Meghan Sullivan
speaker
520 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2017
last heard Jun 2017
Meghan Sullivan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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There's one last kind of time bias that's relevant to uh this debate that Samuel Scheffler has really gotten going.
So he has this book called Death in the Afterlife, which is like the most misleading title for a philosophy book ever, because very little of it's about death, and none of it's about the what we commonly mean by the afterlife.
What Scheffler means by the afterlife is our assumption that there's going to be human civilization after our lives.
Doesn't mean like any kind of
spiritual afterlife where you like are on a cloud with Socrates for eternity.
But Scheffler's project also raises a new and kind of weird form of time bias about meaning.
The whole book is predicated on this thought experiment.
What if you found out that pretty soon after your death the world was gonna end in like a doomsday like event?
Scheffler argues that in those situations you would be you would have a very hard time finding any meaning in your current activities, like writing philosophy or spending time with your family.
they just wouldn't feel as valuable to you in the in that way anymore.
You might still get a little bit of immediate pleasure out of it, but you'd be missing a really important sense of value for meaning because there wouldn't be future generations to inherit your projects or to participate in similar kinds of projects.
An interesting thing about Scheffler's book is he argues the connections that we need to have with other people for our projects to be meaningful.
Those people have to be in nearby generations and in future generations.
It can't be connections with people in the past or the distant future that give us meaning.
Which is a kind of time bias.
It's a time bias about meaningfulness.
But basically you have your preferences are sensitive to what's gonna happen in the nearby future after your death, but not sensitive to what's gonna happen in the really distant future or in or before you were born.
So that's a like fourth kind of time bias.
There's not really a catchy name for it, the same way there is for like near bias and future bias and structural bias, but we might call it like meaningfulness bias.
Oh yeah, I mean it doesn't like, you know, you find out doomsday's gonna happen, that makes it very hard for you to find meaning in your work as a philosopher.
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