On December 5, 2017, David Benatar appeared on the Waking Up podcast to discuss his philosophy on anti-natalism. I felt the conversation slide in a frustrating direction with David not able to defend his position in a way Sam could reconcile. I felt there were missed opportunities to defend this unique position. I am thinking about the usefulness of this perspective, as well as ways to repurpose non-being and nothingness. Consider self-identified soul mates or twin flames with different dates of death. The first to go, so to speak, deals with the pain and the loss of their other. There is no pain or suffering experienced by the first; extinguished flame. What it’s like to be someone deceased is similar to the unborn, the unknown, the unloved. The difference lies, these memories we create and recreate, consciousness as defined by our interpretations.
If a baby was never born, the ghost in the machine or the identity of this particular self (pick your poison) would never know the difference. How could they? And therefore if there is no baby, there is no bathwater. It’s ethically neutral. I think this is tremendously insightful. A benchmark on the pendulum of truth and the control of the ideal sample size. What is this new found neutrality between? On one side we could have the truth claim, such as a Dirac function, either on (living) or off (death). Interestingly this makes a half-truth a vulgar approximation. Choices, that, do not lead to the replication of our species or information are examples of activity to one side of this neutrality, with the other side successfully reproducing and replicating information structures, both of which are subject to the time decay. How do we make our information more replicable? Write! Make memories, defeat nothingness. Now that we know what it is. Being is Not Nothingness.
Ex nihilo nihil fit - Latin, from nothing, nothing is made.