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Once I wasn’t here and then I suddenly appeared and now I seem to be at home in earth and air

I just can’t get behind this:

Benatar’s asymmetry argument

I disagree so much that I’m grateful for him putting it in such stark terms so that we can clearly see how wack it is:

1. the presence of pain is bad;

2. the presence of pleasure is good;

3. the absence of pain is good, even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone;

4. the absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom this absence is a deprivation.

The first statement is an overreach. A li’l bit of pain can be a good thing. Go see the original Inside Out. We humans use pain or pleasure to navigate reality. If everything was pleasure we wouldn’t be able to do that. It’d be like trying to touch type if every key felt like an f. We’d just be rolling around like a giggling mass of broken bones. (Arguably that's what we're already doing according to Ligotti.)

But let’s put a li’l cenobite pin in that for now and for argument’s sake take a look at the third and fourth statements as if the first two were both true:

They contradict each other, which I’m hardly the first to point out (it's why it's called an "asymmetry" in the first place). If I fall into a hole tomorrow and die but that made me dodge being stung by a bee ten years from now, I wouldn’t really take pleasure in not getting stung by that bee. That doesn’t make sense. I know there’s a meme saying “at least she doesn’t have to suffer anymore, at least she’s at rest”, but the apparent wackness of Benatar’s third statement right here is a counterargument of that meme since it just shows starkly how little it makes sense. If no-one is enjoying the absence of pain, is there really absence of pain even? The fourth statement is just as wack.

Here’s the negation of the two statements:

3. the absence of pain is good, except if that absence is not enjoyed by anyone;

4. the absence of pleasure is a li’l sad even when there’s no one for whom this absence is a deprivation.

Now that makes total sense to me.

There coulda been a bird singing happily here but now there’s just a gloomy mire of despair. It’s a li’l sad that the bird was never here.

I didn’t resolve the asymmetry either, although if I’m wrong on exactly one of those two, that’d fix it.

Y’all know how I spend all day everyday wishing I was never born but this “asymmetry argument” is unintentionally showing how wack that wish really is: if I was never born I wouldn’t‘ve benefited from any absence of this pain, completely negating the entire point of that wish, and now that I’ve already made the schlep all the way into existence I might as well enjoy the li’l strawberry of life even as there are tigers above and below me and they hurt in every joint and bone. It’s a pretty good strawberry. Grateful that I’m getting a li’l taste of it.

Wrapping up ”Conspiracy“

The Secular Afterlife Myth

The State-Sponsored Nangijala Trip