Another theory I consider is the quantum theory of felt duration, favoured historically by Karl Ernst von Baer and more recently by Carla Merino-Rajme. This theory assumes that experience isnāt continuous. Itās divided up across discrete experiential frames, a bit like the frames in a film reel.
(...)
Itās also ultimately a story on which the pain is worse because it fills more objective time, so it doesnāt actually support the view that subjective time experience matters in itself.
Itās probably worth mentioning here that youāre assuming the frames and bursts of pain have nonzero durations.
If they instead had 0 duration (instantaneous) but gaps between them, then youād just be counting them, not measuring and summing their durations, and there would be twice as many, so twice as much pain. Is it psychologically or physically plausible for the frames to be instantaneous with gaps between them? Is there any possible evidence we could collect that would differentiate the two accounts?
One might look to the time it takes for a neuron to fire and put gaps between every firing of a neuron, but there could be no fact of the matter about where exactly lines should be drawn. There might not be any one obvious moment to identify with a neuron firing. Action potentials arenāt instantaneous, e.g.
Even if our waking lives are composed of discrete experiential frames, there appears to be nothing in the nature of consciousness itself that requires that kind of discretization. Continuous consciousness seems to be possible, even if in fact our own experiences are discrete. For continuous minds, we seem forced to say either that there is no number of discrete experiences that make up the experience of a minute of pain or that there are uncountably many or that minds like that undergo exactly one discretely demarcated experience during any period of uninterrupted consciousness (compare Tye 2003a: 97). But each of these claims yields absurd results when making welfare comparisons across discrete and continuous minds, as well as among the experiences of continuous minds, if we insist that the right way to measure painās extent is in terms of the number of discrete experiences that comprise an experience of pain.
This is an interesting point.
Could it cause problems the other way, too, though? Is it also possible that there could be minds where the frames are factually instantaneous with gaps between them? If we measure the total duration, it would be 0, because the gaps take up all the time.
This also reminds me that invertebrates also have graded neuron potentials, which we might think have dramatically more possible relevant states than just the two in action potentials. We might even imagine brains with a continuum of possible states. If we tried to measure welfare intensity and welfare ranges by counting just-noticeable differences from 0, you might get infinitely many with brains with continuous potentials, but only finitely many in humans. (But maybe quantum mechanics places a limit on this precision.)
Thanks, Michael. Yes, youāre rightāin the bit you quote from at the start Iām 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 oneāSome of Vascoās comments below point in the same direction, I think. Is your thought that the problem is something likeāIf you have these isolated points of experience which have zero duration, then since thereās 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 thatās a mistakeāThereās an experience of pain there, after all. Itās got to count for something!
I think thatās an interesting objection and one Iāll have to think more about. My initial reaction is that perhaps itās bound up with a general weirdness that attaches to things that have zero measure but (in some sense) still arenāt nothing? E.g., thereās 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, āUnexpected Expectations,ā p. 556-7 for discussion).
The moral intuition that we should use the continuous/āLebesgue 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, Iām 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 Iād want to weight the continuous minds infinitely more anyway. You could use the continuous measure first, and then break ties with the counting measure.
Itās probably worth mentioning here that youāre assuming the frames and bursts of pain have nonzero durations.
If they instead had 0 duration (instantaneous) but gaps between them, then youād just be counting them, not measuring and summing their durations, and there would be twice as many, so twice as much pain. Is it psychologically or physically plausible for the frames to be instantaneous with gaps between them? Is there any possible evidence we could collect that would differentiate the two accounts?
One might look to the time it takes for a neuron to fire and put gaps between every firing of a neuron, but there could be no fact of the matter about where exactly lines should be drawn. There might not be any one obvious moment to identify with a neuron firing. Action potentials arenāt instantaneous, e.g.
This is an interesting point.
Could it cause problems the other way, too, though? Is it also possible that there could be minds where the frames are factually instantaneous with gaps between them? If we measure the total duration, it would be 0, because the gaps take up all the time.
This also reminds me that invertebrates also have graded neuron potentials, which we might think have dramatically more possible relevant states than just the two in action potentials. We might even imagine brains with a continuum of possible states. If we tried to measure welfare intensity and welfare ranges by counting just-noticeable differences from 0, you might get infinitely many with brains with continuous potentials, but only finitely many in humans. (But maybe quantum mechanics places a limit on this precision.)
Thanks, Michael. Yes, youāre rightāin the bit you quote from at the start Iām 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 oneāSome of Vascoās comments below point in the same direction, I think. Is your thought that the problem is something likeāIf you have these isolated points of experience which have zero duration, then since thereās 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 thatās a mistakeāThereās an experience of pain there, after all. Itās got to count for something!
I think thatās an interesting objection and one Iāll have to think more about. My initial reaction is that perhaps itās bound up with a general weirdness that attaches to things that have zero measure but (in some sense) still arenāt nothing? E.g., thereās 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, āUnexpected Expectations,ā p. 556-7 for discussion).
The moral intuition that we should use the continuous/āLebesgue 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, Iām 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 Iād want to weight the continuous minds infinitely more anyway. You could use the continuous measure first, and then break ties with the counting measure.