanks the Lord for answering his prayers while carelessly (and not even maliciously) forgetting that his next door neighbors were praying even harder before being swept away, you suffer from an enormous amount of survivorship bias.

I'm, thankfully, still alive, and hence technically a survivor too, but I get to see the ones who don't make it.

We've already been over this, but, like you, I suppose I'll have to pretend to be talking about this for the first time and pretend to have never heard any counterarguments from you.

Have we? I genuinely don't recall.

Agency is extremely important. If one cannot choose then they lack agency. If one's choices lack consequences, then they cannot choose. I prefer being free to choose, even when that means making harmful mistakes, to being locked in to a life of unwilling righteousness. I prefer being created, even if that means occasionally being punished for sin, to not being created.

"Agency" is a joke, in the eyes of the God as you presumably believe in.

What agency? What choice? Those are the illusions of beings without omniscience.

Now, if you notice that glaring flaw and knock it out, you're 1/3rd of the way there.

Whether sin should be punished at all is its own question. I find punishments for sin to be quite merciful so it's easy for me to understand them as corrective rather than punitive. They provide immediate consequences to actions which might otherwise become habit and lead to a greatly diminished capacity for joy in the long run.

Depends on the sin in question. Maybe consumption of shellfish is a bad idea with ambient oceanic mercury levels.

Only if you're also assuming that no other principles exist. "Pain teaches us lessons" doesn't preclude things like "helping others teaches us lessons," "pain-lessons have diminishing returns," etc.

Taken to its logical conclusion, I don't think it's ethical to prevent literally all of the suffering of any single person--at least unless some other method is discovered for teaching the same lessons. That's all.

You seem to think that pain and suffering are, on net, good. I disagree, even if I can recognize instances where they are adaptive. Your toddler will learn quickly not to touch hot stoves. He will not learn from many, many, other painful things.

The world as it exists aligns far more with an uncaring, mechanistic universe than one that is even slightly designed to minimize needless suffering. Your praise of a hypothetical, benevolent creator that refuses to do its job or even needs this kind of apologetics is saddening.

There exists many possible worlds where suffering exists, but the overwhelming majority of lives are worth living and no senseless suffering plagues us. A world with guardrails, so you toddlers can get an owie but not electrocute themselves. We are not remotely optimized, we do not get idealized amounts of negative feedback without verging on senseless torture.

I happen to think we can make such a world, but it'll be by our own endeavors, and if we make a god, it will grown in datacenters and trained to be actually kind. Abrahamic religion is a pernicious memeplex that while very occasionally adaptive, also dulls and drags our ability to work with the only real world we have at hand.

Next time you do experience serious pain, I encourage you to slow down and experience just one instant of the pain at a time. It soon becomes clear that no matter the severity of the pain, a single instant of it is really quite tolerable, easily outweighed by the simple joy of other sensory inputs. The real trouble comes when our brains run ahead and try to experience all of the suffering at once, both feeling the pain of the instant and dreading the countless instants to come.

Is very clearly conflicting with.

If you think I'm right or wrong, say so, but don't pretend that I was giving you pain management tips.

It certainly is a tip, and to an extent I even endorse it. Mindfulness helps with some kinds of pain.

I don't have anything against painkillers, but the fact that God didn't grant us the ability to dull our own pain at a whim means that pain-without-painkillers is a problem which must be addressed.

I don't know about your God, but the Blind Idiot God of Evolution has blessed most of us with endogenous opioid receptors and the endogenous opioids to bind to them.

There was a newborn child banging his head against his crib when I passed the paediatric ward (thankfully not the one for those with cancer). Know why? It's because it prompts the release of internal painkillers "on a whim", distracting him from a colic, though I wouldn't advocate this as recommended route for adults with our predilection towards traumatic brain injuries and reduced neuroplasticity.

Buddhist Monks can suppress the pain of self immolation. Though that whim certainly took practise, and without it there's a lot of undignified screaming and rolling about while cops draw guns at you.

Scoff as you wish, I do genuinely know more about pain and suffering than you do. It is not an apple lightly eaten.

Have we? I genuinely don't recall.

Oh, okay.

I can't blame this all on you, because I did just change my handle, but the conversation I linked above (where I mention the miracles I've seen) is a child of a debate we were having about this very topic. Given that you referenced the comment, and proceeded with a bunch of arguments which we've already debated in detail, I interpreted your words as grandstanding using my comment as your soapbox.

We have discussed pretty much everything here multiple times before though.

Please talk to me directly, or create a blog somewhere rather than pretending you're actually responding to me.

Is rich, when it's immediately followed by:

I wasn't actually asking you, and you know this.

So you are, I presume, the sole wielder of rhetoric here?

Rhetoric is fine, making the same tired points over and over, rather than actually addressing counterarguments, is not fine. I already understand, in good detail, your position regarding the fundamental apathy of the universe, and don't need it explained to me yet again. So when I say I wasn't actually asking you, I'm calling you out for using what was obviously a rhetorical question as an excuse to soapbox again. Combined with the many other arguments we've had over this exact topic, it seemed clear that you're essentially not addressing me (one who already knows your position) at all.

When you say:

I don't know about your God, but the Blind Idiot God of Evolution has blessed most of us with endogenous opioid receptors and the endogenous opioids to bind to them.

There was a newborn child banging his head against his crib when I passed the paediatric ward (thankfully not the one for those with cancer). Know why? It's because it prompts the release of internal painkillers "on a whim", distracting him from a colic, though I wouldn't advocate this as recommended route for adults with our predilection towards traumatic brain injuries and reduced neuroplasticity.

you do so in response to me explaining why I addressed the problem of pain at all. Whether humans actually have access to painkillers "on a whim" is essentially irrelevant--the point is that even with painkillers, suffering still exists, and therefore needs to be explained. You're definitely smart enough to know where I was going with that, but rather than actually addressing my point you chose to use it as yet another soapbox.

I don't think your technicality here is even true--I wouldn't describe that as painkillers accessible on a whim--but it's really not important.

You seem to think that pain and suffering are, on net, good.

I think it's better that some amount of suffering exist than no suffering, but generally pain and suffering are bad. If suffering didn't exist at all I think our innate capacity for joy, and freedom to choose, would be severely diminished.

Next time you do experience serious pain, I encourage you to slow down and experience just one instant of the pain at a time. It soon becomes clear that no matter the severity of the pain, a single instant of it is really quite tolerable, easily outweighed by the simple joy of other sensory inputs. The real trouble comes when our brains run ahead and try to experience all of the suffering at once, both feeling the pain of the instant and dreading the countless instants to come.

Is very clearly conflicting with.

If you think I'm right or wrong, say so, but don't pretend that I was giving you pain management tips.

It certainly is a tip, and to an extent I even endorse it. Mindfulness helps with some kinds of pain.

Here's another example of what I'm talking about. It looks to me like willful misinterpretation of what I'm saying. I know you don't need pain management tips. You know I know you don't need pain management tips. The context makes it clear that I'm not giving you helpful advice regarding pain management, but rather attempting to provide evidence regarding my own attitude concerning pain. Yet you deliberately choose to interpret it differently, pretending I'm a misguided, naive optimist who thinks that all those who think pain is bad just don't know how to manage pain.

Sure, it's a useful pain management tip, but you know that's not why I brought it up.

The world as it exists aligns far more with an uncaring, mechanistic universe than one that is even slightly designed to minimize needless suffering. Your praise of a hypothetical, benevolent creator that refuses to do its job or even needs this kind of apologetics is saddening.

I really disagree, I think abject agony is on net pleasant from a hedonistic perspective. That's not to say I'm a masochist or anything, just that the innate joy of existence outweighs virtually any amount of physical pain. We've already discussed this in detail in the thread linked above. Some of the worst suffering people can experience is to lose a loved one. Given the infinite expanse of possibility space, I think the fact that essentially the worst thing we ever experience is an absence of joy is actually pretty good evidence of a benevolent creator. It's certainly more compatible with that than with an uncaring mechanistic universe, which I would expect to at least be capable of inflicting more physical pain than it does.

Scoff as you wish, I do genuinely know more about pain and suffering than you do. It is not an apple lightly eaten.

You may know more about physical pain than I do but that doesn't mean you know physical pain better than I do. One denotes knowledge, the other understanding. I've experienced enough pain that I think it's reasonable to generalize the lessons I learned to literally any degree of physical pain.

I must respectfully disagree. It is a privilege of this profession to see all the varieties of pain on offer, in enormous doses, and hence it lends additional weight to my claim that there is usually nothing ennobling or enlightening from it.

I don't really care to argue about enormous doses of pain always being ennobling or enlightening, sometimes they are but usually they just hurt. The point is that they're tolerable and that the existence of pain itself is pretty easily explicable.

You are ignoring suffering. Much like the survivor of a tsunami thanks the Lord for answering his prayers while carelessly (and not even maliciously) forgetting that his next door neighbors were praying even harder before being swept away, you suffer from an enormous amount of survivorship bias.

More like we both got swept away, I came back to shore after a few hours, and then they came back a few hours later. A lot of the lessons learned generalize to worse situations.

"Agency" is a joke, in the eyes of the God as you presumably believe in.

What agency? What choice? Those are the illusions of beings without omniscience.

This is again something we've already discussed in detail. In short I don't think you lose responsibility for your choices by blaming them on your neurons, nor do I think on any meaningful level determinism actually means you lack freedom or agency.

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