This has been brewing in my brain for quite some time, finally, I think it is ready. Posed another way it is the Formal Argument Against Natalism (FAAN).
Premise 0: The objective of life is paradise, heaven, nirvana - achieving bliss.
Premise 1: Qualitatively bliss is equal to nonexistence.
Premise 2: A situation with any amount of pain is less desirable than bliss.
Premise 3: Life is a situation where pain is present.
Conclusion: Nonexistence is preferable over life.
Stated otherwise the conclusion reads: "Life's objective is best achieved by its antithesis - nonexistence, death."
I see reasonable criticisms targeting premises 0 and 1. Let's look into them.
Criticism to Premise 0: "Life's objective is not bliss / Life does not have a particular objective." Fancy semantics aside, I don't see what else could be desirable in existence other than the things we find desirable due to our evolutionary adaptations, namely, sweets, sex, fun and meaning. Indulging in things we prefer for as long as humanly possible (for an eternity after death in some mythologies) is what bliss means. If you think there are things worth wanting besides them, things the human mind does not recognize as worthwhile or recognizes as outright undesirable, I don't know what you are talking about and I dare say - neither do you. Furthermore, if one is inclined to argue that life has no particular objective, I may be inclined to agree, since it bolsters FAAN, not weakens it. If life recognized as objective-less i.e. meaningless, procreating and creating new minds clearly becomes self defeating if not outright malicious, i.e. it's best even for a natalist to accept Premise 0.
Criticism to Premise 1: "Bliss and nonexistance are not equal, bliss is so much better!" I must say that Premise 1 is indeed very counter-intuitive. We often fall prey to this strangeness in our daily lives by trading sleep (a temporary return to nonexistence) for perceived pleasures such as sex and partying. This reasoning, however, only applies to mortal beings who are already alive and forgoing pleasures would inevitably result in suffering of varying degrees, not an absence of perceptions as in nonexistence. The way to pump up your intuition about this is to compare two situations.
Situation A: An existing person flickers between two mental states - one of bliss and one of the usual human ennui.
Situation B: A potential "person" flickers in and out of existence changing from nonexistent to blissful respectively. (We will have to skip over the metaphysical or transhuman ways this could occur.)
In Situation A the change is very real and palpable - it is far better for the person (or a billion) to feel bliss rather than ennui. And it is better precisely not because bliss means pleasure (it may, but it does not have to. Nirvana, for example, means exactly the type of bliss that is characterized by the absence of suffering, by nothingness), but because people feeling bliss would be spared any and all feelings of pain. Pleasures are only relevant within the context of relieving pain.
My contention is that in Situation B the flickering reveals no difference in the world. It makes no difference whether there is one such a person or a billion. Indeed, imagine a planet fit for life but sterile and then an instant later populated by a billion blissful people, then an instant later the people are gone. Keep turning their existence on and off until you can show how them actually being on the planet blissful and all is any improvement of them not being on the planet or anywhere else for that matter. Indeed, there might be such a weird planet in a far-away galaxy. How is the universe or them bettered by being rather than not? As an analogy, consider a brand new heaven (the planet) without anyone in it. Being bored, a deity would snap a billion people into existence to enjoy the bliss of heaven. Boredom having receded the deity would snap the people out of existence. Would it have mattered at all? No, minds are served equally by feeling bliss and not existing i.e. what Premise 1 states.
I'm afraid this argument devastates the very foundation of bliss-based life, since it shows that even if the goal is achieved, either by metaphysical or transhuman means, once everyone enters bliss, they might as well begin flickering in and out of existence, ultimately failing to reappear and not feeling the least bit slighted by it.
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