Scholar

I am thinking about how I could cause suffering to myself but my mind is resisting it, and I don't know how I would do that without damaging myself. I don't think the kind of suffering where I know I am not actually damaging myself is the same as the suffering I would experience if I actually lost something important. I don't have access to psychedelics so that's not an option for me at the moment. But then I think I can predict the way my mind will react, because I see so many other people who react certain ways, and I know how I reacted in the past. It's just that I don't know what is beyond the reaction that makes suffering somehow bad. But then when I look at the suffering there is something about it that I cannot explain in words that makes it seem like it is bad. I just can't articulate it, but then there is also something that makes it seem like just another experience, that I cannot articulate either. I probably should do a solo retreat. The worst thing about this is though that it seems like suffering is not the same if you are being conscious of it. So when I want to learn about suffering, the learning about it is modifying the suffering in a way that makes it different from someone not being conscious at all and just suffering and being immersed in it completely. So how do I actually investigate it? Let's say one would want to measure a particle that changes when you measure it, how would one ever get to know what the particle truly is, if the creation of knowledge is modifying it? And to me it seems to be the same way for all experiences, when I focus on them they become a different thing, when I observe them they are not the same thing as the unobserved experience. How do I get past this?

I don't understand. I have had these kinds of things happen to me a lot when I did martial arts, nothing really changed. Every time I suffered it never really changed anything in the end, because the suffering always ends, and it will eventually for all sentient beings as we all have to die. But that is not even my question, I do know that my behavior changes from suffering, like these peoples behavior, but I do not understand suffering itself. If the experience is void of behavior, of reaction, then what is it that suffering is? Is suffering still suffering if there is no reaction from the mind? Or are these things connected? But then what is suffering other than something that adjusts aspects of the mind? I know I sound edgy but I am confused as to what it is. I can clearly see that suffering is motivating me to write this, and I do see that the behavior is linked to the experience, but what does any of that matter? Nothing can corrupt reality, nothing can harm it, nothing can make it suffer, right? Even if there is total immersion in suffering, nothing actually is happen to reality itself, it seems to stay the same. So what does any of it matter? Are you saying I should not create suffering because I cannot not be trying to avoid it, as my mind is structured in a way to inherently avoid and resist it? But this all seems like just another game that will end one day either way, and I do know that I will be playing this game either way. The more I think about this, the less I know what I am even questioning here.

I think my question is more of "What is negativity truly, and why is it stupid to stop avoiding it?". I never said I see nothing wrong with suffering, I am questioning the nature of wrongness.

Why would it be stupid to live life kicking yourself in the nuts everyday? You seem to be claiming that it is self-evident, but that is precisely what I am questioning. I am aware of the fact that I am not in a position of great suffering, and that if I was, there would be very different kinds of experiences manifesting in consciousness, such as an experience of regret, resistance etc. But why does that matter, truly? Why do you say is it stupid to suffer, and to regret suffering? Why is the experience of regret an inherently stupid thing to manifest in consciousness? Yes, all these thoughts I am having right now will disappear in an instant if enough of the experience of suffering manifests itself in consciousness, and as a result of that new thoughts and behavior will arise. I will rethink my position, of course I will, but isn't that only because my mind is made to do so? I know the behavior will happen, but my question is what is inherently bad about that behavior? Even if I experience the greatest amount of suffering possible, what is it that is actually happening? Is it truly something bad? And if not, why is it stupid to inflict it to oneself?

I think I have put the wrong question into the topic-header. I am aware of the philosophy behind how suffering is created, what it's purpose is and so on, but I am more curious about the experience of suffering itself and why it should be avoided? What about suffering is inherently undesirable in a way that a fully conscious human should strive to avoid it? I know that it's unpleasant, that suffering also include absolute terror, but why are these things any different from experiences like joy? I don't really believe in good and evil, but to me it seems like the experience of suffering carries what we would call evil in it because we find it intrinsically undesirable. How is that possible? Why is it that suffering is such an intensely negative experience, and what does that even mean? It becomes weird because it's kind of like trying to make sense of the experience of colors, I cannot really make any sense of it other than just saying it exists and it is what it is.

If I wanted to justify making others suffering for my pleasure I would probably not be a vegan. I am just interested in the nature of suffering and what makes it inherently bad, I want to know if there is something metaphysical about it that makes it somehow an experience that should be avoided, but to me it looks like it's just an experience that makes us avoid things, so the other way around.

I don't know if it would be good, I probably would not like it, but I don't understand why that matters? Me not liking something is just another experience, and I know it does not feel that way while I am experiencing it, but that is part of the experience. But why is that actually a bad thing?

No, but why does it matter what I like and dislike?

That is not true though, I can finance the suffering of billions of beings without ever having to deal with any consequences, so why would I not do so? And why is it important to avoid suffering at all? I know that I will avoid it because I am an ego, but so what? Even if I want it to stop and regret it, why is that a bad thing? Is the only reason to avoid suffering in others so that I myself don't suffer? And is the only reason why I should avoid my own suffering because I will not like it? I understand that suffering makes me behave and think certain ways, but what is inherently bad about these actions and thoughts, and the suffering itself?

Yes but then why should I not cause suffering to others?

That is what I am trying to do and it just confuses me. The more I look at it the more it seems to become vague. I know that I am avoiding suffering, but that seems to happen unconsciously. My question is: If I was fully conscious, why would I avoid suffering and why would I avoid inflicting suffering to other beings? All it seems to do is make me and them act a certain way... I don't see what's intrinsically bad about it anymore. But even worse, when I focus and try to be conscious of the suffering happening in me it seems like the experience is changing, that the suffering when not observed was different from the suffering that is observed, as if it changes in substance the more I observe it. But then how am I supposed to truly know what suffering is. How can I know that my suffering that I have become conscious of is the same suffering as for another who has not become conscious of it?

You can be lucky that Allah does not get offended, because you are equating Allah to ideas. Ask yourself this: Can you really believe in something other than ideas?

So you looking for an alternative perspective means you literally search for the comments which debunk the debunk of what you were looking for to debunk your own assumptions? How does that not make you worry about your cognitive bias? You could research on gut flora and how it effects the ability to digest plant material. Just because avoiding certain foods stops making you feel sick doesn't necessarily mean that they are actually unhealthy for you for some genetic reason. Imagine if walking made you feel pain in your ankle, would you say that walking is unhealthy for you or would you go and fix the reason for why it hurts you? Think about the kind of person who, without a clear understanding of the situation, would be willing to defend the slaughter and enslavement of billions of helpless beings who did nothing to deserve to be in the position they are in. Think about the kind of person who would stand in front of a fully sentient being, look into it's eyes and kill it just so that they could suffer a little less or feel a little healthier and stronger. Imagine the kind of person who would go out of their way to find perspectives which justify that behavior, to find only evidence that makes him feel better about the actions he is taking day by day. Do you believe that this kind of person is anywhere near the potential they could reach? Do you think they are leading by good example, that they are a reflection of humanity or goodness? The one obsessed with his own health, his own suffering and his own perspective? Accepting and surrendering to reality is very easy if you have blindfolds on that keep you from seeing the world for what it is. How good at accepting reality will you be when you are in the position of the cow which you have no problem of slaughtering? For me this is not even about the cow, this is about the ego, about our willingness to embrace corruption. It's not even about being vegan or not, it is about us not willing to recognize the lies that we keep telling ourselves.

I really do think you are biased, have you ever tried to google something like "Lierre Keith debunked"? If you are open-minded give it a try.

Don't you think you might have fallen victim to confirmation-bias? It is in my opinion telling when people stop their research right at the point when some evidence presented seems to confirm their preferred narrative. You could have easily made a google search and realized how absurd your train of thought in this particular instance is, do you not think that your mind is trying to skew reality to fit it's own interests?

You are right in that we cannot know whether they have an experience of life or not, but there is no reason for us to believe they do. As I said, they do not necessitate an experience of life, everything in a plant, all of it's reactions, can be explained on a simple "chemical reaction" basis. The speed at which plants react to their environment though does imply that they do not experience pain and suffering as we do, even if they did have consciousness. Suffering is all about urgency, and from a plants perspective urgency is very relative. Insects and animals move incredibly fast in comparison to plants, thus we can expect their experience of life to be more vivid and intense. Why would a plant feel terror and doom if it can't really do anything about it's situation? If you look at human beings and the way they suffer, when their life is on the brink of death they usually do not suffer either, because there is no reason for them to suffer. There is nothing they can do about it, just as much as there is nothing a plant can do about an animal eating it. With the argument of health I would challenge you as well and ask you if you would accept this positions if it was humans dying instead of animals. If let's say you weren't sure whether you had to eat human beings to be healthy, would you actually kill human beings instead of first trying your absolute best at an alternative diet? You don't know whether you will be unhealthy or healthy on a vegan diet, can you justify to yourself to harm other animals unnecessarily because you are not willing to try a vegan diet? Let's go back to the vampire scenario, if there were vampires who would kill and drink humans just because they thought drinking synthetic blood was unhealthy, would you accept their reasoning? From my position I would would need absolute proof to myself that the alternative to killing and eating a mammal it is my death. Otherwise I could make all sorts of excuses without ever trying it. It's kind of similar to killing someone you think is a threat without having any evidence for him actually being a threat. Are your assumptions really enough for you to end that beings life on the basis that you believe it to be unhealthy? It's not like you will just die if you go vegan, if you develop health issues you can just go back to eating your meats or mussels.

I do not deny they are conscious or do not feel pain, I think you have a hard time seeing what I am trying to convey to you. And there is no reason to assume that mussels have an experience of life, they do not have a central nervous system. The suffering of mussels, much like the suffering of plants, would be completely unnecessary as they are not as mobile as mammals are. The very reason why we suffer is precisely because we are mobile, because we have the ability to avoid danger immediately. It's not like pain is inherent to nature, pain is simply a tool to communicate to the agent what to avoid. A non-mobile being does not require pain because they cannot avoid anything at all. But yes, I can see why you would have the bias you do, it probably increases your quality of life because, again, you do not need to recognize the unnecessary harm you are causing to your surrounding and to sentient beings who have a far higher capacity for suffering and consciousness than for example insects do. Additionally, if you were worried about insects and plants, you'd have even a bigger reason to go vegan, as animal agriculture consumes and kills more plants and insects than the plant agriculture would do if you directly consumed the plants. Of course the destruction of habitat is significant as well. You are equating intelligence to sentience. Just because a plant can do things does not mean it has an experience of life. The experience of life really is nothing but a tool to react to the surrounding world in real time. By your logic, computers already have an experience of life, as they can do all the things that mussels and plants can do, theoretically. You can program a robot to avoid lots of things, does that mean the robot is suffering when he does so? It is very ignorant to assume that all life on this planet is structured the same way as we mammals are. Just because we suffer when we die, does not mean a plant does. Just because we suffer when we burn ourselves, does not mean a mussel does. In fact, when you are in deep sleep you are not sentient at all. There is no experience of life, even though you might still react significantly to your surroundings. Ask yourself this, if you had no memory of anything at all, ever, not even a short term memory, would you be able to experience the world? If every single moment that passes by you would instantly forget, or even better, it would never enter your memory, what would pain really mean to you? You would still react to it, but would you actually experience it as anything at all? It's an interesting question, and it's not obvious at all in my opinion. Even when your brain is active, it does not mean you are sentient/you have an experience of life. What does that mean for a plant or for an insect? Furthermore, if an insect has consciousness, why do you think your brain is limited to one experience of life? What if different parts of you brain have different, separate experiences of life, with you being the one that experiences thoughts and the ego. What if there are within you multiple beings that communicate with each other. You would never know.

There is no difference between beheading a dog puppy and killing an ant to you? Do you think the ant has the same capacity to suffer as the puppy does? Do you think the ants experience of life is as vivid and complex as that of a cow? Basing your ethical system on life itself is very arbitrary and I would challenge you that you actually do not operate that way at all. If a plant has no experience of life whatsoever, why would you be worried about killing it? Sounds more like you want to justify the killing of fully sentient mammals by equalizing the worth with all other life that exists. By that logic you can justify any behavior whatsoever. Anyways, it doesn't matter that much. Mussels are most likely more than enough to sustain your health even if you have suspicions that a vegan diet might not be healthy for you. Problem solved!

Nobody is right is the point he is making I think. Imagine if you have slept your entire life, you never woke up, and your entire life you were literally dreaming. In your dream a person would come to you and tell you about how you are dreaming. Would you possibly be capable of understanding what dreaming is, or what waking up means? And did ever something happen in your dream that actually made you wake up?

I have the same problem, and I cannot wrap my mind around it either. Let's assume the materialist position, that an outside world exists and that a brain is generating consciousness: If that is true, every idea I have, every impression of reality I have, is nothing but an illusion created by the brain. Though the problem here is that this illusion includes all impressions and ideas of the brain I have as well! Everything I believe about reality is nothing but a belief, that is the very problem! If I believe that a brain exists, what exactly is happening? I have a thought of a brain, and that thought included that the thought of the brain is created by the brain. That means the thought of the brain cannot be the brain, no matter what thought I will have! Your mind should be absolutely blown at this point, but let's continue. If my thought about the brain is not the brain itself then what the hell is the brain? Any thought I will ever have about the brain can impossibly be the brain. By definition the brain is creating the ideas, so how could the ideas be the same as the brain? It gets even worse! The brain is made of atoms, but atoms are nothing but an idea in my head as well! If atoms are what is creating my experience, then clearly the idea of atoms that I have are not the atoms, because the atoms are what is generating the idea! What is going on?! It goes further: Every idea I have about anything is happening in my consciousness, right? It's also true that any experience I have at all is happening in my consciousness as well! But my ideas about consciousness and experiences itself are experiences and ideas themselves! They clearly are not consciousness, but how is it possible that I can even have a thought about consciousness? Why can I think about anything, and what does thinking about anything even mean? At this point I am utterly confused. It seems like it's the limit of the mind, but the problem is that the limit of the mind is just another idea in the mind! This goes on and on! It's like I am generating a fatal error in my own programming. Can you see it too?

If you did smoke boiled potatoes for 1 year every day and it would have revealed to you the nature of reality, how would you convince people of doing the same? What if you had no idea how or why it worked? If you actually do smoke boiled potatoes for 1 year and get enlightened, I am sure you will sound like a madman trying to convince people to do the same. The problem is that only you know it worked, nobody else. Imagine if then someone came to you and asked for proof and told everyone around you it was absurd to have blind faith in that technique? You think there is a clear path to discern between useful tools and useless garbage. You fail to see how difficult that process in actuality is and how in many ways it is a game of chance. If you would only trust what you knew to be true, or what you thought to be true, then you would not be able to operate in this world. Your mind seeks for certainty where there is uncertainty. You seek to know what you cannot know. All I can tell you is that it will do nothing but harm you, and all you can do is consider that I might be right and then seek the truth yourself.

That's not quite true, you do not need to consume eggs, dairy and meat if you have the option to consume mussels and insects. Primates are insect eating animals, and human beings have this weird cultural thing where we completely ignore that fact. Ask one of those Paleo guys whether they eat insects, none of them do. They don't even consider it to be a possibility. If you are worried about ethics/ecology you really will have a hard time to justify consuming product that cause great suffering, death and environmental destruction if you have the option to consume insects/mussels. Just do some research on this, human beings have specific genetic adaptations to digest insect exoskeletons. No need for synthetic anything, you can in fact raise your own mealworms! As far as I know it's not difficult at all. Yes, but nobody is complaining about people who get offered meat accidentally and then eat it. People are complaining about people buying meat fully conscious of their decision. Look, I would still prefer everyone on this planet to be a stick-in-the-ass vegan than have carnists around. It's hilarious how people complain about the behavior of vegans when their own behavior is causing incredible amounts of suffering in other sentient beings without any regard for life. It's like the difference between a mass murderer and an annoying police officer who pulls everyone over because he is an asshole. You cannot compare the two at all, though that is exactly what is happening in the hopes of dismissing the vegan movement. People get offended by calling the slaughtering of animals murder, instead of getting offended by the fact that these animals are dying for no other reason than our comfort. It is quite hilarious.

I would guess that these would be Leo's arguments for eating meat: "No matter how you live your life, you will cause death and harm anyways."/"Death is part of life!" "Suffering and death is illusion."/"Who cares lol, Absolute Infinity!" Leo is a moral nihilist and it seems like people just don't want to accept that fact. From the vegan perspective, it is wrong to actively kill an animal unnecessarily, and also to fund industries that do so. Imagine you thought raping was wrong, and you knew a person who from time to time would be raping people, would you accept the excuse of "You're such a stick-in-ass anti-rapists. If I rape once in a while it's not like it will make that much of a difference!". You'd be viewed as completely insane, and from the perspective of an ethical vegan you look the same if you from time to time kill an animal for taste-pleasure. Another good analogy is being a vampire. Imagine if there were vampires around and they had alternatives to sucking peoples blood out of their veins (always causing death in the process). Imagine these vampires could drink artificial blood, though they hated the taste and wouldn't be fully healthy doing so. If there was a vampire who then went on to snatch himself a human from time to time (and in the process necessarily kill him) because he just "can't help himself", or because he wants to be fully healthy, what would you think about that vampire? And with veganism it's even worse, because even if you are concerned about your health there are multiple sources of flesh that don't come from fully sentient animals. For example, Leo could eat mussels or various forms of insects (in fact, there is almost no primate around who does not consume insects) and be fully healthy as well, but he chooses his comfort for whatever reason he has. Morality is subjective, so we can bend it to how it suits us the most, and I think that is what Leo is doing.

Today I have tried to have some conversations with people on discord (it's a chat-application) on multiple servers, and I am not sure whether I am just incompatible with people or whether people are just being hyper-emotional. I was on multiple philosophy servers and tried to make some Atheists question materialism, I remained calm and non-judgemental. I asked questions about the nature of substance, I tried to ask what they mean when they talk about material, particles etc. and I even went so far to explain to them quantum mechanics, which they immediately dismissed because I am not a physicist myself. They refused to investigate and learn about physics when I told them that I did not think it was controversial to assume that the model of particles, atoms etc. are merely models that are not supposed to resemble reality but instead are a tool to predict it. I was ridiculed, I was called crazy, reductionist, low-iq. They went completely nuts on me. The only person on that server I was capable of having a conversation with was a Christian who claimed he took multiple doses of 5-MeO-DMT. He was the only person who was even remotely open minded enough to even talk to, and note that I really tried to explain these things from the perspective of a materialist, I tried to show them how materialism didn't hold up even from a rational, scientific view-point. Didn't work. Then I decided to strike up conversation with vegans, on a vegan server, because I am a vegan myself. I remained polite and open minded, when people started to call certain individuals Nazi's and Misogynist's, I politely disagreed and inquired for them to tell me why they think that was the case. They went completely crazy, they were offended by the mere fact that I could even consider that these people were not what they claimed they were. It was not possible for me, no matter how hard I tried to appease them and be nice, to have a normal open minded conversation with them. I wanted them to convince me of their position, and they still took offense in the mere fact that I was not able to adopt it. All I am trying to do is find a place where I can have normal conversations with people about philosophy without emotions and dogma. I just cannot find it, and I seriously am questioning whether I have some blind-spot where I just don't see my irrationality that seemingly makes everyone think I am a threat to them. I even tried approaches where I merely asked questions, without including any of my own ideology, and people think I am trolling and being intentionally annoying as if I had nothing better to do. It just frustrates me, the people who are supposed to show compassion show no mercy to people who are of other opinion or ignorant. And the people who are supposed to be rational seem to actively avoid rationalism in the favor of staying in their paradigm. Does anyone here know how to deal with this? Do I have to give up on conversation and debate and just philosophize by myself? I really don't want to do that because I know I have blind spots in my belief-systems that I might not see if someone else doesn't point them out to me.