Yeah, because the person inflicting the pain on someone or themselves is the VICTIM, right?

/sarc

This post was edited by HighschoolTurd on Sep 23 2014 09:40pm

I like this thread.

well said, marcus, well said.

It may be the basis of your conception of value, but not for mine. For instance one could believe that knowledge is the most important thing in the world, even if it were to not result in a positive experience. The pursuit of knowledge itself has been believed to be a worthy endeavor regardless of consequence. You are asserting your personal beliefs as universal truths. Pain or pleasure being "bad" or "good" is not a property of the universe, it is an experience of the subject and as such is defined by the subject.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Sep 23 2014 10:24pm

Knowledge has no intrinsic value though, so it being valued in-and-of-itself is a matter of opinion. My statement that pain and pleasure are intrinsically valued is invariably the case in sentient beings with a pain-pleasure axis. I am merely describing a fact of biology, not a personal belief.

Pain and pleasure are not aspectsof "good" or "bad". Goodness and badness are not some ineffable concept with a higher existence. Pleasure and pain (in the broad sense) are the sole reason we have a coherent concept of "good" or "bad" at all. If good or bad states of mind could not occur, there would be exactly zero books on ethics ever written because they wouldn't make sense.

If one's value system is based on anything other than some aspect of better or worse mental states, it has no basis in reality. A world without consciousness has no meaning at all.

I have a feeling this discussion is going to keep going in circles though, so I'll just leave it at that.

This post was edited by Voyaging on Sep 24 2014 12:02am

So then your position is that because all sentient beings avoid pain and seek pleasure then they must be the basis for good and bad. You also say without pleasure or pain, then good and bad in our minds wouldn't exist at all.

The first is the bandwagon fallacy, plain and simple.

The second extends your definiton of pleasure and pain to be so broad it essentially becomes meaningless. You're basically saying "If we had no emotions at all, couldn't feel pain, had no personal prefernces, and no frame of reference, nothing would appear bad or good", so describing it as pleasure vs pain isn't very apt, your description of good or bad states of mind is a more descriptive starting point than pleasure or pain.

So this changes your position to essentially "anything that causes an unpleasurable state of mind is bad, anything that causes a good or pleasurable state of mind is good". However this is still a matter of definitions to be defined by each subject. There are things I would like to have even if the pain I received outweighed the pleasure (and assumed everybody else to be neutral). Knowledge and experience, to me, is worth experiencing even if it results in a net pain. I would absolutely reject the opportunity to be happy locked in a room if I could leave and explore the world freely while being sad. You might say that I get more happiness out of exploration than I would from the room, but even if I knew I wouldn't, I would still leave the room. There are more valuable concepts to me than being in a good state of mind, some things are worth doing just because they are worth the experience.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Sep 24 2014 08:46am

No, this is a misunderstanding of my position, nociception is a separate thing entirely.



My conception of pleasure is not a petty "blissed out" one and must include all aspects of enjoyment, including intellectual growth, learning, there are whole hosts of mental experiences with extremely variable phenomenal qualities, many of which humans have never even experienced etc. As you say, some things are"worth the experience" despite seemingly being wrought with suffering (say, a strenuous session of study or a painful struggle to finish a marathon).. I completely agree!

I think my use of the word "pleasure" is clouding my argument. I certainly think pleasures can be intellectual, spiritual, etc.... I am merely trying to get across the larger point that there are indeed states of mind that are inherently bad (being tortured, disemboweled), and those that are inherently good, with whole hosts of experiences somewhere on the spectrum, many of which are not clearly one or the other or are some composite of each. Fundamentally, the reason you, or anyone, seeks knowledge and experience and things like this is ultimately for the same goal of affecting in some way the mental world, or of understanding the mental world (which of course, at its core, any form of understanding a thing is merely a mental phenomenon, knowledge is merely a mental phenomenon, etc.)

I will also repeat again that a sentient being with hedonic tone cannot arbitrarily define a phenomenally bad experience as good or vice versa because a significantly positive or negative hedonic experience is strictly intertwined with a subject's ability to conceptualize it as such. A neurotypical person who is being tortured simply cannot authentically believe that the experience is good through sheer force of will (and further is practically forced to recognize is as not only bad but so bad to the extent that they would seek urgent relief so much as to wish for death). If this were the case, all suffering could be avoided by merely wishing it away.

I certainly wish that were the case.

This post was edited by Voyaging on Sep 24 2014 09:22am

Being intrigued by the scientific community, my beliefs weigh heavily on observations we've made of our universe. I love the concept of a multiverse, going along with the white hole theory. If we discuss the idea of dimensions, the concept of what we would consider benevolent, other dimensional beings being real, its pretty cool. And the neat thing about it is it has more ground than modern religion, because highly intellectual minds banded together to forum these concepts.

Gods not real, plain and simple. Religion was the start of intelligence. And just as we evolved, so shall our belief systems.

Ignorant statement. No living person can say God is real or not

just did

grow up

not interested in playing philosophical games of "oh you can't know anything for certain" when you're not even willing to apply that logic to your own beliefs