I want to ask this because I think I missed it the first few times I read Living in Many Worlds: Are you similarly unsatisfied with our response to suffering that’s already happened, like how Eliezer asks, about the twelfth century? It’s boldface “just as real” too. Do you feel the same “deflation” and “incongruity”?
I expect that you might think (as I once did) that the notion of “generalized past” is a contrived but well-intentioned analogy to manage your feelings.
But that’s not so at all: once you’ve redone your ontology, where the naive idea of time isn’t necessarily a fundamental thing and thinking in terms of causal links comes a lot closer to how reality is arranged, it’s not a stretch at all. If anything, it follows that you must try and think and feel correctly about the generalized past after being given this information.
I want to ask this because I think I missed it the first few times I read Living in Many Worlds: Are you similarly unsatisfied with our response to suffering that’s already happened, like how Eliezer asks, about the twelfth century? It’s boldface “just as real” too. Do you feel the same “deflation” and “incongruity”?
I expect that you might think (as I once did) that the notion of “generalized past” is a contrived but well-intentioned analogy to manage your feelings.
But that’s not so at all: once you’ve redone your ontology, where the naive idea of time isn’t necessarily a fundamental thing and thinking in terms of causal links comes a lot closer to how reality is arranged, it’s not a stretch at all. If anything, it follows that you must try and think and feel correctly about the generalized past after being given this information.
Of course, you might modus tollens here.