[ 3 / biz / cgl / ck / diy / fa / ic / jp / lit / sci / vr / vt ] [ index / top / reports ] [ become a patron ] [ status ]
2023-11: Warosu is now out of extended maintenance.

/lit/ - Literature

View post   
File: 19 KB, 300x487, 37C40B52-F5B4-4886-90FE-69C18CBF6860.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
20887663 No.20887663 [Reply] [Original]

>Problem of Suffering

Is there a way to make peace with the following scenario without the aid of a God, Gods, Higher Powers, Karma, and other religious and mystical answers:

>Lives that are suffering from beginning to end, beings that burst into existence, suffer, and then cease to exist. Imagine a baby bird emerging from the egg already sick, a bird which spends three weeks of life in agony, and then is finally eaten alive by ants. If I could talk to this baby bird after he died, and ask if he thought the existence of the universe is valid, could I condemn him if he said it was better that the cosmos had never hatched at all? For him, for so many other animals, and even for many people, life is nothing but suffering accumulating on the head of suffering, and then one dies, and after death there is no redemption, or pay, or justification, but only the dark that was before being: darkness, one crack of light that emanates from something that could be described as hell, and then more darkness.

I’m not religious (although I wish I could have faith in something) and I simply can’t find an answer to this question.

>> No.20887710

>>20887663
If you don’t like suffering in the world, then do something to stop it. It’s not an objective problem, just a subjective one. There’s no need to ask why it exists, but a decent answer would be because we evolved to experience suffering and this has contributed to our survival.

>> No.20887715

>>20887663
To make peace with this is to detach yourself from the concepts of good and bad and to understand reality from a purely deterministic point of view.
You cannot judge each individual experience as validation of life and universe, the suffering is only incidental and isolated and only with our semantics and sympathies for other sentient beings in pain does it cloud our reason.

If I suddenly told you that all of existence was a predetermined narrative of consciousness manifesting ever evolving, greater will until freedom, ala Godhood.
That absolution of reality was our ultimate reality no matter our individual thoughts or choices, that the machine is destined to exist to that point, would it suddenly make everything bearable?

In that sense, just widening your perspective and regarding life and experience as an objective unit of evolution, you'll see that pain and loss is the filter through which greater life can be created.

I hope I've helped you, this wasn't some throwaway response, this has been developed slowly over the last 4 years of my life in the ridiculous downs of reality.
You cannot consider anything individual, you have to look at the total reality.
Relativity of everything.

>> No.20887742

>>20887663
"I am not a happy man, Ender. Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf. Survival first, then happiness as we can manage it."

>> No.20887761

>>20887710
>>20887715
desperate copes by low iq mongrel children. you have to look at the whole brooo. suffering is subjective broooo. you CAN judge the universe on the basis of one "incidental" and "isolated" occurrence because that's all the universe is in the business of doing: producing unrepeatable, isolated occurrences. the world is as saturated with suffering and evil as it is the mediocre comforts that produce garbage shitposts like this. a reality is only as good as its most miserable part.

>> No.20887769

>>20887742
Yes but a vicious predatory brilliance. This world is a beauty pageant for ontological evil

>> No.20887770

>>20887663
Yes, if you're capable of believing that you will die and face eternal nothingness then you've made peace with it. I don't know if anyone can genuinely believe that though, I definitely can't. But I don't believe in God as such either.

>> No.20887784

>>20887769
would you rather a god that could or couldnt?
we are building towards that god if anything, i know this is the lit board and i know this is gonna get schizo but

can you even grasp how ridiculous our perception of reality is going to become in the future? the far future? what our understanding of the truth of reality really is?

and i know these are midwit quotes but
“What is better – To be born good, or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?”
if god was absolutely omnipotent from the inception of the universe, what meaning would suffering or struggle ever have in the trillions of years of existence we are doomed to suffer?
if he didnt realise the great depths of his evil, how could he ever overcome the evil of others?

i know im coming from the otherway but yeah. working towards greater will

>>20887761
of course this midwit missed it

>> No.20887789

>>20887663
>Is there a way to make peace with evil
nope

>> No.20887791

>>20887784
Evolutionist tripe, I don't want to eat children to make God's dick bigger, reality isn't a shonen anime, you are a faggot and a shitwit, stop posting

>> No.20887799

>>20887791
that's why you're a loser and can't handle unmediated truth being directed to you

this is literally 170iq+ shit that isnt repeated anywhere else because the fact is that people have had lesser wills in the past and couldnt even grasp changing their fates

dont fucking subject your npc limitedness to others

>> No.20887806

>>20887799
Lmao 170+ iq shit, basic bitch Chardin mixed with discount Gurdjieff, maybe a dash of Kazantzakis if I was being generous. Bro we're all evolving on Spaceship Earth! Take a hit of this bong! Get the fuck outta here with this shit lmao.

Part has primacy over the whole, immanence is radically prior to the world, you are a joke

>> No.20887810

>>20887663
>the way out is to tell yourself there is nothing after death
Sounds like a massive cope. No reason to think you're getting off this train that easy

>> No.20887818

>>20887761
how can reality be objectively “good” or “perfect” ? These words are meaningless. It is literally subjective.

>> No.20887826

>>20887761
>a reality is only as good as its most miserable part.
for all of existence before consciousness or intelligence/cns to conceptualize good and bad
what was that?

ontological evil? rocks and pure energy, a shitstorm of heat and chemicals
my theory is all encompassing if a bit naive
yours is barely passable and contexually valid for a dualist

smd

>> No.20887830

>>20887810
>the more i think about it, the more im afraid of it

>> No.20887839

>>20887830
>I can't argue so I'm going to misquote you in green text
I love how angry you're getting with people shitting all over you ITT

>> No.20887843

>>20887839
no more point
no more win

>> No.20887848

>>20887843
Your concession is accepted
/thread

>> No.20887851
File: 76 KB, 1200x1200, 1658828276588669.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
20887851

>>20887848
truly an idiot

>> No.20887852

Lower your expectations
Being present helps

>> No.20887853

>>20887818
>Reality is literally subjective
which is precisely why the baby bird in the OP has every right to damn it to hell and AS hell you fucking mong lmao. if there is only the unsurpassable horizon of subjectivity blah blah blah, then people who ate shit and died have a priority of the negative when they say this world is evil. compared to cuckshitters like you who are buffeted from death by an ocean of sweat and lucky happenstance you fucking nerd

>> No.20887857

>>20887826
Wow it's just rocks and energy maan, we're all passengers on Spaceship Earth brooo. Cringe shit eating buffoon. You don't need to conceptualize distress to experience it. Get off my board

>> No.20887860

>>20887851
Not an argument
Cry about it atheistcuck

>> No.20887861

>>20887857
>doesn't know about cerebration

>> No.20887866

>>20887860
yes it is.
idiot

>> No.20887870

>>20887818
Impossibility of the contrary
Reality can't be subjective becks to say reality is subjective would to be state that objectivily
If reality was subjective then wouldn't that conclusion also be subjective?
It's self refuting

>> No.20887876

>>20887866
Not a single argument was found
Glad your threads dying lmao
cope hard atheistcuck

>> No.20887884

>>20887761
>producing unrepeatable, isolated occurrences

>dna
>twins

my argument that youre an idiot is now proved

>> No.20887898

>>20887884
>buh buh buh
>uh uh uh

>not truly identical
>

>not just chemicals and rocks and energy

>> No.20887902

>>20887884
>twins refute radical subjectivity
Lmao these are the retards you're posting on /lit/ with.

>> No.20887906

>>20887902
oh you're just a stupid troll

>or you cant get your fucking labels right

>> No.20887910

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life

I’m not happy with this view, but I honestly can’t refute it.

>> No.20887913

>>20887906
Each of the twins is on its own worldline you utter mong lmao, that two unique subjectivities can be produced out of a single genetic substrate by virtue of time and space supports my argument more than it does yours lmao, unironically end yourself

>> No.20887928

>>20887761
Holy shit i'm tired of seeing bloomer midwits on every schop / buddhism thread, people who discuss this kind of shit aren't trying to force an universal truth upon you, it solely applies to their perspective. Stop doing contrarian masturbation for two fucking seconds and actually realize that the action of needing is a parasite when you can't fullfill your needs, this shit is easier to understand than fucking Plato or Rousseau. You're not going to get constant dopamin shots for your whole life, maybe one day you'll at least understand this

>> No.20887933

>>20887910
>things get hurt therefore atheism
Dawkins is even more of a ha k then I thought

>> No.20887937

>>20887910
i feel like either we're in some kind of hell/purgatory or the universe (not just our universe, but all there is) is just a complete exploration of all possible conscious states. But that still begs the question of why

>> No.20887941

>>20887937
>we're in some kind of hell/purgatory
It's just the result of the fall

>> No.20887959

>>20887870
Reality being subjective truly means that there are only subjects. There is no external reality at all. So everything only exists within the subjective realm. There is no contradiction

>> No.20887973

>>20887959
If reality was subjective wouldn't that conclusion also be subjective?

>> No.20887985

>>20887910
God works in mysterious ways anon :) maybe suffering good? Become a masochist and flagellate yourself.

>> No.20887994

>>20887959
to even say something is subjective is to define a relationship an object has with an objective state

a subjective reality is an oxymoron, you can only say particular subjects experience reality differently from each other which is tautologically true

>> No.20888009

>>20887941
Yeah we just gave to wait until God's kingdom, suffering is totally fine :)

>> No.20888221

Charles Darwin lost his with the help of another: "I cannot persuade myself," Darwin wrote, "that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars." Actually Darwin's gradual loss of faith, which he downplayed for fear of upsetting his devout wife Emma, had more complex causes. His reference to the Ichneumonidae was aphoristic. The macabre habits to which he referred are shared by their cousins the digger wasps, whom we met in the previous chapter. A female digger wasp not only lays her egg in a caterpillar (or grasshopper or bee) so that her larva can feed on it but, according to Fabre and others, she carefully guides her sting into each ganglion of the prey's central nervous system, so as to paralyze it but not kill it. This way, the meat keeps fresh. It is not known whether the paralysis acts as a general anesthetic, or if it is like curare in just freezing the victim's ability to move. If the latter, the prey might be aware of being eaten alive from inside but unable to move a muscle to do anything about it. This sounds savagely cruel but, as we shall see, nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous—indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.

We humans have purpose on the brain. We find it hard to look at anything without wondering what it is "for," what the motive for it is, or the purpose behind it. When the obsession with purpose becomes pathological it is called paranoia— reading malevolent purpose into what is actually random bad luck. But this is just an exaggerated form of a nearly universal delusion. Show us almost any object or process, and it is hard for us to resist the "Why" question—the "What is it for?" question.

>> No.20888229

>>20887715
only actual good response
but guaranteed only like .5 persons will understand

>> No.20888230

>>20888221
That indifference is precisely the essence of evil lmao. God why was everyone before I was born such a midwit?

>> No.20888232

>>20888229
>bro just take a step back to see the painting as a whole lmao
Obliterated in like one throwaway line by Zizek in some book he probably doesn't even remember writing. Summer /lit/ is dogshit

>> No.20888266

>>20888009
Uniroincally this

>> No.20888468

If Nature were kind, she would at least make the minor concession of anesthetizing caterpillars before they are eaten alive from within. But Nature is neither kind nor unkind. She is neither against suffering nor for it. Nature is not interested one way or the other in suffering, unless it affects the survival of DNA. It is easy to imagine a gene that, say, tranquilizes gazelles when they are about to suffer a killing bite. Would such a gene be favored by natural selection? Not unless the act of tranquilizing a gazelle improved that gene's chances of being propagated into future generations. It is hard to see why this should be so, and we may therefore guess that gazelles suffer horrible pain and fear when they are pursued to the death—as most of them eventually are. The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease. It must be so. If there is ever a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.

Theologians worry away at the "problem of evil" and a related "problem of suffering." On the day I originally wrote this paragraph, the British newspapers all carried a terrible story about a bus full of children from a Roman Catholic school that crashed for no obvious reason, with wholesale loss of life. Not for the first time, clerics were in paroxysms over the theological question that a writer on a London newspaper [The Sunday Telegraph) framed this way: "How can you believe in a loving, all-powerful God who allows such a tragedy?" The article went on to quote one priest's reply: "The simple answer is that we do not know why there should be a God who lets these awful things happen. But the horror of the crash, to a Christian, confirms the fact that we live in a world of real values: positive and negative. If the universe was just electrons, there would be no problem of evil or suffering."

1/2

>> No.20888474

>>20888468


On the contrary, if the universe were just electrons and selfish genes, meaningless tragedies like the crashing of this bus are exactly what we should expect, along with equally meaningless good fortune. Such a universe would be neither evil nor good in intention. It would manifest no intentions of any kind. In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. As that unhappy poet A. E. Housman put it:

For Nature, heartless, witless Nature
Will neither care nor know.

DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.

2/2

>> No.20888516

>>20887973
the point is that you can’t know anything beyond experience. When you say “that’s subjective so it’s not true” you’re assuming that there’s objective truth. It’s subjective and only true subjectively. It doesn’t need to be objectively true
>>20887994
objective reality is an incoherent concept. You can only know your subjective experience. This is why the hard problem of consciousness has been so difficult for those who assume an objective reality in which subjectivity emerges. But it doesn’t emerge from anything, it just exists without objective reality, causality, logic, etc.

>> No.20888626

>>20887928
i guess this thread was made by atheists for atheists as specified in op
we should just lurk the hilarious posts

>> No.20889136

>>20887663
Daoism

>> No.20890026

bump for interest

>> No.20890048

>>20888468
Now imagine if there wasn't death.

>> No.20890068

>>20888221
The only hope is that the caterpillar, or other similar animals, do experience something different related to suffering. When we observe these cruel scenarios we cannot help but judge with our standards, relating to those animals with our personal experience. I wonder if animals have some stronger resistance to suffering, if they deal with it differently than us.

>> No.20890109

>>20887663
The bird would say it contributed to the survival of other living things and wouldn't presume to change the order of existence.

>> No.20890186

>>20889136

Im interested. Could you speak more about the aproach of the Taode jing aproach to the problem of suffering?

>> No.20890201

>>20888232
Yeah, a Zizek reader probably gets obliterated daily, if you get the homosexual connotations.

>> No.20890458

>>20890186
The Dao (the ultimate way/course/order of the world) is amoral, treating all things like "straw dogs" (Daodejing chapter 5). Early Classical Daoism does not have karma, so you're not being punished for deeds in a past life. In fact, what they believed happens after death is debated, but it seems that it was "dissipation into the cosmos" (Komjathy, the Daoist Tradition). For the Classical Daoist, life is not samsara. Rather, suffering is just another manifestation of the Dao, not intrinsically good or bad.

From the Zhuangzi:
Master Yu fell ill. Master Ssu went to ask how he was. "Amazing" said Master Yu. "The Creator is making me all crookedy like this! My back sticks up like a hunchback and my vital organs are on top of me. My chin is hidden in my navel, my shoulders are up above my head, and my pigtail points at the sky. It must be some dislocation of the yin and yang!"
Yet he seemed calm at heart and unconcerned. Dragging himself haltingly to the well, he looked at his reflection and said, "My, my! So the Creator is making me all crookedy like this!"
"Do you resent it?" asked Master Ssu.
"Why no, what would I resent? If the process continues, perhaps in time he'll transform my left arm into a rooster. In that case I'll keep watch on the night. Or perhaps in time he'll transform my right arm into a crossbow pellet and I'll shoot down an owl for roasting. Or perhaps in time he'll transform my buttocks into cartwheels. Then, with my spirit for a horse, I'll climb up and go for a ride. What need will I ever have for a carriage again?
"I received life because the time had come; I will lose it because the order of things passes on. Be content with this time and dwell in this order and then neither sorrow nor joy can touch you. In ancient times this was called the `freeing of the bound.' There are those who cannot free themselves, because they are bound by things. But nothing can ever win against Heaven - that's the way it's always been. What would I have to resent?" - Burton Watson translation. Here, death is simply seen as another necessary transformation of nature, and not as a bad thing.

Now going against the Dao can lead to more suffering. The Daoist approach is to align oneself with the Dao. How do we do that? By practicing moderation and following the path of non-contrivance, simplicity, etc.. According to Kuang-Ming Wu in his analysis of Zhuangzi, the "the problem of suffering is itself a mistake. Suffering is not to be solved but to be let be, to dissolve of itself, as snow in the spring sun of our right living ... living appropriately, that is, fittingly to the changing climate of things, now soaring, now roaming" (Butterfly as Companion). Victor Mair's translation of the Daodejing reads, "Hearing too much leads to utter exhaustion; better to remain in the center" (chapter 5).

>> No.20890467

>>20890458
Now you're probably, wondering, what about terminal illnesses? Well, that's just another part of the Dao. You can futilely flail against the transformations, or you can (radically) accept them and attain a sort of freedom. Basically, it is was it is.

Was this helpful?

>> No.20890499

>>20887663
Why do you care? If you don’t think people are being reborn into the world, the suffering produced on earth is nothing compared to the infinite peace of absolute annihilation.

>> No.20890527

>>20890499
And if you really wanted a solution, the best one would be to work towards the death of every living thing on earth.

>> No.20890534

>>20887663
If you have a short existence with extreme suffering from the very beginning is because you were in your previous life's a goddamn vicious motherfucker. Law of Karma. Based Hindus. This is if you believe in a God that has the power to control the unfolding of phenomena. If you don't ascribe to this view then the taoist are the way to go: there are short lives that start with great suffering but there are also long lives that start with great wholesome environments. The extremes merge in the way of the tao.

>> No.20890549

>>20890467

I liked your explanation. Could you recommend some books on the Dao, maybe some history of the early philosophy and a god translation.

>> No.20890649
File: 3.81 MB, 7610x8060, Daoism Chart 2022 v.2.2.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
20890649

>>20890549
I made this chart. If you don't want to spend all of your money right away, go with Daodejing (Victor Mair) and Zhuangzi (Brook Ziporyn). Then branch out from there.