Richard Dawkins thinks we are the lucky ones

[iwanttodie019]

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?"


Out of an unfathomable number,only 108 billion humans have been born so far(100 billion dead and 8 billion not yet dead)

What do you guys think of this quote?

 

[monkeysee2]

The whole idea is predicated on the idea that being alive is good. It clearly is for Dawkins, however many people live a life of extreme suffering. In fact the first teaching of Buddhist philosophy is that life is suffering.

Life is essentially a lottery but someone people lose, and would have been better off in the non-existent crowd.

 

[CaptainSunshine!]

Propaganda to make us live for hypothetical people. Their imaginary struggles are more important than our real suffering.

 

[shampoo sniffer]

The ones who never got to be born were the lucky ones after all.

 

[lachrymost]

I think about this quote quite a bit actually, but flipped so that we are colossally unlucky to be here. I lost the lottery, if you ask me.

 

[WhatCouldHaveBeen32]

Dumb, dismissed.

 

[Michelstaedter]

He even sounds like a fanatical believer who says, "We are fortunate because God gave us another day of life."

 

[Forever Sleep]

He even sounds like a fanatical believer who says, "We are fortunate because God gave us another day of life."

I agree but- the funny thing is- he's a very outspoken atheist. (If it's the same Richard Dawkins I know of.)

I find the whole quote very at odds with his very own rhetoric. If it's the same guy, he wrote: 'The Selfish Gene'. So- he's highly aware of the impact of DNA on our behaviour.

Where does he think these unborn geniuses would come from? They don't just materialise! They are born from people- like our parents. If our parents don't have the genes to be geniuses- what's the likelihood their offspring will get them? Does he think we all have unborn siblings that would have been child prodigies? I imagine the likelihood would be that our unborn siblings would be fairly similar to us.

Or, is his theory that geniuses don't reproduce? I imagine they do. So- the idea that all these incredibly intelligent beings were denied the life spark that we got landed with doesn't make sense from a biological point of view.

It's more realistic to say that a bunch of people with widely varying abilities and potential didn't get that shot at life. Sure- some of them could have been potential Stephen Hawkings. Some might have been another Hitler! Shouldn't we be grateful they didn't come into production?

Plus, I agree with others. It depends on your experience of life- whether you see it as a blessing or a curse. He maybe ought to consider that likely a lot of suicidal people would happily give their lives to someone else to experience- if they only could. So long as they weren't burdened by them anymore.