this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2025
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What if both absolutist viewpoints are wrong?
Maybe just let people decide for themselves and not for some sort of false choice that they need to make 800 babies or 0 babies and nothing in between is acceptable.
Yeah.
I know this post is asking for opinions but it is just so tiring having to have an opinion on everything.
I want to keep some shibboleths to myself thanks.
Most of my opinions are "just calm the fuck down, chill, and let people just be."
Buddhism's main deal is just the Middle Path, which is don't be a dick and don't be an asshole. Be the taint you want to see in the world.
...wait...
@hansolo@lemmy.today @nutbutter@discuss.tchncs.de
Problem is that this argument discards the selfhood from those being born. And it's quite the core of the anti-natalist argument: that the person didn't get a stake in choosing their own birth.
Because if we're talking about lives and decisions, then "let people decide for themselves" ends up really meaning it: they're deciding for themselves, as in some arrogant and egocentric decision, uncaring of of how the very object of decision are "selves" as well.
So, can they also choose to be born?
Selfhood, if we're being frank, doesn't really "form" until at least a year or so into life. Just not enough cognitive ability yet.
Do bears choose to be born? Microbes?
Reproduction is an instinctive behavior, in all species. Humans as well.
@ubergeek@lemmy.today
They can't choose, and that's part of main issue as beings cursed by self-awareness: the impossibility to choose positively or negatively.
It's beyond any capability of will and it taints any other decisions that could be done (see the movie "The Artifice Girl", particularly the dialogue at the end when the robot is talking to her creator about how her primary directives made it impossible for her to really exert any fully free will).
The issue, here, emerges from the lack of choice alongside inevitable self-awareness, which takes us to:
They don't have this curse of "self-awareness". They do possess intelligence (especially crows and dolphins, not mentioned), but they don't end up cursed by knowing the pointlessness of their own existences through a broader, cosmic lens. We do.
Also, they don't restricted themselves into this Kafkaesque rearrangement we call as "human society", where we must "buy" food and "pay" to have a roof above our heads, as if it was some kind of optional luxury. They live from what Mother Nature gives. Bears can roam and do shelters for them wherever there aren't other bears (or other wildlife). Microbes' shelters are literally other lifeforms.
Humans, however, can't live from what Mother Nature gives, no no, this is too extraterrestrial for us to consider doing. I myself can't choose to live among the wildlife like any other primate because I'm prohibited to do so (and, also, because my entire human existence compelled me into artificialities that I'm unable to ditch, such as the myopia I ended up having due to artificial environmental factors (thanks "screens" and "enclosed spaces") leading to the need of using (and purchasing) prescription glasses).
Again, bears and microbes have no such artificial rearrangement.
But we do know it'll form, eventually. We do know the kid will become an adult and they'll be required to become a cog in this machine. Parents often see this as a matter of "proud" ("our offspring has a job"), ignoring how much suffering it accompanies the imposed serfdom (having to "seek" and "have" a "job", having to serve others).
If we were to talk about instincts, murdering to eat (hunting) is also pretty instinctive across species... Humans don't often "murder to eat" because they often delegate it for others to do it, but with enough desperation (e.g. lack of food) a human can even eat other humans (see Chichijima incident)...
It's also instinctive to live among the woods. Why don't we, though? Maybe because we're legally forbidden by other humans to move to a forest and live as our ancestors did, so we're required to live "among society", which in turn requires us to "pay" to "afford" food and shelter.
Are you sure about this? How can you possibly know? How about Octopi? They are, almost certainly, as intelligent as we are, and have 8 brains interworking with each other. You have zero possibility to even guess how they view the world.
Not sure your point? Tribes have always relied on varied tasks for members. Even higher primates do this.
No, it's not. Its instinctive to seek shelter, water, food, and to reproduce. Instinctually, we are also social animals, requiring our tribe to survive.
So, that's the root of the problem, and it's something we can change. See: Seneca Nation, or the people of Chiapas.
@ubergeek@lemmy.today
Science.
Spontaneous Metatool Use by New Caledonian Crows
Taylor, Alex H. et al.
Current Biology, Volume 17, Issue 17, 1504 - 1507
Structure of the cerebral cortex of the humpback whale, Megaptera novaeangliae (Cetacea, Mysticeti, Balaenopteridae)
Patrick R. Hof, Estel Van Der Gucht
Them, too. I forgot to mention them.
My point is how you tried to argue reproduction based on instincts, so I brought another instinct-based trait.
Urbanization and capitalism aren't part of Nature.
I doubt it can be changed, especially due to how things are pivoting to technofascism in the world. I doubt it can be changed, especially due to how we humans are constantly endangering other species for living as "modern humans".
The could be a change but it's beyond human agency: say, if Sun ejected a CME powerful enough, that could be a change of sorts, because it'd finally grind to a halt all the steel-made mosquitoes humans threw to orbit around this Pale Blue Dot, bringing humans back to a more natural means of existing.
However, we humans have been long detached from natural means of living so transition wouldn't be easy, we're sort of cursed to "modernity", so it's complicated.
Science has been able to get inside the heads and determine what animals are thinking? This is a breakthrough! We should now be able to communicate with these animals! Surely we can, right?
Ok, try not eating. Period. I bet instincts will kick in, and you'll eat, and not starve.
Nobody besides yourself even implied they are.
We've changed it myriad times. I provided two such examples.
Ah, so you think all humanity is illustrated only by western living, huh?
No one chooses to be born, which is a condition stretching back to the first cellular life on this planet. That anyone should get a "stake" in their own birth is a ridiculous premise that defies the logic of how life works and the impermanence of everything in our universe. We are the only species that cares to consider beyond biological impulses if we should reproduce, which is a luxury. Responsible use of resources to care for any being in your care, be that a human or a pet, is an individual choice. An unhoused person can be a better pet parent than a rich person, and if you'll notice, the Idiocracy prediction of smart people having fewer kids is playing out with or without anti-natalist support.
Or if you want to go with the reincarnation-approved viewpoint, we ALL chose to be born in some pre-incarnation realm, and we're all set up in soul groups and we all have lives to live that make none of this worth discussing unless it harms others, which is something the pro-natalists are more into by wanting to disenfranchise childless and child-free people.
@hansolo@lemmy.today
It doesn't have to defy the logic. It just requires ourselves to look around and see to where this world is headed. It just requires ourselves to read a history book and realize how humanity is repeating the same errors over and over again. It just requires us to notice how the world the future adults will have to live is likely worse than today's world, as the climate bill, from the imprudent consumption started in past generations, already began to be charged.
If a parent, knowing how the future will be harsher than the present time, how Science and evidence are proving how we're past the point of Paris Climate Treaty, even if we were to stop pollution today (the best time to stop all the greed of Industrial Revolution was a century ago, the second best time to stop Industrial Revolution was yesterday), how wet-bulb temperatures will get increasingly higher, if a parent still decides to bring someone to this Underworld to eventually melt under +60 degrees Celsius, this is what defies any logic. What kind of "future" is being expected for their offspring, really?
Yet we keep endangering ourselves and the other lifeforms.
My spiritual views are based on (among other belief systems) Gnosticism, where there's Demiurge and his Archons trapping everything within this cosmos. My spiritual views diverge from pure religion as I also tend to consider scientific, non-anthropocentric views on all cosmos, so Demirge isn't trapping humans, Demiurge is trapping energy and matter into existence, and we're just part of this energy (self) and matter (biological vessel) being trapped in existence.
Cool, cool cool cool. I get you.
As for having a "stake" in anything, you're just making a lot of fancy excuses for parents making an educated guess, which is what some parents have done forever. Ultimately, it's projection and hope that parents can manage resources appropriately. They don't always do that. Maybe they end up succumbing to alcoholism or dying in a car accident or anything else that frustrates best-laid plans. Everyone simply not having children isn't the solution, though. For starters, generational gluts and booms can be debilitating to a culture and economy even in good times. Humans are animals, and we live on this earth not much above animals in terms of being subject to natural disasters that can wipe us away in moments. We only barely survived as a species about 900,000 years ago, with genetics research suggesting we withered to as few as 1,280 individuals. And it wasn't the conscientious objectors and resource managers with no offspring that let us survive. It was the foolish horndogs who passed on the genes of being foolish horndogs and from which we are all descended by virtue of nearly a million years of horndogging. Which is not a suggestion to "be fruitful and multiply." Simply that things balance themselves out or they don't until they do. Let people do whatever they want and my DINK self will educate and divert resources to my nephews nieces and cousins, and my friend's kids. And so it shall be until I have no more resources left to apply because disease and famine and climate change will boil this place until it's all either desert or rain forest.
As for your brand of Gnosticism, I'm not exactly too far off, just with different labels. So we might be able to meet in the middle that if consciousness is a form of energy as self, that we're "trapped" in order to experience - to have gnosis - of the world, and which carries costs that must be paid before freeing one's self from the trap. That is, we can't deny any being gnosis of any part, be that the gnosis of living a life filled with fear, like the parent that is an anti-natalist or a pro-natalist, or as the child born into a wondrous life of privilege, or as the child born into a dystopian hellscape. Who are we to likewise deny consciousness a chance to experience the chaos and possibly of thriving in it? Some humans just do. So why assume that every human, and human society, is frail and weak by default? Humans have survived worse. The Younger Dryas cataclysm, for example.
Which is all to say, both absolutes are silly because they're impractical, untenable, and wholly a disservice to individuals and to the collective consciousness to some degree.