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What We Owe The Future: Difference between revisions
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It is a situation of ''[[doubt]]'', not ''risk''. Here, expectation theory is ''worthless. This is a good thing.'' | It is a situation of ''[[doubt]]'', not ''risk''. Here, expectation theory is ''worthless. This is a good thing.'' | ||
===About that thought experiment=== | |||
MacAskill came to his thesis courtesy of that thought experiment. Imagine living the life of every being that has habited the planet since mitochondrial Eve and up to the present day.. this gives us an idea of our own contingency, an Idea of the present’s microscopic insignificant compared with what has gone before and what is yet to come. Yeah we are placed to make decisive decisions to reinforce the future. | |||
This, I think, gives the game away. This is to see being in the present as as one of patiently operating cosmic machinery, when it is nothing of the sort. It is as misconceived as as [[Richard Dawkins]]’ idea that a fielder does, or even ''could'', functionally calculate differential equations to catch a ball. | |||
This is an unrelenting, uncompromising deterministic worldview, to be set in opposition to the [[heuristic]], [[iterative]], provisional mode of behaving that characterises any evolving organism in an ecosystem. Here it is in a nutshell, the great distinction between [[reductionism]] and [[pragmatism]]. | |||
=== An infinity of possibilities === | === An infinity of possibilities === | ||
We can manufacture plausible stories about whence we came easily enough: that’s what scientists and historians do, though they have a hard time agreeing with each other. But where we are ''going'' is a different matter. We don’t have the first clue. [[Evolution by natural selection|Evolution]] makes no predictions. Alternative possibilities branch every which way. Over a generation or two we have some dim prospect of anticipating who our progeny might be and what they might want. [[Darwin’s Dangerous Idea|Darwin’s dangerous algorithm]] wires us, naturally, to do this. | We can manufacture plausible stories about whence we came easily enough: that’s what scientists and historians do, though they have a hard time agreeing with each other. But where we are ''going'' is a different matter. We don’t have the first clue. [[Evolution by natural selection|Evolution]] makes no predictions. Alternative possibilities branch every which way. Over a generation or two we have some dim prospect of anticipating who our progeny might be and what they might want. [[Darwin’s Dangerous Idea|Darwin’s dangerous algorithm]] wires us, naturally, to do this. | ||