Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
But then what really matters isn't your current life evaluation, but the overall picture. The Greeks were onto something with their famous idea: "count no man fortunate until he's dead."

What would you do if God came down from heaven and said that you have two options: 1) you will live 99 lives happily and 1 life where you break your neck at age 25 and are paralyzed the neck down for the next fifty years, or 2) you can live no lives whatsoever? Logic dictates that you should choose to live no lives because the amount of suffering you will endure 1% of the time will be so great that when you endure it you will wish you had never been born. This is fundamentally no different than why people kill themselves. Most of their lives were actually happy, but things became bad enough that their perspective changed and no amount of happiness in a "previous life" had any effect on the depression that came later
right now I'm inclined to say that I would take the 99 good lives:1 bad life chance

That's why this is really just a psychological exercise, not a logical one. If we were purely logical, not only would we kill ourselves, but we would take out as many others as we possibly could as well. Probability determines that as long as lives are being lived, a certain amount of unfathomable and unjustifiable suffering will exist. This is such a depressing thought to have, and it gets worse when you consider that creating offspring means that your progeny will play in the same dice game and eventually there will be a Ted Bundy in your family line, a paraplegic, a child molester, a molested child, and a Bradley Manning who will sit in a 6 by 8 cell for the rest of his life, enduring the greatest torture there is
bold I disagree with and I can't see how that is logical at all?

The rest is true and somewhat depressing, but I have already considered it and you can even go the other way. e.g. one of your kids becomes a scientist and figures out how to cure cancer, or develops nanotech to help reverse reverse the trends of global warming