The Meaning of Life: Against Anti-Natalism (Sam Harris, David Benatar, Inmendham)

- yen I emphasize that you're starting
from a blank canvas I emphasize the meaninglessness of the exercise and yet something meaningful arises from it that we cannot evaluate in terms of this phony pain pleasure calculus what does it mean to apply the pain pleasure calculus any of these things to apply it to thousands of hours studying Chinese to say oh well is there more pleasure than there is pain it's meaningless it's it's a it's a categorical error you're putting something in the wrong category it's this is not like BDSM this is not something we can look at how much pain is caused versus how much pleasure and come to a conclusion the merit or value of studying Chinese is it's not going to be quantified in this way the merit or value of going into a humanitarian work who for whom are you even gonna add up the the pain and pleasure it makes no sense part of this delusion stems out of starting from the deep-seated assumption that the meaning of life is pleasure and that suffering is something so terrible that it negates any possible or actual meaning in life so here's here's an example the large parts of the universe that are uninhabited they aren't beings they're certainly not sentient beings and if we think about those uninhabited parts of the of the universe we're not filled with an o2 I think we should be filled with remorse for the absent goods that they are they so if we think about Mars for example where they could be Martians but they aren't we don't think gee think about all that pleasure that those absent Martians could have isn't that a terrible thing we don't think that at all whereas thinking we think about the absence of let's say mmm give Martian woes just like we have wars on earth and we think about the absence of all the suffering there I think we said that's a pretty good thing it's pretty good that they don't have that day that this that is nothing like that on Mars that's a that's an advantage that Mars has over but there's no one who doesn't have those harms exactly exactly but I still think that it's a it's a good thing that there's the absence of that suffering on Mars the idea of a new miracle form of suffering is totally unreal that's an abstraction and it's an abstract comparison that is profoundly misleading in the same way that a monotheistic is right so there are people who who say this is I'll use a very down-to-earth example here you can talk to Jews Christians and Muslims who will say to you well yes you may enjoy having sex outside of marriage you may enjoy fornication in the strictest biblical sense of fornication but what you don't realize is that this is really not very much pleasure and it's gonna involve a certain amount of suffering and sorrow and agony and how can you possibly compare that to paradise in the afterlife how can you compare that to what you're passing up this imaginary afterlife this heaven and so on that ensues for without that much of a difference for Christians Muslims and and Jews how can you destroy one for the other I mean but this is even more observed because we're not making a comparison between earth and an imaginary paradise we're making a comparison between Earth and a nullity an imaginary nonentity which is life as it exists now on the surface of the Moon let's spend a moment on that if I pause it a kind of godlike paradise for all conscious beings right so there really is just there's nothing wrong in the universe by any anything that you can say is wrong you know like there's a little ache and pain over here there's a little dissatisfaction over here I will just cancel that by saying no no these those are moments where there's there's more pleasure flooding in there and more even deeper sense of meaning even deeper gratification of one's intellectual life and these are these are beings who are far more competent than you and I are to judge the character of their experience they've had a billion years to consider the matter and they're still happy to be here imagine mine's constituted like that why should we be indifferent to that and the primordial dial-tone of non-existent see I think what's dividing us here is the asymmetry because if you if you think the is the asymmetry that I am that I'm defending then you'll say well there's nothing bad in that hygienic life that you're speaking about but there's also nothing bad in the situation of non-existence so that the day there they're equal what's going on here invisibly for the the antenatal as' is actually a monotheistic salvific mode of thinking the paradise of the antenatal lists is the moon it's the lifeless rocks on the surface of Mars as surreal as that may sound and they're saying compared to that standard what we do here on earth can never live up to it so why paint a picture why study a language like Chinese why do humanitarian work when it can't compare to this paradise they're holding up as an after comparison but that comparison is utterly unreal and in contrast to that the value of this painting is actually something very real [Music] Banas yen hey guys what's up this video is going to get into some of the profoundest questions of the meaning of life philosophy and practice etc but it does so jumping off from some of the simplest and shallowest questions that are entertained by antenatal astreus t' youtube attention-seeking antenatal s like in mentem somebody love I've crossed swords with in today here on YouTube in the past in the background you can see and possibly here my girlfriend Melissa who is rolling out the dough you're making bread or something huh babe okay pita bread today alright we're doing a lot of baking lately and you can see the outline of my my robot friend as I call it the stand mixer wheel and some other some other kitchen equipment was among our top priorities we first moved into this apartment so look guys this video began with a question from a supporter on patreon if you want to pay one dollar a month you can send me questions and I'll send you replies and if your questions or the discussion is intelligent enough I'll make videos in response to your question just like this one a guy wrote in to me very very sincerely overwrought over the ethical and philosophical issues raised by the ante natal list Melissa in the background she had a period of her life where those questions meant a lot to her I think not these same philosophical questions but the questions raised by child free people and anti-natal SP Palani Internet you know I mean there's a reason why this is meaningful to millions of people it raises questions of how should we live what does it mean to live a good life how should we as thinking intelligent adults resolve to spend the rest of our day is should we or should we not be you know resolving to spend our time raising an infant as opposed to doing the various positive things we can do is it in fact net positive or net negative is it something selfish that subtracts from the world to decide to have your own child or is it something positive that as the world this is not this is not a shallow or simple question and something I know Melissa thought about a great deal before she fell in love with me and basically went baby crazy but hey sorry I'm joking around but her position her this is not shallow but it is true that when she fell in love with me she had a period of really being baby crazy which was interesting to see where I think hormones and the romantic instinct totally overwhelmed what were I think genuinely several years of deep meditations and reflections did you for anyway look I got a sincere question on patreon from a guy who was really overwrought not just about the anti-natal as critique as applied to individual people getting pregnant having babies those decisions but in the broader ecological worldview that sort of step one is the antenatal is arguing that human beings do so much damage to the world that it would be better for the planet in an abstract sense of human beings didn't exist or if there were fewer and fewer human beings ultimately leading to the determination of the human species on earth that's one angle to it but then I think the the necessary kind of ethical and intellectual corollary of that what inevitably follows from this this perspective is the view that all life is similarly deeply flawed so I've heard in mentem who's a youtuber of this philosophical school thought stating in almost exactly these terms he has said that it's it's a mistake for anti-natal ists argue that only human life is flawed and suffering and bad it's it's a mistake he says to think that lions are doing it right that sharks are doing it right and that humans are doing wrong so the point is here if you think the human beings with their intellect and their neurosis and their agonizing over ethical and philosophical choices if you think our lives are not worth living how much less worthwhile is the endless toil struggle and aimless suffering of a lion in the wilderness of a squirrel in the forest of a shark in the ocean of a penguin plodding around in circles on the ice shelf of a the Arctic ax so the same fundamental pessimism which I think in this are in this video I'm gonna argue very briefly or arises from a very simple error but the fundamental perspective or delusion that life itself cannot be justified because of the pleasure pain calculus that when you add up the suffering of the life of that penguin or the life of that lion it's so much greater than the pleasure that therefore it would be better if the penguin didn't exist if the lion didn't exist if all human life and human endeavor didn't exist now in response to this patreon supporter writing to me and I say he was very sincere he talked about his own life and what he's been struggling with and what he's been thinking about and this respect meanness wasn't wasn't a kind of hypothetical debating Club situation or something this son has really impact his life in his perspective um I pointed out that the real moral judgment here is that life on the moon is better than life on Earth by which I mean no life at all I said I might call this philosophy not antinatalism and not pessimism is medical Lu tourism because ultimately the conclusion is that a lifeless rock circling around the Sun is more meaningful than a rock on which there is life ecology forests oceans and the suffering that comes with it that the existence of a nervous system and perceptual organs like eyes and ears that are capable of suffering is something so terrible is such a mistake in this judgment that it's so wrong and so bad that the universe would be a better place it would be morally ethically and sensually superior I say essentially because it comes down to sensations and bizarre sense in terms of the the pleasure of pain calculus it would be better if our solar system were just a series of lifeless asteroids or barren surfaces like the moon so this conversation with this guy proceeded further and it again had a positive impact on him he mentioned that another one of my philosophical discussions really impacted him positively where I talked about the difference between perceiving the world in terms of minimizing your ecological impact minimizing the negative impact as opposed to maximizing your positive impacts which is you know a conceptual difference now think about your own life may not be any actual difference what you do in your life but it's a different way of drawing up the calculus and then say part of this delusion stems out of starting from the deep-seated assumption that the meaning of life is pleasure and that suffering is something so terrible that it negates any possible or actual meaning in life that simply the existence of suffering negates the existence of the whole ocean that there's no point having an ocean with sharks and whales in it if there's gonna be suffering if those sharks are gonna eat fish I don't know maybe the whales eat the shark sometimes depends on which species of whale we're talking about etc etc become the cycle of life is lacking a justification because in their minds the only justification that can exist is of pleasure at weighing pain I think that is a fundamentally incoherent and nonsensical view of the universe view of ecology view of the life of the squirrel and the lion and in the forest and it's especially nonsensical when it's when it's blood human beings now starting of course the selection of examples is significant here and I'm gonna put forward later here on this video an example that doesn't flatter my case but I start with three examples really rapidly that do flutter in my case you can see where I'm coming from where I'm going uh humanitarian work painting on a blank canvas practicing Chinese is a language I woke up this morning I woke up you know vote now or before my girlfriend and I started studying Chinese and listening to philosophy at the same time writing out census in this language I am NOT gonna glorify for you I'm the last person in the world to tell you that this is an intrinsically meaningful use of my time the Chinese language is in many ways shockingly painfully meaningless and I don't lie to myself or others that this is something very meaningful the meaninglessness of it is you know it keeps your teeth clean rinse your mouth with rubbing alcohol is of its it's brisk how meaningless it is to wake up and study these mono syllables and these you know symbols that start it off with human beings scratching into tortoiseshell and bone and you know trying to make little idea graphic you know depictions of you know two hands a hand holding the the moon and this kind of thing so I have other videos talking about the Chinese red language it's produced this legacy of incredibly complex and yet meaningless symbols that I'm now expected to spend the next ten years in my life doing rote memorization for for a very uncertain outcome I mean the ultimate outcome of that after 10 years is that I will never speak read or write Chinese as well as a native speaker does and what I can do with the language of my own life may also be meaningless etc okay so what point is here in a Buddhist sense of the word suffering I'm willing to see this kind of intellectual exercise study education self-development as suffering and even as meaningless suffering right and yet I still think it is radically false to look at this and say wow what's going on right now on the surface of the Moon his superior that you know this is it would be better if life on Earth resembled life on Mars or life on the moon the G if only we could we could get rid of the obstruction of all this biological and intellectual complexity that would be better with humanitarian work again I would not glorify someone going and doing humanitarian work I'm not gonna tell you that it's inherently meaningful I'm not gonna tell you you can even have any reliable sense of positive outcomes if right now you sign up to do humanitarian work in Syria but the the real contrast we have to make in our lives is not between you buying an airplane ticket going to Syria and let's say say handing sacks of rice to starving people handing bandages to people who need medical care let's just say it's the most direct right let's say you actually build a shelter for refugees temporary camps and this kind of things in the borderlands of Syria you're providing material needs for people in the most the most simple sense it would be ridiculous and absurd to contrast that to the surface of the Moon or the surface of Mars and say well look look how much more simple it is without any of this suffering without any of this striving with energy this ambition to something positive morally superior de to move to Mars or for Earth - without human life now there are contrasts that are important you can do this you can sign up and go to Syria or you can watch basketball what was it babe they just did the final four or something in basketball I don't know anything about basketball the NCAA Championships just just happened in in basketball I've never even heard of this crap you know I was spending my time studying Chinese we're actually reading Plato and Socrates and Xenophon we're doing meaningful things and we're baking we keep track every day we do it many people think it's their time the real contrast we have to deal with in life are not between the surface and the moon and the surface of planet Earth but they are contrast between the type of meaninglessness the type of suffering involved in devoting your time to watching basketball as opposed to the type of meaninglessness or the type of suffering involved in attempting to do something positive to humanitarian work and again I don't glorify it you have to watch other videos on this channel cuz I'm gonna go into detail I'm not here handing over the same way would be so easy for me to hand you the delusion oh studying the Chinese language is the most meaningful and rewarding thing in the world Oh going and helping the poor and downtrodden and homeless is the most meaningful thing I'm not offering that at all I do see the the suffering and the meaninglessness and the inevitable disappointment and probably the ingratitude of the people you're helping and quite possibly the end of the humanitarian work you're left with a sense of hollowness and defeat and disappointment yourself and then maybe you want to go home and become a painter and start painting canvases about it so look the canvas again - to paint a picture I emphasize that you're starting from a blank canvas I emphasize the meaninglessness of the exercise and yet something meaningful arises from it that we cannot evaluate in terms of this phony pain pleasure calculus what does it mean to apply the pain pleasure calculus to any of these things to apply it to thousands of hours studying Chinese to say oh well is there more pleasure than there is paint it's meaningless it's it's a it's a categorical you're putting something in the wrong category it's this is not like BDSM this is not something we can look at how much pain is caused versus how much pleasure and come to a conclusion the merit or value of studying Chinese is it's not going to be quantified in this way the merit or value of going into a humanitarian work who for whom are you even going to add up the pain and pleasure it makes no sense the difference between having a blank canvas and painting a canvas painting some meaningful image on this canvas we cannot quantify in terms of pain versus pleasure and I point out the canvas itself painting on a canvas is real whereas this concept of there being a quantifiable thing called pain and a quantifiable thing called pleasure the idea of a numerical form of suffering is totally unreal that's an abstraction and it's an abstract comparison that is profoundly misleading in the same way that a monotheistic arid I says right so there are people who say this is I'll use a very down-to-earth example here you can talk to Jews Christians and Muslims who will say to you well yes you may enjoy having sex outside of marriage you may enjoy fornication in the strictest biblical sense of fornication but what you don't realize is that this is really not very much pleasure and it's gonna involve a certain amount of suffering and sorrow and agony and how can you possibly compare that to paradise in the afterlife how can you compare that to what you're passing up this imaginary afterlife this heaven and so on that ensues for without that much of a difference for Christians Muslims and and Jews how can you destroy one for the other I mean but this is even more observed because we're not making a comparison between earth and an imaginary paradise we're making a comparison between Earth and a nullity an imaginary nonentity which is life as it exists now on the surface of the Moon and and Mars the canvas itself is real we think of the arts and we think of image making you know artifice we think of creating an illustration as something unreal as a mere appearance but in this case it's interesting because that image and what it means is something infinitely more real than this idea about a quantifiable form of suffering and pain what am I gonna paint on the canvas okay I've just been studying Chinese and then I went to Syria and the humanitarian work and let's say because I know what guy who's been doing humanitarian work over there in the Syrian area let's say I'm also interested in boxing I'm not but this guy's thinking of it I think he's still a sport when I'm patriotic I know a guy those are his interests he's studying languages I think he's studying Arabic he's into boxing and he's doing humanitarian work so let's just say he sits down to the canvas and he puts together those feelings and experiences on a canvas he paints a picture and there were elements of training to be a boxer and there are things that related to studying the language and there's some kind of pastiche reflecting his aspirations to help people into a humanitarian work and his disappointment and struggles with bureaucracy there are all kinds of themes played on on this on this canvas all right and the canvas begins with you know a blank empty white fabric there's nothing else there in a sense and yet there's so much there there's a process of painting that's meaningful for the painter there's a meaning that we perceive as being in the image intrinsic to the image or arising from the image that can mean something for the viewer for the audience right there's a social function and a cultural function even a political function to this to this canvas there's a lot more real value here going on that cannot be analyzed in terms of pain and cannot be analyzed in terms of pleasure maybe none of it is pleasure the actual process of painting may not be enjoyable the actual process of looking at this painting and reflecting on the themes of war and starvation and medical assistance and boxing or whatever so this guy's mine it may not be pleasant either maybe at no stage in this is their pleasure and yet we're talking about something mean full and some of that belongs in a completely separate category from these questions of sharks and whales in the ocean these questions of the life of the lion on the plains these questions of what's meaningful and meaningless at human life whether or not it was a mistake to be born or whether or not it's a mistake to give birth to it another child today I think we're actually conflating several different categories and what's going on here and visibly for the the antenatal 'us is actually a monotheistic salvific mode of thinking the paradise of the anti-natal list is the moon it's the lifeless rocks on the surface of Mars as surreal as that may sound and they're saying compared to that standard what we do here on earth can never live up to it so why paint a picture why study a language like Chinese why do humanitarian work when it can't compare to this paradise they're holding up as an absurd comparison but that comparison is utterly unreal and in contrast to that the value of this painting is actually something very real even though we may think of the arts as illusory a bonus Yin