[abound]

One of my favorite questions to ask people is something like: "Imagine a button appears in front of you. Pressing it will snap all human beings painlessly out of existence. Do you push the button?"

Some people get caught in minutiae about downstream effects, I tell them it can go however they want (house pets are free or gone too, planes land harmlessly, etc)

In my circles, I've found it's about 50/50 button pushers to non-button pushers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, vegetarians are more likely to be button pushers.

[moribvndvs]

My first serious programming job was at a start up and the owner asked me this question. I was caught off guard, of course I wouldn’t! I couldn’t really explain why at the time, but it essentially revolved around the fact that I was young and optimistic. 25 years later, I’m not so sure. Now, said optimism has almost vanished and there are days pushing seems like the path to least suffering, but I also feel it’s unethical for one person to decide for everyone else.

[greygoo222]

I mean this sincerely, not as an insult: consider that the problem is with your mind or personal life, not with the world, and you should look for a way to address that if you haven't already.

[moribvndvs]

Suggesting that the wholesale suffering wrought by humanity unto itself and all other life on this planet throughout its entire history is merely in my mind or a problem with my personal life is actually incredibly insulting on top of being willfully ignorant.

[greygoo222]

That's not what I'm suggesting. I'm suggesting your attitude towards it might be.

[NoGravitas]

“For better or worse, pessimism without compromise lacks public appeal. In all, the few who have gone to the pains of arguing for a sullen appraisal of life might as well never have been born. As history confirms, people will change their minds about almost anything, from which god they worship to how they style their hair. But when it comes to existential judgments, human beings in general have a unfalteringly good opinion of themselves and their condition in this world and are steadfastly confident they are not a collection of self-conscious nothings” ― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

[wincy]

That’s wild to me. I’d hazard a guess that 0% of my friends would push the button (okay, lizardman tax, I’m sure I could find someone I know who would say yes). I think they’d also feel a need to go find whoever made said button and lock them in a cell for safekeeping.

[glenstein]

It's impossible to refute anecdotes purporting to represent populations based on what they might do in a hypothetical, and the people being described fade further out of tangible existence at every next layer of abstraction.

But Most Vegans I Know (tm) regard human life as valuabe, speak in terms of harm reduction, and tend not to fantasize about making Vault Tec real.

[gowld]

If human life is net harmful, then harm reduction means targeting 0 humans.

[glenstein]

How representative do you feel that view is of vegans generally?

[squibonpig]

If you've ever flown in an airplane and looked down at a town, it's outskirts and interface with nature, and the natural environment that surrounds it, you'll probably know the feeling. Our species, if it's even right to lay some kind of claim to the species or to the amalgam of biological, social, technical processes that we lump under that label, is a great colonial organism pervading a larger body. But like the bacteria that inhabit our bodies, even in the cases of bacterial infestations that are unhealthy for us, there's no ontological distinction between the bacteria and the body. The body is eating itself or burning itself up always like the body of a starving person; in doing so it produces beautiful and complex arrangements and unknowable futures, it produces itself anew and becomes somebody else. When we take moral judgements, which are no more than functional elements at work within the body, and attempt to apply them to the body at large, or to our representational, projected image of it, all we're doing is helping along the same process of self consumption (or immolation) that the body is already undertaking. Whether you press the button or don't press the button, the process, its beauty and its horror, continues along uninterrupted.

[diacritical]

Look up on negative utilitarianism and the Benevolent World Exploder if you want to find more info on the button idea.

Basically the idea is that if minimizing suffering is more important than maximizing pleasure, a world with no life would have no suffering whatsoever.

Regardless of whether you believe that, removing humans only would still leave the unfathomably huge amount of suffering of wild animals and after a while someone else will evolve and take the role of humans. However, if we leave humans exist, they could either destroy everything anyway (like with nukes or AI) or eliminate suffering like David Pearce and others imagine.

[bayarearefugee]

FWIW I wouldn't push the button.

I just think we are going to absolutely deserve the outcome as we collectively and metaphorically push that button... which we continue to do and are regressing on stopping ourselves from doing so a handful of super wealthy can watch gamified number go up.

[gowld]

What makes you think that we we collectively and metaphorically are pushing the painless button?

[bayarearefugee]

Well you're right, the real world isn't so simple and the button we are pushing certainly isn't going to be painless.

[pmarreck]

We have examples of how that actually plays out (in a limited form).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

[tengbretson]

Ehhh no they wouldn't.

[hrimfaxi]

Are you in silicon valley by any chance?

[relaxing]

Even more, Xoogler.

[mock-possum]

God what an awful prospect. How about when you push the button it only removes the button pushers, so the rest of us are free to continue enjoying our existence.

[stouset]

The point is that continuing to enjoy your existence is inflicting a massive toll of suffering around the world, to both others humans as well as non-humans.

I’m not saying I’d be one to push the button, but I think it’s worth trying to understand the mindset of someone who would. It’s very arguable that pushing it would be the ethical thing to do.

[trylfthsk]

Not entirely convinced that outside the torment nexuses used in industrial meat farming, natural suffering is any lesser sans humanity.

[aziaziazi]

Estimated scale of the torment nexuses: https://considerveganism.com/counter/

[stouset]

The fish counter is horrifying, I had no idea.

[aziaziazi]

The fish counter comes from here https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/animal-welfare/artic...

One could argue there's a double count: about one-fifth of fish are caught to feed other animals (mainly fish, but also terrestrial animals). But I don't think one kill offsets another.

> around half of wild-caught finfish numbers are destined for reduction to fishmeal and oil, of which, respectively, 70 and 73% are used for aquaculture feeds

[mock-possum]

That’s an interesting point, but the degree to which enjoying my existence inflicts “a massive toll of suffering around the world” seems negligible, how much harm could I as an individual really be doing?

I’m a very small drop in a very big bucket, and in the already tragically short time I am allotted on this earth, I would like to enjoy myself, thank you very much. I would not dream of asking others to kill themselves so that my existence might be marginally improved.

[SoftTalker]

What if the suffering is the point?

[hypeatei]

It is, because you can't have pleasure without suffering but I think these conversations should focus on the amount (maybe as a percentage) of suffering that someone/something experiences.

If you were locked in a room and being tortured, would you think it'd be appropriate for me to go: "they feed you at the end of each torture session, isn't it worth it to keep going for that?"

[diacritical]

> you can't have pleasure without suffering

That's not true, though. There's no physical law that states that an X amount of suffering is required for an Y amount of pleasure. Nothing prevents you from taking a brain that's feeling pleasure and keeping it in that state. We don't have the technology, but it's not impossible theoretically. It's a configuration of neurons that somehow gives rise to qualia. Maybe in the evolutionary or day-to-day psychological sense we "need" suffering to overcome adversity and get stronger or not to become too content with what we have and lose it, but that's very far from a law of nature or a necessity in the real sense. And obviously some animals live their whole lives in bliss, others in agony. So it's not like there aren't any real life counterexamples.

[itsanaccount]

Because that line of "enjoying your existence" making no mention of the monumental harm we cause to every biome on the planet is exactly the kind of selfishness that the button pushers would like to eradicate.

[greygoo222]

Biomes are not moral subjects and don't deserve consideration. (Pigs are).

[namero999]

Biome is just a fancy term that encompasses a set of moral subjects.

[Capricorn2481]

> Biomes are not moral subjects and don't deserve consideration. (Pigs are).

Where do you think animals live?

[greygoo222]

Causing harm to biomes is not the same thing as causing net harm to animals inside biomes. The base rate of harm done to animals inside biomes is immense and horrific.

[Capricorn2481]

You're doing crazy gymnastics right now. Eliminating biomes drives animals to extinction. In what world could you argue that doesn't deserve even a little moral consideration?

I'm not going to argue with someone who works this hard to be a contrarian.

[wincy]

And I’d call entertaining thought experiments such as this “having such an open mind your brain falls out of the back of your head”.

[jancsika]

You should definitely watch the Black Mirror episode about the robot bees!

[NoGravitas]

“optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbor nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the most unspeakable sufferings of mankind” ― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

[hypeatei]

Well, some people do choose suicide but I have a feeling that you'd be uncomfortable discussing assisted suicide. These conversations around humanity and suffering typically end in thought terminating takes such as yours. Why even respond if you're effectively throwing your hands up in the air and ignoring nuance?

[greygoo222]

The person you're responding to is explicitly saying they would be fine with suicide.

[hypeatei]

> is explicitly saying

I don't think it's explicit, that's why I put the quip in there about assisted suicide. This thread is showing me that perhaps a lot of people would be okay with the "complainers" offing themselves but I'm not sure... my gut feeling is that a lot of optimists hold conflicting beliefs around this.

[greygoo222]

As a card-carrying optimist, I am strongly in favor of universal right to die. Maybe you should wait for the people in this thread to report their opinions before making assumptions?

I don't want most "complainers" to kill themselves, nor would I recommend them to, but I support their right to. And if they showed me convincing evidence their life contains too much suffering to be worthwhile, I would agree with their decision.

[pmarreck]

If I were to implement such a button, I'd make it so that only the people who said "yes" would disappear.

Life is a gift. A painless life has no value. In fact, if you are genetically immune to pain, your lifetime survival rate is something like the teens.