Someone wanna explain to me how I'm wrong?!

A while back I posted what I felt to be an adequate deconstruction of David Benatar's antinatalist asymmetry. Francois Tremblay "responded" to my critique and when I attempted to follow up, he proceeded to ignore my arguments and then ban me.

Being the anxious and obsessive-perfectionist I tend to be, this has not sat well with me. Apparently I "don't get it" and am "not addressing the argument", as well as being generally an idiot.

I've made a diagram which I think will hopefully show what I believe to be the problem in the asymmetry. So please, if anyone is reading this (especially you, Tremblay), explain to me how I am wrong, preferably without telling me to die in a fire. Or, if you agree, post a comment and you'll get a purple sticker.

Tremblay in particular claims that Benatar is not talking about possible people but states of affairs.

If we ignore states of affairs, the symmetry is obvious. But Tremblay argues that "this is not the argument".

Regardless, I think the diagram clearly shows how an asymmetry derived from states of affairs is still question-begging and ad hoc.

The absence of pleasure is seen as a personal bad (from the possible person's interests), but not an impersonal bad, since nobody is actually there to be deprived of pleasure. The impersonal values here, then, are referring to the value of a state of affairs.

The absence of pain is seen not only as a personal good (from the possible person's interests), but also an impersonal good. Tremblay, to paraphrase, says that the absence of pain is impersonally good because nobody is suffering.

But this ignores what could (and should) be applied to the absence of pleasure: the absence of pleasure is impersonally bad because nobody is experiencing pleasantness. Indeed, we can (contra Benatar) actually feel regret for missing an opportunity for pleasure, even if there's nobody there to experience this regret (excluding ourselves). For example, if we have a choice between one state of affairs in which a person was extremely happy (and felt no pain) and another state of affairs in which nobody existed at all, and we chose the latter option, it is plausible that we would actually feel regret for not bringing this happy person into existence.

None of this is to say that we actually have a duty to bring happy people into existence. As I've pointed out before, our obligations prioritize pain over pleasure. Having a child takes a lot of effort - any obligation we had towards creating happy people would be counteracted by our own discomfort.

Furthermore, it's not even clear why we should ignore the symmetry of personal values in favor of the supposed-asymmetry of impersonal values. This seems to be question-begging.

Additionally, there is implicitly a prioritization of harm in the asymmetry (no harm is a good, no benefit is not-bad). But this is not logical, rather it is material argumentation.

The bottom line here, the underlying point, is that if nobody needs to exist for the absence of pain to be impersonally good, then nobody needs to exist for the absence of pleasure to be impersonally bad. There's no justification for applying an impersonal value to one but neglecting this for the other in the purely logical, formal sense.

On our duties to others and ourselves

Say a society exists in which there is little to no pain of existence for the inhabitants. In fact, there is so little discomfort that giving birth is hardly any effort at all - it's almost as easy as blinking! Your daily life is not affected at all when you introduce yet another perfectly happy person into your perfect world - they pop into existence instantaneously and immediately begin to experience bliss.

I am going to make a tentative* argument here and say that these inhabitants of this perfect society do indeed have a duty to bring more happy people into existence. It would be a bad thing to not bring these potential happy people into being, both for their own sake and for the impersonal good.

This may sound absurd, but remember, life in this society is perfect, endless, and requires practically no effort, if any at all. It is so easy to introduce a happy person into this world that you really would have no excuse not to. Why wouldn't you bring happy people into existence? What reason would you have to not bring a happy person into existence if this required little more than a thought?

Compare this idealistic world to the real world, in which life is by no means easy or perfect. In the real world, we seem to have a sense that there is no need to make happy people, whereas there is a need to not make miserable people. What is different here that makes this so?

The first obvious difference is that the utopian society had no miserable people. So there would be no duty to not make miserable people, since that wouldn't even be conceivable. Or if there was a duty not to make miserable people, it wouldn't be applicable to this perfect world. Whereas in real life there are miserable people everywhere you look.

The second issue is that giving birth and raising a child in the real world takes a tremendous amount of effort. Which is an important point: is the potential happiness of a possible person more important than the happiness of the parent individual and their community? Shouldn't we care more about who already exists rather than someone who might exist? In the perfect utopia, nobody was not-happy, so nobody already-existing had to be placed into priority.

This clearly goes into the social meme that parenting is a great sacrifice - the parents could have done some other stuff and had fun if they didn't have a child, but they decided to have a child and "give the child a life". And it's true. I'll concede the point even though I don't support birth - raising a child, let alone multiple children, is a massive commitment (which unfortunately so many prospective parents don't understand).

But the point of the second issue is that we seem to not feel any duty to create more happy people because we have more important duties to people who already exist, and to create happy people takes effort, effort that would have been put to use towards the other duties we have to people who already exist.

What about our duty to not make a miserable person? That's easy, literally. You just have to not make a miserable person. It doesn't take effort, apart from maybe buying a condom or getting an abortion, both of which are negligible efforts in comparison. The effort it would take for you to prevent a miserable person from coming into existence does not compare to the actual misery of this person.

However, what seems to be the case is that there is a priority of duties: we have a priority not to make miserable people and the duty to make happy people is either much less or non-existent.

So priority is an important aspect of our ethical duties. Thus our duties can be ranked as follows by kind and priority:

1. Duty to other people who already exist
2. Duty to ourselves, since we already exist
3. Duty to possible people who do not exist

1.) before 2.) implies that the greatest good for the greatest number is more important than our own personal dreams and desires. 2.) before 3.) implies we have a duty to ourselves before possible people - therefore we aren't guilty for not having happy children if we're not interested in it, and also that we aren't guilty for having a child if this child's personal suffering is outweighed by the utility this child provides for yourself and the community.

This might seem a bit troublesome. If our duty to possible people is less important than our duty to other people who already exist, then this means that it might be acceptable to give birth to one miserable person in order to benefit the vast majority (instrumentalizing this one person). I've flirted with the deontological idea that we shouldn't instrumentalize other people, but while I haven't made up my mind, I'm beginning to see it as rather ad hoc, like a black sheep in my otherwise largely consequentialist leanings.

Or, at least, the instrumentalization of a person so that the majority will experience a great reduction in suffering seems to me to be right. However, using this one person so that the majority will feel great pleasure at the expense of this one person is wrong, because the great pleasure of the majority wasn't needed. But the reduction of suffering was needed.

If this still seems unethical, remember that all that exists is the here-and-now. You aren't pulling a potential person from some blissful nirvana of non-existence. What matters more is what is happening right now, here, where all the suffering is.

I'll admit, this still seems a bit awkward, as if there had to be a better way. I align myself largely with the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas thought Ethics was First Philosophy, and that this was the case because our immediate phenomenological experience is that of the Same and the Other. The Other forces upon us duties to it - Levinas called our ethical duties a kind of "persecution". Whether we want to or not, we feel compelled to serve the Other.

So if the person born complains that they were born not for themselves but for those who already exist, it's the way it is. We would have to.

But scenarios like this are highly implausible, so it's not really worth stressing over. If we really get to the stage in which we have to rely on possible people to save us, we've screwed up somewhere. We could do it without them, in most cases. 

However, an example may prove the point: you live in the early 1900s (thanks to time travel) and have the choice to bring one person into existence who will not have a decent life but will later go on to assassinate Adolf Hitler, thus preventing World War II and the Holocaust. Your bringing this person into existence is not so everyone else can feel great pleasure, it's so that millions of people don't die horrible, miserable deaths. Hopefully the person born will also understand that this was needed and realize that the world isn't charming. 

Another possible example would be the highly-unlikely collective agreement to cease all life. We might have one or two more generations so that we can get all the technology ready to make sure we do a thorough job.

What still needs to be answered, though, is why suffering has priority over pleasure, and why it's okay to instrumentalize people for a reduction in suffering but not in an increase in pleasure.

I'm not entirely sure why this is the case, but it's so deeply intuitive that I find it rather impossible to see how it could be wrong. It's just so obvious that the reduction of pain is more important than the construction of pleasure. It feels deeply wrong to me to place emphasis on pleasure and ignore pain.

One possibility is that the phenomenologies of pain and pleasure are different. 

Pain is pressing. It requires our attention, immediately. It engulfs our entire awareness and focuses our attention to it. It is difficult to control our reactions to pain.

Whereas pleasure is intoxicating. There's no need to have pleasure in the sense that there is a need for there not to be pain. It's not pressing, it's supererogatory.

Other, more metaphorical, phenomenological ideas are that pain is a burden, whereas pleasure is light as a feather, or that pain is intense while pleasure is "fluffy", or that pain inhibits normal life while pleasure merely distracts normal life.

The bottom-line is that pain is of priority and pleasure secondary.

So we can make another (idealized**) hierarchy of duties:

1. Reduction of pain in others
2. Reduction of pain in oneself
3. Prevention of pain for possible others
4. Increase of pleasure in others
5. Increase of pleasure in oneself
6. Facilitation of pleasure for possible others

Notice also how the prevention of pain for possible others also inadvertently reduces the pain in others (in most cases), since you're preventing them from even being an actual other that requires pain to be reduced. The best way to reduce pain is the avoid it in the first place.

EDIT (addition): Also notice how the worst case scenario is is worse than the absence of the best case scenario. In other words, the worst case scenario might be 10,000 (-)s, and the best case scenario might only be 100 (+)s. The risk does not seem to be worth it.

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*Please note that I wrote this at 2 am in the morning so if anything sounds crazy that might be why.

**Ethics does not cater to what we can do or are willing to do. If this makes everyone morally deficient, so be it.

Avoiding the Holocaust

Corpses at Dachau

When we say:

S1: "It would have been a good thing had the Holocaust not happened."

 What are we actually saying here? That is to say, what metaphysical assumptions does this statement imply?

The same general idea seems to be able to be said in a different manner:

S2: "It would have been better had the Holocaust not happened."

In colloquial discourse, we would understand that both statements are implying the same thing (whatever that is).

But in a philosophical sense, these two statements are quite different.

Both statements utilize the pronoun "it". I believe that "it" is referring, in both statements, to a state of affairs (or a possible world) in which the Holocaust did not happen.

However, S1 is not coherent under philosophical analysis, whereas S2 is. In fact, S1 is the colloquial statement that, despite its construction, is reduced to S2.

A state of affairs is a composition of objects and their properties, and the relations between these objects. For sake of convenience, objects are anything that can be referred to as a subject of a proposition, inanimate objects, active processes, or events alike.

The speaker in S1 would have us believe that the state of affairs in which the Holocaust did not happen is good. That is to say, the state of affairs in which the absence of something - the Holocaust - is good in virtue of the absence of the Holocaust.

But this is problematic, since a state of affairs is made up of its constituent objects. It is not clear how the lack of an object can be enough for a value to exist. Something else needs to either have been repressed by the existence of said object or be added in to "fill in the gap" and make the state of affairs good.

Whereas S2 is a philosophically-coherent statement. In S2, the state of affairs in which the Holocaust did not happen is better than the state of affairs in which the Holocaust did happen. Why? Because the former state of affairs lacks the Holocaust!

Now this may seem like it would fall into the same trap S1 did. But this is not the case. For S1 proposed that the lack of a bad (the Holocaust) resulted in a good, whereas S2 proposes that the lack of a bad (the Holocaust) results in a better. Better/worse evaluations are inherently comparative.

Therefore, absences of goods and bads result in comparative analysis, whereas presences of goods and bads results in absolute analysis.

Perhaps you're not quite convinced. Here is a slightly different example:

"State of Affairs A has ten happy people. State of Affairs B has five happy people. You must choose one to be actual."

Anyone of sound mind would choose State of Affairs A, as opposed to B, since A has more happy people (more is an comparative adjective). This makes State of Affairs B worse than A, and A better than B.

However, State of Affairs B is not bad. It still has five happy people as constituents! It's just not as good as A. The absence of five more happy people does not make B bad.

The act of choosing between states of affairs can be good or bad, but the state of affairs must have goods or bads as constituents if they are to be considered impersonally good or bad and not just better or worse:

For if we remove the state of affairs in which the Holocaust happened, we are left with a state of affairs empty of any Holocaust. But without a state of affairs in which the Holocaust happened to compare to, the empty state of affairs is now "naked" of any value. Its comparative value depended upon the alternate state of affairs in which the Holocaust happened.

Similarly, without State of Affairs A, State of Affairs B loses its status as "worse". However, it does not lose its constituent five happy people. State of Affairs B stands independently as a good state of affairs in itself.

One final example:

"It's a good thing that Jim is trying his best."

or

"It's better that Jim is trying his best." 

The only reason why it is a good thing that Jim is currently busting his ass is that we commonly associate working hard with success. That is to say, the act of working hard commonly (or so the conservatives claim) leads to a better state of affairs - one which Jim is successful. This future state of affairs need not be good in itself, though, for Jim's action to be good. Jim might just need to work hard so he doesn't get audited by the IRS, which doesn't constitute a good state of affairs in itself.

In conclusion:

1. Absolute values of states of affairs depend on the presence of its constituent objects
2. Comparative values of states of affairs depend on the presence or absence of constituent objects of other relevant states of affairs
3. Actions to produce a better state of affairs (regardless of its absolute value) can be evaluated in absolute, normative terms.

Thus, the statement:

S1: "It would have been a good thing had the Holocaust not happened."

is referring to a comparative state of affairs in which the Holocaust never happened. Such a state of affairs would not be absolutely good, but only relatively good, or, in other words, better. Relatively/comparatively good refers to the decision to choose the better state of affairs.

Therefore, when a person says that it would have been good if that child had not been born, they are saying that the prevention of this child from being born would have been good, not that the state of affairs in which the child is not born is actually absolutely good (but in reality is only comparatively better).

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(You know it's bad when the alternative, in which no absolute value exists, is seen as a good. Such (understandable) defective axiological reasoning applies in many cases, from the immigrant desperate for a safe haven even if it's a ghetto, to the suicidal individual who wishes to die, to the decision of whether or not one will have a child.)

Does pessimism marginalize the rest of philosophy?

Albert Einstein said that the definition of stupidity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the same result. Can this be applied to philosophy? It seems pretty stupid in itself to even ask if philosophy could be stupid (stupidity is anathema to philosophy) - but can this be applied to the goal of philosophy? (of course this is a philosophical question, but more of a pragmatic one regarding the choice to continue the philosophical enterprise). If something doesn't work, and it continues to not work after countless attempts, should we consider giving up?

A cursory look at the history of philosophy (which is more of a history of loosely-related thinkers and groups of thinkers instead of some kind of perennial tradition) will show that it has a rather poor record of producing true statements, when truth is the goal. Countless philosophers have used the same general methods to try to come to true statements, but we never seem to be able to agree on any of them. At least from a superficial point of view, Einstein's quote would seem to apply: philosophers from all eras keep trying to answer the same damn questions and every time they fall short.

Now, Einstein's quote was probably meant more as a joke and would apply to things in which there are alternative methods of acquiring the goal. Typing incompatible code into a Python processor will not give you everything you wanted, and continuing to use the incompatible code instead of trying something new like Python will not do anything and is just stupid.

If we continue to slip up and fail to produce true statements, does that mean we ought to stop trying? Are we being foolish by expecting truth? Out of all of the previous attempts at truth, how likely is it that your attempt is going to be true? The ongoing cultural trend in (modern) philosophy has less to do with inquiring about the nature of the world and more about winning an argument, or releasing "weird" philosophy. It's more of a game than anything. The same could be said about many other academic fields (including mainstream science), but philosophy kind of stands out from what I can tell.

We can keep trying to beat the computer AI at chess on Master level - but we'll never be able to beat it. We can try to make a perpetual mechanical motion machine, but we'll never manage it. We can try to make a utopian society that will last forever - but we'll never reach that point without hurting others and it'll eventually get fucked anyway.

It does seem rather hopeless at times.

A couple of my thoughts on this:

• Philosophy actually has produced truth in some sense, or, at the very least, constrained the possibilities within a more manageable range. It has a great track record of identifying problems. I think there are two types of philosophical questions: the interpretive and the constructive. The interpretive questions are the ones that are more likely to lead to agreement and are mostly reflective problems (pace Wittgenstein), the ones that can be revealed after an honest look at the everyday experiences of a person without bias or apprehension. They are questions whose answers don't usually stray far away from experience itself, and are the questions whose answer typically result in the feeling of "enlightenment". The constructive questions are those that start to get into the real theoretical aspects of philosophy, such as metaphysics, epistemology, etc, things that can't be immediately experienced but must be modeled. The constructive questions, like any architectural structure, will inevitably fall or be revised. Out of both of these types, the questions that are more pressing and thus require more pragmatic answers are going to result in more agreement (and collective agreement is the closest we'll ever get to real truth).
• Philosophy is largely innocuous. That is to say, it is usually ethically innocent. Nobody usually gets seriously hurt by philosophical inquiry alone (the fallout is another issue...). If there's any reason to stop doing philosophy, ethical issues isn't one of them. Ethics is, fundamentally, a philosophical field anyway.
• It's fun.
• It's therapeutic (a symptom of a larger problem)
• The biggest thing, though, is that philosophy is largely a natural thing for any person to do. We can't stop thinking philosophically. It's what we, as minded individuals, do. We think, just like we breathe and eat and shit and sleep. We might as well try to think right, or at least better.
• If nothing more, irrational thinking has a tendency to harm other people and yourself. If you're concerned about not being an idiot and hurting other people, then philosophy, particularly the pragmatic questions, is going to be needed.

In conclusion, my view on philosophy is that, when it's not ethics or politics (the more pragmatic-oriented), or an interpretive question, we're never going to really come to truth or professional agreement. I don't share the optimism of the graduate student who thinks their new idea will be the-next-big-thing and will lead to a century of understanding, finally solving everything. Which actually makes it surprisingly difficult at times to stay involved in philosophy as a hobby - part of me is always intrigued by the constructive questions, and another part knows that we'll probably never know the answers which somewhat kills the motivation at times.

Most of us claim to be against subjectivism and relativism - and yet we're content with believing we hold the truth in spite of history.

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This is especially pertinent to someone as pessimistic as myself. My love of philosophy seems almost like the "black sheep" of my worldview - humanity is doomed, we really shouldn't reproduce, politicians inevitably become corrupt, life in general is malignantly useless, whoever made the universe was either incompetent or morally questionable, but hey! philosophy! (nevermind that pessimism is philosophy...)

The thing about philosophy is that you can't half-ass it and still consider it philosophy. If you didn't try your very best, then it's probably bullshit. Even if you try your very best, it's almost certainly bullshit.

At the same time, however, to try your best requires that you have a desired end-goal in mind: in this case, it's truth.

But look at the history of philosophy. We haven't really gotten close to any constructive truth, it seems. Philosophers hold a position either because they naively think they have found the truth, or because they feel that by holding a belief, they are helping the dialectic.

And that is why it's difficult to "justify" constructive philosophy as a pessimist. If I don't have faith in humanity, why should I have faith in philosophy? If I don't really care whether or not humanity dies out, why should I care about finding the truths of reality, something that kinda needs a temporally-extended intelligent species?

At least for myself, philosophy have several uses:

• Contrary to the established belief that metaphysics is first philosophy, I think that it is ethics that is first philosophy (pace Levinas), or an ethics-based metaphysics. You have to be alive in order to do anything else, and so we have to ask ourselves how we ought to live, or if we should live in the first place.
• Philosophy is largely therapeutic for me, not so different from the philosophical works entitled "Meditations" by various authors. It's something to dissolve issues with, and to most importantly pass the time. It's something to think about on the train, or at work, or while you're falling asleep. 
• I'm a pessimist in terms of structure but an optimist in terms of the human spirit and drive. We need only to temper this human spirit when it is ethically problematic.
• As said before, philosophy is largely ethically innocent. So the drive for truth is not that problematic in the way the reproduction of the species is. Now, the transcendent drive for truth is partly dependent upon the continuation of a species that can do this drive. In which case, something like philosophy is not a justification for the continuation of the species, but merely a result of it. However, what is justified is a personal drive for truth. I can do whatever the hell I want so long as I don't seriously impact anyone negatively. In a sort of twisted manner, I can leech off of the surrounding reproductive insanity without condoning it. I can be a part of society without approving of it. I can watch Game of Thrones, take a walk in a public park, and read philosophy without explicitly approving of the underlying structure. Such will be a post for the future - how to live negatively in an affirmative society.
• I like philosophy as a challenge more than I like it out of a wish to come to truth. Coming to truth is more of a byproduct of my enjoyment of it as a challenge, just like a rock climber may just enjoy rock climbing in general and not necessarily or solely the final push to the top.

The anguish of existence

I recently watched a shitty horror B-movie with a friend (The Forest for anyone interested). Having been a shitty and mostly uninteresting film, I wasn't too engaged with it and rather started to analyze the various emotions and feelings the characters experienced.

Fear, extreme pain, guilt, worry, anxiety, suspicion, despair, the list goes on.

What struck me the most about these feelings is that nobody in their right mind would want to experience them. If you asked someone if they wished to start their life if they knew they would experience these feelings at some point during their life, I doubt they would wish to start their life. These feelings are not just bad, they are really bad. People already alive are subconsciously aware that they will experience these feelings in the future, but never put two-and-two together and realize that this reasoning should extend to before they were born.

Now, Antibullshitman recently commented on one of my previous posts, criticizing my idea that the pains of existence might be justified if there is a blissful teleological end-goal. Although I still accept the general idea presented earlier, I will admit that ABM has a valid point: there do seem to be some pains that cannot be ethically redeemed by a teleological end goal. I will explore this below:

The aforementioned feelings the horror characters experienced are what I would label terminal experiences. By terminal, I am obviously referring to death, albeit in a slightly looser sense as will be shown. It's why they are really bad - it's not just the run-of-the-mill tedium and aches that people understand to be transitory and merely uncomfortable, it's a kind of anguish, a feeling of meaninglessness. They are inherently connected to death.

Fear results from a person realizing that they are in a situation that they perceive to be life-threatening. Extreme pain usually accompanies incidents that threaten the life of the individual. Guilt haunts a person forever. Worry, anxiety, suspicion, and despair are all inherently tied to the idea that life may not go on, that this may be end. All of these feelings result from a lack of knowledge: the individual does not know if they will make it out unscathed or even alive.

A key point that I passed over in my previous post on teleological end-goals is that, if we knew that the teleological end-goal was known and guaranteed to exist, life as we know it would largely be quite different from what it is currently.

We can clearly see this when we analyze the lifestyles of religious monks, nuns, priests, and the like. You don't typically see the drama, the deception, the anguish of secular life in a religious setting. In a religious setting, your fellow devotees believe, just as you do, that there is a redemption at the end of the road. There is no need for all the drama, deception, or anguish of secular life - why would there be? Such happens when people lose sight of the end-goal, whether that be heaven, nirvana, or a hedonistic alien machine from Planet Xenu. There would be no horror films to which this post is inspired from!

There's certainly something to be said about this. If you're a Christian, then you likely will believe that if everyone just believed in Jesus, the world would function much better and life would be more peaceful. If you're a Hindu or a Buddhist, then you likely will believe that if everyone just adhered to the teachings of Brahman or Buddha, then world would be much better and life would be more peaceful. Thus, any kind of religious belief worthy of being called religious is going to include some desire to escape, to transcend the mundane world in pursuit of the heavenly redemption.

I have my own issues with Western monotheistic religions (they use lack of faith as a reason for the human condition, as well as victim-blaming), but my own sympathies rest in Buddhist belief. One need not adhere to all the various metaphysical ideas transposed upon the original teachings of Buddha by monks later on to understand that life is suffering, life is dukkha, and that we meditate and follow the dharma so that we are not re-born (this is not re-incarnation as the Hindus believe; think like a candle passing its flame to another candle).

The secular life, the anguished life, is not worth living and not worth starting. The life of virtue, the life of understanding, the ascetic life, is worth attaining, but this does not mean it is worth starting. For this lifestyle is not "natural" in the sense that it is easily committed to. It is fundamentally a reaction to a state of affairs. Why would it be a good thing to impose this burden upon someone, even if the virtuous life is worth living? The Buddhist teleological end-goal is known to be death; the ascetic life is one that tries to deal with life as it is, trying to transcend life while it's being lived, unlike Christian or Muslim ascetics who deal with life so they may go to heaven. (note that while I have sympathies with Buddhist belief, I do not believe it is a cure-all to all of our problems - it merely diagnoses the problem similar to that of the European pessimists, and its solution - asceticism, can only go so far).

So, back to the main point of this post: these terminal experiences are incompatible with a knowledge (hell, even just a belief) of a positive teleological end-goal in the usual sense.

If it were the case that the only way to get to heaven was by a torture chamber as ABM brought up, then I agree that it would be wrong to put this person into that situation. I think a better example, though, would be to say that the only way to get to heaven is by going through a series of violent rapes. These violent rapes are horrible. In fact, any heaven the exists afterwards is going to fundamentally have to erase your memory for you to even enjoy the heaven. And it's clearly wrong to harm someone even if they don't remember it.

So the overall point being made here is that a known, good teleological end-goal can only justify birth if the preceding life does not include terminal experiences. And a life without a known, good teleological end-goal (belief does not count, it needs to be knowledge) cannot be justified at all, regardless of whether or not there are terminal experiences.

The fertilizer of meaning: meaninglessness

From the very first day you were aware that you were a person, you have been bombarded by cultural memes propagating the goodness of existence. You have been bred to become an asset of the economy, a gear in the well-oiled machine. You have been manipulated and assimilated into something you neither explicitly desired nor consented to being a part of.

All of the mechanisms surrounding you have a common source: the overarching fear of death (the annihilation of the ego). From the fear of death sprouts meaning, for meaning is a reassurance of the ego. The number-one priority of the ego, if it is not trying to survive or is distracted by a novelty, is to sustain a stable ecosystem in the mind.

Before you were born, others were struggling with the meaninglessness of existence. And so they built civilization, culture, social memes, etc to distract them from the possibility of death. To try to ignore the scream of impending doom.

So you were born into an environment that was already set up to deal with this fact of existence. Before you even knew of the meaninglessness of existence, you were exposed to apparent meaning. An entire society that focuses on establishing the ego as the microcosm of the world. You're so fucking important!

But then you start to get disillusioned with the game. You start to see cracks in the walls. And thus you have your first (of many) existential crises. If you do not succumb to the crisis, you build yourself back up. You mind meaning in the suffering. You find purpose in a purposeless universe.

For most people, it's enough for them to submerge themselves back into the collective insanity of society. Others need more personal meaning. But everyone who is a functionally-"healthy" human being finds some way to deal with the meaninglessness.

What is most disturbing is that it seems that most people forget why they even had to build this thing call culture or meaning in the first place. They forget the origins of their angst. 

They forget that their meaning was fertilized by meaninglessness. They look at the flower without looking at its roots. The flower might be beautiful, encouraging, deep, meaningful, or what have you. But we must not forget that the only reason this flower is this way is because of where is came from. And where is came from is not beautiful, deep, meaningful, or anything like that. We can't forget that meaning is a reaction to an undesirable state.

"It's all in your miiiiiiiind!!!"

Never tell a person with chronic anxiety and/or depression that "it's all in your mind!"

Why not? Because the person with chronic anxiety and/or depression already knows it's all in their mind - at least, the psychological reaction is in the mind. No shit, sherlock.

But that's the thing: it's a reaction, an impulse from perceptions of the environment.

Just as anyone who heard a stick crack in a forest would immediately begin to feel anxiety, (heightened sense of awareness, increase in heart beat, shortness of breath, dilated pupils, a gnawing and growing feeling that something is wrong and a general inability to relax), the person with chronic anxiety (and/or depression) perceives something to be wrong with their environment. There is an acute feeling of dread, as if something bad is about to happen, similar to the feeling one gets in a horror film when the protagonist goes into the dark room unprepared.

It doesn't matter if these perceptions are skewed, biased, distorted, or inaccurate, what matters is that the person feels they aren't skewed, that they aren't biased, distorted, or inaccurate. Reassuring them that it's "okay" because you don't perceive anything wrong does little to help, just as you telling me that you didn't hear a stick crack in a forest would not generally reassure me. I don't think you see what I see, because if you did see what I see, you would probably have the same reaction as I do.

Typically my own anxiety revolves around an obsession with my responsibilities to others (worst-case scenario architecture and catastrophizing), as well as an obsession with doing something I do not wish to do (ego dystonic, for example, joining a fundamentalist church group despite being an atheist). Most people aren't going to take these too seriously, but I certainly do. The former is largely what I perceive to be a rational obsession, whereas the latter I fully know to be irrational, yet intrusive, thoughts.

Anxiety, like most emotions, is not entirely susceptible to rationality; even if you were able to give me a list of reasons why I am wrong about something, or how I'm not perceiving the world accurately, I would most likely retain an acute sense of dread, even if it has been diminished.

This is because anxiety largely revolves around the unknown, the uncertain. You are uncertain about what caused the stick to crack in the forest, therefore you feel anxious. It's just with chronically-anxious people that they perceive a threat where there may not be one, simply because they are not 100% sure.

In light of the inability to be completely certain, an anxious person will fall into a series of compulsions, meant to reassure them that everything is okay. Compulsions rear their ugly, insidious head when the anxious person continues to compulse despite the obsession being largely "rationally" dissolved. The obsession has moved on from simply a logical or rational peculiarity to a strikingly emotional, non-rational character, provoked by the very compulsions that were meant to dissolve the obsession in the first place. The compulsions metaphorically dig pathways in the brain, not so different from other habit-forming exercises. In this case, the compulsion becomes a kind of habit, one sustained out of fear.

The best solutions to these episodes of anxiety and fear are to interrupt the thought-pattern. One way to do this is to yell a profanity or punch something like a pillow; this releases tension and reminds you that you are in control. Another method is by meditation: quiet your mind, focus on a single thing (such as your breathing), let this fill your entire focus. Another method is to exercise: go for a run, lift some weights, clean your house, etc. The last method that always works for me is to plug in my headphones, listen to an album or so, and slowly drift to sleep. The point of all of these methods is to interfere with the movements of anxiety, to get in the way of the thought-pattern. As soon as you get out of the rut you've made, it's easier to appreciate the circumstances with a more open-mind not plagued by dread or panic. Although it certainly is difficult to resist the pull back into the trenches.