tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post2435139775434925579..comments2023-10-29T10:32:36.914-04:00Comments on Philosophy, et cetera: Nanoseconds that MatterRichard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-7587449270289240372017-05-26T14:23:32.775-04:002017-05-26T14:23:32.775-04:00I've been thinking about this a bit more -- an...I've been thinking about this a bit more -- and apologies if you've already deatl with this somewhere. By this point you've spent so much time thinking about this family of topics that there are a lot of parts of it spread across several posts! I always worry that I'm fatally ignoring something that you dealt with explicitly in a paragraph in a linked post that I read a little too quickly. And it's particularly an issue here, since I'm rusty on matters of expected value, which increases my chance of missing some key qualification.<br /><br />I'm not sure (1) is completely handled by the intransitivity argument. The argument linked to in the post only considers phenomenal experience; but as I noted in the previous, we actually need to be considering some mix of phenomenal experience and deliberate action. Action is the more obvious problem here: what kind of action-difference does a nanosecond allow? And for an action-difference the time difference needs to be (1) at least indirectly discernible, otherwise it can't be taken into account and (2) such that there is room for at least partial control with respect to that difference in duration. Both of these start running into problems below a certain threshold of duration. Thus it is difficult to see how a nanosecond (much less a picosecond) could, under any circumstances at all, lead to greater richness, complexity, or value-conduciveness of action. There is a cumulative character to action, so in those terms, we do seem to have reason to think that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Even if a nanosecond's difference does make difference, if you give two nanoseconds it seems plausible that the second nanosecond, allowing one to build on the first, is massively more valuable than the first. This raises the possibility that a half a million minutes for one person may involve far greater action-value than single minutes distributed among half a million people, all other things being equal. I think this is a better way of looking at the worry about chunking that I mentioned in the comment on the previous post, and it does a better job of taking into account the points you make in this post that are relevant.<br /><br />(It occurs to me that this is one way of thinking about the point you raised in the previous post, the difference between a minute on one's death-bed and a minute in the midst of your life: if there is a cumulative effect, then the more time follows it, the greater the value due to later minutes allowing one to build on prior ones, even without counting anything else. But this significantly complicates any attempt to compare a lot of little gifts of time with a few big gifts of time.)Brandonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06698839146562734910noreply@blogger.com