Thoughts Triggered by Tolstoy's A Confession

Ptolemy, I recently heard an interview of David Benetar, the author of "Better to Never Have Been Born."  His argument, as I understand it is: Once you are born you suffer and no matter how much joy you have the suffering is worse so it would have been better to not have been born."

Now my take on his argument is that he is attempting to quantify something that is unquantifiable except by the one experiencing it.  Perhaps in his life suffering outweighs (or better, he perceives it to outweigh) joy, but there is no way to measure the one second of joy I might have against a hundred years of pain and declare for me that it would have been better that I should not have been born.  Both joy and suffering are personal and only the one experiencing them is qualified to declare the suffering worth more than the joy (and thus one should sacrifice the joy to avoid the suffering).

A second thing occurs to me in that the joy and suffering I feel are personal, but my existence may be the catalyst of joy or suffering in others.  If I have a thousand years of suffering but, by my suffering, I give one person a moment of joy, only I can say if it was worth it. 

Thus, internal joy and suffering and the joy and suffering you bring to others may swing the balance, but only within the mind of the one experiencing the joy, the suffering and the giving of both to others.

I suppose it's bit like looking for the perfect wave.  You travel the globe, ride thousands, and am never satisfied...until that one perfect day when EVERYTHING is right.  Catching that thirty seconds of bliss, to most, makes the years of searching worth the effort.

AJ

A short note regarding the desire of meaning.  That we can predict things is related to our ability to project.  I predict a car is going to crash into a wall as it passes because I can project it's future path leads to the wall.  I project that my watch will stop ticking because I know that the energy used to keep it going is finite and time is not.  We project into space and time, but also in ideas.  We think about power.  Then we think about a more powerful person, and a more powerful person than that, and then a more powerful person that than, and so on....until we stop.  Why do we stop?  Have we hit a wall?  No, we have recognized that our imaginations can conceive of a regression so complete that it has no end.   Thus, in my mind, one of tools by which we stop the infinite regressions into which we could fall, is to have what I call "capping words"  by which we signal that the projection has no ending point.  "Infinite" is one word.  "God" and "Devil" may be capping words for "good" and "evil."  The necessity of having capping words is obvious to anyone who has ever entered into those endless chains of thought you come across when you are a kid.

One of the problems for those who take meaning seriously (or who wish for eternal significance) is that they know that they cannot peek into eternity because they are finite, and thus have no certainty that what they think will last will really last.  Or perhaps another way of stating it is that they long to experience the eternal in the finite.  There is a book by a famous religious professor who makes the distinction that the religious person tends to see their experiences as eternal while the secular sees them as limited to the here and now.  Or as he puts it, "the eternal is collapsed by the religious person into the finite". 

In any case, I would suggest that the search of meaning reflects either the individuals ability to tolerate temporal ambiguity or the the desire to close open ended questions.

AJ

ajqtrz wrote: Thoughts Triggered by Tolstoy's A Confession For Angrim

might i inquire in what sense this is "for" me?

I know. I just couldn't resist to post. 

Smart rationalists believe in God: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager