It is better to have never been

Thanks, Pro. I. Discomfort is bad.. Or is it? Please recall the definitions of 'good' and 'bad': Good: An overall positive experience/state Bad: An overall negative experience/state I had shown last round that for her argument to work, then discomfort must be 'bad', i.e. a truly negative state. It has become patently obvious that Pro simply has not done this, and in fact I do not see how she possibly could go about doing this. Given that she has already conceded that affirming 'life is discomfort' is an impossible to prove premise, then she needs to affirm the following argument: P1. All states of discomfort are bad P2. Life perpetually produces states of discomfort C. Life perpetually produces bad states Where even this is not enough to demonstrate her required conclusion. The simple fact the people do not want to be in a state of discomfort and would prefer a state of comfort only demonstrates what is said at face-value, that all things equal a state of comfort in a particular area is preferable to a state of discomfort. A 'desire' or 'want' is simply too broad and simplistic to give a precise description of what genuinely is 'good' or 'bad', it's the reason why words such as pain and suffering are actually useful. It seems patently absurd that somebody with a near infinite number of superficial wants or desires is in anything like the state of 'discomfort' that somebody with physical trauma may be in. Pro attempts to justify the first premise: ""Would anyone prefer to live a life wherein there was no attaining things that they desired, OR have a life wherein there was no desire to attain them in the first place?" This is an important question, which is also very subjective. Without the desire you would never have done the tasks between not having and accomplishing, and you would have missed out on the self-rewards and memories involved in succeeding. If having a 'new' desire does not impinge on one's well being (as Pro seems to affirm) then it quickly does not follow that 'discomfort is bad', and that 'comfort is (only) the relieving of a discomfort. "Could you imagine training every day for a place in a tennis tournament, yet never making it?... ...Would not that life be filled with heartache and sorrow? Would it not be better to not exist?" I would recommend asking Caroline Wozniaki, Jelena Jankovich or Miloslav Mecir, all of which have never won a grand slam despite being quite capable of doing so, or Jimmy White (snooker), a six time world championship finalist. It's a fairly safe bet that none of these regret pursuing their dreams('discomforts') of becoming a respective champion. The world just isn't that simple, and many smaller goals and accomplishments may lie between what you really want, all of which could be argued to add positive value to their lives. "If feeling nothing is neutral (neither good nor bad; there is nothing to value), then we can determine that because discomfort is less desirable, that it is bad." Discomfort could also be more desirable to a 'neutral' state, following this line of reasoning. In either case it's over-simplistic. Moreover it also implicitly concedes that 'comfort' states are preferable to neutral states, which essentially concedes this debate if true, since it drops its 'life is always a negative/bad state' premises. Moreover Pro has offered nothing in opposition to my other refutations of 'discomfort is bad', people would not voluntarily out themselves in states of discomfort if the only gain is going to be a relief of that specific state of discomfort at most (massages, cinema examples). Pro has also not adequately addressed that other factors are involved other than discomfort/comfort, and that the relieving of discomfort is not equivalent to the annihilation of that state of discomfort. Her only response is to obfuscate my examples, which is simply just a case of creating a strawman. Recall my argument: P1) If discomfort was 'bad', then discomfort would not be voluntarily created P2) Discomfort is voluntarily created C) Discomfort is not 'bad' P2 is affirmed frequently, every time one visits a museum, watches a film or flips on a porn channel. While it may fulfil other states if discomfort, it will create additional, larger ones as one realises more desires. Seldom does one cite a 'reluctance to have new desires' as a reason for not doing something, very seldom, which is something that would be predicted by Pro's philosophy IF 'discomfort is bad'. Pro's boredom argument, is essentially just affirming my original point, that comfort/discomfort is an over-simplistic view a the state of affairs, and there are many other factors (both positive and negative) that are involved. II. Unintelligent Design: Pro agrees/strongly that subjective value can be attached to things, which weakens her own position as it can be attached to life itself, well being and other non-directly related to well being entities, such as knowledge, accomplishment, etc. She also agrees that humans have capacities that are outside if what she portrays in her evolution/cosmology arguments. She agrees that the origin of something has no bearing on it's function, which weakens her position further. Much of her argument followed roughly the lines of: Life is intrinsically purposeless/lacking in value - Life is pointless and therefore is better to have never been But she has given absolutely no response to my counterpoint of that if we accept thre is no purpose/ultimate value in life, then why would life be better to have been/never been at all? Since it's all irrelevant. Human's extinction is ultimately unimportant, human's continuation is ultimately unimportant. It doesn't matter either way. If that's true then I simply do not see how Pro can think the state of affairs ultimately favours human's complete non-existence, when it seems patently obvious it favours neither. The only way to address this debate is from the state of affairs from the point of view of the sentient beings involved, the grand scheme of things is clearly irrelevant. A lump of gold is worthless absent a sentient being to perceive it, yet there is no reason to accept that it is better that the lump of gold never existed in the first place. It's a nonsensical statement. III. Real Impact Reading over Pro's arguments last round, I think my rebuttal to overpopulation was right on the money. Pro makes additional arguments for suffering life causes, which I am not sure if within the rules of this debate. Her argument is life causes suffering (extreme discomfort), to which my answer is - so what? Why should it matter that there are examples of extreme suffering as pro has pointed out, it simply does not demonstrate the resolution to even a weak extent. It only demonstrates the conditions that those specific individuals are in, she has a lot of work to extrapolate this to the entire human species, or even a significant fraction of it. I made the assertion last round that having in individuals in a sub-optimum state of discomfort would be preferable to having much fewer, individuals in an optimum state of discomfort is a reasonable one. If some people are always going to suffer to an extreme extent which allows for a much, much larger population to live in happiness then I do not see how Pro can make her argument work unless she is to argue that a world in which even a minimal number of people undergoing extreme suffering negates the preference for the whole to exist. So despite her graphic tale, it just doesn't support her position, it is made worse by the fact that these are very foreseeably mitigable in the future as technology mind society progresses in our stage of rapid intellectual development. It is very conceivable that we would have a sustainable society that would be absent of virtually all of this suffering in the future. IV. Life is imposed "The fact that life can be bad, that you really do not know what a life is going to be like until it is lived, puts you in no position to judge whether the life should be lived." Are we? If I play a round of roulette which pays out 100:1, and my chances of I winning are 10:1, then gambling is a sensible option. While we may remain ignorant of how a specific life will be, we do not remain ignorant of how that life is likely to turn out. Pro's argument can ONLY work is life is already known to be generally bad, that future lives are more likely to be bad than good, and this ignores potential future developments. "You have no right to say whether a life should be lived" Pro weakens her own position with this statement, as she is now including 'rights' into the mix of things that need to be considered with life, which is another clear concession that Pro's philosophy is over-simplistic. V. Existential Nihilism: Pro drops my points on that existential nihilism avoids virtually all the evidential problems in Pro's arguments, as well as better accounting for neutral states and is the natural concequences of the rejection of intrinsic value/meaning. VI. Future: It is very conceivable that emotions drives and sources of pleasure and pain can be manipulated in the near future, if not in humans then in sentient AI. If discomfort really is bad, as Pro asserts, then the processes that cause these can be manipulated. In any case a society can be engineered to achieve maximal happiness/pleasure and minimal unhappiness/discomfort. This seems to have been overlooked by Pro, since by going extinct we deprive countless generations of a happy and meaningful life in the future. Remember that this debate's scope is not just the present moment and in the past. VII. Conclusion: Will save my full summary for the next round. Back to Pro for her summary/closing!