Timothy Trytitle

Describing one’s self as an “____enjoyer,” (politics enjoyer, Michigan enjoyer, etc.) has reached max saturation. The term is already beginning to sound cringe, and I suspect in no less than five years will have same cringe-level as “Coffee FTW!” or “epic bacon.”

@matt_e_cochran First is true. Second does not follow from the first, however, which is a mistake a lot of people are making. Not necessarily false, but just independent.

You're not a disembodied spirit who randomly occupied some couple's baby. You are your parents' child, and couldn't be anyone else's child without ceasing to be you. Your parents deserve to pass it to you, and your proper response is honor & gratitude, not dismissing it as luck.

You are doing this weird thing where you are acting like the VoI necessarily justifies all progressive and liberal policy, and then using it as an attack on the method? Rawls would agree with you that if anti-discrimination lawsuits, or migration, or gun control or whatever were bad for society as a whole (taking into account the least well off members), then they should not be implemented. Of course, he was a liberal so he likely disagreed, but not because of the VoI or anything. Also, a lot of people miss this, but VoI actually just asks you to imagine you represent someone but do not know who it is, as opposed to a council of souls

@zjpea @GreeneMan6 "DOJ reaches $30 million settlement with PayPal for offering business loans only to minority businesses which discriminated against White people" This is what you are advocating for. Don't get mad when people see through your spirit mask. We ain't buying your spirit nature.

Indeed, I would agree that imagining hypotheticals is a core part of thinking. However this “Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance” is a specifically gamed hypothetical designed to lead to a certain dishonest conclusion. The idea of this exercise is to pretend your birth was a random event across the space of all current humans while superimposing the context of deciding a “fair” distribution of rights & privileges. The exercise makes a reader think: “Well, due to my culture, I expect a certain level of rights and privileges. So based on the veil of ignorance, I should want those rights and privileges for people in all countries!” This, naturally brings us to the leftist conclusion that we have an implicit morally duty to extend rights to all people. But this is not an honest examination, it’s a hat trick that the progressive uses to smuggle in his own morality. It’s easy to see how the trick works if you invert the question. Any serious examination of “right and privileges” understands these things as the equal and opposite counterparts to “moral obligations and duties”. But could we do the same”veil of ignorance” exercise for imposing societal obligations on people? For instance, as a Westerner, imagine that you were forced to live in a randomly selected society and follow its own moral strictures, rules, and cultural regulations. What kind of society would you be comfortable existing in, chosen from behind the veil of ignorance? Wouldn’t it only be Western style societies? So wow, we just developed a moral imperative to invade all nations and impose Western Societal norms on them based on Progressives favorite first principle! But No! We can’t do that! That would be imperialism! Well fine then. If there is no universal obligation to impose moral duties then there can be no universal moral obligation to distribute entitlements.

I admit this is interpretation, but when I hear people use “you could have been born in Sudan” I think they mean like “as a Sudanese villager.” Otherwise, there is not much punch to the hypothetical in my view. If my parents had decided to move to Sudan or something, I would still be raised in comfortably (with extreme wealth relative to the country). I would be well educated and have educated parents. I would be fluent in English and have a firm command of American culture etc. I would be able to go to college in the US and move back very easily. Basically, if I was born in Sudan because my father had been made American ambassador to Sudan or something, that would be fine, but not really how I read the question.

@TimTrytitle @TrueSlazac Why would any of this be true necessarily? You could be born to the same parents but in Sudan. Yes your upbringing would've been different but at that point it is the same as the breakfast hypothetical.

“What if you were born in Sudan” “But I was born in America” “I know, it’s a hypothetical, how would you feel if you were born in Sudan” “But that’s impossible, I was born in America”

@EchoesofEmpire_ Same vibe

‘Lafayette We Are Here’ an American WWI poster.

@morallawwithin Wait aren’t you a kantian? Are yall even allowed to do quantitative valuing and summing like that?

“Factory farming is an atrocity like no other that humanity has committed.” “Dude, you’re crazy, valuing animals the same as humans.” “Okay, let’s say I value humans 100x more. Factory farming is still the worst atrocity ever.” “No I mean like, you value animals infinitesimally. Anything else is crazy”

Respectfully, this is twitter. There isn’t “Agenda” or anything and I have basically been on the same tracking on approaching this as analytic philosophy since my first reply. You can go read the entire thread. I agree it’s annoying when people shift mid conversation to avoid the initial point they brought up, but anyone can start a new discussion in a new direction. My claim has, and always had been, that “You could have been born as a different person in a different country” is metaphysically impossible.

@TimTrytitle @The_Sublimatory @TrueSlazac I also think phil of mind is very interesting yet its interjection here is not. This was my initial point, that you’re taking us on a tangent that is its own subject and not the subject at hand.

Yeah, but do you think it would be worse or equally culpable if you stole with the intention of killing him? I think either answer is reasonable, but I think a lot of people find the intention relevant. Someone who killed an animal to eat it is less bad on my view than someone who kills an animal because they enjoy inflicting suffering. At least in the law, there are often crimes which require a “intentional” mens rea above a “knowing” mens rea

Nothing I said involves “boiling everything down to pleasure”; I mentioned pleasure only because it’s what’s actually at play with serial killers, as far as I know. Re: stuff on intention, if I stole $5 from a mom who needed that money to buy medicine for her dying child, wouldn’t that still be “straight up evil”? The kid dying isn’t my intention, it just happens to be a side effect of me getting what I want.

There’s really no reason to have this position except being straight up evil

That’s true, if you boil everything down to just pleasure seeking. At a different level though, I think whether the suffering itself or the killing itself is part of the chain of your intentions is relevant. There’s the example of the terror bomber and strategic bomber. Both who drop bombs, in the same place, in the same way, knowing it will kill civilians. However the terror bomber is trying to win the war by inflicting terror, and the strategic bomber is trying to take out military infrastructure, and is just accepting that civilians will die. I think many people (not all) would ascribe different levels of morality to those actions.

I think as a general matter, people who are pure evil don’t non-instrumentally want to maximize suffering; rather they’re fine with an arbitrary amount of suffering if it means they can get what they want. If I’m not mistaken, even serial killers do what they do because it brings pleasure and excitement, and if it weren’t for that, they wouldn’t kill.

@SophiasHotTakes @TrueSlazac Interesting. But under that theory, wouldn’t someone with a radically different self-narrative per se be a different person? My issue is that if you say “Abe Lincoln could have been born Adolf Hitler”, what would even be “Abe Lincoln” in that being.

@TimTrytitle @TrueSlazac No, I am very much interested in the theory of identity, and my current working hypothesis is that self is the self-narrative that superego constructs out of ego-level memories. I can chat about that more! I just don't think that it invalidates the spirit of the question

Yeah I mean I take that during the observer phase, there is no secondary being observing like a Cartesian Theater, just the experience of the Sudanese man, happening in your brain. If it was just your brain with no reconciliation, I think that’s tough. I would personally say it wasn’t “you” just someone using your body, like when demon possesses someone. However I think it is arguable that the physical space of your body is enough to call it “you” I think the real issue is that, quite obviously, when you have none of these there is no connection at all.

You preempted me with the harder question. What if it was your brain but no memory reconciliation? Actually, making the memory reconciliation mandatory leads to very strange retrocausality problems. If no memory reconciliation means you were never that Sudanese man at any point during the simulation, does that mean that if you get Alzheimer’s or amnesia near the end of your life, that you were never actually… you? Nah, identity can’t be tied to memory, it has to be tied to the conscious observer itself. The watcher of the movie. Regardless of what he remembers.

Yeah, I mean people are fine doing that because they are not thinking through to carefully and not really internalizing what it would mean. You can kinda come up with a coherent way of thinking about it (It's "me" with my memories and personality, but in a sheep's body!) for these joke questions, but I think that is different than the call of this. To be clear, I am in this discussion for the deep philosophy of mind debate because I find it interesting, but yeah, I have already said I recognize the general thrust of both the original question — empathize with others — and of these joke questions. But yeah, if you are not interested in the analytical philosophy of mind part of this, that's fine and I understand this can seem pedantic from another context.

@TimTrytitle @TrueSlazac Look, people find the question of "would you still love me if I were a worm?" or "would you fuck a sheep if you were another sheep?" coherent. So clearly they are capable of conceptualizing the notion of self even under dramatically different circumstances

I get the point. I am here just talk about philosophy of mind because I find it interesting. As tempting as it is to think that we are some “seat of consciousness” that can be freely transferred to others, this is exactly what I’m rejecting. A lot of people (I think you as well, but you are free to correct me) are basically postulating some Cartesian Theater in which there is some inner “you” who gets to take in all the experiences of yourself, and we could just transfer this to another being. That is what I’m arguing against. To be clear, people should still be grateful for their opportunities and wealth they get through no work of their own nonetheless. Unlike some other people in this thread, I don’t think this has much to do with political theory or ethical theory. Like I think it’s wrong to say that “King Louis XVI could have just as easily been a peasant” because his parents and identity itself are what made him king. But still, that doesn’t mean he “deserves” to rule over everyone! Anyway, take a look at Cartesian Theater en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian…

@TimTrytitle @The_Sublimatory @TrueSlazac “You” could be experiencing a [less] fortunate consciousness or vice versa through no force or will of your own but the pure external mechanics of the universe.” The purpose is to evoke humility more than empathy I believe

Sure, I have always held that such is fine. I can also empathize with a Sudanese person, and imagine what it is like to be them. I have always specifically been objecting to “You could have been born as a Sudanese tribesman” as not only physically impossible (obvious) but also metaphysically impossible. That’s about the extent of my claim, and yet, a lot of people disagree!

@TimTrytitle @The_Sublimatory @TrueSlazac If you can imagine being a lot less fortunate, you’ve achieved the objective of this question and your follow on is still very much the tangent. If you’re ok with “imagine you were not in the top decile of human welfare and were instead in the bottom decile” then that’s fine too

@doomoog @ImSmilingRn Underrated comment

@ImSmilingRn Could not go into a bowling alley in the one on the left

Would you guys rather wear the Hedjet of Upper Egypt or the Deshret of Lower Egypt

@souljagoyteller @intentionalisms Luckily, Jacob-Rees Mogg definitely answered this youtu.be/jle56PGd0i4?si…

@intentionalisms The slave trade sure, that was always going to go away no matter what. But slavery itself? Would be a much more complicated issue

Britain probably doesn’t abolish slavery in the 1830s if it still owns a monopoly on world cotton production

@TrueSlazac @Trey_Explainer Would like to see it broke up more than just over under 45 though

@Trey_Explainer In polls it’s the other way around, zoomers and millennials are more pro-AI than Gen X and boomers

Go read the the book Downfall by Richard Frank which pretty conclusively shows there was no impending unconditional surrender. What they were thinking about was a conditions surrender in which 1.) no occupation 2.) Japan does its own trials for any war crimes 3.) No disarmament of Japan 4.) Emperor stays Obviously the first 3 were completely unacceptable and would have left the Japanese imperial regime entrenched

@Dinkeldash AI summaries are not sources.

It's not a defence of the Japanese empire to think it was outright wrong to kill 200,000 people when they already knew the war was about to end.

@SophiasHotTakes @TrueSlazac The hypothetical wipes out ALL theories of identity Same body? Obviously not Same memory? No Same genetics? No Same hereditary line? No Same personality? No In a universe where “I was born as you and were born as me” that would be exactly this universe.

@TimTrytitle @TrueSlazac Even if they don't explicitly believe in souls, relatively few people are "me = my memory" hardliners, and a lot of folks out there think that Star Trek teleporters kill you, but a full memory wipe doesn't. So whatever this theory of identity is, it supports this counterfactual

This is true, but I’m not taking about determinism. Could the earth have been 5% larger? It is conceivable that it could, even if it was determined by physics and initial condition of the universe that it would not. Could a triangle have four sides? No. Such is logically impossible by the definition of a triangle.

@TimTrytitle @TrueSlazac Determinism does not eliminate the existence of chance. Even in a completely deterministic universe, it would still be true that no one chooses their genes, parents, social class, or country. There is literally no contradiction or difficulty in answering that simple hypothesis.