Interesting, yes, but I'm not someone who can argue his way out of pain. Kudos to anyone who can. I don't firmly espouse a materialistic ontology, but a lack of an explanation for subjectivity doesn't make materialism incoherent, just incomplete.
Incomplete how? If you need a form of dualism to make materialism complete, then it ceases to be materialism. There comes a point where you have to ask if a specific question can be addressed within a specific framework
even in principle, and if the answer is "no," then you're in trouble
.
Acknowledging the fact that you're experiencing pain and employing certain tactics to dissipate it is pretty counterproductive to making an argument that it's not real. You might be able to argue that pain can be controlled or ignored through various disciplines, but you can't argue that it doesn't exist. If it didn't exist, we wouldn't have to write pages and pages on how to avoid it.
This depends on how we define pain. If whether it actually
hurts depends on your mindset, then that aspect of it that makes it identifiable as pain does not seem to have any independent reality.
Well, I simply disagree with you that this is a genuine problem. You're looking for external validation of something that is inherently an internal phenomenon. There is no external validation of whatever meaning you find in your life, and your desire to have one is as irrational as my satisfaction in not having one. All motivations are ultimately hedonistic, even seemingly altruistic acts, which is why the ice cream example is such an easy illustration. We're all motivated by carrots and sticks, sticks being painful consequences we avoid and carrots being rewards that feel good, which we pursue. Asking what the point is in pursuing good feelings is like me asking you what the point is in memorizing interesting facts you never expect to use in life. It is its own subjective reward, even if it doesn't have some intrinsic "objective" quality of "meaning" or "value." If you're looking for more than that, let me know if you find anything. I would find that very hedonistically satisfying.
I'm a virtue ethicist. I think there's a difference between pursuing something because you like it and pursuing it because it is good for you. This is why the ice cream example is so disturbing, because it is
not good for you. It may taste good, but it is actually
bad for you. Psychologically, there are benefits to valuing forgiveness over vengeance or love over hate. This is not the equivalent of preferring chocolate to vanilla--you do not hold moral values because you arbitrarily like them, but instead you like them because they are inherently good (at least from the human perspective, as shaped by evolutionary factors). Whatever we strive towards, we become, so it is better to know what you are striving towards and why instead of picking whatever feels good at the time.
I'm not actually looking for external validation. Even from a theistic perspective, I do not draw a strong line between God and the self. I'm looking for internal validation that is actually grounded in reality and not whim. (I would say that the naturalistic virtue ethicist is still mired in paradox, because what is good for us is ultimately arbitrary. This doesn't mean not following it, but I think you're always going to end up in Absurdist territory, endlessly rolling a boulder up the hill.)
It might be more satisfying to believe you can make objective moral proclamations, but if we all just believed what made us feel warm and fuzzy, we probably wouldn't survive long as a species. Instead, what's allowed us to survive long as a species is a shared ethic of reciprocity, which fosters cooperation, which eases each individual's burden of labor for survival. This isn't something it's wise to "shrug off" as a quirk of our genetic heritage. That may be all there is to it, but that's no more reason to reject it than it is to embrace it. Defaulting to rejection of all values in the absence of an objective basis for any values is itself a value judgment, and thus completely self-defeating when presented as anything other than a subjective opinion.
One of my points was that in the absence of objective reasons for anything, there is nothing that the atheist can say to someone who disagrees that life is worth living. It is just one subjective way of looking at things against another, and if yours is not objectively stronger, you have no case against anyone else. This is not a self-defeating opinion, it's just the situation we're in when all value judgments are inherently subjective.
That said, I'm not really advocating rejecting all values. The Absurdist thrust of my argument is that if there is no objective basis for valuation, than a very important aspect of human experience is illusory, a matter of subjectively superimposing values over a void. This is the nihilism that I keep on saying is at the heart of atheism, and it has nothing to do with accepting or rejecting values. There is simply always going to be something fictional about the way we relate to them, unless you deconstruct morality to the point that you're talking about something entirely different.
I don't really mind the fact that morality can't have an objective basis. I think morality is an important facet of humanity, and I think we're perfectly capable of constructing ever-improving models of morality that are based on agreed-upon foundations rather than something "objective." If it's conducive to well-being, it's doing its job.
This makes you a moral realist, probably some form of utilitarian. If you think that morality is
not a matter of what makes us warm and fuzzy but is something based in biological function that can be improved upon, you are adhering to objective standards of morality. Foundations cannot be agreed upon if there are no objective facts about what is conducive to well-being.
You're still going to stumble over the question of why we ought to care about things that are conducive to well-being, but theism doesn't remove that particular problem entirely either.