Oh, mainstream philosophy.
http://chronicle.com/article/Is-Death-Bad-for-You-/131818/
Summary: Shelly Kagan, Yale philosophy professor, discusses the argument that death isn’t bad for you, because when we are dead we won’t care. He hunts around for justification, doesn’t find anything satisfactory, or even paint a clear picture of what “satisfactory” would look like, and ends up conveying mostly mysteriousness to the audience.
There are a variety of right ways to approach this argument. One good goal is to understand what’s going on in someone’s head when they say that death is bad for you.
Reading the article, a bell rang for me about all this discussion of “possible worlds”—for example, the idea of feeling pity for people who don’t exist. We usually don’t interact with people who don’t exist, so what process has led us to compare these different worlds against each other?
The answer is a decision-making process. “Possible worlds” doesn’t mean spawning any physical universes—it’s a convenient shorthand for imagined possible worlds, which we (in our capacity as intelligent apes) compare against each other, usually as part of a consequentialist decision process.
Once you start looking, you see the fingerprints of decision-making all over the article. It’s the machinery that generates these possible worlds to think about, and the context that colors them. So I think noticing that “possible worlds ← us imagining possible worlds as part of our decision-making” is a good relationship for understanding topics like this.
Edit for clarity: The basic idea is that death being bad is, at its root, a function of the decision-making bits of our brains. This can be seen not just from a priori claims about “low utility = bad,” but from the structure of what Shelly Kagan hunts around for, which mainly involves choices between possible worlds.
Kagan understands these issues much better than you suggest, and than most Less Wrongers. I say this based on reading his academic work and long experience with LW. The snark is unwarranted and looks silly.
I agree wholeheartedly. In fact, anyone who still regards Kagan with suspicion based on this article should probably look into the course that he’s been teaching for the past few years and is available as part of Yale’s online Open Course project. The topic? You guessed it: Death.
It’s worth a watch even if you vehemently disagree with his opinions, since he presents a clear and concise methodology and works through several arguments and issues that may be of interest to LWers less familiar with Philosophy who are eager to learn. It’s what got me hooked in the first place.
http://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/phil-176#overview
Well, on the other hand, who am I to judge? Let’s see if I can clean up some things (tone-wise, that is—facts are going to be pretty much unchanged).
Is it your opinion that he intentionally made things confusing for the readers of the Chronicle? I’m only judging by the article, but I feel some license to be judgmental.
A.) It’s not a journal article. B.) He “conveys mostly mysteriousness to his audience” only if what you mean by that is that he explains and explores a problem while admitting he does not have a complete answer yet...
What I mean by conveying mysteriousness is that he starts with a topic the audience will have an initial common-sense reaction to, and spends the article showing why their first justifications of this reaction (which can be funneled a bit when he tells everyone what some possible justifications are) cannot be trusted. It’s provocative, which is a fine thing. But it plays into the whole “reason clashes with common sense, the truth is mysterious” thing, which is less fine.
I don’t really know what this “thing” is or why it’s bad. I take your use of the word “mysterious” to be referencing “Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions” but I don’t think Kagan is doing anything more than enjoying tackling an interesting problem. The same as any scientist would. “Common sense” is often a heuristic response that hasn’t been subject to our analytic processes, there is nothing wrong with checking to see if the heuristic response makes sense with full analytic scrutiny.
Hm, I guess it’s a bit different. If it was like that, the question would be “why are living things special?” and the answer would be “they have elan vital.” “Elan vital” being the mysterious answer to the mysterious question.
In Kagan’s article, the question is “is death bad for me?” and the answer is “it’s mysterious.”
Well if Kagan is wrong about it being mysterious, then I suppose it would be bad to give that answer. But simply writing an article saying something is mysterious is not at all bad in itself.
I agree.
Actually, I think the universe is better for me with my friend being alive in it, even if I won’t ever see her. My utility function is defined over the world states, not over my sensory inputs.
Isn’t that included when he says “that is worse for you, too, since you care about your friend”?
But he assumes that it is worse for me because it is bad for my friend to have died. Whereas, in fact, it is worse for me directly.
How is it worse for you directly?
I value the universe with my friend in it more than one without her.
From his Wikipedia page:
Oh, LW scholarship...
Whoops, typed law when I mean philosophy. Please cut me (and others) some slack :)
For those that haven’t noticed, there is a better discussion of this article on OB that Robin started last Monday.
The last lines of the article:
So is death bad for you? I certainly think so, and I think the deprivation account is on the right track for telling us why. But I have to admit: Puzzles still remain.
Kagan does feel that death is “bad”, but he only throws this in at the very end after spending the entirety of the article arguing the opposite.
One of his dominant questions is: Why do we feel bad about the loss of time after our death as opposed to feeling bad about the loss of time before our birth. I won’t go into detail here about the article’s content, but I do have a thought about it.
This is just me running with an idea in the moment, so I apologize if it is not well organized:
Let’s say we have just purchased tickets to a concert. It features a band we have always wanted to see play live and the concert is several months away. We may certainly feel impatient and agonize over the wait, but in some sense the anticipation is a build-up to the inevitable moment of pleasure we feel when the actual day arrives, followed by the actual moment when we are at the concert hearing the band play in a crowd of people. Once the concert is over, it is over in every sense. The anticipation—having something to look forward to—is over, AND the event itself is over.
If we look at being born and subsequently dying as though they are similar to buying tickets to a concert and attending the concert, I think we can define why the time before the concert is not perceived as “bad” but the time after the concert has ended could certainly be percieved as “bad”. Before we are born, the events of the world can be perceived as the build-up, the anticipation phase, or “buying the ticket”. The world is being prepped for our entry. Life itself is the concert, it is the show we all want to be a part of.… we want to be in that crowd hearing the music. When the concert is over, there is an inevitable sense of loss. Everything leading up to the concert fueled the ultimate enjoyment of the concert itself. What comes after the concert can only be seen as “less appealing”, or “bad” in comparison to the build-up to and excitement of the concert itself.
In other words, we see the events leading up to something we “want” as being positive, even if they present some level of agitation due to impatience or a strong desire to just get there already. We inherently know that the waiting will make it all that much sweeter. Yet the end of something we “want” to continue is difficult to define as anything but “bad”.
Being upset about the time lost BEFORE our birth would be like being upset about missing a concert we never wanted to buy tickets for in the first place.
He’s not, not arguing the opposite. He’s doing philosophy by Socratic method. I really hope this wasn’t a common misinterpretation here.
No, I”m sure it is just my lack of knowledge regarding philosophy and the associated methods of discussing it. I never actually believed that the author was trying to convince me that death was not bad, but (as I stated above) playing devil’s advocate in order to explore ideas and challenge the reader. I simply wouldn’t know enough about it to name it the “Socratic method”. My bad.
Great. And not problem, just a miscommunication then.
He.
Also, everything up to the paragraph starting with “Alternatively, if all facts can be dated...” is an argument for the badness of death in the presence of undateable facts (which seems to me the more reasonable position).
So no, he didn’t spend the entirety of the article arguing the opposite.
Right..… :) Oops. Fixed.
But the same paragraph continues with: But that, of course, returns us to the earlier puzzle. How could death be bad for me when I don’t exist?
It feels like the article is playing devil’s advocate but I perceived that the bulk of it was playing to the tune that the sentiment of death being “bad” is rather irrational.
Whether or not possible worlds are ‘as real’ as the actual world is a different question from whether or not “possible worlds” equal “imagined possible worlds. The answer to the second question is almost certainly “no”. For a world to be possible it is not necessary that someone imagine it.
The causal history/ cognitive explanation of the idea of death being bad is not the same as a justification for it. It of course makes sense that humans would have evolved to worry more about not dying than about not having begun living earlier. But the normative question is about what we should value and why. I tend toward the non-realist camp myself so I’m tempted to answer “there isn’t and can’t be an answer to the normative question”. But if you’re worried about the behavior of very powerful agents trying to extrapolate human values the question of whether or not “death is bad” is inconsistent with our other values and beliefs is important. I thought the article was a rather good survey of the major arguments regarding this particular value question, though, if it hasn’t had it already, the subject would benefit from a cognitive science based approach.
I think of this as a feature, not a bug. Death doesn’t have some inherent essence du badness that we could extract and bottle. So if we understand what people are telling us about themselves when they say “being dead would be bad for me,” there’s not much left to worry over.
Except for the question “what should we do?”, i.e. normative philosophy.