Thanks, Michael. Yes, you’re right—in the bit you quote from at the start I’m assuming the bursts have some kind of duration rather than being extensionless. I think that probably got mangled in trying to compress everything!
The zero duration frame possibility is an interesting one—Some of Vasco’s comments below point in the same direction, I think. Is your thought that the problem is something like—If you have these isolated points of experience which have zero duration, then since there’s no experience there to which we can assign a non-zero objective duration, if you measure duration objectively, you count those experiences as nothing, whereas intuitively that’s a mistake—There’s an experience of pain there, after all. It’s got to count for something!
I think that’s an interesting objection and one I’ll have to think more about. My initial reaction is that perhaps it’s bound up with a general weirdness that attaches to things that have zero measure but (in some sense) still aren’t nothing? E.g., there’s something weird about probability zero events that are nonetheless genuinely possible, and taking account of events like that can lead to some weird interactions with otherwise plausible normative principles: e.g., it suggests a possible conflict between dominance and expected utility maximization (see Hajek, “Unexpected Expectations,” p. 556-7 for discussion).
The moral intuition that we should use the continuous/Lebesgue measure here seems tied up with the intuition that consciousness is continuous and not a bunch of instantanenous frames with gaps between them. If it is in fact instantaneous with gaps, then the moral intuition seems unreliable and you should probably go with the counting measure instead, with which the frames would have nonzero measure.
FWIW, I’m not a moral realist, and if it turned out both kinds of beings were possible together, then there could be no fact of the matter about how to weigh them against each other. But maybe I’d want to weight the continuous minds infinitely more anyway. You could use the continuous measure first, and then break ties with the counting measure.
Thanks, Michael. Yes, you’re right—in the bit you quote from at the start I’m assuming the bursts have some kind of duration rather than being extensionless. I think that probably got mangled in trying to compress everything!
The zero duration frame possibility is an interesting one—Some of Vasco’s comments below point in the same direction, I think. Is your thought that the problem is something like—If you have these isolated points of experience which have zero duration, then since there’s no experience there to which we can assign a non-zero objective duration, if you measure duration objectively, you count those experiences as nothing, whereas intuitively that’s a mistake—There’s an experience of pain there, after all. It’s got to count for something!
I think that’s an interesting objection and one I’ll have to think more about. My initial reaction is that perhaps it’s bound up with a general weirdness that attaches to things that have zero measure but (in some sense) still aren’t nothing? E.g., there’s something weird about probability zero events that are nonetheless genuinely possible, and taking account of events like that can lead to some weird interactions with otherwise plausible normative principles: e.g., it suggests a possible conflict between dominance and expected utility maximization (see Hajek, “Unexpected Expectations,” p. 556-7 for discussion).
The moral intuition that we should use the continuous/Lebesgue measure here seems tied up with the intuition that consciousness is continuous and not a bunch of instantanenous frames with gaps between them. If it is in fact instantaneous with gaps, then the moral intuition seems unreliable and you should probably go with the counting measure instead, with which the frames would have nonzero measure.
FWIW, I’m not a moral realist, and if it turned out both kinds of beings were possible together, then there could be no fact of the matter about how to weigh them against each other. But maybe I’d want to weight the continuous minds infinitely more anyway. You could use the continuous measure first, and then break ties with the counting measure.