On a Recent Conflict, My Views & a Critique of Reductionism

1. Introduction

I left an online discussion group about a week ago due to a conflict and I have been reflecting on it quite a bit. I thought I'd use this as an opportunity to write on what I've been thinking about these past few months as this conflict is representative of my principle concerns and allows me to update people on my views. I was initially conflicted as to how best to approach this blog post. On one side I would have liked to just make it about the arguments (we take so much pride in our ability to do that!) and mention no story, but on the other, I realized this was impossible, because the arguments in question and the personal are inextricably linked. To argue against this premise would be to say that our views -- our convictions -- do not affect our behavior, do not affect our reality, which is absurd.

Allow me to build on that by saying that I believe we are making a fatal error when we believe that we are in possession of ideas. Beliefs and ideas "appear as independent beings with individual bodies, in communication with humans but also between themselves", Marx said. We can go further and say that they have a life and power of their own, and they can possess us, Morin says. I believe we have been possessed, in the Western world, by a reductionism that traces back to Descartes, and it is one such possession -- in my view -- that has lead to the conflict that prompted this post.

Now, it would be hypocritical to say that my ideas do not possess me, and indeed, I do not exclude myself here. However, I believe we can use this possessive nature of ideas to our advantage. Being possessed by ideas like complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty, these, as far as I can see, do not lead to nefarious effects because they include rather than exclude, and they are centered around the idea of ongoing self-critique: our knowledge is always prone to errors and illusions. Ambiguity and complexity pave the way for tolerance and comprehension; reduction is a way to declare war.

Not that conflict should be avoided at all cost. Conflict is stimulating and necessary. Groups that avoid inner conflict are guaranteed to be or to devolve into an echo chamber. This conflict I was involved in was an instance of conflict that was desirable and important, but it was trivialized and ignored from the get-go, and later on was portrayed as being undesirable and petty.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Honestly, I think I'm mostly responsible for this conflict because I could have just left a long time ago, knowing that the environment in question breeds an hostility towards anything but its own dogmas and encourages willful ignorance. That is no doubt one of my shortcomings. As for the rest of them, which are obviously numerous, I am less in a position to explore them due to the nature of biases. If others want to discuss my shortcomings and present to me my blind-spots, I welcome them to do so. My comment section is open. I am always looking to learn more about myself.

  2. The conflict

Now, elaborating on the conflict itself. It begins with the fact that the person I have argued with embraces a reductionist/scientistic paradigm/worldview, while I oppose it. Every single time I challenged this person's claims/presuppositions, I was met with one or multiple of these reactions: defensiveness, arrogance and dismissiveness. Rather than ask me questions when I initially disagreed with him each time, he chose to pigeon-hole my statements into his favorite boogeymen: the supernatural and the religious. (If he wasn't ignoring them altogether.) This occurred every single time. Not once did he try to be fair to my arguments by asking questions. Not once did he show a genuine interest in the material I am drawing from, despite claiming to be open to it.

 In the heat of things during the last conflict I was asked to explain my position and chose not to do so for three reasons that I can think of. (1) I am not in a position to teach people. (2) the previous reactions and misrepresentations discouraged me, and (3) because of the medium itself. The main issue with a live chat room is that encourages "fast thinking" (Kahneman). It's a fast-paced environment that encourages quick judgments, knee-jerk reactions. Put simply: shallow thinking. So, undesirable reactions and misrepresentations are understandable, and we should have lowered expectations between participants and be willing to forgive each other readily if we are misrepresenting each other's views. However, there was no such willingness there, no spirit of conviviality, and there comes a point after repeated offenses and stagnant exchanges where something must be said, at the risk of creating a conflict that delves into the personal.

Also, since things were heated, it was certainly not the time and place for an exposition of my views. I've previously held back on challenging this person because of his tendency to strawman and pigeon-hole my (and others') positions and the cocksureness with which he argues and rants. This behavior is highly indicative of someone who has a serious emotional investment in his positions, which means that it's not possible to dispassionately argue the arguments themselves, because they are strongly linked to his self-esteem. I suspect he's aware of this to some degree due to previous talks on our tribalistic nature, and I don't think he lacks the self-awareness to exclude himself from such a nature. I don't exclude myself either, we are all in the same boat, but I think it's obvious that some people deal better with their fanatical and dogmatic impulses.

Unless provoked, I am one of those people who doesn't want to harm others' self-esteem by saying or implying that they're making mistakes or being uncritical. The thing is that even if these statements are not made explicitly, the implications of challenging someone's deeply-held certainties are felt as if this is what they are being told. This is especially true when it comes to someone who evidently takes great pride in their intellect, which was the case with this individual. I had no reason to want to hurt his feelings by positioning myself as more informed or knowledgeable than he is, so I simply kept quiet most of the time. And indeed, it is when I finally had enough and I stated that his thinking was not nuanced that his pride got the best of him and things went south quickly from there.

A few days prior to this last conflict, we had a disagreement on nutrition, which is worth mentioning. He dogmatically pushed the idea that Soylent is the scientifically-backed food of the future -- a meal replacement that "improves upon nature", citing nothing but a study that had no results published. From my perspective, he was working backward from his conclusion due to what seems to be a proud bias that the "nature lovers are always wrong" -- an instance of black and white thinking and pigeon-holing. It's like he operated under the belief that the less real food he eats, the less like them he is, which is necessarily good, and to hell with making evidence-based decisions.

It's like wanting to reduce the amount of air you breathe because of the existence of breatharians (people claiming to survive on air and the sun's energy alone). Sorry that it inconveniences you, but in 2017 you still need to eat real food to maintain your structure as a natural machine. Soylent can hardly be considered food at all -- in fact it is banned in Canada where I live because it doesn't meet the basic requirements of a meal replacement. It operates from the reductionist framework, despite the fact that food synergy or "wholism" has been well-established in nutrition science, while the consumption of extracted, isolated & concentrated nutrients have done very poorly in clinical trials and mostly show no benefits at all. (See also a recent example: here.) In my view, Soylent is an overpriced gimmick that is primarily marketed towards people who value productivity, i.e. making money over taking care of their health. I definitely see the appeal in it, because I value not having to think about food, but there are better alternatives for quick meals if you value your health.

What became obvious to me with the last conflict is that this person is also rude and abusive if you challenge him for long enough. This is the more personal bit that I feel like I have to mention, because this is exactly what the user thedeliriousdonut, a philosophy student, said when he left the group, too. I have had other people tell me the same thing, but I decided to keep giving him the benefit of the doubt prior to this last conflict. This user also said the following:

"The success rate of that server to say things that are so trivially incorrect that it's clear there's an almost extreme lack of critical thinking and the low likelihood of anyone being convinced, sooner rejecting logic than admitting they're wrong, makes it clear my time would be wasted there. I don't really want to be in that server ever again. It does nobody any good. Someone rude and inconsiderate being in power is only the cherry on top."

I sort of came to his defense back then, giving him the benefit of the doubt, but now I see I was clearly wrong, because this is what I came to conclude as well. Based on this, I don't believe anyone should invest themselves in this community while this person is in power. There is a hierarchy there and power is not distributed; he does not have to ask other admins before he chooses to do something, so he essentially has free reign to act on his impulses. This is not how a serious place operates, and it's especially ironic of one that has a rule to "check one's biases". What I am obviously not saying is that this person is evil and should be ex-communicated or punished in some way. I don't believe that at all. (Not that this post could ever have that influence anyway.)

Now that this stuff is off of my chest, let's get to the arguments. What evidence is there that so many of the ideas that are floating around there are wrong? If I recall correctly, for thedeliriousdonut, logic was not valued and there was an uncritical embrace of scientism. The elephant in the room for me is that reductionism reigns unchallenged there. The first thing to understand is that despite my clarifications, the term reductionism was seen as nothing but an insult towards naturalists more than once. This is especially funny considering the fact that (1) I'm a naturalist and (2) there is a consensus among naturalists that antireductionism is the correct position to adopt and it is reconcilable with physicalism.

And if you don't trust the previously linked Wikipedia source, watch the "Moving Naturalism Forward" conference hosted by Sean Carroll on YouTube (especially day 1 when they speak about emergence). It's also worth mentioning that one of the panelists, Daniel Dennett, a well-known philosopher known for his hardline materialist and functionalist views also changed his thinking in recent years (despite being an old man, and we all know you can't ever teach an old dog new tricks -- that should suggest something about the strength of the arguments).

Ok, some examples of things that are asserted as self-evident in the chat room: "of course love is [just] a chemical in the brain", "human behavior is entirely predictable", "life is [just] an addiction", "the whole is not more than the sum of its parts", "there's no such thing as a self", "there's no such thing as creativity". Alright, you get the idea. So, why do I think this is wrong? Well, I'll get into that now, but first, I have to stress again that the main issue I have is the assurance behind the claims and the lack of intellectual curiosity of those who make them. These are not claims made by people who are studying the subject matter as objectively as possible. They are made by people who are pretty much only consuming material that already aligns with this view. That's one big problem in itself -- one which isn't new in this community.

Secondly, it's a question that I can only answer partly and superficially. I am a student who is learning every day -- or trying to -- I am not in a position to teach others. The best I can do is share my thoughts and some resources. I have only started seriously studying the sciences recently, but in that small time frame, I have learned a lot. I only wish I could share what I've learned in a competent way, but I can only fall short of such a goal. I will, however, elaborate on many of the things I've touched upon (or neglected to mention) in future posts when I'll know more.

3. An update on my views (critique of reductionism)

I feel like I should preface this by quickly allaying some people's worries: none of this is inconsistent with philosophical pessimism or the nuanced antinatalism that I have tried to promote over the years on my YouTube channel. It is entirely consistent with the illusion-busting project that I embarked on many years ago when I plunged into the pessimistic literature; it is its continuity. And if you don't agree after reading (and charitably trying to understand my views),  I'd love to hear your thoughts. The pessimistic literature is an important piece of the puzzle to me but on its own it's just deeply insufficient because it isn't integrative. Some important lessons from the pessimists to carry forward are, in my view: progress is not linear,  utopic thinking is dangerous and chaos is inevitable. The tendency towards self-justification and self-deception is a fundamental problem. Time-consciousness opens us up to terror and there are stark implications of our awareness of death (and its repression) (see: Becker/Terror Management Theory).

We also have to embrace an active and dignified skepticism, as Cioran argued. Speaking of Cioran, let's remember that he was planning to write his graduation thesis on Henri Bergson. Yeah, the guy who wrote Creative Evolution. Indeed, Cioran, one of the most famous pessimists, was certainly no reductionist, along with Schopenhauer -- the two figures that I've discussed the most in the past. This is certainly not me rejecting my roots. In fact, we can go back as far as the Pre-Socratics to see the compatibility of pessimism with non-reductionist -- and in this case non-dualistic -- thought (Heraclitus was called the "weeping philosopher"):

"[Heraclitus] denied the duality of totally diverse worlds—a position which Anaximander had been compelled to assume. He no longer distinguished a physical world from a metaphysical one, a realm of definite qualities from an undefinable "indefinite." And after this first step, nothing could hold him back from a second, far bolder negation: he altogether denied being. For this one world which he retained [ . . . ] nowhere shows a tarrying, an indestructibility, a bulwark in the stream. Louder than Anaximander, Heraclitus proclaimed: "I see nothing other than becoming. Be not deceived. It is the fault of your short-sightedness, not of the essence of things, if you believe you see land somewhere in the ocean of becoming and passing-away. You use names for things as though they rigidly, persistently endured; yet even the stream into which you step a second time is not the one you stepped into before." (Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy)

3.1 The need for a different approach (method)

  I believe Heraclitus was right and I've come to see him as probably the most important of all of the Pre-Socratics. His view is that everything is in flux, interconnected, interdependent. Antagonistic yet complementary. It's also referred to as "the one and the many" or uniduality or Process Philosophy. But what might have seemed obvious to him is not so to us. I think his thinking must be rejuvenated, but what must be added is the contemporary approach of transdisciplinarity. An attempt to unify knowledge between the sciences, but also a bidirectional bridge between philosophy and science, since science on its own is not enough either (see also Vico's Scienza Nuova). We live in an era where the sciences are compartmentalized, where we are encouraged to become specialists in one area over everything else and to "stay in our lane". As a society, we look down on generalists or someone who qualifies as a "jack-of-all-trades".

Our disciplines are closed off from one another and it leads to a certain complacency in our pursuit of knowledge -- it is the opposite model of that of the old Greek Paideia. The result is that our experts -- the people we should be able to trust the most -- have but only fragmentary knowledge, incapable of integrating and contextualizing knowledge within a global perspective. This is why people like Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris are a laughing stock in academic circles outside of their own: they cannot help but talk about the things they do not specialize in, and they do so with a certain arrogance and make errors, but they rarely ever care to engage with others to correct them.

Now, this hyper-specialized, reductionist approach is still so pervasive for a reason: it has led to a series of great discoveries and advancements in science, and it's a comfortable position to hold. We feel powerful when we feel like "masters and possessors of nature", to use Descartes' words. On the flip side it has also led to a pernicious way of thinking and interacting with the world, the biggest of which are the ecological catastrophes we're now faced with and the conflicts between individuals and cultures that reduce (dehumanize) each other to something strictly Other. I'm now convinced that we are at a point in history where it has made its limitations patently evident.

This is where La pensée complexe, "complex thought" (coined by Henri Laborit, but popularized by Edgar Morin) comes in. It doesn't have the hubris of proposing a solution, but it proposes a transdisciplinary method by which one can outline ways to develop pertinent knowledge. It seeks to allow the intercommunication between science and philosophy without reducing one to the other. Complexity is a problem word, not a solution word. "Complexus" in latin means what is woven together. "[We] must encourage a "general intelligence" apt to refer to the complex, the context, in a multidimensional way, within a global conception." (Morin)

3.2 The constructivist epistemology and the importance of cybernetics

It was Jean Piaget who coined the term transdisciplinarity, which means "a unity of knowledge beyond discipline". The importance of understanding Piaget's constructivist theory of knowing is absolutely essential to anyone interested in developmental psychology (he is the most influential thinker in the field to this day). But it also has deep philosophical (epistemological) relevance (see von Glasersfeld's Radical Constructivism for a brief outline). It's no coincidence that transdisciplinarity begun with Piaget, and this serves as the perfect springboard into the following part of this post.

Schopenhauer once said that, "he who hasn't read and understood Kant is a mere child". It must be stated that the revolution that came in Philosophy with Kant was a constructivist one, like that of Piaget in psychology. So what Schopenhauer was really saying, or would be saying today, and which antinatalists who supposedly respect him largely ignore, is that if you're not engaging with constructivist theory, your thinking can only ever be infantile. If you're trying to "describe reality", engaging with constructivist literature is not optional, irrespective of whether you agree with it or not. It would be like trying to explain biological evolution while ignoring Darwin's work entirely.

This might not matter to those who want to just play philosopher and earn performative points within their respective groups, but to the others who want to actually learn and think for themselves: do your homework. You probably don't need to start reading Kant immediately, but you should read up on the importance of his work in philosophy. Kant rightly characterized his constructivist view of experience in his Critique through an analogy with the revolution wrought by Copernicus in astronomy. I don't think he was exaggerating in the slightest, so unless you think you shouldn't acknowledge the reality of heliocentrism, you might want to consider treating epistemological constructivism with some semblance of respect.

Now that I've superficially highlighted the pivotal importance of constructivism in philosophy and psychology, what does this mean for contemporary science? One such Copernican-in-scope revolution has begun there too: this is where systems thinking and the cyberneticians come in. The main contribution of cybernetics/systems thinking, specifically the "new" or Second-Order cybernetics, is that it discovered that we cannot understand processes like learning, cognition, adaptation, communication -- indeed we cannot understand life -- without understanding systems, their emergent properties and organizational capabilities, as well as the relationship between the observer and the observed (again, this is the constructivist epistemology: we must be accounting for the observer in what is observed, always).

Gregory Bateson, one of the founders of cybernetics, argued that "differences are not physical entities, that science excludes human beings as living systems. He was against any supernatural explanation of the mind, but also against reductionism: the assumption that mental processes -- or any processes  that require computation of a difference -- could be reduced to physics or chemistry." Fourty-five years later, we are still stuck with the same either/or logic that Bateson overcame. Bateson argued that relations are not material; they arise through the computation of a difference, and those differences (which are not things) are, for example, why humans have the ability to think. Terrence Deacon, whose work has come to prominence in recent years, refers to absences in a similar way and introduces new interesting terminology to face the problems brought fourth by the higher-order complexity of living systems.

Cybernetics, catastrophe theory, chaos theory and complexity theory have "the common goal to explain complex systems that consist of a large number of mutually interacting and interrelated parts in terms of those interactions". These parts are understood to not be reducible to a mere ensemble of parts: the whole is more than the sum of its parts. While systems thinking arose independently of cybernetics (with von Bertalanffy), they are often thought to be synonymous. Cybernetics is what really put systems thinking on the map, so to speak. Its main findings and developments go way beyond the scope of this blog entry, but I want to touch on a couple.

3.3 Moving beyond linear causality: order/disorder/interactions/organization

Cybernetics showed the importance of moving beyond linear causality by discovering circular causality (also called pseudofeedback, reciprocal causality, and mutual causality) and self-organization (also known as spontaneous order), but a paradigm-shift still hasn't occured. But just as physics moved away from the classical model by discovering nonlocality, irreversibility and indeterminacy, so did biology move beyond its classical (reductionist) approach. We discovered irreducibility and irreversibility in biological systems.

We already knew things weren't determined at the micro-level and the macro-level but we still wrongly assumed that the classical laws of physics were sufficient to explain everything that occurs at the meso-level -- our level as living organisms. We are still generally not aware of the significance of Pirogine's Nobel Prize winning work on dissipative systems, von Foerster's principle of "order from noise" (1960), and Atlan's "organizing randomness" (1972).

Morin writes: "von Foerster says that "self organizing systems do not feed only in order, they find also noise in their menu." (1960) This Foersterian principle is different from Schrodinger 's disorder, which is, statistically, order. But the Foersterian principle, as well emphasized by G. Gunther (1962), establishes the synthesis: the "Aufhebung" (overtaking) of order-from-order and of order-from-disorder is mechanicist, "order- from-disorder is regularity, order-from noise is novelty, or creativity."(Italics mine)

Elaborating more on these ideas and the related concept of self-organization is beyond the scope of this blog, but its importance cannot be overstated. What we can briefly say here is that we know from them that order and disorder are everywhere active, productive, present in the universe, from its genesis to its transformation and becoming. Disorder participates to the order of the world, order participates to the disorder of the world. Morin terms this relationship Chaosmos, because it links Chaos and Cosmos and creates a tetralogical loop between order/disorder/interactions/organisation.

We can see that Laplace's demon has long been defeated, but it still haunts many. The universe is no longer a neatly ordered place: it is an incredibly complex network of systems within systems within systems -- existing through a dialogical relationship between order and disorder at every level ("dialogical" means antagonistic, concurrent and complementary). When it comes to living systems, they are generating themselves and each other (see: autopoiesis).

This is what we don't see in artificial systems, as they receive their information from the outside; they do not generate themselves, they do not produce a self or a being, they produce a product. They are predictable since they work through a negative feedback loop that prevents disorder or deviance. They have no real autonomy to speak of: if the components fail, they cannot regenerate themselves. We, on the other hand, are always "failing", our cells are dying, but we generate new cells in their place continuously. We are back to Heraclitus, who said that us mortals are "living of death, dying of life". Living of death is obvious, since we must eat other living organisms to maintain our selves, but it's the more profound "dying of life" that is elucidated here. Indeed, we only survive by dying, and making way for new life. There is a dialogical relationship between life and death, order and disorder.

3.4 Emergentism and systems biology

 Think about a cell. All of the properties that distinguish the cell from the molecules which confer to it its living properties (nutrition, metabolism, reproduction, just to name the most important ones) occur because cells are composed of molecules, but they are not reducible to the properties and the qualities of the molecules that constitute them. These qualities are emergent properties. "We can name emergent properties the qualities or properties of a system which present a character of novelty in relation to the qualities or properties of the parts considered in isolation or arranged differently in another type of system" (Morin). Our emotions, our cognition, our self-awareness, they are emergent properties. To say that our feelings are reducible to their physico-chemical components is not a science-based claim. They depend on them, but they are not reducible to them. Moving one step further, things like intentionality, value, purpose and meaning can actually be argued to be causally efficacious rather than epiphenomenal, which is explored in Deacon's work, "Incomplete Nature".

 Living systems are no longer assumed to be fully determined through a straight-forward "point for point" process of cause and effect. This is why we now have the interdisciplinary field of systems biology. The Human Genome Project and its successes is "an example of applied systems thinking in biology which has led to new, collaborative ways of working on problems in the biological field of genetics". It is a holistic (non-reductionist) approach to biology. Biochemistry and genetics alone forces you to work within a framework of isolation/disjunction and linear cause and effect which breaks down in the face of the complexity of living organisms.

3.5 On autonomy and constraints

 

 Autonomy is one of the most confused notions there is. I believe this confusion stems over the fact that it is not an essentialist notion, it is an organizational one. We have to go beyond simplistic, reductionist, essentialist thinking that would have us think that autonomy is non-existent everywhere because nothing has "real" (meaning superlative) freedom. This proposition doesn't make any sense to begin with, since for anything to exist it must be subjected to constraints. People have trouble looking at autonomy in terms of degrees rather than in absolutes. It is clear that we have more autonomy than the artificial machine and it is because we are both open and closed as a system.

Openness alone is hemorrhagic and the absorption of the system by the environment; "closedness" alone means wasting of the system and asphyxia. The self is the aptitude of active organization to close itself after being open, to reopen itself after closing again. Autonomy can only appear at the heart of an active organization, within a recursive process that is self-generating and which allows for a permanent regeneration and reorganization. What might seem like a paradox isn't one: it is through our dependence to our environment that we gain autonomy. It is because we are autonomous that we can maintain this dependence.

 Ecological dependency has created the conditions of autonomy, and in creating them, created being and existence (generative autonomy). The artificial machine is not autonomous enough to be dependent (ecologically), it is too dependent (anthropo-sociologically) to be autonomous. It is only open functionally, not ontologically/existentially open. If it is not programmed for a task (and maintained) from the outside, it becomes an object, it is no longer even a machine. The natural machine, the living being, on the other hand, nourishes itself with matter/energy, not only to "work", but to exist. It works to exist, to regenerate its molecules, its cells, ergo its being and its organization which are constantly degrading.

3.6 Holism is not the alternative

 We can't just look at everything purely in terms of systems or wholes. It's not a matter of holism vs reductionism, we have to go beyond both in order to embrace a meta-paradigm that integrates both. Holism on its own ignores the parts -- it ignores also that the whole is not merely more than the sum of its parts, but also potentially less than.  An example of this is the human being in a society. Human beings make up society, but the society retroacts on the individuals, through culture, language, and laws to uphold. Culture allows the development of our potentialities, of our thinking and of our conscience, but it is this same culture that engenders unconsciousness, closed-mindedness, obscurantism and fanaticism.

Society can protect us, liberate us, but also control minds by imposing its coercion and repressions, it can stump emancipatory and creative impulses. Laws evidently create repressions and inhibitions as well. The same is true at the level of the cell, where molecules are subjected to constraints and inhibitions when the cell "represses" an enzymatic reaction or prevents a gene to express itself. The same is true at yet another level: two gas atoms combine to create a liquid or a solid, and this transformation is paid by the loss of the gaseous quality (solid ammonium chloride, water). Holism must be discarded as soon as we see that a system's rich developments can also lead to some underdevelopment within the same system due to constraints/inhibitions.

A simplistic holism prioritizes the knowledge of the whole over its parts but we do not have to necessarily do so, while reductionism is only a problem when it is implicit and unexamined; it simplifies the complex and assumes that it is simple ex post facto. Its assumptions are taken for granted as being more representative than they are, which leads to errors and illusions. Unlike a simplistic holism, however, this approach has had impacts that are very harmful and far-reaching, beyond the sciences and into personal and social life as well as culture. The problem is not reductionism itself, it's that we have become possessed by it, unable to think outside of it. We have to put our foot down and partly exorcise Descartes from our minds to make space for what is not simple and dual, for what is complex and unifying (but never total. Adorno: "The totality is untruth.") We should be open and integrative, not closed and excluding.

4. Closing thoughts and a word to antinatalists/efilists.

 I wasn't planning on discussing antinatalism in this blog entry, but since I will be announcing this on my channel, which has been largely dedicated to antinatalism throughout the years, I want to say a couple things to those who might read this. Since this might be unfamiliar territory to many people, I can predict some resistance from some antinatalists to these ideas, even those who would grant me the limitations of reductionism, on purely pragmatic grounds. It would go something like this: "This is mystery-mongering! We could lose momentum or create a life-affirming narrative through our embracing such a (meta-)paradigm."

To this I would first say that mystery-mongering is no worse than its alternative, and Schopenhauer has an apt quote here:  “The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.” As for the second charge, I suspect any intellectually honest/curious/non-religious antinatalist will have no problem embracing a new paradigm without it affecting their antinatalism. You can easily remove the reductionist foundation without any issues and retain a global antinatalism view, why not? I personally can't see my antinatalism being affected in the future because the conditions for it will not change in my lifetime.

It's still impossible to know for sure, but we must understand that all actions undertaken in a complex environment have uncertain results and are therefore a gamble. This is one that I have no problem taking. Schopenhauer again has something important to say here: "Life is short and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth." What is the alternative to seeking truth (and speaking it)? Ideas of strategically using falsehoods, half-truths, simplistic memes and propaganda with the hope that they would take over and "do the job" for antinatalism are difficult to take seriously. I don't think it's a credible strategy in the long term in a world where most people have access to an enormous amount of information at the click of a finger. Stopping your education so that you can only ever be a messenger of what you currently believe is also not going to help your cause, since it will greatly weaken your rhetorical appeals.


Lastly, I want to say that I've pretty much outgrown my fatalistic impulse. I recognize that the human adventure has been a bloody one, and the probable is that it will remain so. Everything points in that direction. But it is equally true that history has shown that the improbable can have an important impact in changing the course of history. Improbable reforms could take place, as they have in the past. Improbable creative endeavors could impact life in ways that are currently impossible to imagine, because they have already. We simply do not know what's going to happen. We are not in control, but we are also not mere puppets. History has taught us to expect the unexpected. That is, as far as I can tell, the most realistic stance to take. I believe that moving forward we should value vigilance and remain grounded in a rational uncertainty.