Posted: Nov 13, 2014 1:33 pm
Thommo wrote:Fallible wrote:Thommo wrote:So you're saying that someone who isn't suffering (any living person who you would not say is suffering) is suffering more than someone else who is not suffering (a dead person).
I think that's a straightforward self contradiction. Clearly two people who are not suffering are suffering the same amount (not).
No, again, what I am saying is that living people experience while dead people do not, whereas what you seem to have understood me as saying is that if someone is not suffering at all at one point in time, they are still suffering more than a dead person. To restore some context to the picture - in the passage you replied to, I specifically referred to the case where a loved one dies and the one who goes on living suffers -Quite clearly then, the living experience more suffering by virtue of the fact that the dead do not experience at all, and it is therefore worse for the one left alive when a loved one dies, simply because the loved one no longer 'is', and the one left behind is suffering.
Unless there is a way that a non-existent, non-experiencing person can experience something so that it is 'worse' for that non-existent, non-experiencing person than it is for the extant, experiencing person that I don't know about, obviously.
So again, my point is that dead people don't suffer, and that TMB is acting like this is somehow in dispute when he says 'if we assume that dead people do not suffer as do the living'. It is not in dispute - we can fairly safely say that dead people do not suffer 'as do the living', unless we decide to entertain unevidenced and unfalsifiable assertions about life after death, because dead people lack the capacity to experience full stop, while living people - although not being constantly in a state of suffering - have the capacity to experience various sensations and emotions, including suffering.
Sure, but that doesn't sustain the other part of your post, which most closely addressed what he said and which I underlined above as my point of contention. Taking it as a given that the dead neither suffer nor thrive (which TMB also did) does not allow us to conclude that the living have it "worse", nor that they suffer more in the most relevant sense of the word "suffer".
Given that I usually agree with you I am leaning towards to concluding that the fault here is mine, yet at the same time I cannot seem to see the sense in what you are saying. Firstly, what exactly are you referring to with your 'most relevant sense of the word suffer"'? Most relevant according to whom? Taking it as a given that the dead neither suffer nor thrive does not allow that the living suffer more? How do you reckon? If someone scratches their face a little harder than they intended and that manifests as a little pain, they have immediately suffered more than a dead person can. A dead person. Not a dying person. If you have nothing of a thing, anyone who has even the tiniest amount of said thing has more of it than you do. If you have nothing of a thing and never have, anyone who has ever had at any point the tiniest amount of said thing will have had more than you do. Someone may have suffered long and hard in life right up until the point of death. That is still the suffering of the living.Many living people, even the bereaved, view their ongoing life positively.
Did I say otherwise? Some people even view suffering as a positive experience. That people can see their ongoing, bereaved life positively does not suggest that they are not also suffering.
In a very relevant sense their existence is preferable to that of death, by their own assessment.
As far as I can make out, this does not address anything I've said.