A being that does not represent the world has no conception of what representation might be like, since the being has no conceptions.
A being that lacks consciousness has no conception of what consciousness might be like. The being might have intentionality (our unconscious thoughts, after all, have intentionality), and so might have the contentful thought that there can be beings that have some crucial mental quality that goes beyond the unconscious being’s mentality.
A being that lacks will presumably has no consciousness of what rational will or responsibility might be like. Again, the being might have the concept of beings with “something more” in causation of activity by means of thought.
The distinctions between non-representing and representing, unconscious and conscious, and involuntary and voluntary involve immense qualitative and value gaps. In each of the three cases, we humans exemplify the higher of the two options. At the same time, we are not alone in all these on earth. We share representation with all living things, I suspect. We share consciousness with many animals. But responsibility, I suspect, is ours alone.
I find it implausible to think that we are at the qualitative apex of the space of valuable possibilities. It seems quite likely to me that there could be beings that differ from us in further fundamental valuable qualities in such a way that we are on the lower end, and if we were to meet these beings, we would be unable to grasp what they have which we lack, though we might on testimony, or maybe even empirical observation of behavior, conclude that there is such a thing.
In fact, I suspect there are infinitely many such distinctions, and that God is beyond the higher side of all of them.
In heaven, might we be raised to have the further higher levels? Maybe, but maybe not. However, the mere epistemic possibility of us being gradually raised to acquire infinitely many further such irreducible values is enough to undercut any “argument from boredom” against eternal heavenly life.
Assuming there are infinitely many more such non-V and V pairs, I wonder what this infinity is. Does it have a cardinality?
4 comments:
A few years ago, I played around with the idea of ‘near-omniscience’. (This term shows up on Google results but probably with different meanings.) How close can an entity get to being omniscient(and infallible) without actually being omniscient? I don’t think it makes much sense to posit a being that knows all true propositions save one. And I didn’t think it helped a lot to talk about some minimum number of propositions this being wouldn’t know. Here was the best I could come up with: God knows all things through a single, simple noetic act, requiring no synthesis. We know things by means of many, many syntheses (the synthesis of a subject with a predicate in each proposition we know). But maybe there is an angel who knows reality by means exactly two simple acts of cognition and exactly one synthesis of the two.
That seems to me like a V beyond us.
Interesting. Another kind of near-omniscience would be a being that confidently believes all and only the true propositions, but doesn't know them all, maybe doesn't know many of them.
If you have belief without knowledge near-omniscience, you would still have to have a lot of second order beliefs about the quality of various arguments supporting your other beliefs. E.g., for lots of propositions p, there is some proof S which is a good proof that p. You would have to confidently believe each such S was a good proof, and yet you would *still* need to lack knowledge that p. Is it possible for some mind to have confident true beliefs about all such propositions? I can think of two ways we could answer yes. First, we could suppose that the bwk near-omniscient being would lack the skill required to carry out the relevant inferences from one proposition to another, even though it would always assign the right truth-value. Second, we could suppose that filling the gap between true belief and knowledge ultimately requires something more than having really good arguments (maybe having sense-experience or something), and the bwk near-omniscient being lacks that additional something.
One could confident but unjustified true belief about contingent truths. If one was near-omniscient in the sense I outlined, I suppose one would have confident belief that one's belief is unjustfied, but that happens, doesn't it?
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