Misery, Misanthropy, Melodrama: Consider Your Options

Here is my bud estnihil's take on the shabby state of the world.

The world is bad. What does that mean? It means first and foremost that we should do something to fix it. What does this knowledge do to us?...

Misery, Misanthropy, Melodrama: Consider Your Options

Dual Monopoly

Ethics dictates that monopoly is to be preferred in everything. Needless to say this goes against capitalist economics, which is indirect evidence for immorality of capitalism, but more on that some other time.

What I mean when I say that monopoly is to be preferred is that unity within a system is far more efficient for producing prosperity than adversity. Take the human body - as long as it operates under the monopoly of a single genetic conclave, it can be expected to prosper (since genes that couldn't get along just died out). When, however, rogue genetic material enters the human body (as bacteria or virus), disease ensues. 

Disease is the scars left by warfare among genes for nutrition. 

Same in business - it makes little sense for companies to enter competition with one another if they can merge and thus exchange adversity for unity. It is only in extremely rare cases that it is more profitable for a company to continue vying with others, namely, when the market is just emerging or undergoing dramatic change - when a company can hope to emerge more profitable at the expense of other companies. This scenario is unlikely in stable markets where the product or service provided cannot be expected to be improved, specifically in most utility and basic necessity providing businesses such as water, electricity, nutrition commodities (unprocessed foodstufffs), data transfer/storage etc.

But there is the flip-side of monopoly I am not oblivious to, of course. We are reminded again and again by economists that ethical considerations notwithstanding, monopolies tend to become assholes, artificially increasing prices, and driving scarcity to maximize profits.

Monopoly preferred by a company may not be preferred by its clients.

And this is undeniably true for every capitalist monopoly - without outside regulation and ethics-enforcement either from a democratic government or direct pressure from people themselves, the wellbeing-increasing capacity of monopoly will be abused to create profit for select individuals.

Avoiding or negating this problem, it seems to me, should be the holy grail of economics and applied ethics. Here is my take on it.

Capitalism has to go. If not right now and in its entirety, then selective de-capitalization has to be enforced relentlessly in areas of public interest. This, of course, is not a new idea and is already working exemplary in many countries around the world - utility companies are either state-owned and provide their services at reasonably low and accessible costs (profit going into the wellfare budget anyway) or privately owned, but constantly regulated and inspected to ensure the company is not ran for mere profit, but of customer satisfaction. 

What I am arguing for, however, is a much more intense monopolization and de-capitalization, the prime suspect being the food industry. I see no reason why there should be more than a couple milk and bread processors in a country. I first began thinking about this when I asked myself how come foreign milk is always cheaper than the one we produce ourselves. It's so bizarre, even with the additional cost of transporting the milk significantly further to reach its customers, which involves the myriad costs of trucks moving and freezers rattling that much longer etc, foreigners can pull off milk being 10% cheaper. This means they produce it at as low as 80% cost as we do, which means they are 25% more efficient. Think about it - if they produced all the milk, they could meet all our milk demands and use only 80% of resources we would have used. Think of all the economic, environmental, time and human resources saved. That's mindblowing! What I want here, then, is for foreigners to totally out-compete the local useless producers merely on ethical grounds. If not, I want the foreigners to take over the local companies and introduce their undeniably more efficient means of production here. And I see no reason the local government should not weigh in on this goal either with relaxed legislation, allowing foreign companies to purchase local ones and make investments, or with direct monetary incentives for local companies to offer themselves for sale to foreign partners at reduced price. 

What we have to strive for is monopolization and unification of every single industry on the planet, because that is what maximizes an industries output and capacity to provide the needed goods and services, but at the same time, just as importantly, we have to constantly ensure that these global monopolies are working not for pure profit, but for maximizing customer satisfaction.

Lastly, since we live in a scumbag-filled world of rampant corruption, I always encourage indie competition for the big monopolies, existing or desired. That is because there always is just too much we don't know and, hence, an infinite amount of ways to improve on the monopolies, at least for a time before that adopt the improvements. This would take the form of small companies with innovative products and services at the cutting edge of technology and trends in anything from data-services to organic foods and alternative energy sources.

Thanks, Discuss!

On Antinatalism, Pt. 3

Whenever I discuss my antinatalistic viewpoint and present the arguments for it, I find that the central insight, namely, that there is an assymetry of pleasures and pains between born and unborn individuals, is extremely counter-intuitive for most people and is somewhat hard to explain in familiar terms. Lately, however, I have spent some time thinking about improving this and have, hopefully, come up with a satisfactory way to think about it.

When thinking about pleasures and pains, I propose to introduce a measure of involvement or presence necessary to "feel" this stimulus. I put feeling in parentheses because I don't mean it in the usual sense, but rather in the sense of being the subject of a stimulus, the potential beneficiary of experience.

Feeling pleasure requires high presence.

Feeling pain requires high presence.

Feeling an absence of pleasure (unfulfillment, frustration in desires) requires presence. 

Feeling an absence of suffering (not suffering, nothing) requires no presence.

In the usual, familiar case of humans it is worth understanding pleasures as purely evolutionary - sex, sleep, solving puzzles, sweets and lolcats are a source of pleasure not because they possess inherent phenomenological pleasure attributes that we perceive, but rather our brains have evolved to allow perceiving certain stimuli as pleasurable, usually to serve as a drive for evolutionary advantageous behavior - mating, resting, feeding, attaining mastery. Dennett has explained this perfectly here. So pleasures as stimuli require sophisticated presence - a brain. Put another way - for a stimulus to serve as a source of pleasure, there must be a brain present that would allow for it.

Pains are a similar story - organisms develop neural pathways to expediently and reliably inform the brain that a stimulus is harmful and to force a behavior of self-preservation. It becomes problematic, unfortunately, when consciousness allows for feeling oneself feeling pain. So humans being the most conscious beings on the planet are vulnerable to the most profound suffering while, admittedly, capable of experiencing the greatest level of pleasure as well.

Now, about unborn people. I think that it is useful to think of the unborn as the amount of matter necessary for rudimentary consciousness - in this sense ALL matter is a part of an unborn person's body (curiously, even a living person's body's matter can in time become a part of another's). Now we can claim that a rock is, in fact, a part of an unborn child and birth would then be seen as a biological arrangement of matter to allow for consciousness. Perhaps we can even say, without straining credulity, that a rock IS a child, albeit not yet configurated to have consciousness. Now we can think about the unborn in a materialistic setting. I think it is not unreasonable to claim that the level of presence of rocks is zero, since there is no way for a rock to be frustrated in what amounts to being a rock. I think we can claim without problem that a rock would be indifferent to falling into a star and being fused into different chemicals, much like we could claim that the subatomic particles that constitute the rock could care less whether they are a part of a hydrogen atom, an iron atom or a part of a neutron star's chemically indeterminate mass. So being a rock, i.e. unborn, by default makes one unable interpret a stimulus as either pleasurable or painful. I pose the conclusion this way to point out that the common-sense attitude of rocks not being stimulated at all since they lack the capacity to interpret the stimuli might be mistaken. Absence of pleasures is not frustrating to rocks for they have no frustratable desire to have pleasures. So if my arguments hold water, the only purview of "feeling" available to the unborn is, indeed, an absence of suffering. Let me repeat - all inanimate matter can not and does not suffer every moment of every day. And this is capitally good. Consider the alternative - imagine all matter conscious. The center of the Earth, the Sun, meteorites - all with a consciousness similar to human's. I contend that such animate matter would be utterly miserable since many of their desires would be frustrated with no means to relieve this frustration.

I hope I have demonstrated that it is possible to think of all inanimate matter as in a state of blissful non-suffering, especially when compared to a conscious existence. Hence reproduction can be viewed as a transgression against this natural state of matter, transforming it into beings that are severely disadvantaged in their ability to avoid suffering, even if it grants the laughable ability to enjoy pleasures which turn into pains if they can't be enjoyed due to circumstance.

Discuss!

On Antinatalism, Continued

The five minutes between being awake and asleep are, perhaps, the most productive for my thinking. I have struggled a lot to come to a clear understanding of Benatar's argument of asymmetry when thinking about born and potential children. I have come to believe that a graphical i.e. mathematical representation of his argument is the clearest.


Here is how things stand for all the living:

As we can see from this matrix, the conclusions are clear: If you are already living, it is good to feel pleasures and not feel suffering, while failing to escape suffering and having to go without pleasures (which for biological systems such as humans really equates to suffering) is bad.


Now, for analyzing of the unborn I propose to use a simple technique - multiplication with a minus, since they are not living yet/ever. Lets see where adding a negative multiplier to the previous matrix takes us.

The first implication we get is, unsurprisingly, that adding a minus multiplier to this value matrix has inverted it, similarly to the line of thought that if life is good, being dead/unborn is therefore bad. Lets examine this, however.


An immediate eyesore for me is the "absent suffering" quadrant. While technically the analysis says it is Bad (and we can only arrive at this conclusion by a stretch and if we maintain a holistic view of the relationships between the quadrants), I really can not commit myself to thinking and saying wholeheartedly that I resent not having a million more children on Earth whenever there would be a chance for them to "not suffer". And Benatar's argument takes this but one step further and points out the similar situation in "present pleasure" quadrant for the unborn, where the analysis shows a minus. He says that it is fallacious to "resent not having a million more children on Earth to feel certain pleasures." I certainly have never had to sigh under my breath whenever I experienced a joyous moment for thinking "oh, I wish we could increase the population so those new people can experience similar joys". And I am told my thinking (or lack thereof) is in step with a vast majority. But there is one more consideration. It is asking: "Are the unborn really "hurt" from missing out on joy?" Being a Bright, I tend to rephrase this question as: "Are rocks really "hurt" by lacking the consciousness to appreciate the joy, of, say, love?" By what we can extrapolate from our understanding of the world, no, they are not. It is therefore unlikely that a million billion unborn, potential beings look down on us from a form of heaven and go: "Look at them having all that fun! We could be having it too, if only they had more babies whose bodies we could quicken!!"


This discussion has illustrated that if we were to somehow evaluate the "hedonistic value of life" and it turned out to be a positive value, it would not imply that every unborn child loses out on exactly that amount of pleasure. Quite the contrary, the unborn have all the perks of suffering avoidance on by default. This is especially relevant since I am convinced that the "hedonistic value of life" is never a positive value (for a single person for himself) thus evading suffering is more important than to be able to experience joys, in which not being born is the ultimate strategy.  


Discuss!