A year of moderate pleasure is worth paying a second of intense pain for.
An eternalist explains this in the obvious straightforward way: the total pleasure you experience on this deal is more than the total pain.
But for the presentist, at any time during the pain, you just have the pain. You will have the pleasure, but it’s not a part of reality and hence of your life. And at any time during the pleasure, you just have the moment of pleasure, but because it’s moderate, it’s not enough to offset the past pain.
What we want is an explanation of why it makes sense—as it obviously does—to add up the pains and pleasures over a lifetime. For the eternalist, since all of them are a part of reality, adding seems to make a lot of sense. But for the presentist, it is really unclear why you should add unreal things to real things to get a “total benefit” or “total cost”.
7 comments:
Thanks for another thought-provoking post, Alex. I think that a presentist could give the same explanation of why that makes sense as an eternalist could, were they a good explanation. That is because the difference between presentism and eternalism has got nothing to do with such things. That difference is a metaphysical difference. It would affect whether relativistic spacetime is an actually existing entity, or just a theoretically existing entity, for example. Adding up expected pains and expected pleasures over some length of time in order to make choices is an entirely different kind of thing. I have no idea how to explain how it makes sense, but as you say, it clearly does. Where you are going wrong, I think, is in ignoring those "expected" for the eternalist, as though they are only there for the presentist. But maybe I am wrong about that, maybe you mean to say that it makes sense to add up actual pains and pleasures. If so, then I seriously doubt your "as it obviously does". Perhaps God can do such things, but I am not even sure how we could measure them objectively. Yours truly...
Think of adding up benefits across people to calculate total utility. That's only rough, but it makes some sense. But it only makes sense when all the people we add up over are real people.
To Kant time is a "thing in itself" that we can not understand.
Our memories of past pleasures and pains and our expectations of future ones are part of our present experience. That makes them real, even to presentists.
But why do we care about our memories or act on our expectations? Why do we treat our experience of expecting pain as somehow comparable to our direct experience of pain itself? I would say that we just do – it is part of being human. From an evolutionary point of view, it seems plausible that acting to balance expected pains and pleasures against present ones would help us to survive and reproduce.
But note that our experience of expecting pleasure is not all that pleasant. And the judgment that it's worth having a one present pain in exchange for many future pleasures doesn't depend on memory: we could suppose each pleasure and pain will forgotten after being experienced, and the trade is still worth it.
Thanks for your reply, Alex.
If presentism is true, then during the painful second, the future pleasure does not exist, although it is bound to exist. It would be rational to add them up, why not? You are not adding a real thing to an unreal thing, you are adding two values associated with the real pain and the anticipated pleasure. You would have to be very rational to do that during the painful second though! To add them up over a lifetime you would have to be looking back over that lifetime, and then you would be comparing two memories. And to choose this deal in the first place, before that painful second, would be two add up the values of two equally unreal things.
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