Guys, I think we're fucked

Heres some more though

My point is that your opinion is uninformed by default and cannot be made more informed so long as you exist. You have no concept of what not being born or not existing entails, and you're misconstruing "not-X" to be an accurate enough description to start making predictions. Existence itself (as we describe it) is really just shorthand for those conditions we observe around us through our limited set of perceptions. We cannot definitively comment on what we're not equipped to observe.

Put it this way: imagine you lived your whole life inside a blank white room. You put on one pair of glasses, and you see that the walls have pictures painted on them that you can only see with those glasses. You put on another set, and you see different paintings. You might be anticipating that I'll say something like "you're trying to describe what it looks like through a pair of glasses you haven't put it on," but that's not accurate. You know there are four walls, you know the colors you've seen, you can guess something that might be close to the truth. I'm saying you're presuming to know what things look like outside that room.

You can't seriously believe that zygotes have a want to live or die, that there's an autonomous entity outside the psychical body before it even exists, can you?

I'm not sure that "outside the physical body" would really be the most accurate terminology, but yes, I do believe that. It comes part and parcel with recognizing that I've never been outside the white room, that I and we ultimately know very little about our universe, and that I personally observe the singular phenomenon of my own perception of self. I choose things, I think thoughts, I do and create new things and ideas.

There are people who argue that this is all purely the product of the physical brain, and that's fine. But it's based on a set of presumptions about the world (logical positivism and pure materialism) that I don't share. And if one abandons the presumption that all that is can be explained purely by breaking it down and examining its constituent parts, then the idea of a soul isn't hard to fathom at all.

/r/antinatalism Thread Parent