Tuesday, July 26, 2022

The intrinsic badness of certain future tensed facts on presentism

It is bad that tomorrow someone will be in intense pain. On eternalism, we can easily explain this: tomorrow’s pain is just as real as today’s. But on presentism and growing block, future pains don’t exist.

Presumably, the presentist and growing blocker will say that the tensed fact of there being an intense pain tomorrow is bad, and this bad tensed fact presently exists.

Is this badness of the future tensed fact about the pain an instrumental or non-instrumental badness? If it’s instrumental, it is not clear what it could be instrumental to. The main candidate (apart from special cases where there is an obvious candidate, such as when the pain leads to despair) is that the fact that there will be a pain tomorrow is instrumental to tomorrow’s pain. But the fact that tomorrow there will be pain won’t cause that pain—otherwise, it would be trivial that every future event has a cause.

So the present badness of there being a pain tomorrow would be non-instrumental. But now imagine two scenarios with finite time lines.

  • Scenario A: There is a mindless universe with a day of random particle movement, followed by the formation of a brain which has intense pain for a minute, followed by the end of time.

  • Scenario B: There is a mindless universe with a century of random particle movement, followed by the formation of a brain which has intense pain for a minute, followed by the end of time.

Let’s suppose we find ourselves at the last moment of time in one scenario or the other. Then in Scenario A, there was a day of the obtaining of a “future pain fact”, and in Scenario B, there was a century of the obtaining of a “future pain fact”. If a future pain fact is a non-instrumentally bad thing, then there was non-instrumentally bad stuff in Scenario B for a much longer period of time than in Scenario A, and so Scenario B is much worse than Scenario A with respect to future pain. But that seems mistaken: the greater length of time during which there is a future pain fact does not seem any reason to prefer one scenario over another.

2 comments:

Zsolt Nagy said...

English is not my native language, but the last sentence shouldn't be rather phrased like this?

"The greater length of time during which there is a future pain fact does not seem [to be] any [or some] reason [for preferring] one scenario over another."

Is this correct? Does that "seem" to be that way?
Well, it seems to me at least, that you rather wanted to state and claim there the following:
"The greater length of time during which there is a future pain fact is no rational reason for preferring one scenario over another."

Did you rather mean that there?
Really, is that no good and rational reason?!?
Why are you so ignorant and blind regarding to reasons - to good and rational reasons?!?

Zsolt Nagy said...

Besides in both scenarios there is intense pain for a minute in the future. How appears one scenario to be worse than the other one?!?
Because of "presentism"-existential pain?!?
Hahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahh.....