If you could push a button and simply cease to exist, would you press it?

I'm not sure it's even "would you rather have never been born" cos if you had never been born you couldn't make the choice to press that button. It's a more abstract question than that imo.

Jim: Antinatalism.

"Hi, my name is Evan, and I was aborted"

http://www.clevelandrapecrisis.org/uploads/Sitepage/cache/800x522_Support-Group-p1.jpg

If you could push a button and simply receive $14.2 million dollars, would you press it?

Question is not about winning the lottery, do not talk about winning the lottery in this thread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO5dYyrcmVo

I'm beginning to think my lottery comparison was misunderstood by everyone?

If you could push a button and instantaneously gain mad virtuosic piano skillz and know how to play every Chopin piece ever, would you press it?

Thanks Adam. I was saying a happier person would fantasize about that. A depressed person fantasizes about being able to not exist and not hurt anyone in the process, or am I not looking at this deeply enough.

i totally disagree. i meditate on my non-existence quite frequently, find the prospect of my "death" to be a relief, and yet i consider myself a quite happy, productive and engaged person because im not psychically fighting off the prospect of non-existence or meaninglessness.

See fear of death thread to see why I am positive "relief" is an irrelevant term in that context.

"it would involve no physical pain to yourself, and no emotional or financial or other repercussions to the people around you"

ie. NOT suicide

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Friday, October 19, 2012 11:34 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^this is otmfm. suicide is not just self-nullification, it is also an act of immense aggression against anyone/everyone who knows and loves you, and I'm gonna speculate that everyone who commits the act is at least aware of this

(also there's a part of Gravity's Rainbow where it is posed that suicide is the ultimate combination of every sexual fetish)

Uh, no it isn't. It's only a contingent fact that it hurts other people, not a necessary one. It's not an integral part of the definition. Therefore removing oneself via that button is a form of suicide.

I am pretty much the female Falstaff, so hell no; as long as there is good food, the wine's a-flowin', and I have dudes to make eyes at I am stickin' around.

― homosexual II, Thursday, October 18, 2012 4:41 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

:-)

"i wish i had never been born" <- isn't this an idea most people flirt with and move on from during adolescence?

^

suicide is not just self-nullification, it is also an act of immense aggression against anyone/everyone who knows and loves you, and I'm gonna speculate that everyone who commits the act is at least aware of this

that is so completely arrogant. I would argue it's the exact contrary, the fact that you cannot commit suicide because of the pain you will cause to the family, friends makes your personal suffering much worse. you talk like a priest and your line of reasoning is evil, don't be so condescending and let people make their own choices.

Suicide has had different meanings in different cultures. Sometimes it's been seen as socially responsible. I think we can speak of it in the abstract as just self-killing, with no value-judgment attached.

I am listening to "The Safety Dance" right now; fuck off, button

ate a tasty burrito for lunch, button couldn't be further from my mind

burrito stall

otm

http://www.vhemt.org/colorvisualize.jpg

I think this question is more about VHEMT-style selflessness than anything else.

lol @ the idea that people who buy tons of lottery tickets and fantasize about winning being the definition of happy people

I've never come across a one of those lottery ppl who fall into anything remotely resembling 'happiness'

ie the dude at my grocery store who comes out to his car, scratches off the scratch ticket, wins nothing, goes back in and buys 10 more, wins nothing, goes back in buys 10 more, rinse repeate for 30 minutes every day

Even though lately I feel like I asked for a fuzzy blanket and someone gave me a wire monkey mother instead, I still would not push the button.

lol @ the idea that people who buy tons of lottery tickets and fantasize about winning being the definition of happy people

― some dude, Friday, October 19, 2012 4:19 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Um, comparatively is all.

yes people who fantasize about winning the lottery are happier than people who fantasize about being in Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

I absolutely wouldn't push it TODAY; but c'mon, it'd be nice to know such a button exists if I'm ever suffering the final painful months of terminal cancer or something equally horrible.

(What about paralysis - what if I couldn't physically push the button myself? Could somebody push it for me; and would they then instantly forget why they pushed such a button? Would the button's existence be retroactively wiped out too? POINTS TO PONDER.)

what if you were told someone could push the button for you, but the button actually wipes that person out instead?

Who told you this? Would you remember the person that actually got wiped out existed?

http://www.officeplayground.com/Assets/ProductImages/pi2500-2699/2571_BSButton_1.jpg

Can I see what the rest of my life has to offer me before I choose?

If there's travel, someone special, and an ounce of peace of mind coming up, I'd not press it.

But if it's continuing on the path it is at the moment, get me that button please.

How is this question not about suicide?

― Evan, Friday, October 19, 2012 10:22 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a much more interesting question than it looks on the surface.

yes, exactly HOW is this question not about suicide?

the thread-starter (famously now) said it just wasn't, by fiat. apart from the clusterfuck that followed, that declaration had no weight. the word suicide has appeared dozens of times as people approached their answer to the question in good faith.

but others (w/o reading back thru, sorry) have agreed that this scenario is something entirely different. (generalizing here) those are also some of the same people saying they'd push it, am i wrong?

what is it about the negation of pain and trouble (and memory?) in toto that changes this act from a suicidal one? i think this needs to bu justified.

it's the part about no negative repercussions

yes but HOW

Framing the question as "do you think the world would be a better place if you never existed" still is pretty suicidal since you're fantasizing a scenario that causes nobody close to you pain but with the same outcome for yourself.

My dad refers to the time before I was born as when I was "a bone over the road ditch"

I guess that's what this place would be, that place of non existence. I literally envision a bone... in a ditch.

IMO the question as originally framed is indistinguishable from suicide, just with a fantasy element and lack of "consequences."

reframing the question as "not to be born" or "never having existed" is much more interesting.

psychoanalysis sometimes talks about the desire for constraint, that is, the desire for that which inhibits the complete fulfillment of desire. that's interesting here because the second scenario above would seem to suggest in some sense to desire the completion of desire as its ultimate negation. ie, a performative contradiction.

what is it about the negation of pain and trouble (and memory?) in toto that changes this act from a suicidal one? i think this needs to bu justified.

Maybe it has to do with the social dimension of suicide. I don't agree with the idea voiced above that suicide is necessarily an aggressive action, but it's an action that has a social effect, impacts other people, has meaning for them. Maybe the feeling is that by eliminating the public consequences of suicide and making it strictly private, it loses the social significance that we normally associate with it. It then becomes something else.

If you commit suicide there are negative repercussions, if you push this hypothetical button there are none. There are (some similar) negative repercussions in non-suicidal death as well, but if you push this hypothetical button, again, there are none. Why is this? Because it is a hypothetical button. This is a button that bypasses death, that transcends time and space and to some extent logic.

The question is not 'If you could push a button and die...'. This is about something beyond death, and as such should be considered in a grander scale than the usual human life.

The scenario described in the initial post is basically the theme to M*A*S*H.

Ceasing to exist is not dying. If you are religious, does your immortal soul cease to exist? If you are a materialist, does the matter comprising your corpse cease to exist?

This is one reason why i think this question is very different from suicide.

so then, if this is a fantasy of universal painlessness, it is a roundabout acknowledgement that, no matter how little value you place in your own existence (vs oblivion), OTHERS value you. is their love, however attenuated, really that intrusive?

why not press the button "halfway," but the other half -- you're still around but you and everybody you know finds your existence painless?

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy23neI1Wno
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8i47-QBL4Qo
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AB: That's assuming that materialists all believe that matter is sufficient to sustain identity even in entropic form. *I* would cease to exist even if my disintegrated matter fell down to earth as a fine dusting of emil.y-tasting frosticles.

guys guys this question is about whatever u want it to be do u see

otm

without a second's hesitation.

If you could push a button and simply turn into you-tasting frosticle dusting, would you press it?