When ice seemed like it could have turned out to be something other than the solid phase of water, we would be comparing the options based on the common facts — the evidence or data — the different possibilities were supposed to explain. And then by finding out that ice is water, you learn that there is much more water in the world, because you would then also have to count all the ice on top of all the liquid water.[13] If your moral theory took water to be intrinsically good and more of it to be better, this would be good news (all else equal).
Suppose we measure amounts by mass. The gram was in fact originally defined as the mass of one cubic centimetre of pure water at 0 °C.[1] We could imagine having defined the gram as the mass of one cubic centimetre of liquid water, but using water that isn’t necessarily pure, not fixing the temperature or using a not fully fixed measure for the centimetre. This introduces uncertainty about the measure of mass itself, and we’d later revise the definition as we understood more, but we could still use it in the meantime. We’d also aim to roughly match the original definition: the revised mass of one cubic centimetre of water shouldn’t be too different from 1 gram under the new definition.
This is similar to what I say we’d do with consciousness: we define it first relative to human first-person experiences and measure relative to them, but revise the concept and measure with further understanding. We should also aim to make conservative revisions and roughly preserve the value in our references, human first-person experiences.
Suppose we measure amounts by mass. The gram was in fact originally defined as the mass of one cubic centimetre of pure water at 0 °C.[1] We could imagine having defined the gram as the mass of one cubic centimetre of liquid water, but using water that isn’t necessarily pure, not fixing the temperature or using a not fully fixed measure for the centimetre. This introduces uncertainty about the measure of mass itself, and we’d later revise the definition as we understood more, but we could still use it in the meantime. We’d also aim to roughly match the original definition: the revised mass of one cubic centimetre of water shouldn’t be too different from 1 gram under the new definition.
This is similar to what I say we’d do with consciousness: we define it first relative to human first-person experiences and measure relative to them, but revise the concept and measure with further understanding. We should also aim to make conservative revisions and roughly preserve the value in our references, human first-person experiences.
In French:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160817122340/http://www.metrodiff.org/cmsms/index.php?page=18_germinal_an_3