Comment on Quantum Non-Realism

Wed, 02 May 2012 13:57:34 GMT

Can you clarify why you choose to grieve for people at all?

I mean, you seem to classify grieving as an example of expending resources on someone. So if person A dies and person B grieves, B is expending resources on someone. Who benefits from those resources? It certainly isn't A; A is dead.

There seem to be a number of possibilities.

1) Nobody actually benefits from those resources being expended. In which case your reasoning seems to equally well reject all grief, not just grief over hypothetical superluminal travellers.

2) Some surviving person benefits from B's grief... maybe B themselves, maybe A's family members, maybe somebody else. In this case rejecting grieving for A may have costs, and perhaps those potential costs should be understood before rejecting it.

3) A benefited, while alive, from the fact that B runs algorithms that reliably result in B grieving for A once A is dead. In this case rejecting grieving for A may have the consequence of also rejecting those algorithms, which would perhaps otherwise have been beneficial to someone in the same way that were in the past beneficial to A. Here again, perhaps those potential costs should be understood before rejecting grief.

Is there a fourth option?

Discuss