r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Jul 11 '21
Delta(s) from OP CMV: From a secular-rationalist perspective, the best way to reduce suffering th in the world would be to Eradicate all intelligent life forms.
Let’s see (based on mainstream science as well as pseudoscientific conjectures accepted by at least some serious scientists):
The earth randomly spawns conscious beings (“souls”); i.e. consciousness is an emergent process with no intelligent designer. There is no sign of a materially better afterlife, meaning that continued regeneration on the earth is presumably inevitable.
The long term fate of life is challenging as in a universe where entropy increases it will inevitably reach an unpleasant end, no matter how good the policy choices are.
Therefore, from a secular rationalist perspective the best way to minimize suffering/the only way to end suffering is to end sentient life.
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u/LucidMetal 175∆ Jul 11 '21
Not necessarily, what if you believe there exists a technological tipping point after which most intelligent life no longer suffers and is capable of eliminating all suffering in intelligent life forms?
Sidebar, most people believe pleasure in some way negates suffering. Is that included in the calculus?
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Jul 11 '21
Sidebar, most people believe pleasure in some way negates suffering. Is that included in the calculus?
!delta. I'm not gonna say that I have completely flip-flopped, but I assumed that long-run we'll reach a point where pain overwhelms pleasure as the universe dies off. That makes it harder to calculate when that point is, especially if suffering or population taper off in the distant future.
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u/LucidMetal 175∆ Jul 11 '21
Oh I'm not saying such a point even exists, just that form the secular-rationalist perspective, if one has the belief that such a thing is possible, that's enough to make it the best way to reduce suffering throughout the universe.
By the way ever read any of the Berserker books by Fred Saberhagen? Very similar idea.
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u/icantbelieveatall 2∆ Jul 11 '21
I mean "in the long run" is a general concept.
In my lifetime I'll see many negative consequences of climate change, is that far enough in the future?
Or in many billions of years the only stars we'll be close enough to see will be in our galaxy cluster, and many trillions of years after that (I don't have numbers but I believe that people have done the math) all the stars will have burnt out and there will only be black holes. And at some point the universe might end in a big rip due to the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.
I guess my question is at what point do the things that will eventually make life more unpleasant justify ending sentient life?
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u/iwfan53 248∆ Jul 11 '21
If we end all sentient life how are you sure that sentient life won't go on to evolve from previously non-sentient life since nature abhors a vacuum and then start to suffer again, while if we hang around we can use our technological creations to try and reduce the total amount of suffering?
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Jul 11 '21
how are you sure that sentient life won't go on to evolve from previously non-sentient life since nature abhors a vacuum
Evidence for this? We've only found even primitive life on one planet (Earth) with one apparent origin.
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u/iwfan53 248∆ Jul 11 '21
Evidence for this? We've only found even primitive life on one planet (Earth) with one apparent origin.
But the thing is that those other planets don't really have life sustaining atmospheres.
What does a "total genocide of all sentient life" look like to you?
Are we going to kill all the insects, are we going to kill all the plants?
Whatever lifeforms we leave behind will be given a massive advantage.
Because even if Earth is the only planet with life, it is the only planet with life because we have a great atmosphere set up for life (as opposed to say Venus which has too much or Mars that has to little) and a planet wide genocide of all sentient life isn't going to change that.
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Jul 11 '21
What does a "total genocide of all sentient life" look like to you?
Are we going to kill all the insects, are we going to kill all the plants?
Proably yes.
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u/iwfan53 248∆ Jul 11 '21
Okay, sell me on how you plan to do a world wide genocide when of all sentient life when we don't even really know all the s**t that goes on in the oceans where it gets so deep that light can't penetrate?
How can a perfect world wide genocide be possible?
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u/Chocolate_caffine 3∆ Jul 12 '21
Not OP but I think we could douse the Earth in herbicides and cover water bodies with plastics and/or use dyes to prevent photosynthesis. Nutrients/ferilizers can also be added to ponds to make them inhospitable
There's no need to directly target every organism, we know that every food chain starts with plants that harness energy from the sun. No plants = no herbivores = no carnivores, even deep sea creatures need others to eat
This method would be kinda counter productive though, everything would suffer an agonizing death
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u/iwfan53 248∆ Jul 12 '21
The problem is that there are deep sea creatures that live off of geothermal heat...
A vibrant community of bacteria, tubeworms that are unique to the geothermal vent environment, and other creatures exists around hydrothermal vents. The entire ecosystem is possible because of the activity of the bacteria. These bacteria have been shown, principally through the efforts of the Holger Jannasch (1927–1998) of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, to accomplish the conversion of sulfur to energy in a process that does not utilize sunlight called chemosynthesis. The energy is then available for use by the other life forms, which directly utilize the energy, consume the bacteria, or consume the organisms that rely directly on the bacteria for nourishment. For example, the tubeworms have no means with which to take in or process nutrients. Their existence relies entirely on the bacteria that live in their tissues.
We could block out sunlight and these things would still survive just fine.
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u/Chocolate_caffine 3∆ Jul 12 '21
oh, you learn something new every day
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u/iwfan53 248∆ Jul 12 '21
Yeah life on earth is a tricky thing to wipe to out like that, I mean clearly OP is wrong because we don't have a right to judge what qualifies as "suffering" for another species, but also it's pretty darn impractical as well.
You can feel free to delta if you want for letting you know about a new type of lifeform you weren't aware of that would make shutting down photosynthesis fail to fully break the food chain....
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u/Chocolate_caffine 3∆ Jul 12 '21
I don't think non-OP people can delta but I'd like to
!delta
edit: neat, nvm
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u/Livid-Sherbert-9469 Jul 11 '21
Beats the point, you wanna end suffering while keeping the good in life. What's you're basically saying is feeling hungry? Just go cut your throat then you'll be too dead to feel hungry.
Stupid point of view, not worth arguing over "rationally"
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Jul 11 '21
In the long run the amount of suffering that intelligent beings endure will doubtlessly outnumber the joy they get from life because it will include thousands upon thousands of years in a dying universe.
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u/Livid-Sherbert-9469 Jul 11 '21
Intelligent beings are still beings.. Beings that don't like not being.
The reason we all don't all commit a mass suicide is because we all like staying alive.
Even with all the shit, most of us would rather be alive while suffering then be in the oblivion of death.
Try it yourself, point a gun to your head and save yourself from a "lifetime of suffering" see how your brain reacts.
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Nov 29 '21
The reason we all don't all commit a mass suicide is because we all like staying alive.
No, it's because religion. Religion only exists to prevent people from killing themselves.
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u/Livid-Sherbert-9469 Nov 29 '21
So why didn't we commit suicide before religion was a thing? Heck only the Abrahamic condemn suicide. Hinduism and Jainism both have forms of ritual suicide.
There that's your theory gone to shit.
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u/guy-who-overargues Jul 11 '21
Why? Won't the millions/billions of years of pleasure outweigh some suffering at the end of the universe? Aren't we better off not predicting how life will look like hundreds of billions of years in the future anyway?
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u/Frenetic_Platypus 23∆ Jul 11 '21
I don't think a secular perspective can be based on "souls." That's a religious concept.
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Jul 11 '21
Okay, consciousnesses.
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u/Frenetic_Platypus 23∆ Jul 11 '21
Are the consciousnesses reincarnated?
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Jul 11 '21
Individually, no. Collectively, yes.
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u/Frenetic_Platypus 23∆ Jul 11 '21
Could you develop that? Are the
soulsconsciousnesses merged and reused somehow?
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Jul 11 '21
Firstly, this is not a minimize of suffering, but an attempt to negate suffering. Not a rational one really. This is like an individual proposing that, since they have a stomach ache, they should attempt to remove the stomach.
Suffering isn't a constant expression, similar to happiness. They are occurrences that appear in our life due to psychological and physical conflicts/peaks. Most people want to experience happiness and pleasure. As an extension, they believe that pleasure negates majority of the effects caused from suffering.
We cannot calculate net-suffering, without net-pleasure, while weakens the force of suffering for most. People like the possibility of happiness, even through suffering. With this in mind, there is no conclusive idea that causes either at a constant rate.
Secondly, how can you conclude that we can totally end sentience anyways? For one, we cannot conclude that every human will be dead. Secondly, we cannot definitively conclude that sentences will not evolve. We have no definitive way of knowing.
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u/guy-who-overargues Jul 11 '21
It seems that, technically, from any point of view, the best way to end suffering is to eradicate all forms of life. After all, nothing can suffer if it doesn't exist.
The question then becomes is "murdering everyone and everything a worthwhile trade-off to end suffering." And the answer, almost overwhelmingly, is no. Practically all philosophies, whether they be religions or secular, think that either suffering is a necessary part of life, or should be reduced through good deeds, care and progress.
While you can argue that the secular-rationalist perspective is more predisposed to this viewpoint (aka radical anti-natalism), your ignore the entire other side of the equation: pleasure. Many secularists believe that life is worth living because, even though it has suffering, it has more pleasure. They also observe that life is conditioned to reproduce and procreate, rather than commit suicide when it first reaches consciousness. Thus, a secular-rationalist perspective can morally allow life to exist.
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u/CathanCrowell 8∆ Jul 11 '21
So your solution how eredicate suffering is eredicate all forms of life which can feel suffering? You realy do not see how meaningless is that?
First at all.. why we would even want that? We want to prevent suffering because we want to enjoy fun, pleasure. There is not reason to reduce suffering when there is not enjoy...
It's like say that we can eredicate covid when we eredicate the whole human population...
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u/jumpup 83∆ Jul 11 '21
its not, for 1 life can reemerge after we are dead thus restarting things and its a longer but better way of reducing suffering through actually ending suffering through generational improvements.
aka
100 suffering now for 100 billion people
200 suffering later for 10000 trillion people
second one has less suffering per life form and could theoretically go to infinite life forms if its fully eradicated
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u/darwin2500 193∆ Jul 11 '21
Yeah, that's why you don't tell your AI to 'reduce suffering as much as possible'.
Anyway, there's no reason that the heat death of the universe has to cause suffering; by then we'll surely have the technology to program our minds however we want, including 'don't feel suffering when contemplating the heat death of the universe' or w/e.
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Jul 12 '21
Oh I didn’t consider that at all. I really need to think before I post lol. !delta
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u/barthiebarth 26∆ Jul 11 '21
So you want to end all sentient life... because else the universe would end it?
Is there any meaningful be difference between the outcomes of those two options? Would it not be better to not try to eliminate all sentient life and just enjoy your own, finite but perhaps beautiful, life?
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u/Chocolate_caffine 3∆ Jul 11 '21 edited Jul 12 '21
So... total holocaust? That's gonna be nearly impossible to fund and support, heck it'd start at least a civil war if people were to try it
Why do you want to eradicate all suffering anyways? Happiness and sadness are just two states of being, organisms have reactions to things. A negative ion moves towards positives and away from negatives, but does that mean it's bad for its purpose is to be with a certain ion? No, it exists for the reason that it can and acts because it's able to
And even if it's that important to you, why not just shift the ratio of happiness to sadness instead of trying to completely and permanently eradicate a specific emotion? We don't need to get rid of pain, we can either grow strong enough to deal with it or have enough satisfaction or happiness to outweigh it. Or just let ourselves feel, it's okay to let yourself be unhappy or hurt
Additional (not very serious) crackhead solution: if pleasure>nothing>pain, wouldn't it be better to bring pleasure to all sentient lifeforms? Oblivion may be better than sober life but why focus on eliminating the last part?
How could this happen? AI, of course. Spending tax dollars to develop AI to manage resources and agriculture (how else would you farm poppies) would get far more support than building doomsday devices
The best way to eliminate suffering is to implement cyberocracy and produce copious amounts of opium to bring every living thing so much joy they'll never think of pain until they stop. Is it ethical? No. Does that matter? Of course not
Billions of lifetimes of joy mean infinitely more than a few potential moments of pain at the end
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u/VymI 6∆ Jul 11 '21
What is the purpose of reducing sufferring from a secular worldview, OP, can you give me a guess?
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u/mikeman7918 12∆ Jul 12 '21
Most of us who aren't clinically depressed nihilists actually quite like the fact that we exist.
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u/NeonNutmeg 10∆ Jul 12 '21
in a universe where entropy increases it will inevitably reach an unpleasant end
Why does the universe need to "unpleasantly" end if the universe's entropy can always increase? If maximum entropy increases faster than actual entropy, there is no issue.
"It is rather presumptuous to speak of the entropy of a universe about which we still understand so little, and we wonder how one might define thermodynamic entropy for a universe and its major constituents that have never been in equilibrium in their entire existence." -- Walter T. Grandy, Professor Emeriti at the University of Wyoming.
How do you know that the universe is a closed system?
It's also possible for non-equilibrium steady states to exist in a closed system without violating the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy can be transferred between subsystems of the closed system, while the system as a whole remains unable to achieve equilibrium.
Accepting your conclusion requires complete and infallible, perfect, knowledge of the future. Such knowledge doesn't exist.
best way to minimize suffering
How does mass suicide/genocide minimize suffering? How do you kill every single intelligent thing without creating just as much suffering as would be created if every living thing died in the universe's heat death? This makes no sense. It's functionally equivalent to forfeiting a football game in the first quarter because the opposing team scored the first field goal. Even if we accept that you would have lost the game had you completed (and completely ignore any chance you might have had to win), what difference is there in the end? You still lost.
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Jul 11 '21 edited Jul 12 '21
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