mechap
I didn't read the posts closely enough, or I would have realised you were already invoking Ligotti.
Even if I could imagine a possible world in which my ideal was realized or my grave sufferings were solved, I would never think that it would have been better to have been born to that possible world.
I would never think that it would have been better not to have been born.
Can't the statement also mean simply that "Given this instantiation of my existence, I am glad for its existence." without making any judgement on possible worlds? After all, just like how the neverborn can't judge life, it's nigh impossible for us to accurately evaluate possible worlds. I might be glad to be in this world, but also acknowledge that I'd not be happy to be born as, say, a quadruple amputee (though I also might!). It's hard to say I would never think X.
Yeah, the asymmetry of pleasure and pain is the fundamental principle of antinatalism. I don't necessarily disagree with antinatalism as a principle in silo, because I accept that asymmetry. There's the counter-arguments of life generally being more good than bad, of life in itself being a good, there being greater goods than pleasure, etc. But I guess in general I find it hard to really have a strong view on the whole matter because it all hinges on how you evaluate life, death, good, bad, pain and pleasure, which are all very emotional evaluations. Every person has a wildly different calculus for it, and said calculus can also vary greatly with time because that's how emotions roll. The matter therefore feels a little too mercurial to focus too much on this, a bit too insubstantial. But that's probably part of my coping mechanism for the death-fear/consciousness-terror!
These perceptions of feelings of the cancellation of the ego as a controller are integrated with the feeling of cosmic unity I guess.
What's your experience with the feeling of cosmic unity? I don't think I've ever had that experience, though I have read about it many times.
So you are suggesting that we might be part of a spontaneous order that we lack the level of understanding to comprehend, but which ultimately makes consciousness a bearable condition?
I think that more accurately, we are not only part of a spontaneous order, but we generate many many of these orders as we interact with each other throughout life. We generate them, we tweak them by participating in them, we sometimes even actively mould them, but it is the embracing of these gestalts (consciously or otherwise) that helps to drown the consciousness-terror. It doesn't have to be a full embracing; we dip into numerous group identities at the same time to varying degrees (eg, sex, job, economic status, hobby, forum of choice).
I think we totally have the capacity to understand these abstracted orders (though we likely don't use it very much). For example, we understand the ideas of in-group/out-group mentality fairly well. It's not like we can't comprehend nationalism, we understand the phenomenon reasonably well and will probably have more and more sophisticated understandings of it in the future. But probably that comprehension isn't very relevant to the effectiveness of how it soothes the consciousness-terror when we embrace these ideas. If anything, comprehension might have the ill effect of causing you to be too self-aware of yourself in relation to it to sufficiently immerse yourself, popping you back out of the stream and unable to shuck off your individual identity for a group identity. Excess self-consciousness sabotaging your efforts to quell said self-consciousness, as it were.
