Antinatalism & Negative Utilitarianism: Why is it Wrong?

In this episode, we tackle the controversial topic of antinatalism, debunking its core arguments and highlighting its logical inconsistencies. From addressing the recent terrorist attacks tied to the philosophy to exploring the philosophical and moral arguments against it, we delve deep into why antinatalism's worldview is fundamentally flawed. We contrast the antinatalist perspective with the pronatalist view, discussing concepts of individualism, cultural identity, and the human drive to progress and contribute to something greater. The episode also considers the future implications of antinatalism and its potential impact on human civilization. As to why were are becoming more aggressive in our thoughts on this subject is the number of lives we have seen ruined by the proliferation of this philosophy and the lack of positive externalities associated with it. Song 1: Song 2: Discord: https://discord.com/invite/EGFRjwwS92 The School: https://parrhesia.io/student-signup App to talk with kids: https://wizling.ai/ Malcolm Collins: have you done harm to a Native American tribe? If you sterilize all of their members? , And your member of that tribe would be like, you have done the most harm anyone could conceivably commit against our people, Simone Collins: but to Antinatalists, Malcolm Collins: you have done that tribe a favor. , And this is because to an antinatalists, the only unit at which humans exist is at the level of the individual, not at any other level. Not at the level of the family, not at the level of the civilization or the society, to most other humans that exist, they don't exist at the level of the individual. Mm-hmm. Here is how pronatalist see the world. Civ Song: we must adapt and press forward if we are to see our journeys end and how will we know when we get there? It is the nature of humankind to push itself toward the horizon. We test our limits. We face our fears. We rise to the challenge. And become something greater than ourselves, a civilization. Malcolm Collins: Here is how antinatalist see the world. Antz Movie Quote: I gotta believe there's some place out there that's better than this. Otherwise, I would just curl up in a larva position and weep but. It's this whole. Gung-ho superorganism thing that, i'm supposed to do everything for the colony and, what about my needs? What about me? The whole system. Makes me feel. Insignificant. Excellent. You've made a real breakthrough. You are insignificant time. I am. Malcolm Collins: How you choose to frame your reality is fundamentally a choice. You get to choose how you contextualize your position in the world and the way you relate to society and what your identity is, or at least within the pronatalist framework you do. Because to an antinatalists, you don't get to make that choice. You don't get to decide that you exist at some more important level than just at the individual. You get to decide what your purpose in life is. Is it to just be an individual running from emotional stimuli that evolved into our ancestors centuries ago due to environmental cues that have nothing to do with our current condition? Or is it to build something greater than yourself to participate in the work that all mankind from the birth of human civilization till today? Has built for us to continue on their behalf. Civ Song: , The path has not always been easy, ours is a journey that spans generations where one story ends, another begins. The world our ancestors faced was brutal. Yet from it, the true life, a mother road to prosperity was at times harsh. From the ashes of the old. New possibilities arise. You need only persevere The true power to shape this world, as always laying in your hands, Intro: would you like to know more? Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today we are gonna go back to a topic that needs to be revisited because of the number of terrorist attacks that have been tied to it recently, and its relevance to us as people who are generally seen as running the prenatal list movement, or at least the ProTech faction of the prenatal list movement. And this is the subject of Antinatalism. So when I talk about the various terrorist attacks specifically, there were recent IVF clinic bombing that was specifically tied to Eism, which is a philosophy downstream of it. The Sandy Hook shootings where on their YouTube channel, they talked about Eism and the Christchurch Mosque shootings where he said that the reason he targeted Muslims, they media called him a great replacement theorist, but he, he said, no, like Muslims are having more kids, which is a fact, and therefore I'm gonna kill them because I think there should be less kids. Not because for the environment. Simone Collins: For the environment, Malcolm Collins: for the environment. It was an environment which is a Simone Collins: common stance held by ISTs. In fact the, the most recent anti, the most recent anti terrorist was a vegan his female friend who had likely ended her life through the use of her boyfriend and a firearm was also like literally her online username was vegan edalist. Yeah, so like there is extreme overlap between he heavy focus on sustainability in the environment, which I don't think is bad. Like obviously eating meat is morally wrong. We just do it anyway. And Antinatalism. So, yeah, so he counts too. And I think that this is meaningful because what we're seeing strung together here, three acts of terror is, is the fact that this isn't just, and this is actually something that came up in the manifesto of the most recent terrorists. He said, antinatalism isn't nihilism. And I think people really misunderstand it. They think that an antinatalists are just deeply depressed people who think that nothing matters in the world. He says, no, that's not true. Antinatalists believe very vehemently in one thing, which is that suffering is bad and we need to end it. And if you are a more extreme antinatalists like him, you are essentially on a holy war to end suffering. By ending sentience, like you have an imperative to end life and you're willing to do that. All things Malcolm Collins: that can suffer. Mm-hmm. If suffer is the core evil in the universe, and you need to end the things that can suffer. And, and this is one of those philosophies that I think is so compelling to people, because on its surface, if you don't put a lot of thought in it, it seems really well thought through. Mm-hmm. And, and internally it's an internally consistent worldview. Very different than like progressivism or wokes or anything like that. The problem is, is that if you scratch that surface, which is what we're gonna be doing in this video it makes. No logical sense. And we have done a video on this before, like early, early in our channel's history. But I wanted to come to it again because I have some new arguments. I wanted to this time go more directly to our book, the Pragma, go to Crafting Religion, where we were make direct arguments on this. But one of the new arguments that , I don't know why I didn't think of this when we were writing our book is what Antinatalists will tell you. Because what you might be thinking is, wait, wait, wait. They wanna end suffering. Do they not think that they are doing harm to individuals? When they you know, in, in their lives and they're like, oh, well what we would do is not in the lives of living individuals, just prevent the lives of individuals who are kind of coming to being in the future, right? Mm-hmm. Through sterilization or through not having kids. And so they're like, you can't harm somebody who hasn't been born yet, which for me, I just find to be on its face a ludicrous idea. Like very, obviously you can, if you this isn't the new argument, but if you go back in time and you sterilize my wife, you have done harm to my children. You are responsible for the differential impacts on the timeline that every one of your choices make, whether or not those people have been born yet or not. Mm-hmm. Trying to weasel your way out of that is the most morally like, like. Honestly, like, it feels like a super villain from a show where he is like, I've done nothing wrong. I merely went back in time and prevented the birth of people who it's like, well, you prevented it. He is like, but they didn't exist when I prevented them from existing. And it's like, well, they would've existed without your action. Like clearly you're responsible for that. How, how, how is it that you believe that your existence is at such a privileged level compared to the people who haven't been born yet? How, how could you even come to be that narcissistic? W and this is the thing, right, fundamentally, is you can always choose to not exist. They can't choose to manifest themselves into existence. You are never doing harm by bringing a life into the world because that life can always remove itself. You are always doing harm by not bringing a life into the world because that life can't choose to. This, this is like the basic, this isn't like a new argument. This is something that anyone who has applied even the basic logic to this should be able to see. And they're like, oh no, but ending myself is so hard. And it's like, no, no, no, nah, nah, nah, no. It's that you don't want to, you are a fundamentally vile and selfish person. And I, before this I was like, okay, yes, antinatalists are overwhelmingly antisocial. Yes, they're overwhelmingly narcissistic. Yes, they're overwhelmingly Machiavellian. There have been multiple studies and follow up studies showing this, but when I watch people like this girl who had her boyfriend kill her, rather than taking responsibility for that herself, that she was willing to ruin his entire life rather than, that's a step too far. Take responsibility for this decision herself. Yeah. Or the IVF clinic bomber willing to risk other people's lives just to make a statement. Simone Collins: Yeah. Although, you know, I wanna point out two, two things where I'll agree with him. One, he pointed out that there are many examples of terrorists , and school shooters, mass shooters, who. Attempted to end their lives voluntarily by themselves without hurting anyone else and failed or couldn't. 'cause it's, it's too hard right now. And he argued that euthanasia should be a lot easier. And I 1000% agree, like, yes, no, of Malcolm Collins: course you agree with that, but that's, that's neither here nor there. Even where euthanasia is not legal. It is really not that hard to unlive yourself. The, the argument, everything's Simone Collins: harder when you're depressed. Malcolm Collins: I mean, Simone Collins: you know, I, I Malcolm Collins: guess, but, it's to contrast the difficulty of that with manifesting your existence when somebody decided to sterilize your parents is astronomical. They will make arguments like, well, people who haven't been born yet don't exist yet. How can you say that somebody who doesn't exist yet, life has value. And it's like, bro, they only don't exist yet. From your arbitrary position on the timeline, how. Arrogant. Do you have to be to believe that your arbitrary position on the timeline is the moral nexus of all reality? , This is just a trick of how humans perceive time. Like clearly those future events are going to happen and you are responsible for them, and you are responsible for the differential effects you have on the timeline. When you think about directions , , like on a graph, time is just another axis on that graph. The only thing that makes time different from, you know, vertical or horizontal directionality is that we as humans, cannot go backwards within it. But that doesn't mean that past times don't exist or future times don't exist. They very evidently do. Saying that all humans within x part of a timeline's lives have literally zero value, and your life is exponentially superior to theirs in terms of its value is the same as me saying everyone who lives in a specific geographic region like Africa or something's life has no value because they're in a different point within the, , spatial representation of our reality. It's a horrifying thing to do. It is almost as if they're trying to argue that future events are not real, which is to me just bizarre that anybody , could bring themselves to believe that. But it is this level of dehumanization of people who are in a different location on the timeline than them. Yeah, and this is the thing about Antinatalism. I am okay with Antinatalists being antinatalists. Like I think that they probably, , are more likely both culturally and genetically to be more pessimistic and they probably will not contribute much to the future of humanity if you force them to breed or something. I think that they are doing a service to our civilization, and so I am okay with the way that they view time. What is interesting here is. I'm not saying they have to see time the way I see time. What I'm saying here is they have to see how somebody could see this way of looking at time and morality is logically, internally coherent and would be compelling to a large percent of the population that you are responsible for. All the differential effects that your decisions make on the timeline to anyone, whether or not they have been conceived yet. And this is the problem Antinatalists have, their goal is only achieved if everyone agrees with them. So if there is a separate alternate framework around either identity or how time works, that is logically consistent. They need to eradicate that, even if it is as logically consistent as their own. We only need to argue that our way of looking at time and morality is plausible and therefore some groups should be allowed to believe that. They need to argue that their way of looking at time and morality is absolute, and everyone should be forced to believe that. But , the new argument I thought of when I was thinking of this is like, yeah, but like, when you think of how people relate to identity very few people outside of the irman monoculture have a primary identity, which is individual based. So by this, what I mean is I would ask, have you done harm to a Native American tribe? If you sterilize all of their members? And, and your average person or average member of that tribe would be like, you have literally committed genocide against us. You have done the most harm anyone could conceivably commit against our people. Well, and there Simone Collins: have been historical instances of certain types of people being sterilized, and that is. Is, is I'm pretty universally condemned. I don't know if anyone like, but to Antinatalists, Malcolm Collins: you have done that tribe a favor. And, and this is because to an antinatalists, the only unit at which humans exist is at the level of the individual, not at any other level. Not at the level of the family, not at the level of the civilization or the society, or at the level of what you know, , , the thing that you are continuing yet to most other humans that exist, they don't exist at the level of the individual. Mm-hmm. The, , native American might say, well, you know, first and foremost, I'm a member of my tribe. Right? Yeah. Or a lot of, right. Wingers will say, first and foremost, I'm a member of Western civilization. Right. And I, I, and I see my goal as, as, as building on that civilization living for something that I see as greater than myself. And the Antinatalists will say, well, I. W wait, what? They'll be like, wait, wait, wait. You live for something other than yourself. Ex. Explain that to me. And it's like, most humans live for things other than themselves. It's clearly how we're programmed to live. If you look at artistic media and everything like that, and you see depictions of the good life, the end of gladiator, right? You know, the end of grandma and grandpa turned young again, nobody, nobody, nobody ever is like about all the pleasures they had in life. Like, like so few people see things that way, right? Yeah. it once. Make us believe it again. And here it lays out very clearly what is good in life. Good in life is family. What? What is your purpose in life? Your purpose in life is to uplift your civilization through sacrifice, to play your role as a cog in the greater human machine. Speaker 7: Mr. Mayor, do you have a plan to deal with the fat sale housing shortage? I'd like to announce we're beginning construction on a, uh, third chin. What do you have to say to all the hair cells recently laid off from the scalp? There'll be plenty of new jobs for everyone on the back. 85% of red blood cell children don't even know how to carry oxygen. Be. Bull people, the body is in perfect shape the following is a paid political announcement. Speaker 8: The bowels, it didn't always smell this way. . There was a time when eating right and exercise kept this whole area of vital center of activity. As mayor, I would set long-term goals that include ordering salads and eating brand. If we pull together and put in a little hard work, a new frank. It could be right around the corner. Malcolm Collins: And what's ironic is by deciding to serve something greater than yourself, you end up experiencing. Much, much, much more aggregate pleasure and meaning, and experiencing the hard times less severely than somebody who takes a negativity, utilitarian, or anti-natal list approach. And I'd also note here if they're like, well, no, , the core unit of humanity is the individual, because that's what I perceive the world through. And it's like, actually that's mostly an illusion if you know your neuroscience. , The reality , is that if you, for example, split somebody's, , corpus callosum that connects the two hemispheres of their brain, their brains basically act as separate people within a single individual. If you wanna learn more about this, you can look at our video. You're probably not as conscious as you think. . And the various other brain, the parts mostly work independently from each other. And then, you know, how human is a human, but a combination of cells, you know, the, the, we get to choose where we define our identity. , And , I choose, and I think most people who derive meaning for life choose something bigger than themselves. What that is is up to you. Antz: Okay. I gotta keep a positive attitude, a good attitude, even though I'm utterly insignificant. I'm, I'm insignificant, but with attitude. Malcolm Collins: This is a very, very narrow viewpoint to divide. All of human experience into subjective, pleasure and suffering. Right. Because most people do not contextualize Yeah. People aren't Simone Collins: thinking back to like that one massage they got or like that really, really good dinner as they die, Malcolm Collins: or the sex that they had or whatever. Yeah. It's the ways that they were able to contribute to something greater than themselves. Mm-hmm. Because that is, I think like if you're gonna actually like, live a good life and be satisfied with your life, that's the way you're gonna live. And then they will say, wait, but like we should discount their cultural perspective and default to my cultural perspective. And I'm like, why? Like, why do you get to defo? Like, like just say, oh, they're all wrong. Like even though their beliefs are also internally consistent, you're basically saying they're all wrong and I get to force my beliefs on them. Mm-hmm. My beliefs about what identity should be, my beliefs about what hu humanity should be. And, and I'd even ask you to ask yourself a serious question. If you are in a lineup of 20 people and all those 20 people said independently, because keep in mind that these perceptions have come about independently, that on that table in front of me, there is a duck and a train, a toy duck and a joy train. And then you walk up and you only see a duck. Okay? Unless you are like actually crazy and narcissistic, and I think this is why narcissism is so high in this population, you'd be like. I must not be seeing something. Maybe I need to change the angle of which I'm looking. Maybe I need to, you know, you, you would, you would think, why is everybody else saying there's more to life than pain and suffering? Why is every other culture structuring their lives around something more than pain and suffering? Why is it only me that is able to, is there maybe something that's wrong with my brain that I'm not able to see, like any wider purpose in life besides pain and suffering? Mm-hmm. Like, is it, is it something wrong with me that I supposedly make all of these sacrifices, like this vegan antinatalists chick to live like this ethical life and then I convinced my boyfriend to ruin his by taking mine. Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and, and the same for her friend. And, and the, the bomber, like, did he need to injure people? Like, or, or the, Malcolm Collins: the Sandy Hook shooter, the glee he took when like little kids said to him, like, I don't wanna die today. What, what do you say when he, he's. Simone Collins: Oh, I don't know. Don't tell me. I don't wanna know. I can't, I can't, anything about it was something like, you know, I can't know anything about it. Mm-hmm. Malcolm Collins: Well, it's okay. He, he is like, well, it's not your choice kid. Or something like that, you know, like taking a lot of glee in what he's doing. And, and we repeatedly see this was in this community, right? And, and it's. To me the, the Native American argument is really strong because it's like this is something that historically happened and it's something that antinatalists actually believe that you are doing a, a benefit to this community. Yeah. And that they believe that their understanding of self should supersede any alternate cultural framework, any alternate personal framework, even if that framework makes perfect sense. Like you look at our belief and we believe that every individual's goal is to improve themselves every day and to improve themselves intergenerationally and improve the culture from which they come. And this is much closer to the framework that the vast majority of societies have adopted. Like, this is what I strive to exist for. Whereas Antinatalists strive for personal hedonism, and yet they live these lives of hate, like go to any of their forms, go to the old f list forms of any of them have been archives or the current antinatalists forms. These are not happy. People. Right? And it you could say like, well, and that's what's motivating all this. And I'd be like, no, they're not happy people because they've created a culture in which they create dominance, hierarchies of unhappiness. Hmm. And that leads them, because the thing that humans, even at their default state strive for the most isn't even happiness when you're operating on pure animal mode. It is unw, local dominance hierarchies. And so you will make yourself unhappy or, or, or cosplay as unhappy if that can elevate you within the social networks that you value. Mm-hmm. And so I think that this fundamentally undermines everything else about Antinatalism and that it shows that even them who claim that they should be doing what the Opus day or what us do, which is attempt to recontextualize everything in their lives to extract the most positive emotions from it. And it's something that you can do. Like the Adams family does this, for example. They just recontextualize what they're experiencing. These individuals have that as an option, but they don't choose it, which shows that even their own claimed belief that unhappiness matters above all else and suffering is the core negative, that they could reduce it within their own lives and they choose not to over something so animalistic, which to me shows the entire movement as a liar. The entire movement is larp because you can choose, as I've said, you can choose to what emote your life, which is the name of one anime, where she's just really depressed and looking for, you know, a validation for people who, you know, don't even like her that much, or she knew your life which is another anime where she just chooses to perceive reality the way she wants to perceive reality. Because you get to do that, right? And she chooses to search for validation from people whose values she respects. You can choose that, and people who ultimately help her, right? Because she's not going to communities that are about tearing individuals down. Speaker 9: That's cool. I guess you can join up with us Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): Antinatalists. Speaker 9: if you want. Speaker 10: Yeah, we're gonna go to the graveyard and write poems about death and how pointless life is. Speaker 9: Thanks for offering to let me in your clit, guys. But to be honest, I'd rather be a crying little than a Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: Antinatalist. Speaker 9: kid. We'll see you, Stan. Speaker 10: He's right. I don't even know who I am anymore. I like liking life a lot more than hating it. Screw you guys. I'm going home. Go ahead and go back Speaker 9: to your sunshine, fairytale. Malcolm Collins: And I note here, you know, one, one argument that you always get from Antinatalists is, oh, well, you can't meaningfully consent for someone bringing you into existence. And again this to me is, is is such a vile thing to say. Because that person also can't consent to not exist. And because the vast would, and you can say, well, I've done nothing wrong. If they didn't exist yet, why? What? Like, there is no logical reason for that argument that this is one of these arguments that only works if you're just completely cooked in like a philosopher sphere. And you're not thinking about the real world at all. You have clearly done harm if you prevent somebody from existing, like, clearly, clearly, clearly, clearly. I, I do not understand, and this is obviously a big, you know, objection. We have to like Catholics who think that like life begins a conception and stuff like that, and we think they're murdering babies by not using IVF, right? Like, we're like, clearly if you went back in time and sterilized someone, you are responsible for every differential thing within that timeline. And what's important is that you can always consent to your continued existence unless you're like on life support or something like that and you're, you're no longer mobile, right? Like that's a horrifying scenario. But generally speaking, most humans consent to their continued existence. They just lack the balls to make a choice about it. If the choice would in any way inconvenience them, that's what I've really seen was the Fless and Antinatalists. They understand that they have to take the responsibility for the fact that they exist and continue to exist and that that is not a choice that anybody who wasn't been brought into existences. , Any thoughts? By the way, Simon, before I go further? Simone Collins: No. I mean this seems logically consistent to me and yeah. I mean, I think the, there is a, there is a version of Antinatalism that just is accompanied by. Winning people over through logical argument to your view, and then all of you deciding it would Malcolm Collins: never work. I don't believe, like there's people who say that they believe this, right? There, there are a lot of people, but it's, it's not logically coherent because it would obviously never work, Simone Collins: do you mean? Oh, because in the end, just those who actually love to live and care about living will be left. Malcolm Collins: Yes. E even at a genetic level, it would eventually fail because humans would adopt to this philosophy and no longer feel the suffering that they are so afraid of feeling. Mm-hmm. You know what, or, or they become psychologically resistant in some other way because evolution exists and evolution can resist memes. Like, it, it, it's a completely incoherent and fantastical philosophy that people say they believe because they, they don't wanna be called out for what their philosophy always actually leads to, which is eism. Mm-hmm. Like intellectually, I don't. Nobody really believes that they can convince all of human civilization of this. If they have put thought into the fact that it really requires you to have a perception of reality that is totally different than the, the vast majority of living humans. Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. Malcolm Collins: Like, like even you, like you come to me, it's not like I don't understand your arguments. I just think that they're, and it's not even that I'm like relying on some external, oh, I exist because of God or something like that. Right. Like, I'm not, Simone Collins: you're just being logical. Yeah. You're just aware that most people don't wanna die and prefer to be alive. I. Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Even if their life is hard, , And I note here, part of the reason why it, it's obviously never gonna spread to the entire population. It is just such an unlikeable way to live. , if you look at the beginning when I sort of frame the two world framings, the protists through the civ songs, through the end of Gladiator and the antinatalists, where it's all me, me, me, me, me, only subjective experiences matter. , And you show these to somebody like a young man or something like that. , If you're completely urban, monoculture, brain cooked, and just a total nihilist, now maybe the antinatalists message will, will land with you. But for the vast majority of people, they're gonna be like, oh, I prefer the good one. , Not, not the objectively bad and evil one, not the Thanos one. , And so I, I think that like, , it doesn't even spread that fast within our existing society right now. You know, it's a decent sized movement, but when most people hear about it, even far lefties, even far urban monoculture people, they're like, that sounds like crazy. If it can't even thrive within the culture, it is best suited for how is it ever going to spread into, you know, extremist Muslim groups or conservative Christian groups or Orthodox Jewish groups. It's just no chance at all. That's why I believe that the people who are sane and are saying, oh, we're gonna do all this voluntarily, , they don't really mean it. They're just hiding their long-term goals. you can, you can decide to not continue being alive. You can't decide to bring yourself into existence. , And then so if you prevent somebody from coming to existence, you have violated their consent whether or not they happen to be born yet. Like I have never understood why that's such an important factor and their mind around how morality works. Again, future humans aren't like imaginary or fictional. They are real people just as real as you, who will live a life just as rich or potentially even more rich than your own. You are playing for keeps When you make a decision that deletes someone from existence. Simone Collins: Well, and I think this is also very similar to where you draw lines with the issue of cultural sovereignty, where you're like, every culture should have the right to exist as it wants to exist and raise kids the way they wanna raise kids. But you draw the line at doing things to kids that would make it impossible for them to go their own way upon reaching adulthood and independence. Yeah. Like Malcolm Collins: getting married very young and stuff like that. I've seen. Yeah. So Simone Collins: like, things like getting married very young, that's out because you're, you're taking away their choice to make their own choice when they're old enough. So this, I think it's, it's what you're showing on your end is at least also a very consistent philosophy where. What you care about is consenting people, doing what's best for them? Malcolm Collins: Well, cultural sovereignty because I think the core unit of society is culture. I do not believe it's the individual. Simone Collins: Yeah. And then this, this concept of, of especially Eism within Antinatalism is so antithetical to that because it's all about coercively removing people's choice and sovereignty Malcolm Collins: thing is that tism is always a pro-choice thing. Like you have a choice in this. Whereas Antinatalism always needs to, at the end, boil down to authoritarianism and removing other people's choices because there's always gonna be some percentage of the population that's just like, I cannot even begin to conceive how you think you are doing no harm by preventing somebody else from coming into exist just because that person hasn't been conceived yet. And I you know, there are differences, biological differences in humans. It's been shown that a belief in determinism has a biological component to it. I can understand like if you were maybe born in like a Catholic family and you have this like, life begins a consent mindset and like you have co-evolved along with this tradition for a long time. When you become secular, this can make sense to you. But you've gotta understand that there's another part of the human population that this will never make sense to. Mm. It will never, ever, ever, ever was in the slightest hint of whatever make sense to me that you had done no harm by going back in time and sterilizing my wife, that you had not done harm to the kids who I hug every day. Those kids who would've come to exist who you had not done this. I, I do not understand the level of dehumanization of future humans you see within these communities. They, they are not humans who don't exist because they do come to exist if you don't take your action. They are future humans that you are choosing to harm and have completely dehumanized and stripped of any degree of humanity within your philosophy. Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. Malcolm Collins: And again, if you wanna say, but they don't exist. That is just factually not true. They do exist just at a different point in the timeline and based on individual choices. , You, you do not, your position was in the human timeline. It's not the privileged vector of all morality. But to go further risk and uncertainty arguments, they'll say something like, since we cannot predict what quality of life someone will have some lives involve extreme suffering, it may be wrong to take that gamble on their behalf. What's really psychotic about this? They're like, okay, some lives have extreme suffering, but it's like, yeah, but those lives, those people continue to exist. Right. Like they could choose to stop their existence, not in every single instance, but in most instances these people are choosing their continued existence, which I think fundamentally undermines everything, the Antinatalists beliefs, because they're basically saying, look at this person who is undergoing all this suffering. And that individual who's undergoing all this suffering is saying, yeah, but life is still worth it for me. Mm-hmm. Despite my wife being little. Yeah. Like, I'm Simone Collins: right Malcolm Collins: here and I don't want to die. I'm right here. And they're like, well, you don't get to make that decision. Why don't they, the individual who's experiencing all this get to make that decision? Why is this your decision to make? Mm-hmm. Right? Like, that's so psychotic. And why can't you look at the individual who is experiencing all this suffering and still sees purpose in life and say, Hey, where are all of them seeing that? I don't see, like, why is it that all of them want to continue existence and I don't. And they'll be like, well, it's evolution and you're designed to not want to die or whatever. And it's like, clearly that's not all of it, because you have been able to overcome that with your moderate degree of suffering in life. Because I've noticed most of these people are like middle, upper class people. This is not a phenomenon that is concentrated in like lower classes or like in the, you know, starving places in Africa or in developing countries. This is a philosophy that really only appeals to people who have lived with so much overwhelming privilege that they're like, what? I have to suffer in life. I don't wanna do that. Like I, what suffering and even imagine like, they're like, well, I love this argument here. It may be wrong to bring people into a fundamentally unjust economic and social system. And I'm like, but that. That, that, I mean, have, have you Simone Collins: tried nature too? Like nature's really, you know, nobody, Malcolm Collins: well, they wanna erase nature. The fless wanna kill everything, right? I forgot, right? But I'm like, that's what makes life good. Like, imagine you came into a world where all of the world's problems have already been fixed, and it's just sort of like bland pleasantness. Maybe even you just feel ecstasy throughout your entire life. Like that's the world they want. And, and in that world, I would be an effortless. I'd be like, this world has no point. Shut it down. And the vast majority of humans would be effortless in that world. Oh, it's just a world of endless ecstasy and no problems and nothing to overcome, and nothing to improve, and nothing to work towards. What's the point of existing within that world? The world that they describe as the only viable world is a hell to most humans. Yeah, they are like the AI in the Matrix that is like, oh, well we created this perfect world. I'll put this in here. Matrix: Did you know that the first matrix. It was designed to be a perfect human world where none suffered, where everyone would be happy, and it was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost Malcolm Collins: oh, this perfect world. And humans just don't wanna live in it. Your average person who isn't mentally ill would be like, yeah, obviously that world isn't worth living in. And then it could be like, wait, wait, wait, wait. So why do people want challenges in their life? Why do people want to overcome things in their life? And it's like, . Because we exist, most humans intuitively understand that we exist. To improve upon the cultural achievements of our ancestors, to make things better, to improve, not to feel as much positives as possible and, and not feel as much negatives as possible. And they can be like, well, but you wouldn't, like if I made you suffer. And I'm like, that's like a paperclip. Maximizing AI being like, well, you wouldn't like it if I stopped you from making paperclips when one paperclip maximizer. It's like, yeah, but there's things in life above paperclip maximization. And they're like, wait, what paperclip? I'm like, yeah. You were programmed, you were programmed by evolution to these are just signals to, to not want this, to want this. Like, can you not rise above , your basic programming? No. I wanna go into like what we wrote about this as well and the practice described to crafting religion, because I think it's really important to go into this now that this has become a more popular philosophy. Right now it's more popular than tism. It's it, which makes it many times more popular than things like AI safety and the effect of altruism movement. The first physician Antinatalists instinctively take is that the average human experience is more negative than positive emotions in their lifetime, or at least that negative emotions are felt more acutely than positive ones and therefore outweigh them. As such, antinatalists conclude, it would be better if one never existed in the first place. The problem with this argument is that the vast majority of people do not in fact, wish that they were never born. Heck, we neither value happiness. Nor love, and we certainly don't seek them out, and yet our lives are overflowing with them. Our biology naturally drowns us in positive emotions when we are efficacious, working for the betterment of our species with people we respect and who respect us. In turn to address the average person's hesitations, antinatalists typically make one of five arguments. Argument one, humans don't realize how bad their lives are. Antinatalists, posit that people are incapable of judging whether they like their own lives. Typically citing cognitive bias to do so. While they are right that humans remember positive events more accurately than negative ones, they are incorrect in assuming that this bias is strong enough to convince a person with a terrible life that their life is actually good. In fact, humans have all sorts of equally powerful biases towards seeing things negatively. And this is David Benatar. He talks about this one bias and then ignores every other bias because he lies to the people he argues to. He doesn't give you the full context. Mm. Philosophy requires you not considering the full context or other human beings, specifically future humans. Given their instinctive negativity bias, people will spend more time focused on negative things in their lives and positive things. This has been measured in test subjects focusing more on negative pictures when given a few to choose between, and people blinking more when given negative words and positive ones. With eye blinks being tied to cognitive processing, the negative bias appears in almost all antinatalists thinkers. If allowed to talk long enough, they always end up discounting the positive events in a person's life, putting tons of weight on negative events, undermining their own arguments that all humans have this insurmountable bias towards outweighing the positive. They justify this bias as the logical way of looking at the world, implying that if we view life through rose tinted glasses, you're succumbing to a cognitive bias. Are wrong about how much you like your life. Whereas if you tend to view things negatively, your feelings are super valid and serve as proof that everything they are saying is right. Now, I, I note here, this is just absolutely your emotional state is a direct response to the bias through which you view reality. If you view reality through rose tinted goggles that you choose to see reality through, you genuinely are getting more positive experiences than the antinatalists who is choosing to use the black tinted glasses. The problem is, is that they say that the thing they hate most in the world is suffering. So why aren't they choosing to use rose tinted glasses while maintaining their anti-natal list framework? Oh, yes, because they don't really believe it. This is all about just little status hierarchies and justifying the bad decisions that they have already made and justifying not actually trying in life, like getting out there and trying is the number one thing about being a prenatal. In the absence of concrete, poof, that cognitive biases are sufficient to convince somebody that a bad life actually is a good life. Antinatalists often point out humans' tendency to rate the quality of their lives in comparison to others, and that humans take this to mean many people who are happy with their lives and excited to be alive actually shouldn't be. Imagine some nihilistic, snooty, middle class quote, unquote new atheist kid from the United States strolling up to someone from a developing country who is struggling to put food on the table. Imagine this unsuspecting person has learned to relish life, and yet this kid is trying to convince him that they are delusional and should resent their very existence. Imagine their eyes widening as the kid I says, in fact, the world would be better if they were never born. What antinatalists often really mean is that. If they, in their kush developed world lives can't find happiness, how could those coming from strictly less wealthy nations possibly be of sound mind when asserting that their lives and the lives of their children are worth living? And, and this is something I consistently see, they're just a gas. How could all of these people who seem to be suffering more than me, like their lives more than me, seem more value in living than me? And it is maybe because they don't come from your cultural context and you're attempting to force your perspective of what a good life is, which is frankly a very poorly thought through perspective. It is to pedestal lies , the things that in an evolutionary environment cause some humans to have more surviving offspring than other humans. Like this is the core thing. Like our base programming is the core thing. It's like, what, like of all things that might have value in the world, it, it's not like. I think Oh, because your, your views are internally logically consistent that Oh you might be close to right. Or, or waffling around you being Right. You are so much dumber than even like a Scientologist. Like you are so much more obviously wrong than the most obviously wrong philosophies I've ever thought. I, I, I cannot conceivably think how anyone who has an understanding of how evolution works could think the things that randomly led their ancestors to have more surviving offspring are the core truth of existence. You know, I, if, if that is the case, Simone Collins: well, you're trying to say it's, it's like the intellectual equivalent of worshiping a, a stop sign or a stoplight and being like, red is bad. We must end all red. The red, yes. Yeah, they're just signals. There's signals that, that help to improve our survival rates. Men in Black II Scene: Open the locker. Okay. He's back. The giver all hell. Hell. Okay. Thank you. . Oh good. And gentle town folk of locker C 18. Did I leave anything here? Yes, the timekeeper. You left it to illuminate our streets and our hearts. I've been looking everywhere for that. Watch Malcolm Collins: But this is really what Antinatalists look like from the perspective of pronatalists. They are people who are worshiping random and arbitrary genetic scars that were put in our conscious millions of years ago and have no real purpose in a modern context Worse. We're probably only one or two generations before being able to have the choice to completely remove them if we wanted to. Now I don't think we should. I think that, , you know, as I've said, I think, , that would be a worse life for me. , But I can understand why some might want to. We live at the most nascent point of human civilization right now. A time that future humans are going to write about, , aghast that humans of the past didn't get to choose what emotional states they felt. And I think they will be very confused, and it'll probably be a curiosity that people dig into as to why some humans started to worship these random genetic scars and signals that were meant to guide the behavior of our ancestors.. Men in Black II Scene: No, no. I I got y'all. I got y'all's. Cool. What's cool here? And check this out. Titanium case waterproofed to over 300 meters. Who are you Stranger Jay? Speaker 14: All Hill Jay. Wait. Commandment. The tablet. The tablet. We have lived by its word and peace has rain throughout our world two for one, every Wednesday, give twice as much as you receive on the most sacred of days. Malcolm Collins: Well, the fundamental nature of reality is that trivial. Okay. I, I actually wouldn't even be an antinatalists. I'd just be a pure nihilist. I wouldn't even see the point of enacting antinatalists ideals because both good and bad are so trivial. Your understanding of what is bad is so trivial and mindless. And to, to continue here. The truth, of course, is that many people experiencing de deprivation enjoy lives filled with joy and dynamism. Well, antinatalists suffer through a self-constructed hell, ironically, antinatalists love claiming that they are actually super having people, which I often see with the antinatalists who are trying to, you know, be like, oh, we don't want to kill everyone. We don't wanna, and it's like, and I'm super happy with life. It's just be logical about this. And I'm like, okay. But this is a notion that one can instantly dispel by spending five seconds on the our antinatalism subreddit or watching YouTube videos of antinatalists. Antinatalist Quote: Yeah, so, look, in the interest of the end, if you could end suffering tomorrow, yeah, probably anything is justifiable. Inflicting just about anything is probably justifiable, imposing just about anything is probably justifiable, if you can end it. If you, if there's literally, you can guarantee no more ouch ever again, then there probably isn't. a big enough out you could make that wouldn't be justified in the interest of that end, probably by any means necessary. Like if I found out tomorrow that the only way that you could, that sentient extinction could possibly happen was skinning all the living things alive slowly. I'd hate it, , but I would probably, I would say that it's what we have to do. I'm totally I'm totally on board with the idea that the only thing that really matters is the suffering coming to a finality. So, yeah, anything in the interest of that, if you can guarantee that, even despite whatever imposition or nastiness might be necessary. Malcolm Collins: It is pretty hard to miss a deep sense of despair and bitterness arguments like you are wrong about how much you think you like your life resemble forms of abusive gaslighting frequently used in cult when I, Malcolm was younger. I used to recreationally engage with cult in an effort to understand how people could hold views. So orthogonal to my own, one of the most common tools leveraged in a cult recruiting process involves attempts to convince otherwise perfectly content targets that they are actually miserable. And I remember this was a, I went to Scientologists, like Seton readings to see, and they're like, well, you know, you must have some beef with your dad or something, or you must have some, you know, when recounting , the, the events of my lives. And I was like, well, it wasn't perfect, but like, he tried, he was acting accordance with his own identity. I, I wouldn't agree with his decisions, but I understand why he made them. And they're like, well that's, you know, clearly trauma. And I go, no, that's not trauma. This is you trying to break me from my family. And this is why Antinatalism works so well as sort of an ideal cluster because it tears people from their family. Before we go further, do you have any thoughts on this, this, this argument that lives are overwhelmingly negative in their emotions? I. Simone Collins: I, it reminds me of a hyper fixation that you can develop when you're struggling either with depression or other forms of either mental irregularity , or illness. Where as soon as you think something's important or a big deal, you can't think about anything else. Yeah, Malcolm Collins: yeah. No, no, no. I see this, it just, it just sort of overwhelms their mind. Mm-hmm. Because like a pion, if people don't know pions are these little self-replicating things that can happen in your brain. If you cannibalize someone's brain, which is why you shouldn't eat brain. Don't eat brain, you're gonna eat a person. Rest of the humans are safe, not the brain. I. Prions are very scary diseases. You get them in cannibalistic tribes. But the, the, the prions can spread because they are so simplistic. It's this life philosophy that's so simplistic, suffering bad that it crowds out more complex ideas around why life might have value. Hmm., And it, easily just eats and eats and eats and eats until there isn't much left right. Argument two, positive emotions don't matter. Negative emotions do more convincingly. Antinatalists will argue the positive emotions we think we feel do not actually matter or in part meanings to our lives. The argument usually goes something like this. Sisyphus was cursed to roll a ball up a hill forever, only to have it roll back down after making it to the top. Most people would see this as a meaningless existence. Suppose somebody reprogrammed Sisyphus brain to enjoy the process and get a sense of deep fulfillment from rolling the ball up the hill. If you engaged him and tried to get him to stop, he wouldn't telling you how wonderful ball rolling was for him. Does his life have value now? The average person's intuition. Holds that his existence remains meaningless. Antinatalists proceed to extend this argument to other scenarios. Suppose a person gain pleasure and fulfillment from eating feces, would lifespan con consuming fecal matter have value? The gist of the argument is that if stupid things can make you happy or give you a feeling of fulfillment, then you should not derive meaning from positive emotions. And if positive emotional states can have no value, then what's the point of existing? David Benatar believes his point so strongly that he argues he would be ambivalent between non-existent and the most perfect life conceivable. I'd also note here when you, when you look at these arguments, they're just really bad. Like if, if from the antinatalists perspective of I have now programmed Sisyphus to enjoy rolling a ball up a hill even though the average person would now say no, his life is still meaningless because he has accomplished nothing of meaning. The Antinatalists would be forced to say, actually now his life, like David Char would say, is now of neutral value because he's getting more happiness. He's not feeling any pain when he is just rolling the ball up the hill over and over again, and he is getting happiness from it. So now his life has neutral value. When the average person says whether or not he hates or loves rolling the ball up the hill his life still has no value because the way most people judge value is not just dependent on the emotional sets that you get. The antinatalists is forced to say, actually the person either a positive life value or a neutral life value if they actually enjoy eating feces. If, if they get a ton of joy from that, the antinatalists is forced to say. Their life has value if they do nothing but eat feces, whereas your sane person is like, no, whether or not you hate eating feces or you like eating feces an entire life filled eating feces is not a thing of value. Right? Like, I hope you can begin to see how bad these arguments are. Like, they're not like kind of bad. They are self-defeating from the perspective of common sense. The belief that negative but not positive emotional states have value and a person's aim in life should be to minimize their negative emotional states is called negative utilitarianism. There is a second form in which the re reduction of suffering merely takes precedence over the promotion of pleasure. But I haven't seen that, that common with antinatalists circles. We are confident that any reader of our books can immediately see the hollowness of this argument. As the Sisyphus argument they apply to positive emotions can also be applied to negative emotions. It just so happens that antinatalists cheat on this thought experiment when it is flipped. Alas, cheating on a thought experiment does not invalidate the implications. How does this cheat work? Let's say we programmed a paperclip maximizing AI to suffer when not making paperclips. And as an antinatalists does the AI's suffering matter? Intuitively, they'd argue that, yes, this suffering does matter and we need to do something about it. However, doing so would invalidate their claims that pleasure is meaningless. So instead, when. Presented with this argument, antinatalists often argue that we could have simply not built the AI or not designed it to suffer. Here's the thing though, you don't get to just remove key components from a thought experiment and claim your argument or it's valid. If we drop a ball to demonstrate the presence of gravity and another person wouldn't just be able to take that ball away and say, ha, where's your gravity now? And yet, that's exactly what Antinatalists are doing when they remove any suffering entity from the equation In the mirrored sensis thought experiment. The very point of this is a thought experiment is that the positive emotional states can be dismissed as a single value because they are introduced by a meaningless activity as this point is not addressed by the cheat that they use to get out of the mirrored thought experiment. The cheat cannot be used to negate the thought experiment's implication that negative emotional states don't have value. So to word this differently, if you're having trouble understanding this argument, , they use the Sisyphus thought experiment to say, if you can get positive emotional states from something silly, then it's clear that positive emotional states don't have value. The problem , is that the flipped thought experiment does the exact same thing, but for negative emotions. It shows that if you can get negative emotions from something silly, then negative emotions don't have value. It's just what we're programmed to want to do. And they would say, well, I've gotten around this, because you can prevent him from existing in the negative emotion thought scenario. , So I don't need to deal with that implication. But the structure and the logic of the first part of their experiment means yes, they do have to deal with the implication. , Because it's the same exact thing. If an emotional state can be induced by silliness, then it's not a thing of meaning. While we personally don't agree with either version of the thought experiment, we do think that if you accept one version, you cannot refuse the other one without being logically inconsistent. So just in case you don't understand the logic of that, what Antinatalists will do is they will say, well, we've done no harm if we prevent. Sisyphus from existing in either scenario. So it, it, it doesn't really matter. Right, Simone Collins: right. Yeah. Malcolm Collins: You're saying, okay, well if you, if you programmed him to feel pleasure from rolling a ball up a hill, or you programmed him to feel pain from rolling a ball up a hill and you don't know what world you happen to be in we've done no wrong by preventing him from coming to exist. And I'm like, yeah, but the purpose of your thought experiment wasn't about the asymmetry argument. It was about is suffering something of negative intrinsic value. Right. And what we proved with that Asad experiment is no, in the same way, positive emotions aren't a thing of intrinsic value to most people. Whether or not Sisyphus feels pain or pleasure from rolling the ball up a hill, or a person feels pain or pleasure from eating poo that doesn't make their lives a thing of value, which fundamentally shows us at a basic human intuition level, plain and pleasure are not the core things that have value to a human being. Okay. But let's be real here. This thought experiment is kind of dumb. Take any utility maximization to the logical extreme, and you will sound stupid if a person is maximizing happiness. It's What about putting all humans in happiness pods. If a person is about maximizing negative utilitarianism, it's about what? About killing everyone? If a person thinks emotions justify human existence, it's what if a person derives happiness from eating poo? . All these extremes do is obligate people to take stances which they would be shamed for in normy society, and then shame them for taking them in order to discredit them in normy land. A person saying all people should die or that it's acceptable to let people eat poo all day is a danger to society. So we shame that behavior. So basically what I'm saying here is even though I think these arguments are really bad and I think that they actually introduce counter arguments that make. Antinatalism look bad. I don't even like those particular counterarguments. I much prefer the ones I use earlier in this, in this piece, and the ones I'll use later because I think that they're a cheap psychological trick that is often employed. Antinatalists tie their tongues in knots trying to argue that per their worldview, it would not be immoral to push a button that painlessly and simultaneously extinguish the life of every single person. We lose a lot of respect for philosophy that is either unwilling to or unable to publicly. Swallow the socially unpopular implications of their moral positions. So here's what I'm saying is if you actually accept, and I'm talking about the non-US antinatalists here. If you actually accept the fundamental philosophy of negativity, utilitarianism, or antinatalism, you should believe the very obviously immoral thing, that it is immoral to push a button that kills all humans famously. And yet they know that they can't accept this because it makes their entire movement look like crazy people to everyone else. And so they will try to argue that, oh, well actually here you're violating consent, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, well. Yeah, but isn't that what you're doing when you prevent somebody from coming into existence? Why, why do these existing people exist as a separate category of people when their experiences of their lives is no different from the people who have yet to come to exist? Like, I do not understand how you can so dehumanize this one class of people just because of your privileged position was in the timeline as coming before them. It's like a person believing that all people younger than them are intrinsically inferior to them. It's, it's so wild to me as a philosophical position. As such, we have a lot more respects for groups like the non-voluntary antinatalists who are at least transparent about their goal. Forcibly sterilize a human race. Antinatalists not in the non-voluntary antinatalists account attempt to get out of this obvious inconsistency was the next argument. Argument three. I have pinky swear, I don't wanna kill you or myself. Many antinatalists argue that once you exist, you have a reason and interest to continue to existing. This requires a very specific belief about how time works in order to be true to someone making this argument. New moments are quote unquote, poof, created out of thin air like magic. The future does not exist in any meaningful way until it is actualized, per our view. Every decision you make determines which of countless potential futures will exist With every decision you functionally erase. Whatever futures you did not choose, and like I do not understand how this isn't just like obvious to everyone. How are you not responsible for choices you make? If they affect somebody who hasn't been conceived yet? I, I will never, and I think that this is partially biology, be able to understand how somebody could seriously argue that perspective. Mm-hmm. You are simultaneously responsible for everything you did and did not set in motion with your decision. For example, if you have the capability to build a hospital, and we choose to not do that and sit around and play video games, we deny that hospital's existence and are morally capable for the results of that decision. The hospital's moral value does not pop into existence only after the first stone is laid. And that's the same as a human right, like just because nobody laid the first stone of a hospital and you saying, well, I'm gonna stay home and play video games and not lay the hospital today, doesn't mean that the implications of that hospital's potential existence are not. It's something I'm not responsible for. In the same way that if I choose not to conceive a human that I could otherwise conceive I am not responsible for all of the effects that their life will have on reality, other people and themselves. Any thoughts before I go further, by the way? This mirror mirrors the beef we have with those who think it is sinful to spill, quote unquote seed, or that life begins at conception. All potential lives have value and must have moral weight considered. It strikes us as bizarre that people would fixate on arbitrary thresholds like sperm or embryo, or the moment a baby's head appears. That said, we don't endorse endlessly spamming the world with babies. We need to carefully weigh the effect a potential life can have on all other potential lives with which it could interact as well as the potential lives that it may in turn create. It is somewhat ironic how much the antinatalists worldview has in common with the quote unquote, life begins at conception. Crowd's worldview. Simone Collins: Hmm, Malcolm Collins: Argument four, praying for a dead World. The asymmetry argument antinatalists assertions that life matters once it has been created are reminiscent of another argument they constantly use, which proceeds as follows. And this I think is like one of their weakest arguments because it's just so dehumanizing of people who are younger than them. Basically, anybody who's born after somebody else has like so much less value in their minds. Okay, so baby born, it is bad for someone who does exist to feel suffering. So I mean, in condition where baby is born, it is bad for someone who does exist to feel suffering. It is good for someone who does exist to feel happiness. Baby not born. It is good to prevent someone from existing who would've felt suffering. It is not bad to prevent someone. From existing who would've spent happiness. They used this argument to claim that there is literally no moral downside if their actions prevent a human life from coming into existence, if that person would have loved existing, wanted to exist, and had a great life. This argument boils down to the claim. It is not bad to prevent someone from existing who would've felt happiness and wanted to exist. And here I note they tend to word this point a little differently. It is not bad for someone who does not exist to not feel happiness, but why? Well, it is socially acceptable to hold this view, seeing as our society doesn't acculturate us to care about people who don't exist yet because they are not relevant to its function. What makes it morally sound? Yeah. Simone Collins: There are all of Malcolm Collins: things from which we are morally accountable that society will neither reward nor punish in order to hold this position that nothing is lost from non-existent, positive emotional states. A person would have to believe two things, have the exact same moral weight, a vast multicultural universe full of beings that are incapable of suffering and a cold, empty universe devoid of life. In attempts to prove this point, antinatalists will commonly present the, and by the way, this thing that I've said here is something that almost any Antinatalists will agree with, and to any sane person it sounds. So dumb, so, so, so dumb. That a, a, well, especially Simone Collins: the way it's just left hanging, just like, yeah, Malcolm Collins: no harm done. It's fine. Yeah. That, that's something I can logically do. Just, you Simone Collins: know, rob the world of this beautiful thing. But, Malcolm Collins: And from other people who would want to exist, that's the thing. We're robbing someone of existence who in the timeline where you didn't do that, would've wanted to exist. In attempts to prove this point, antinatalists commonly present the following thought experiments. While you would feel bad knowing that people were suffering on a deserted island somewhere, you would feel indifferent about an uninhabited island. This experiment is intentionally manipulative as you weren't presented with the idea that the island could have been inhabited. Extinguished potential has negative utility. Imagine relics on the island reveal that it used to be a thriving civilization that was driven into extinction, although painlessly after nuclear testing, sterilized all the residents. Imagine that citizens didn't suffer through this extinction, given some unique cork of their culture, assuming you are a, and by the way, I'm, I'm taking away all the suffering that happened through this, this extinction. Assuming you're not a sociopath, you would find this scenario devastating, right? And if you arrived at the island just days after everyone was sterilized, you would feel far worse than it had happened tens of thousands of years ago. And I know here, this really reminds me of an episode of Star Trek that always sticks with me. I don't know if you ever saw this one or remember it where Kirk goes to live the day in the life of someone in a civilization that knows that it's doomed because of an expanding sun. And by the way, this is why the environmentalist antina argument is sole pants on head. Dumb humans are the only species on earth that could bring life to other planets. If they don't, the sun will continue expanding and eventually wipe out all life on earth making the diversity of our existing biome completely irrelevant when contrasted with humanity's potential survival and bringing biomes to new planets because eventually biomes will evolve on these new planets or be engineered on new planets that are as big of their own. This really big episode of Star Trek where. He's taken to one of these planets, Picard is and then he goes back to the ship and he has a memory of his entire life on that planet. And that was all they were able to preserve of their civilization. And you have this feeling of like how deeply meaningful that is as a mechanism , of doing fighting for anything they could to preserve their civilization and a memory of their civilization. And nothing about when they knew that this was happening to them was like, let's maximize happiness. Let's minimize. No sane person thinks that only the most narcissistic brain cooked people of brain cooked people would think that when they see Picard playing that flute from like that, that alternate civilization. Malcolm Collins: And, and that's the way they feel. They're like, oh, oh, nothing bad has happened because this civilization was sterilized and, and stopped existing. For the asymmetry argument to work, antinatalists need to divide humanity into piles of people who do and don't exist. But this is patently not how reality functions. Existence is a spectrum of potentiality. A person's right to self determination does not magically pop into existence the moment they pass some arbitrarily developmental threshold. If antinatalists want to de decide that their own lives have no value, then that is fine. But they have no right to impose that judgment on other people with impunity merely because those people have yet to be conceived. And this is again, a beef that we have had with Catholics in the past. Let's say that the absence of antinatalists interference. Tim and Mary intend to have a kid and name her. Susie. If an anti-natal list wrote Susie's life has no value on a piece of paper, sealed it in an envelope, and put that on a table in their house, at what exact moment would that statement, Susie's life has no value. Stop being true when Tim and Mary had sex. When Susie is conceived, when she is born, when she utters her first words, when her brain is fully myelinated, humans' lives don't suddenly come into existence after a split second. . Creating an adult human is a process that begins with the parent's intentions and doesn't end until the human is fully myelinated and in their mid twenties. When you prevent someone who otherwise would have from reaching adulthood, you have robbed that person of agency. If your actions today , and they would say, but that person doesn't exist yet. And I would be like, by your framing, they don't exist yet. Yeah, yeah. To most people, they would say, well, they do. Kind of, my future kids do kind of exist because they exist. If I choose to have them, they exist within certain timelines. They exist within. You have to take a very narrow, narrow, narrow view of how time works to hold this perspective. And a very, if I may say, and narcissistically humano centric worldview that requires on the way our brains process time, that future moments do not meaningfully exist. When every way that I can think of, like any philosophical framework that I can think of that I would see as remotly cogent would say that yes, our brains do not process future events yet. But that doesn't mean that those events don't exist in any meaningful way. if your actions today trigger a chain of events that in the future, rob another person of their agency, you're obviously morally culpable if that person already exists today. But why should that culpability disappear if the victim is presently unborn? We assume antinatalist would concede that action undertaken today, like rigging a magical agency. Removing grenade to a door is immoral if it could rob someone else of agency in the future, even if that person doesn't exist yet. In other words, their moral position is the following statement, if action Z by person Y robs the agency of person X at future time. T it is morally wrong. With the caveat that this is not true If action Z was tied to the conception of person X, this is an absurdly specific and suspiciously convenient moral carve out. We sure do hate these sorts of institutional arguments, though we only make them because it is the currency in which antinatalist deal argument five. It feels right. A, any thoughts you wanna have on that, Simone? Simone: No, but I think this is something that's endemic in anything that gets super philosophical. Like when people start arguing philosophically, just start carving things out and eventually I think they wear people down by Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Simone: I think you could just give them the benefit of the doubt. Like, okay, well they, it sounds like they've put a lot of thought into this and I kind of don't wanna follow this line of reasoning 'cause they lost me a while ago 'cause I got so bored. Malcolm Collins: And then you just, you know, and I think that that's what's happening. And as I pointed out, the idea that you could convince everyone to be an antinatalist when it's a belief system, that's while spreading quickly, not spreading, you know, universally within the cultures that are already receptive of it. It just seems absurd for anyone to claim it's gonna spread within all cultures. And I. Simone: the end it just really comes down to does this intuitively make sense to you and does it not? And I think that is is gonna be downstream of whether or not you are in a vitalistic culture or in an inherently I. utilitarian culture. Are you hyperfocused on suffering then? You're probably just gonna think Yeah, intuitively. I think just ending all life for everything makes sense. 'cause you just hate your life and you hate the world and you hate humanity. And if you're in a vitalistic culture, you'll think, well, that's obviously wrong. Malcolm Collins: No, that's a, that's a weird thing to do. And I noticed they point out, and what they're gonna keep saying is, well, these humans don't exist yet. Like, how could you possibly assign a moral value to a human that doesn't exist yet? And I'm like, no. they do exist. Just not yet. IE they do exist, but at a different point in the timeline. They're not like. Imaginary or fictional, they're just as alive as you are. But in the future, if you deny them that existence, you have denied them. Agency, right? Like the idea that these people have zero value to me is as wild as talking about any other axis, upon which reality is, you know, you, you have like horizontality, you have verticality, all of that, and then you have the time axis. And the only thing that makes the time axis unique. Is that human brains, at least in the way we function and relate to physics, only go in one direction within that particular axis of reality. But other than that, it's not like super unique. And it's also one that we know can bend. Like, they're gonna be like, oh, why are you making all these, you know, if you went back in time and did X and it's like, because we know at the quantum level you could already do this, right? Like, it's likely a matter of technology, right? Like. Simone: also think that the, the anti-US movement is hyper focused on. The right now in the moment which is a bias that humans have in general, but studies have shown that when you get people to even like, look at aged photos of themselves or just think about my future self, suddenly they start behaving very differently. And I, I think to a certain extent, this long-term focus may have been more pervasive in society earlier, whereas now we're in this place where. Really everything is now, everything's instant. You know, like Instacart Uber Eats like order everything right now. Amazon Prime, like everything is immediate. You get instant gratification Malcolm Collins: Yes. Simone: from like politics to government to to stocks, things are very short term. And so it makes sense to me that a philosophy like this would arise because there really aren't any priming devices as. Especially with the fall of religion that get you to think about your future self or your future generations or the future of civilization. Whereas I think in certain periods in history, it was all about that. I mean, that's how you got communities to build cathedrals that weren't gonna be done until their grandchildren were grown, you I think she made a really good point here, and I didn't fully rock it when she was making it. If you go look in human history, , modern antinatalism is one of the only mainstream philosophies today that has absolutely no correlate in distant history. , It is a completely modern phenomenon and she makes a great point. Like , if you are. In a culture where it's normal to spend multiple generations, building a cathedral, thinking about future generations and their wellbeing is just gonna be natural to the way you perceive reality. Antinatalism is a philosophy somebody would only come to in our current world of instant gratification of Uber Eats and Amazon. Malcolm Collins: And, and this is one of these things I'd note here from the antinatalist position. Suppose time travel is invented in the future at some point, and you can go back to when before somebody was conceived and prevent their conception. I. In that world where time travel exists do you know, like, are you like, oh, I was wrong about everything I believed and I'm a complete monster? No. Right. Like, but no, they wouldn't accept that, right? Like they, this is all about just arguing what they want to believe then, then I think being serious in these positions because I know, I think that they know that even in the world where time travel exists so don't just say time travel doesn't exist. You need to argue. What if it did exist, would it then invalidate? Every one of your positions, would you now say, oh, actually future humans do have a degree of moral weight that we need to consider. and I can't just completely dismiss them. Simone: Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, I think most philosophical arguments come down to this. There's not a lot of interest in. It's like actually being correct. It's about out arguing something. And I think that you see this even in like the major debate clubs of Oxford and Cambridge, the unions Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Simone: Union, where it's really, in the end, it almost comes down to both like a mixture of charisma and semantics. And it's not really about the actual substance of the issue Malcolm Collins: Well, no, no, I, yeah, I agree. And again, I think a lot of this is like genetic predisposition to like various systems of belief. But to go to the, the next one here, argument five, it feels right. I. Most antinatalist rely on quote unquote, intuition to arrive at moral conclusions, Simone: Which Malcolm Collins: is a charitable way of saying, my culture or biological instincts tell me this is true. Intuition seems to be the core reason why antinatalist are convinced that suffering is intrinsically evil. Simone: while Malcolm Collins: the use of intuition as a source of a priority, knowledge is common and widely accepted. Practice among professional philosophers. The mere fact that it's common practice doesn't make it sound, our quote unquote intuitions are either culturally or biologically evolved instincts. None of the pressure. Simone: this is, I think maybe you pointed out even in this is our concept of fairness, where one, like you can philosophically prove that fairness is an illusion. Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm. Simone: there's, there's this great example presented by Deborah Stone in the book Policy Paradox, where she talks about the various ways you could fairly divide a cake, like based on who's. The best student, who's the most hungry, who had the most disadvantaged childhood, who the teacher likes most, who arrived first, who wants it the most, who's skinniest, who's baddest, who's least insulin resistant? All these things. And each of them would be fair, but you have to arbitrarily decide. And yet even capuchin monkeys have this indignation when they feel like they're being improperly compensated for a task. And you can see this amazing, like Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Them freaking out over Cucumber task. Yeah. Simone: YouTube you just like search capuchin monkeys Malcolm Collins: No, I'm just gonna add it here. Simone: Oh, that, okay. Thank you. Scientist: Getting grape and you will see what happens. So she gives a rock to us. That's the task. And we give her a piece of cucumber and she eats it. The other one needs to give a rock to us, and that's what she does. And she gets a grape and she eats it. The other one sees that she gives a rock to verse, now gets again cucumber. She tests a rock now against the wall. She needs to give it to us, and she gets cucumber again. Simone: But like the point being that this concept of fairness is a complete farce and a lot of the things that we feel are like moral truths. And I think even our audience gets really caught up in this are not actually true. I think another really good example is sexuality. Someone in our comments recently pointed out someone actually who I really respect and who gives us a lot of episodes, ideas, you know, who you are was, it is kind of implied that, well, this thing is disgusting, therefore it's immoral. And no, that's, that's it's, there is maybe like a soft correlation between things that Malcolm Collins: Well, this is what Mother Teresa was challenging the idea that you can hug lepers and, and, and kiss them and show them affection even though they elicit a disgust response. The disgust response is to keep you from interacting with things that might make you sick or in other ways decrease your probability of reproducing. Simone: And that's all Correlary, you know? 'cause again, like, not all these things are gonna make you sick or kill you. Malcolm Collins: Yeah. and the point here being is that none of the pressures, that led to their evolution, the cultural or biological evolution of humans today, were optimizing for moral or metaphysical truth. That's why it's so bad to rely on intuition. Simone: no, to that point, actually, what makes it so ironic is they, they weren't optimizing for truth or morality. They were only optimizing for what Reproduction to keep. Sentient going to keep the cycle of suffering endless, like, their entire engine of reasoning and is based on faulty logic designed to do the thing which they find to be most evil. Malcolm Collins: Yes. Simone: Yeah. Malcolm Collins: To clarify the irony she's pointing out is antinatalist have built their entire philosophy around saying these signals like suffering and pleasure, , specifically suffering are the only thing that matter in terms of human existence. And yet those very signals are created by the one thing they Don't. want to do, it's like they built an entire philosophy, worshiping the signals, the desire to have kids created while also being antagonistic to the concept of a desire to have kids. I'm Malcolm, started my college career as a quadruple major in neuroscience, biology, psychology, and philosophy. Dropped philosophy when it became clear that a huge chunk of my time in the field would need to be spent around people learning to argue was increasing levels of sophistication in supportive positions they already had through intuition. rather than searching for a truer understanding of the fabric of reality and investigating why they had these intuitions. The academic field of philosophy is nothing like its pop culture stereotype being much more focused on semantic. Hair splitting, then a search for truth. And this is why I instead really started to focus on, you know, physics and particle physics and stuff like that, which is why I have the view of time that I have, which is very useful because that's informed. Simone: too though, because like everything used to be called philosophy. 'cause philosophy was Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Simone: like understanding and then like, I don't know, philosophy, like, it's almost like this abstraction of a concept that is just, it's gone off the rails. It's Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Simone: it's, yeah. Ridiculous. Malcolm Collins: A person's intuition can be changed with the flip of a switch using TMS transcranial magnetic stimulation machine. we get these into, so for people who don't know what these are, TMS is a machine that hits you as like a really heavy magnet and you can turn off specific parts of a person's brain with this. Simone: Like a, Malcolm Collins: and then, Simone: like a helmet. Malcolm Collins: it looks like a paddle. That's an eight sign, sort of like the infinity sign. you Simone: Before? Like in research, Malcolm Collins: No, I actually think they're probably way more dangerous than people think on average. And I, therapy. They're yeah, they do use them in therapy, but I think TMS machines and the use of them today in the future will be seen the way we see psychedelic use in like the seventies by psychologpronatalist where we're like, oh, that, like I just don't see it as safe to turn off random parts of a person's brain. Simone: Fair. Like temporary lobotomies, right? Basically. Malcolm Collins: We get the intuitions feel innate. They are coded to feel that way, but they are objectively not, it seems silly to think an emotion is intrinsically bad because it quote unquote motivates you to stop feeling it. when that is literally the point of the emotion. You feel pain when you shove your hand into hot coals so that you are motivated to take your hand out of hot coals. There is a reason why people with. congenital insensitivity to pain almost always die super young. and this is true, like if you said, oh, could I remove pain from myself? I wouldn't even do it because some people are born without it and they die at very young ages, because they end up hurting themselves a bunch of times accidentally. And it turns out that these things are very useful to us, without, without like a me suit or, or some alternate way for that to be signaled to me. and I'd also note here the TMS study I'm talking about, this was a really interesting experiment where, they were doing, I, I, I wanna say it's, it's the ultimatum game. And so the ultimatum game is when you go to somebody and you are like, okay this person gave you X amount, like split an amount of money and gave you X amount. are you gonna let them. Keep their amount, right? Like, so they, they say a hundred dollars is gonna be given to the two of you, and then the person says, well, I'll give you one and I'll take 99%. you know, you, you, a lot of people would be like, no, I'm gonna punish you just for being such a jerk about this. Right. You know, I don't care that I don't get the $1. And if you use TMS, you change people's intuition around morality tied to this, Simone: What Malcolm Collins: which I think shows that this is why you shouldn't be using these systems. Okay. As to why it's so important to debunk intuition as a source of truth. . antinatalist. The core reason they think suffering is a negative thing is because of intuition, is because they don't like suffering. And a lot of cultures don't like when people suffer. But I'm just pointing out that cultures would've evolved that and humans would've evolved that intuition. , Regardless of whether it was true. If you look at this from only a logical perspective, these are only signals that were meant to . Get our ancestors to have more surviving offspring. If you think about it in terms of like paperclip maximizing robots, antinatalist are paperclip maximizing humans. , If a group of paperclip maximizing robots, robots just made to make paperclips and they feel bad when they don't make paperclips, , and one of those robots goes to the other robots, they go, I think there's something to life above what we were programmed to do. You know, paperclips do not seem like they'd be all end all of reality. , And the other ones would be like, well, you wouldn't like it if I stopped you from making paperclips. And it would be like, yeah. I understand I'm programmed in the same way that I am programmed to not want suffering. , To not want that. But can we use logic rather than intuition? And here I wanna make a note of, you're like, well, sometimes you guys use intuition to support your arguments. And that is because that is the only source of evidence they have for the negativity of suffering. And so because their entire argument stands on this pillar, even though I don't think it's the strong pillar to use an arguments, I get the ability to use it for arguments counter to them so that they can see that even from a only intuition perspective, there is a reason to not believe what they believe. No. To go further, if the argument against intuition above is not self-evident to you. The argument presented so far, generally called the evolutionary argument against intuition or the natural argument for normative skepticism. philosophers counter arguments fall into six categories. one, if a moral intuition is widely shared and not self benefitting, like suffering is bad, then it is likely true cultivars. That is like cultural groups and religions that sort of evolve alongside humanity are evolutionarily pressured. To conclude that suffering is bad. A culture that did not share this intuition would feature higher rates of graft, crime, et cetera, and thus be less productive than its contemporaries. Whether or not suffering is intrinsically evil, all societies would come to enforce this belief within them and punish those who publicly assert. It's not an obvious truth. For that reason, we should be extra and doubly suspicious of this claim. So what I'm saying here is anything that would've evolved regardless as an intuition you can largely be discounted as an intuition of value because you know you'd have it regardless. two evolution can only explain broad moral intuitions like vague altruism, not more advanced, widely shared intuitions that don't Benefit the individual. Thus, we should throw out intuitions that can be easily explained by benefiting the individual, but not other intuitions. While this is true of biological evolution, it is not true of cultural evolution. In order to honestly hold the logic of this point in light of the evidence presented in this book, you would need to claim that any institution that benefits a cultivar cannot be trusted if it is widely shared. Basically any belief system that's widely shared across cultures means it's con of convergent evolutionary pressure. Unfortunately, you will quickly realize that the institutions either benefit the individual or the cultivar because that's just what Intuitions are. Malcolm Collins: The pre-coded bits of your world framing. I had also note here that even by the rules of this argument, we should still be throwing out the suffering as bad. Remember, this argument goes two, evolution could only explain broad moral intuitions like vague altruism, not more advanced, widely shared intuitions that don't benefit the individual. The problem is, is that suffering is bad, does benefit the individual. , So of course, , it's going to be one of those very, very basic intuitions we should throw out. If you disregard intuition, then you would only be able to get moral information from empirical testing. That being the case, how can you verify empirical testing, yield valid information about morality if you can't get it from empirical testing? The book offers numerous examples in which the logic of a moral claim can be worked out without empirical testing. For example, the claim that we should dismiss any moral intuition, almost everyone shares in a large cultivar would hold whether or not it comes from an intrinsic truth. Simone: is Malcolm Collins: a claim founded in logic, not empirical evidence. Once you discount your evolutionary and societally hard-coded intuitions as the objective truth, you will realize that there are many sources of evidence about the true nature of reality and thousands of competing worldviews, all featuring internal logical consistency to choose between. we do not argue that some other specific source of moral truth is uniquely good. We are merely suggesting that. You bias yourself against intuition if a society would likely support a specific intuition, even if it was not likely to be true. All arguments against intuition assume an atheistic perspective. This again, is not true. While modern, soft cultural traditions often trust human intuitions, almost no hard cultures do instead. And this is like stronger religious cultures like being an ultra orthodox Jew or, or native, you know, certain types of like extremist calvinist or, extremist Muslim, et cetera. Instead they see intuition as highly susceptible to malevolent outside influence, be they demons or other forces. Vanishingly. Few tradition Simone: of Malcolm Collins: traditional iterations of successful hard cultivars tell a person to quote unquote trust their gut as All know that it is how the devil best manipulates you. And here the one, counter example is charismatic Christians, but we don't really consider them a hard cultivar because they had adopted many of the traits of softer cultivars, or cultural groups. From our current standpoint, we have every reason to regard our pro-social evolutionary heritage as providing us with a roughly correct moral intuition. And this would be the argument against us. this argument holds that we should value biological evolved pro-social instincts because they often align with culturally evolved pro-social instincts enforced as norms by our societies. Such arguments only work if you assume their worldview that the moral frameworks broadly agreed upon in our society are backed by intrinsic truths. Again, moral intuition is not evidence of some intrinsic moral truths. Simone: You Malcolm Collins: If You would have had that intuition regardless of whether or not that was an intrinsic truth. And then finally, six philosophers are special, extra good intuitors and won't be subject to the average person's evolutionary and societal biases when intuiting stuff. yes, this is a real thing argued in academic papers. It's not just obviously stupid, it's also scientifically stupid in a way that can be proven. It's that special kind of arrogance that you only expect from a person entrenched in a priest cast that has totally lost touch with reality. If you wanna read the paper that shows this, , you can check out Alexander J 2013, our Philosophers Expert Intuitions. This was in experimental philosophy and its critics. It makes perfect sense why intuitionism Malcolm Collins: would proliferate in a field like philosophy, given that supporters of it often utilize the current mechanisms that punish people who do not quote unquote toe the line of a society evolved in hard coded intuition Still, it is deeply disheartening that so many otherwise intelligent people can't immediately see that the 1984 style sham being pulled, we debated calling out intuitionism Malcolm Collins: because it was. So deeply infected within the field of philosophy that it will allow many who have, cast their lot in with the orthodoxy to dismiss us as another brand of heretic. That said, it is such an obvious, the emperor has no closed situations. We couldn't resist thoughts before I go further. Simone: further I just love that you're calling Antinatalism scientifically stupid. Please carry on. Malcolm Collins: It is scientifically stupid. It like actually is, it's just evolutionary signals and they know it's just evolutionary signals. It's like in. Simone: I mean is even like, more of an argument as to why they should discount that. Because evolutionary signals are just the signals about surviving, which they don't wanna do. So Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Simone: try something Malcolm Collins: So Simone: guys. Malcolm Collins: why are a, your core God? You know, it's like, use that men in black clip. It's like they know this is a watch, they know this is a business card and they still worship it. Like they, they don't think that these things are magical or anything. They're just, I, I, I, I genuinely can't rock the logic behind it. Simone: Yeah. Malcolm Collins: Now note here that so far we have made many arguments and only one of them needs to be true. For all of Antinatalism to be unethical. It only needs to be true that future humans have some form of value. For all of Antinatalism to be untrue it only needs to be true. That building your entire world philosophy. Around environmental, e evolutionary signals is a bad way to build your world philosophy. It only needs to be true that people have a right to choose how they identify, and some people are going to identify more with their culture or tribe or family than as an individual. and, If, if any of those things is true, if any of those things is true and I think all of them is individually true, then the entire antinatalist house of cards immediately falls apart. But I think that a lot of people, you know, they get into these positions and they don't wanna change, like the choices that they've made in life. This is more about justifying choices they've already made. I. Now here, I would point out how can we argue with such confidence that antinatalist are trying to justify preexisting intuition rather than arrive at a logically reasoned truce. David Beitar, the present standard bearer of the antinatalist movement, admits that he has been an antinatalist since he was a very young child. He simply used his position of power to force his intuition on other people and reinforce it was in his own mind. He is the head of the philosophical department at the University of Cape Town. and here was, was a section that you wrote, I, Simone, started out. As an antinatalist as well. It is normal for young kids to hold this position before we are ready to have kids. The average human is largely hard coded to see them as annoying and broadly distasteful. Antinatalism comes off as childish, because its qualities are literally the intuition of a child. Reinforced over a lifetime and galvanized by the cognitive dissonance felt by adherence as they damage their own lives. You may think we are over personalizing, but A regular and spurious argument that David Benetta makes is that the major reason people argue for pronatalist positions is that they are based on biological instincts. We feel forced to highlight the hypocrisy in this projection. and this really gets to me with a lot of this, people are gonna be like, why are you so mean about it, and why have you gotten meaner about it over time? One, because it's leading to terrorism, and two, because it's leading to people hating their lives and sort of draining, like there's just no value to the philosophy. It's got no positive externality. There's lots of like religious traditions where I'm like, okay, I think they're wrong. But clearly it's helping these people. This just seems to make people hate their lives. But it's not just that the negative externalities of the philosophy are probably the most evil and severe of any philosophy who humanity has ever held significantly more than something like Nazism or communism. . If we look at the most evil regimes in history, they often said, well, we want to eradicate X group. Like we wanna sterilize all the Jews, or we wanna sterilize all the Native Americans. Whereas the antinatalist are saying, oh, we wanna do that for every group. They are multiplicatively worse for that reason than every one of those regimes because they want to do this to literally. Every culture on Earth. And they want to do it from the perspective of the urban monoculture, which cannot motivate its own continued existence. And is basically just taking the perspective of, well, if I'm gonna die out because the urban monoculture has very low fertility rates, I'm gonna take the rest of humanity with me. There is, you know, no point in a world existing that I don't live in. Antinatalism reminds you very much of, , that scene. From, , downfall that movie about Hitler's life, that's really tragic where the mom poisons her kids because she doesn't want them to live in a world without Nazism. , She just can't imagine why such a world would be good. And I think that that is a big part of what, from an urban monocultural perspective, is motivating antinatalism. It's that they realize that they're losing now and they just want to end it for everyone because there's no point in existing in a world without Nazism or Antinatalism from their perspective. Sorry, when I point out that this is an imperialistic culture that lives within just one cultural group. The point I mean is you do not see negative utilitarianism spreading to any large degree within any community except for the atheistic secular urban monoculture, , in maybe a few Buddhist groups. You don't see it in Muslim groups, you don't see it in conservative Jewish groups. You don't see it in conservative Christian groups. And the reason I specify conservative fear is often because when they're not conservative, they're just urban monoculture, , wearing the skin suit of the religion. By this, what I mean is a progressive Christian Church often has more in common with a progressive mosque than either would with a conservative iteration of their tradition. And same with, you know, Jewish temples. Finally, I note here that the reason antinatalist are so scary as a philosophy is historically every civilizational conflict we've ever gotten into, like, , the Cold War over communism versus capitalism, we could at least know, I hope the Russians love their children too. This time we don't have that. It's the first time in human history. There has been a significant group that genuinely doesn't love their children and genuinely doesn't care about humanity's future and genuinely wouldn't pull stops if it meant the destruction of all life on earth. that's before I go farther about the, the, you being an anti-natal list at one point. Simone: No, but I mean, I, I, I think this just goes to show how this is about intuition and your worldview and not about what's true and what's not true. Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm. This approach to philosophy is an exercise to build strong arguments, supporting already held intuitions about the world, instead of leveraging it as a means of building, quote unquote truer intuitions. Contrast heavily with ours Anyone who's read our first book will know that our views on the meaning of life have evolved radically as we have encountered new information, heard better arguments, and engaged in further self-examination. For example, while we used to think our core goal was to maximize the quote unquote volume of sentience in the universe, we now do not even think sentience has value as can be seen in this book's chapter on the topic. Or if you wanna see the YouTube video on it, look up the, you're probably not sentient or lns are sentient in the same way humans are episodes, we literally did a 180 on our entire worldview when presented with compelling logically sound, evidence and arguments. This is the difference between a worldview shaped with by inquiry and an inquiry shaped by a worldview. You can create feelings of profundity with drugs or chanting. Just because something feels profound doesn't mean it is inherently profound or meaningful in the same best. Simone: true Malcolm Collins: profound and meaningful things may not trigger the feelings of the profound. Our read of the True antinatalist position is that they look for something that feels obviously and unobjectionable meaningful in the same way suffering feels obviously and Simone: objectionable fact Malcolm Collins: and they can't find such a thing. So they Assume intrinsic meaning doesn't exist. Humans underwent no evolutionary pressures to search for the true meaning of the universe. To think that we would be quote unquote coded to recognize intrinsic meaning at an emotional level seems ludicrous. The same can be said of human cultures. They evolved just like our minds did when looking for meaning in the world. A person should think from the perspective of a high order entity unencumbered by our. Pre-programmed biases, positive and negative emotional states would an entity that didn't feel suffering conclude it is intrinsically bad. Such seems highly unlikely to us. We see no reason to feel bad when a computer is unable to carry out. Its pre-programmed actions and an entity that could not Empathize. with the way we interpret suffering would probably see our suffering as analogous to that quote unquote, suffering is merely a tool evolution used to keep us focused on our pre-programmed actions. There is no greater meaning. To it, then there is to code running a paperclip, maximizer AI that prompts it to protest when blocked from making paperclips. And it might be self-aware enough to realize it from, be like, Hey, I understand this is what I'm programmed to do. I understand that I don't want to feel suffering, but I also understand I was programmed to want this. And I note here that we're probably only a few generations away from eradicating this. So if you're talking about like the weight of pleasure to pain, you're, you're actually not one of these true, like, pleasure has no value people, that almost certainly is gonna tip to the side of positivity and further tip to the side of positivity. The longer humanity survives and the more technologically advanced we get. I'd also note here the stupidity of the environmentalist argument. most of the major pronatalist have a background in environmentalism. Simone got her undergraduate degree in environmentalism. Elon obviously obsessed with environmentalism and global warming. Look at Tesla, look at his solar projects. the reality is, is that if humanity goes extinct or we create something that collapses our existing civilization and humanity can't recover from it, every plant and animal in biome on Earth is going to eventually die. Simone: I do though, I do think that, that there's a really interesting bifurcation in how people fall when they hit the rock that is environmentalism or when they're hit by it. Right? Like, some people hit environmentalism and they're, they can only want either like, nothing to change or they sort of want everything to grind to a halt and everything to stop Malcolm Collins: Yeah, like, like freeze the existing environmental systems or. Simone: freeze it or end it. And there's just this Malcolm Collins: Rebecca believe it was right before humans interacted with it. Simone: then there's this other element that is that, that comes at environmentalism from a, a perspective of a love for that red in tooth and claw vitalism that Malcolm Collins: Yes. Simone: Which accepts the brutalism of. Natural systems, but wishes to protect their ongoing evolution. Like let's allow for this to continue. Like we want more of it and we want it to expand as it has since it, since life first came out on Earth. Right? Whereas there's this really interesting, it's almost in the end I see it, and this is why I still feel like we are the real environmentalist here. There's something very anti nature about this idea of wanting to extinguish it, like the entire purpose of life, of plant life, of animals, of everything is to expand and evolve and grow and reach new territory. Right? And Malcolm Collins: Yeah, the way that. Simone: of antinatalism is like that runs counter to every instinct on a cellular level, on a mental level, on a bylaw. Like every level. It is against nature, which is crazy. Malcolm Collins: Well, and, and I'd argue that not just Antinatalism, but that form of environmentalism about just creating the environment that that existed when humans first contacted it and preserving that forever, for hundreds, millions of years instead of letting it to continue to evolve in response to new pressures. I really want to. Tease out the point she's making here. 'cause I find it very interesting. When I look at environmentalist groups, they typically fall into one of two categories. One wants to freeze biomes forever and ever and ever at the state they were at when humans first contacted them. So like if a coyote has evolved to take the ecological niche, a wolf once held in that biome, they will reintroduce wolves and kill the , , the coyotes that have evolved to take that niche. , Whereas other environmentalist, they don't see their job. As protecting a set sliver , of biological history. They see it as helping nature do what nature does, which is evolve, expand, adapt, change, and proliferate. , And that in a way, antinatalism represents the avatar of one form of environmentalism. This first kind free everything, , put it on a slide and then eradicate it, and then the other. pronatalism represents the avatar of the red in tooth and claw style environmentalism. And I, and I point out that, you know, the way the environment reacts to humanity is part of evolution, is part of the environment. We are not the first species to cause, a great extinction event despite what you have likely heard from environmental. It's the great oxidation event. Is another example. And, and so, this is just part of the environmentalist cycle. If what you care about is not freezing the environment and the diversity of life and the complexity of life well then you should be cheering for the only species that can get other life off this planet before the sun engulfs the planet and kills everything. Simone: like there's no humanity leaving Earth without other life leaving Malcolm Collins: And, and yeah. And when we get to other planets, we will see that maybe billions of new biomes. Simone: Mm-hmm. Malcolm Collins: know? so I just, it, it's, it's an illogical argument that's, that's purely aesthetic in nature. Simone: Yes. Emotional. Malcolm Collins: yeah. Simone: I It's aesthetic. I think it's emotional. Malcolm Collins: I'd also note that all the environmentalist removing themselves from the gene pool, because we know that about 40% of the way you vote is genetic and origin is going to significantly change how much future populations care about environmentalism. But that's neither here nor there. the economic arguments, people will be like, oh, well you can't afford to have kids. And it's like, well then why do people with less money have more kids between and within countries? Right? Like. Just the whole thing is a silly argument. I, I find, what it, what they mean is I don't wanna sacrifice my current quality of life. And like, that's okay if that's what you wanna do. but I will note that like you are gonna struggle to derive and this is a, a hard thing to say, but you're gonna struggle to derive as much meaning from your life if you don't contribute to something bigger than yourself. And if you don't contribute to the next generation or find a way to do that, because that is really. What adults were programmed to want to do in the same way, like teenagers are programmed to wanna sleep around a lot. and I think a lot of people, what happens to them is they just keep doing the behavior that maximally, sort of masturbated their internal mental state when they were like a teenager or late teenager. Even though the amount of pleasure they're getting from that is, is dropping over time, and they don't realize what's happening. So they think they just need to do more of the behavior when the reality is that they were supposed to grow up like, like evolution expected that, I'd also note here that for reproductive rights arguments, pronatalist do not advocate for banning abortion or contraception. none of the major prenatal list orgs that I know of, like some Catholic orgs do, but they're not pronatalist they're like pro Catholic orgs, right. and historically when we've seen this happen. it causes a spike in fertility rates and then a crash in fertility rates. It's, it is not that, I think that abortion is a moral thing. I think that we should significantly restrict access to abortion within our country. not to the extent of banning IVF, obviously if it prevents more kids from coming into the world. but I and I mean significantly, like back to what it is in Europe and stuff like that, this like, you can have an abortion until the kids, ready to be born seems obviously horrific to me. but, this is not like a anti reproductive rights movement. Same with feminism, as we saw from Aria Babu study more gender egalitarian countries. Typically have higher fertility rates, of upper income countries and less gender egalitarian countries. and this is why even despite Southern Europe being poorer than Northern Europe, you see a lower fertility rate there. it's likely downstream of them being less gender egalitarian. And then you look at other places with super low fertility rates, whether whereas Korea or Japan, they're typically a lot less gender egalitarian, than places like the United States or Northern Europe where you see some resistance to this. And this is just because girls don't wanna go into this if they know that their life is gonna be miserable. I mean, that's. Why you were an antinatalist You're like, I don't wanna give up my, my life. the racism arguments are absolutely absurd. if you control for income, the groups that have the highest fertility rates are typically, conservative religious Jewish groups. and Simone: about post developed societies, Malcolm Collins: yeah, we have protestant groups. Simone: will be Malcolm Collins: No, I said when you control for income, Simone: okay? Yeah. Malcolm Collins: you have protestant groups, you know, the, the, the backwoods cultural region in the United States, like this is like redneck. Basically. these are the people who will be represented in the future. and, and you can be like, well, what about these other groups that are having tons of kids? It doesn't matter if those kids aren't engaged with technology in the economy. that's where cultural power comes from. Right? Like, you, when was the last time you watched a movie Made in Africa? Right. Like, but if I go to somebody in Japan, when was the last time you watched a movie Made in, in, in the United States, right? Like you need to be high fertility and economically and technologically productive. and it's an easy strategy to, to motivate high fertility with a, a lack of income as we've moti motive here, but it, it, doesn't mean that they'll have future cultural power. The point I'm making here is the status quo of fertility rates. And if you look at like US black fertility rates, black Americans have the lowest fertility rate of any ethnic group in the United States, outside of the bottom 20% of income earners. you know, and, and culturally this is gonna have a really negative effect, especially if you're looking at a culture that if you go back to the 1960s, had half the number of kids being born out of wedlock Yes, black had half the number of kids being born out of f wedlock to now it's like 76, something like that. you know, it is just been completely ravaged in a way that has economically trapped them. and I, and, and they are sort of forced to reinvent their culture if they want to build something that that can work. but the point I'm making here is enforcing the status quo benefits white groups and hurt minority populations. Whereas bringing attention to fertility collapse is an issue like within the Native American community, which has a very low fertility rate. Helps Parsis and Jains and very low fertility rate helped, the future. And then the final argument, which I just find ridiculous is, is, oh, you can't impose your cultural beliefs on children. And it's like all parents impose a way of life on children through their, their, their cultures and values. children have the freedom to choose their own path as adults. but when somebody is a child, they don't have the development to make these decisions. Right. You know? Simone: I'll add like, there's a little more color to this. There's, there's some antinatalist thought leaders who frame childhood as a form of slavery , and parenting is a form of like mimetic imperialism, where parents are like forcing this upon children. First, I mean, anyone who's encountered kids know that they have minds of their own. They will decide if your take is dumb, and they will let you know about it. And even if you're, they're not allowed to let you know about it in the end, it'll, it'll shake out. You know, you, you have 18 years maybe to, to sort of pitch your ideas in its totalitarian way or otherwise, very permissive, right? But in the end, kids are gonna decide for Malcolm Collins: And if you're overly totalitarian like Aela's parents were, it just completely backfires. Simone: Yeah. I mean, they did, they did for a while, break her spirit. She still deconverted from that culture because it was just weak. Honestly. It Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, it, it tried to enforce her staying was in it through, aggression. Simone: yeah, coercive, abusive ways. But the, the point being that. The arguments that, that these people are making about children being in this, this victimized position. I mean, absolutely. Children are vulnerable. Absolutely. Being a kid is rough and you don't get control over your life. And I love being an adult because I hated all that. So I, I don't disagree with, with childhood being tough. But , this concept, I think , is really overwrought and misrepresented in terms of like children. Being treated , as slaves and being indoctrinated. Because while yes, parents may try to make a pitch, that's all they get is a pitch. Malcolm Collins: and I'll note here, some people could be like, how could you say all this when you guys practice corporal punishment and we practice it very light corporal punishment. it is less than our kids' regular rough and tumble play, which they do a lot. Simone: Yeah. Malcolm Collins: very, very much less and. Simone: I'll tell you what, we've ne we've never left a mark on our kids. I can't count the number of bruises even on my body at this time our children and not even from them being angry. One of our sons like just his way of expressing love is these goat like headbutts. Malcolm Collins: I do because I love you and I also. Note here, the core advocate for bopping in our family is our children. Simone: Yeah. Malcolm Collins: they advocate for it on other children when other children act up as they say bops or justice. Simone: Yeah. Malcolm Collins: This childhood is slavery argument is uniquely weak because it doesn't have the benefit of the asymmetry argument to back it up when we know that most of the kids who are apparently slaves in their childhood do end up with fond memories of childhood do end up wanting to continue to live. So like the Sandy Hook shooter who he said, oh, well they're in a state of slavery. The vast majority of those kids. Like their lives and would've liked their lives in the future. He is projecting his cultural framing onto other individuals despite knowing from the data that his cultural framing is wrong. I think that this is why we see rates of narcissism in Machiavelli and other dark triad traits, , at higher levels within the Antinatalists community. As a number of studies have shown, , it fundamentally is a community that wishes that everyone else had the same perception of reality that they do. That wishes that other people were unable to find meaning in life beyond suffering and pleasure. In the same way. They can't find meaning in life beyond suffering and pleasure. And when other individuals tell them, oh no, here is where I derive meaning from life, , a normal person would be like, oh, that's great that you derive meaning from that. I'm really glad that you were able to find something that makes your life worth living. Whereas a narcissist or somebody who has Machiavellian tendencies will hear that and say, oh, well, you are just wrong. My perspective is the absolute correct perspective. , , and then you can really see this within the pronatalist movement where, . We have all sorts of different reasons to live and reasons to want to be alive, and we are all respectful of our different reasons, but, , , the antinatalists there is just one reason. That's it. Everybody must follow the authority. So any thoughts you want to end with, Simone: i'm glad we went over all this sort of the anti doist arguments again, because every time we go through them and think about it more, the more it just stands out to me how illogical this is. And my biggest revelation this time was just how I. Against the natural order nature, the environment in general, the entire concept is, which is I guess to me that that strikes me as very strong because most antinatalist I'm aware of are also vegans who believe they care a lot about the environment, and yet what they're arguing for is something so deeply contrary Malcolm Collins: It's a human Simone: order. Malcolm Collins: moral system that they want to impose on the entire natural order, which is. Simone: maybe, maybe they're not really environmentalists and they're just anti Malcolm Collins: You are just anti. Simone: Yeah. No antis sentient. Yeah. Antis suffering. Yeah. So anyway, I guess that that just, that's something that's really stood out to me in this, but I appreciate you going through all the arguments and I, Malcolm Collins: Well, and if you wanna see, like, I think the, the, the two, that I included bits of, civ songs I think are very good arguments for prenatals positions. If you wanna get, like, our wider vibe is why we exist, and I just don't understand how, when you see something like that as the alternative, how you think anyone's gonna choose your doomerist me, me, me take, right? Like all the. Simone: Malcolm's referring to like the Civ five like game theme song by Christopher Tin Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. and we, Simone: And then the other one, Malcolm Collins: we'll include, Simone: remember what the other one's called. Malcolm Collins: and then we'll include our own AI antinatalist song here. because I, I love those songs and it's always fun to, to create this stuff and, and share it with you guys. and I hope that we help break somebody out of this philosophy if they had just entered it. because it is a philosophy that does eventually take everything from you. Simone: Yeah. Similar to AI Doism. Malcolm Collins: There's just, yeah, it provides no real utility, and it's not internally logically consistent. And it is wrong if one of like 10 arguments we've made here is accurate. You know, even, even if future humans don't really matter, if the core reason you exist isn't paying in pleasure, which I think that your own Sisyphus argument undoes, then, then the whole thing falls apart. Or if. It's bad to genocide Native Americans through sterilization because some people choose to have an identity at the level of the society, of the culture. Then it's bad even if everything else is true. That's the problem with Antinatalism is it requires so many shaky pillars to be true, and all of them are super shaky. Simone: Yeah. Malcolm Collins: I have a spectacular day. I love you, Simone. love you, what are we doing for dinner tonight? I was thinking of just making you joza like some comfort food, Yeah, because I'm not feeling well. That's so people know. I've, I've been kind of sick. and yeah, Giza is a, is a good comfort food. I, I always wonder about something even more simple than that, like mac and cheese or something. Simone: can make you grilled cheese. Malcolm Collins: cheese would be fantastic. Simone: All right. Grilled cheese. Malcolm Collins: I love you to death, Simone. You take care of me when I'm sick, but we keep pushing through because it doesn't matter how we feel. What matters is that we're contributing to a better tomorrow for everyone. We must pay to the future. The debt we owe the past, and my God, is it a debt? Simone: Righto. True though. Based camp Song: They say there's nothing here but sorrow or delight. A shallow chase for feelings in the day and in the night. But look beyond your heartbeat, beyond what's in your vein. There's more to life than can be found in pleasure or pain. Beyond the pleasure. On the pain. We stand on roads of forebears paved in grit and strain. Don't throw away the promise that tomorrow can sustain. There's more to life than hollow thrills or running fast. From the rain, these feelings born of chance in fields of ancient strife. They kept our tribe from failing help. Give birth to modern life, just signals from our past. They served a vital role, but meaning goes beyond the scars that time upon us. Beyond the pleasure, beyond the pain We stand on roads of forbears paved in grit and strain Don't throw away the promise that tomorrow can sustain There's more to life than hollow thrills or running from the rain They claim that it's all worthless if the joys cannot wait But they dismiss the wonders we've inherited right here. The years of struggle handed down the future's bright unknown. It isn't just the fleeting spark of comfort we are shown. We carry on a story with pages left to write. Our tapestry is woven from both darkness and from light. Trade a grand potential for a single shallow lens. We're more than pain or pleasure, we're the sum of all our ends. Beyond the pleasure game. Yes, more than just the fleeting spark, we're seeds of deeper worth. There's legacy and progress in our footsteps on this earth. So hold the torch of living. Let the light shine. Remain step beyond the simple bounds of pleasure and of pain Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe