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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   3641 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 23, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Is religious faith necessary for maximizing happiness in a utilitarian framework? Consider these two thought experiments:

  • Two people are on a deserted island without food or water. Logic tells them that they will surely die, and there is nothing they can do. One of them has faith, the other does not. The one with faith will believe in an ultimately good final destination, and may even believe (in the face of reason) that God will find a way to save him if He so pleases. Of the two dying men, only one man can maximize his happiness in his last days. The atheist, even the most poetic and nostalgic atheist, could not be as happy without a fully fleshed out and trained belief in a final ultimately good hereafter. Maybe he will remember the good in his life, but human happiness is optimal only with hope and desire (the happy man is the man desiring to meet his wife, not the man who remembers the wife who passed away).

  • A man can bear extreme pain with positive feeling if he believes his pain is for a reason. For example, a soldier who knows that his death will save his loved ones and protect his community will die with a certain gladness, which exists in spite of and alongside the pain. Given this, consider a society in which everyone believes that all of their pain and misery is for an ultimate heroic purpose. This is a society in which everyone’s suffering is turned into something positive, and hence a society with greater sum total happiness.

Depends on whether the idea of life after death makes you feel better. Not so for me.

I feel the same way, and so arguments like this are puzzling to me. I find the idea of an afterlife incredibly disturbing, and felt that way even when I was a Christian. At the time though, I did enjoy feeling that there was a God looking out for me.

Same. I always hated the idea of living forever, even in paradise. It used to give me panic attacks as a kid. There's an idea that stories about the horror of immortality are just cope because we know we're going to die anyways, so we pretend it's a good thing, but for me it's very real. I have never found the idea of ceasing to exist too frightening (though it's a little creepy), though some people find it utterly terrifying. The only thing that frightens me about death is the possibility that it's not the end.

What about it seems disturbing to you? The idea that it never ends?

That's exactly it. I have a terrible fear of eternity and the infinite. Makes my mind want to crawl into a little hole and shut down.

That's really interesting. Do you like existing currently? We can overthink the meaning of "billions/trillions/quadrillions of years", but the duration is somewhat irrelevant. There's just Now, a moment which all of time passes through, and which I never want to end.

I love existing! But I love existing in this world that I know. Existing in some other form could be terrible and that's very scary to me.

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