From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Fri Jan 03 2003 - 10:15:47 MST
Mike Butler asks some great questions. I am
considerably relieved that at least one person
has some idea of what I am talking about:
> Lee Corbin wrote:
>
> > If ">" is a preference relation, then
> >
> > normal > abnormal > null.
>
> For some preference relationship(s). Yours?
Yes! (although "relation" is the correct term mathematically)
> What of the people who [say they] wish they had never been born?
As for me, they are either correct or incorrect about
their lives having been worth living to them. If this
is a persistent attitude---and it's not just that they've
been recently jilted by a lover---then their lives are
not worth living, and it would have been much better if
someone similar to them but not quite identical had been
rescued from non-existence.
> ? contented > suffering > null ?
No. If the suffering is enough to make a life
not worth living, then
contented > null > suffering
(BTW for others, a preference relation should not be
read as meaning exactly "greater than".)
> ? resigned > struggling > never-born ?
Sorry, I'm not parsing that one very well. Often
people who seem "resigned" to their fates, are sometimes
called "fatalistic" I suppose, sometimes just "depressed".
They may or may not have lives worth living (to them).
The same for those who struggle with life, as often
we all do.
> Says who? On what basis? On a bad day, I think
> things won't get better. What if bad days are as
> good as it gets?
Says me. (But in a way that I hope persuades others.)
If the bad days are so numerous that you consistently
wish you never had been born, then it would have been
better if someone else had been born, or even null.
Yet we are not too far away from a time in which our
psychological ailments can be treated---after all,
people should have internalized by now a materialist
perspective, and understand that the satisfaction, joy,
contentment, happiness, and other states merely reflect
the chemical constitution of one's brain at time t.
I have one desperate friend thinking of suicide, because
the total value of his life is sinking into the red, and
there is only a little hope left that he'll get better.
But he is intelligent enough to recognize the possibility
---there is almost always hope---, and besides he is also
enough up to speed to be wanting to punt, and get frozen.
> The problems of informed versus retroactive consent
> are many. So are the problems of an entity's chattel
> versus sovereign status--even sans the hard-edged
> duality implied by that way of putting it.
> One philology source I've read claims the ancient
> Greeks and Romans didn't even have a word for
> leaving newborns out on flat rocks if they didn't
> seem fit. Supposedly, the term "infanticide" was
> coined by a much later Christian scholar. Go figure.
>
> I have no recipe.
>
> I have a solution, but the margins of this email are
> too small to contain the proof.
;-) Yes. But I'm appreciative that you've probably
got something *new* in mind that isn't just a desperate
form of curve-fitting to ancient traditions that passes
for most of the debate on this subject.
Thanks,
Lee
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