I think a lot of us take lots of things a lot more seriously than we admit. Like, I’ve gotten 180% more likely to say meaning-of-life type things over the last six years, but I don’t think my actual concerns changed much.
I think a lot of us take lots of things a lot more seriously than we admit. Like, I’ve gotten 180% more likely to say meaning-of-life type things over the last six years, but I don’t think my actual concerns changed much.
Also I think we should distinguish between indifference to realness in the sense of thinking that vivid enough fantasy/hallucination without false belief (so, like the ultimate virtual reality video game forever) can be a good life, and in the sense of thinking that fantasy/hallucination with false belief can be a good life. Like, distinguish between highly prizing fantasy and being indifferent to having false beliefs.
Is there an argument against hedonic utilitarianism based on the the transparency of experience? Something like: hedonic utilitarians supposedly reach their judgement that a pleasurable experience is good regardless of whether it’s veridical by imagining having a pleasurable experience, but what they are really doing is imagining what the experience is an experience of and judging it good.
I am seriously into this Chris Korsgaard paper.
i’ve been thinking about how color perception provides a very simple model of how people can have artistic experiences that have complicated content that isn’t immediately verbally accessible to the person who had the experience. when i see a certain color, let’s say pink, i don’t have immediate verbal knowledge of where pink is in the rgb coordinate space — but it is still the case that in thinking that something is pink i represent it as having a certain rgb value, since I can discover the rgb value of my pink qualia by reflection alone (by comparing and contrasting pink to other color-qualia, until i get a full definition of pink’s positions in the color-space by working out pink’s relationship to all other colors). so, to the extent that experiences have content by virtue of their relationship of similarity and difference to other experiences, their content can by far exceed what we can verbally know without reflection. and as i said in a previous post,it seems intuitive that the representational function of experience in our cognition involves a mapping from structural relationships between qualia to structural relationships between the contents our experiences represent (e.g. pink things look like something physical about them is halfway between how it is with white things and how it is with red things).
Adrian Kent on Many Worlds: “It’s no more scientifically respectable to declare that we can, without further justification, confirm Everettian quantum theory by neglecting the observations made on selected low Born weight branches. A Pavlovian association of low Born weight with small probability—illegitimately carried over from one world quantum theory—may perhaps lend an aura of greater respectability, but in Everettian quantum theory the Born weight is simply a number attached to branches. It has no intrinsic relevance to theory confirmation, and unless we add further structure to the theory, we cannot justify assigning it any such role.”
Anger is the one emotion whose conative content and hedonic character are seperate. Like, fear is a feeling that the way things are is bad, and being afraid feels unpleasant. Anger’s a feeling that the way things are is bad, but being angry doesn’t feel unpleasant.
there’s a point i kind of think might be worth writing about one day, cause i don’t see it anywhere in the literature on value and hedonism. it’s that there are many phenomenologies of value that aren’t ‘enjoyment’ in even a broad sense. for example: pride, determination, feeling-that-i’m-doing-the-right-thing, a sense of meaningfulness, and many many kinds of conative seeing-as (like, i can be making a painting and feeling very miserable, but for it to also be the case that the painting that i’m making seems glorious or perfect or worth-caring-about or what have you). an autobiographical example would be that i really don’t enjoy thinking about fundamental value-theory, but at the same time the activity of thinking about fundamental value theory “feels valuable” to me when i do it.
There’s a topic I’ve been trying to explore that I can’t find in the phil of mind literature: I am trying to learn about the epistemology of knowing the ‘coordinates’ of one’s present qualia (let’s say in a given modality) within the manifold that defines the qualia-space of that modality. (So, for example, knowing how phenomenal yellow compares with phenomenal pink.)
I was expecting to find a lot of literature about this issue in the context of representation, because it seems intuitive that the representational function of experience in our cognition involves a mapping from structural relationships between qualia to structural relationships between the contents our experiences represent (e.g. pink things look like something physical about them is halfway between how it is with white things and how it is with red things).
The big question I couldn’t find anything about is what it is to be ‘aware’ of the position of your present qualia in the manifold: Do we want to say that the relevant qualia-space is implicit in your present qualia, such that having only your present qualia is sufficient for an ideal reasoner to know the relevant qualia-space and know the (Fregean) ‘meaning’ of your present qualia?
It’s impossible to suffer while believing that the suffering will end in a millisecond. I suspect that this impossibility is a logical fact rather than a psychological fact — that suffering is nothing above and beyond the representation of future suffering. And the “future suffering” being represented is itself not anything that in addition to being represented by a present self can exist as a metaphysically basic experience of a future self, because we never represent a single instance of future suffering but rather a complex temporally elongated experience of suffering, and there exist no metaphysically basic complex temporally elongated experiences. So I suspect that suffering is no different from other attitudinal states in which we represent complex four-dimensional states of affairs as being good or bad. (There are issues here aplenty. One could maybe argue against me that a metaphysically basic experience which represents some complex four-dimensional state as being the present state can be what is actually represented by a metaphysically basic experience that represents that complex four-dimensional state as a future state.)
