This is a great post, and I wish to improve only a tiny piece of it:
“Similarly, we often continue to discuss, and care about, concepts that have lost all their moorings in anticipated sense-experience.”
In that sentence, I hear a suggestion the primary or only thing we ought to care about is anticipated sense-experience. However, anticipated sense-experience can be manipulated (via suicide or other eyes-closing techniques), and so cannot be the only or primary thing that we ought to care about.
I admit I don’t know precisely what else we ought to care about, but my intuition is that advanced concepts like “anticipated sense-experience” are theoretical constructs, built from a chain of reasoning out from more foundational notions, and must be tested against “common sense”, which includes a notion that if you’re doing something probably fatal, you should only do it in order to accomplish a goal in the world that you will not experience, rather than a goal in the world where you’re surprised to find yourself alive.
This doesn’t require any amendment to the original statement. Once you decide to cope by closing your eyes, your future sense experience options are limited—same with suicide. So neither will often be rationally chosen (except perhaps in a scary movie screening).
You’re right, no amendments are necessary; I was answering a subtle implication that I heard in the sentence, and which Anna Salamon probably didn’t intend to put there, and it’s possible that my “hearing” in this matter is faulty.
However, your comment makes me think I haven’t been sufficiently clear: A “quantum” suicide strategy would be combining a lottery ticket with a device that kills you if you do not win the lottery (it doesn’t really have anything to do with quantum mechanics).
If we all we cared about was anticipated sense experience, this combination might seem to be a good idea. However, it is (to my common sense, at least) a bad idea; which is an argument that we care about something more than just anticipated sense experience.
This is a great post, and I wish to improve only a tiny piece of it:
“Similarly, we often continue to discuss, and care about, concepts that have lost all their moorings in anticipated sense-experience.”
In that sentence, I hear a suggestion the primary or only thing we ought to care about is anticipated sense-experience. However, anticipated sense-experience can be manipulated (via suicide or other eyes-closing techniques), and so cannot be the only or primary thing that we ought to care about.
I admit I don’t know precisely what else we ought to care about, but my intuition is that advanced concepts like “anticipated sense-experience” are theoretical constructs, built from a chain of reasoning out from more foundational notions, and must be tested against “common sense”, which includes a notion that if you’re doing something probably fatal, you should only do it in order to accomplish a goal in the world that you will not experience, rather than a goal in the world where you’re surprised to find yourself alive.
This doesn’t require any amendment to the original statement. Once you decide to cope by closing your eyes, your future sense experience options are limited—same with suicide. So neither will often be rationally chosen (except perhaps in a scary movie screening).
You’re right, no amendments are necessary; I was answering a subtle implication that I heard in the sentence, and which Anna Salamon probably didn’t intend to put there, and it’s possible that my “hearing” in this matter is faulty.
However, your comment makes me think I haven’t been sufficiently clear: A “quantum” suicide strategy would be combining a lottery ticket with a device that kills you if you do not win the lottery (it doesn’t really have anything to do with quantum mechanics).
If we all we cared about was anticipated sense experience, this combination might seem to be a good idea. However, it is (to my common sense, at least) a bad idea; which is an argument that we care about something more than just anticipated sense experience.
It’s a good point; thanks. I had indeed missed that when I wrote the sentence.
Suicide is groovy
It hides the scary movie
And I can take or leave it if I please