Like this.

But also, Srap Tasmaner has probably heard my 'insight' on these matters to the point of fatigue and I fear if I use the word 'narrative' one more time in any post I might well inspire physical damage. — Isaac

These days, I'm attempting to sing a different tune..

To wit, here's what I've been thinking about -- unfinished, but it's time to post something.

Being in the habit of telling each other what we know, I tell you something I think I know -- about the mind or reality or some philosophical thing -- but instead of thanking me, you disagree. This is shocking and bewildering behavior on your part. (Surprise.)

If I do not understand your position at all, that's the worst case for me, because what kind of action (i.e., talking) can I engage in in response? Anything is better than this, so my first step will be to substitute for your position a position I believe I understand and can respond to. (There's a cart before the horse here. Have to fix later.)

I want to bring your views into alignment with mine, and that's why I make arguments in favor of my belief. But I probably don't really know why I believe what I believe, so I'll have to come up with reasons, and I'll convince myself that if I heard these reasons I would be convinced. But really I have no idea, since I already believe what I'm trying to convince you of; it's almost impossible for me to judge how much support these reasons give my claim. Finding reasons for what I already believe presents almost no challenge at all.

This is all risky behavior though, because I've opened myself up to more disappointments: you might reject my reasons themselves, or you might reject that they provide support for my "conclusion" so styled, or deny that they provide "enough" support, whatever that is.

Denying the premises is really the least of my worries, because we're talking roughly about intuitions -- making this the fourth recent thread I've been in to use this word -- which I'm going to gloss here as beliefs I don't experience as needing justification. If you share my intuitions, we still have to fight about the support relation; if you don't, I can just keep daisy-chaining along until we find something we agree on. This is routine stuff, have to have common ground even to disagree let alone resolve such a disagreement.

But that still leaves the support relation. Not sure what to say about that. If you start from the idea that some people will just "get it", we're still talking intuitions; as you spell out more and more steps between what your audience accepts and what they don't, this is what logic looks like. The usual view, of course, is that "being logical" makes a connection a candidate for a step in the argument; the thing is, I think we spell things out only to the point where the audience agrees, which means something they accept without reasons -- and here we're talking precisely about the support relation that holds between one belief and another, and the sorts of things I come up with are just things that sound convincing to me as someone who already believes, which means my process for producing reasons is a kind of pretend.

It's entirely possible that logic is some kind of refinement of such behavior, a constraint placed on it, which is how we tend to think of logic, the guardrails of sound thinking. Dunno. One thing I think the description above gets wrong, now that I've written it out, is that the support relation really shouldn't be presented as another belief itself, but as a rule or habit for passing from one idea to the other. (I think empiricists and pragmatists would agree on that.) So the issue at each step I have to spell out is not whether you accept a proposed connection, but your behavior -- do you pass from antecedent to consequent as I predict or desire?

Very convincing though, you've clearly been practising. — Isaac

Now you can just get the app, LadGPT.

Did you see that ludicrous display last night?
— Srap Tasmaner

No, but my first-person-instatiated-point-of-view saw it. I was out. — Isaac

Try googling what you quoted there, and if you don't recognize it, you're welcome.

"Did your point of view see the match last yesterday?" — Isaac

Did you see that ludicrous display last night? What was Wenger thinking, sending Walcott in that early? The thing about Arsenal is, they always try to walk it in.

Apparently there's a difference! — Wayfarer

Yeah. One's from the protagonist's point-of-view, one's not. Or do you think it was impossible for Nolan to write or film the 'subjective' scenes?

Also, Nolan is famously red/green colorblind, which makes this all weird.

David Chalmer's doesn't say that consciousness is off-limits. He says it is intractable from the third-person perspective, due to its first-person character — Wayfarer

'Intractable' is all I meant there, but I was trying to resolve the ambiguity in "due to its first-person character."

If you're demanding the book be on the shelf when I hand it to you, that's just a double bind, and probably a misunderstanding on your part.

If you want to know why we only find books on shelves, you want to see what it is about shelves that make them uniquely capable of hosting books.

But that takes for granted that you and I are both subjects of experience, so that you can safely assume that I will understand what you mean. — Wayfarer

So is the argument that consciousness is off-limits because it's first-person, or that one of the things psychology needs to account for is that it is first-person?

The first is "Being me the book on the shelf"; the second is "Why are books on shelves?"

objective physical sciences exclude the first person as a matter of principle — Wayfarer

So what?

I think you're aware of this discussion in exactly the same sense that I'm aware of this discussion. Why should I define a special me-having-my-awareness instead of just saying I have awareness just like you.

Why should there be science conducted exclusively from my point-of-view? And if there can't be, why is that a shortcoming? Other people can study the same properties of me.

The grammatical differences among first, second and third person sentences present some interesting quirks, Moore sentences for instance.

But other than that, how exercised do we get about the difference between "He said he's going out" and "I said I'm going out"? We translate between them regularly.

(Obligatory anecdote: Kafka said, "I became a writer when I found I could say 'he' instead of 'I'.")

But if you define a phenomenon so that its first-person-ness is part of the phenomenon, we're in "Hand me the book on the shelf" territory.

Just don't do that. We use mentalistic vocabulary about others as readily as we do about ourselves, attribute knowledge and beliefs and awareness and forgetfulness and consciousness to other people all day long, and we mean the same thing as when we describe ourselves as being in these mental states. What matters is the book, not its being on the shelf. That's just a double bind.

That's perfect. Temperamentally I'm much closer to Graves, but, as he suggests, it's not always very satisfying.

And there's reason to doubt the capacity of analysis alone to get us to the understanding we want. Even though I don't think I can shake the habit of analysis, I'd like at least to supplement it with a thinking closer to image and myth. (Some of the philosophy that has left its mark on me is like this, Wittgenstein, Sellars, Heidegger, others.)

So while in one sense I started this thread as a protest against insufficiently analytical argumentation, my real motivation is more like overcoming analysis as a paradigm, or at least embedding it within something more varied and more flexible, but without giving up the rigor and precision of analysis, the things that make it useful and powerful.

Revising.

D. H. Lawrence's first book of poems was called "Look! We Have Come Through."

Robert Graves reviewed it, saying, "Perhaps you have, and a good thing too, but why should we look?"

That was roughly the mood in which I wrote the OP.

Sorry to clutter up your thread — unenlightened

Heh. This thread is about clutter.

I agree with your remarks in spirit, the charming and damnable heterogeneity of it all, but I still think there is a thread (heh number two) of persuasion running through all the sorts of things we say.

Quine reports that Burt Dreben once told him that great philosophers don't argue -- the idea being that it's all about competing frameworks. Give people an approach they like better and it doesn't really matter whether the old one is still more or less tenable, it just becomes irrelevant.



This thread is still very much on my mind, so I'll probably come roaring back in another day or two.

what was an interesting conversation we here having seems to have fizzled out and been replaced by yet another truly bizarre argument — Isaac

So still on topic.

My eyes glaze over when there's a lot of "That's not what I said," and "That's not what I meant."

To coin a phrase, Why should we talk about the history of this conversation?

What is the relevance here? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Maybe none. I only skimmed the exchange you were having with @Isaac, and don't want to take sides. It's just that this caught my eye:

This is a logically valid argument. — Count Timothy von Icarus

In other discussions, it wouldn't have bothered me, but since we're talking about what makes an argument acceptable, I thought it a somewhat misleading phrase.

Probably not important.

Any activity which loses sight of life as a whole becomes unmoored and I don't think that's terribly healthy. — Isaac

That's more or less the idea. If logic stands above and apart from our practices, it hangs in the air. More later.

>If it is Monday, then Grover Cleavland is the President
>It is Monday
>Thus, Gover Cleaveland is the President (proposed entailment/conclusion)

This is a logically valid argument. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Given modus ponens as an inference rule. (And thus not a theorem.)

Actually constructing arguments requires some system of deduction, not just the definitions of the logical constants.

But it is the entire nature of intuition that it extends if not transcends the current limits of what can be discursively extracted from the context. — Pantagruel

Not sure about "transcends". I talked about this in @wonderer1's thread, the difference between not reported and not reportable, and the difference between not reportable in principle and not reportable as a practical matter. I get the feeling you're alive to the issues here, hence the careful phrasing.

On the other hand, I'm a little puzzled by the hint that it must be intuition that extends. Is the idea that conscious processes can't extend because whatever hasn't been discursively extracted from a context can't be by conscious analysis? By definition? I almost see an argument there, but it's not clear, and that's probably on me.

The expert diagnosis of a very experienced MD versus an intern for example. — Pantagruel

Isn't there a study from years ago showing that AI is better at reading x-rays than most radiologists?

Herbert Simon concluded decades ago that intuition is kind of a myth, that it's overwhelmingly a matter of experience, and perhaps some habits that make knowledge more accessible. But there's no preternatural insight. Your comparison of the intern to the experienced MD makes sense with that understanding as well, without mythologizing intuition.

Been really enjoying reading your thoughts in this thread.

the 'argument from equals' in the Phaedo — Wayfarer

I've been mulling over your post and I don't have a simple response to it. I might spend some time actually looking at the Phaedo and then start a thread on it. In the meantime, I have some remarks.

1. I think it may not be possible to resolve our differences, because I am not sure they can be expressed cleanly, that there's some proposition or set of propositions you hold true and I false, for instance. Maybe, but I have my doubts.

2. There is a broad sense in which you seem to believe there is a world of concrete particularity, accessible to the senses, and a world of abstract generality, accessible to reason. It looks like there's little room for disagreement; I can't taste or see or touch the relation of equality, only things that are or are not equal.

3. That's not so far from Hume's observation about causality, but he didn't conclude that we can learn through rational insight what we cannot learn by looking; he concluded that the belief in causality is in some sense a fiction, a useful simplification.

4. If Plato's argument is right -- not clear to me yet -- if the concept of equality is unlearnable, then we might also conclude that we have no such concept, rather than concluding it must be innate.

5. "But of course we have the concept of equality!" --- We are adept at doing the things that having a concept of equality was supposed to explain, certainly. But if we cannot have such a concept, then the explanation must change.

6. It seems to us we see the entire environment before us, like a high-definition movie on a screen, our visual field. This is false. There is no such rendering of our environment present anywhere in our brains, and could not be. The truth is that we move our eyes frequently, much more than we are aware of, and we see a section of about a degree or two of our visual field clearly each time; the complete visual field is patched together without our awareness, giving the impression of a seamless whole.

That's an example of how an explanation can change to make something impossible possible.

7. The assumption that we must have the abstract concept of equality to judge whether two sticks are the same length suggests a computational model of the mind, with abstract rules being applied to concrete cases as they come up. I have my doubts.

8. Presumably the argument against materialism will continue before birth: if it's not a concept that could have been learned, it will also turn out to be a concept evolution could not have provided us with.

9. As you see it, Plato provides a dispositive argument that equality cannot be learned, but we have the concept, therefore ... If that argument is watertight, there's no need to consider empirical evidence, which could only mislead us.

10. On the contrary, I'm inclined to look at the research. Mathematical concepts have always been a central focus of developmental psychologists from Piaget on down to today. Parents and teachers spend time teaching children how to count, how to recognize shapes, similarity and difference, and so on, or at least providing them the appropriate setting for learning those concepts.

11. At what age do children actually acquire the concept of equality? What does the proto-concept look like, and how do they use it? Are there differences between cultures?

12. Mostly I think making claims about what can be learned and what cannot without looking at the development of children is worse than a waste of time.


As I said, I may post something about Plato, just because it might be interesting, though, not because it would lead to anything.

Christianity is kind of odd in that the central figure doesn't really demonstrate characteristics we'd think of a masculine. Jesus is a pacifist. He's compassionate. He's a son, not a father. Maybe he represented some kind of shift? Not sure — frank

Don't we worry, we fixed that.

No one likes to think of art as a business or trade. — apokrisis

I want to say there's a famous holograph of Balzac, page with the title of the new book at the top, and the rest of the page is full of calculations of how much money he'll make from it, which debts he'll pay off, and so on.

We do also argue to persuade, and sometimes the success of that persuasion is more important than the method. — Isaac

The general view is that there's good persuasion, which follows the rules of logic, and bad persuasion, which doesn't.

I'd rather switch that around and say logic is partially descriptive of at least some the types of persuasion we find good, or think usually work, etc.

That there are valid arguments that aren't persuasive is obvious: if you don't accept a premise, doesn't matter that the conclusion is properly derived. (Multiple ways not to accept premises too.) So persuasive arguments seem to be a subset of valid arguments. But it's not like that because a lot of arguments aren't deductive. So really it's a matter of the two overlapping.

But I still think persuasion is primary, and what we see with non-persuasive but valid arguments is escape, a derivative use of tech that originates as a type of persuasion. It's similar to how I've come to think there is a core use of language in the simple, direct account of what I know that you don't, basic narrative, but that form can be repurposed to lie, and, well, everything else.

we could do the same thing self-consciously and perhaps improve our reasoning. — Srap Tasmaner

@Wayfarer @wonderer1

I want to add that this is not the only option.

I'm interested in @Pantagruel's suggestion that there may be more of the analog input in the system than the digitized projection of that reality. That's really interesting.

But in a general way you could choose to self-consciously do something *different* from what your hardware does on its own, and I think this is kind of the goal in practices like meditation and phenomenology. The question that arises is how far back into the simplification process you can get, and we keep finding that the answer seems to be, not as far as you might have hoped. There are things your brain's going to do whether you like it or not.

But that still leaves some options. Can you catch it in the act? To some degree maybe you can, and again that's where I see meditation and phenomenology, but again the issue is how early in the process you catch something before it gets simplified for you.

But you may also be able to learn how your brain simplified and that in itself can be valuable.

And you can make some effort to un-simplify, to re-complexify.

Lots more to this.

You never know what battles the people around you are fighting. — frank

Yeah, contrary to the story I tell over in the intuition thread, every time I see someone driving aggressively I try to tell myself they're rushing somewhere for an emergency. I'm not always convinced by my argument, but I do it all the same.

Amen!

I suppose what I meant to say is that mathematics allows for utter precision, whereas, in reality, things are generally not mathematically precise. — Wayfarer

Certainly.

To paraphrase Bertrand Russell, we model the world mathematically not because we know so much about it, but because we know so little. — Wayfarer

That's very nice, but there's a lot more to say. We only can know a little because of the creatures we are. Bandwidth is small and reality is big.

It's only those aspects which can be quantified that provide mathematical certainty. — Wayfarer

Or, again, the other way around. Nothing can "really" be measured, but only approximated. We can call what we end up with certainty or precision, but it's really usability, since processing power is also limited. That math is more precise is the whole point. I'd like to say that simplifying the world or experience into a usable form just is the mathematical impulse. It's not that some aspects of the world can be measured and some can't. Everything can be turned into math.

And the mathematical impulse to simplify and make computable -- that's also obviously what's going on with logic.

It's funny how when you read Plato, he talks as if these are all the same thing -- you know, the way he'll say "those of you interested in philosophy and mathematics, in music and astronomy". That is, those of you who have noticed how we simplify the world in order to think about it and recognize that we could do the same thing self-consciously and perhaps improve our reasoning.

gravitas — frank

Always been an important word to me, yes.

The nasty version of "Man in the Arena" is the quote from Steinbeck: "Critics are like eunuchs gathered around the marriage bed to watch a whole man perform the act of creation." Jesus.

The one change I would make to The Man in the Arena is that I don't see any need to denigrate the weak and the timid. I get the sentiment, and I've tried to teach my kids, both the boys and the girls, that life ought to be an adventure. But there's no call to point out when anyone stumbles, whether he's strong or weak. You see what I mean? It's bad for the soul.

do you guys think most science textbooks waste the student's time by going through the history of how a theory came to be developed? — Count Timothy von Icarus

No. My issue wasn't really with the use of history per se, but with how it was or wasn't connected to other points being made, which would hold for any sort of obiter dicta in a post. I left in the detail that it was a specifically historical point as an opening for defending a different view of what sorts of connections between points are required in an argument.

I remember the specific moment I decided to trust my intuition. I was in college, at the library studying, and some guy came in and dropped his books on the next table over from where I was and dropped into a chair. I glanced over and thought to myself, dumbass. And then I upbraided myself -- Why do you do that? Don't be so quick to judge. Don't jump to conclusions, you don't know that guy. After a while he left and I left shortly after. I was heading for the stairs that were right next to the elevator and he was standing there, repeatedly pushing the down button. We were on the second floor. I decided right then that whatever I had picked up on when I first saw him, I was right. Dumbass. Probably hungover dumbass. I have trusted my intuition ever since.

But I don't actually know what he'll say. — Srap Tasmaner


Turns out you do! — Isaac

No I didn't!

I like the point about proxy victims. That's similar to points you've made before about how to understand the statistics of risk, stuff that's second nature to you but that I have to think through. This was very clear.

Not sure I buy the point about the elite trying to distract us from the real issues. I mean, of course that's a real thing, in many cases well organized and funded -- but shouldn't you apply the same statistical approach to whether Helen Mirren's mouthing off is necessarily part of such a scheme?

Maybe you see that a little differently, her speech as part of a regime of distraction by its effect, regardless of her personal status as co-conspirator. I'll leave that for you to sort out.

Facebook — Isaac

Facebook. ::facepalm::

So yeah, adherence to the rules of rational discourse are a really good guide, partly because they themselves are a cost outlay, they show good intent. — Isaac

Good one! Should have thought of that.

(Heard a fascinating theory along these lines of the origin of organized religion: there have to be burdens, like dietary restrictions and so on, as bona fides of your seriousness about being a member of the group; and these are only necessary because human communities had grown large enough that you might not know right off whether someone is one of us or one of them. Religion then steps in as a kind of passport, offering proof of group membership by having these up-front costs. A shared religion indicates a level of trustworthiness, so then religion can even cross borders and enable the maintenance of trading ties and so on. But again, it has to cost you something more than professing membership or no one will think it a reliable indicator of your trustworthiness. Another way of handling the cheapness of talk there.)

One other thing that occurs me, that comes off the idea of the sentiment of rationality being the feeling of release under tension, is that a lot of what we actually do is more rhetoric than logic, in this sense: if you think of storytelling as the art of withholding information -- so that the audience feels anticipation and is eagerly engaged, anxious for the next reveal -- then we make our little step-by-step points so that the audience will keep getting a little hit of the sentiment of rationality. I put it that way because it's like the way casinos take all your money by giving you occasional trivial payouts. Part of that manipulation, I've always heard, is that the win must come at irregular and unpredictable intervals -- by building in uncertainty about whether the next spin will be the next win, tension and anticipation can be maintained, but no one can maintain that state of tension indefinitely so you have to allow some occasional release.

Around here, that's something like uncertainty about where the steps are headed. When do I find out what the point of all this is? When do we get to the part I'm going to balk at? When do you admit what you're really driving at? And you can see the impatience building all the time; having suffered through a handful of points, feeling like their grasp of the issue is thoroughly established by the hurdles they've cleared so far, people start wanting to get to the big showdown. Part of what's going wrong here might be that step-by-step argument is too predictable, and while taking each step might be in itself satisfying, the process as a whole doesn't have the same hypnotic effect that gambling and storytelling do.

What does get people engaged is the surprise conclusion. You agreed to A and B, and voila! A and B entail C! Didn't see that coming did you! Then you get a big rush of rationality, which you'll have to struggle to shake off before you can examine whether A and B really do entail C. (And you'll hope they really do, because that was cool!) The thing about religion I described near the top, that hit me that way, as an awfully clever idea (which I'm not sure I conveyed very well).

very bad PR — BC

It was the sort of bullying that has no place in my idea of being a good man.

But the slapping is not apocryphal.

You understand, right, that it doesn't matter if the idea was factually accurate? It's how Americans wanted to think of themselves, and how I learned to think of the American ideal of manhood. You didn't enjoy war or seek glory; it was something you did if you had to. Maybe that was propaganda, to distract from whether you had to. Also doesn't matter.

You're probably right. It's my childhood reading of history I'm referencing.

I withdraw aspersions I cast in the direction of Sherman.

Was Patton also not the jackass I took him for? Brilliant warrior, sure, but a jackass.

Discursive or conceptual cognition operates by casting concrete particulars in symbolic terms, which relies on general concepts or universals. But there is always a gap between the ideal rational cognition made possible by symbolic thought and the concrete totality. I remember being very struck by this when I moved from the high-school physics of vectors and formulas to university physics, where the plethora of approximations involved in real-world calculations were suddenly being considered. — Pantagruel

Doesn't this reflect the distinction between mathematical idealisation and reality? The former allows for complete precision as a matter of definition, of which the reality is always an approximation. — Wayfarer

I think mathematics could be construed as the extreme limit of ideal-theoretical symbolization? The golden ratio appears in organic forms, but these instantiations are close approximations to the mathematical ideal. — Pantagruel

I hope no one minds me going back to this part of the thread. There's something here I don't understand.

Both of you describe reality as approximating the mathematical ideal.

Isn't it the other way around? Isn't the mathematics a simplification of reality? When you fit a curve to your data, you don't say the data approximate the curve. --- I mean, you can, if you like, proclaim the simple formula a physical law, and explain the variance however you like, confounding this and that, and claim that in the right conditions the data would better "instantiate" the law. But you don't have to take that seriously. All you're saying is that the formula's predictions are pretty good, and in some circumstances even better. How is nature supposed to "instantiate" mathematics? Are we sure we know what that means?

You can say the same thing about, for instance, musical notation, that it's a simplification of actual music making. There was music before notation, before music theory. That musicians now play from a score, so that they in some sense "instantiate" that score in performance, changes nothing. They still do more in performance than is recorded in the score. It's a sort of ahead-of-time simplification of what a performance of it will turn out to be.

And the real question is whether logic is a similar simplification of reality -- or perhaps merely a simplification of the relations between our concepts. For instance, there's just no chance that color perception actually works the way it's suggested here -- there's the freaking dress, for example -- and we've all been in situations where we were perfectly willing to attribute two different color terms to an object. (Most recently, for me, a debate about a coworker's pants that I was dragged into.) The necessary exclusion of other colors by any color looks like a simplification of how we use our color concepts.

All these simplifications do good work and save real time and energy. They are useful approximations of reality, not the other way around.

I would expect courage to tend to manifest differently in men and women. — wonderer1

I'm not sure I would, though it would fit nicely with that thing I posted about risk long ago.

But you hit the other thing I wanted to bring up!

Everyone agrees that masculine and feminine traits and behaviors -- whatever their proximate or ultimate origin -- can manifest in both men and women. Nobody's got dibs on anything.

But it does make a difference who's doing the manifesting. The example everyone agrees on is that women who behave in masculine ways (self-assertive, whatever) are often given a hard time for it.

But I think what I mean by being "a good man" is somewhere around here, it's the specific meaning that attaches to a man manifesting masculine traits. -- I'd almost rather say that it's about the way a man manifests feminine traits as well, but that's not quite it.

A couple reference points that resonate with me, for better or worse. If they're problematic, I stand to learn something.

There's the Raymond Chandler statement I posted earlier in the thread.

There's Jack Shaefer's novel Shane, basis of the movie. I remember reading it and thinking it perfectly nailed a certain American conception of masculinity, the reluctant hero.

In a similar vein, there are these odd pairs of generals in American military history: Grant and Sherman, Bradley and Patton. Sherman and Patton both thought of themselves as warriors in the grand European tradition, flashy seekers after glory. Grant and Bradley were somewhat business-like men who hated war.

I remember as a kid reading, probably in the American Heritage history of World War II, a story, possibly apocryphal, that German troops were a little unnerved the first time they faced Americans. They had fought the British, and the British, heirs to a grand military tradition the Germans could understand, sang as they entered battle. But these Americans were silent, grim. Americans weren't there for glory, but to do the job and get back home.

And what connects Chandler to this chitchat about war is that a good man is willing even to do unpleasant things if they must be done, and does them in part so that no one else has to. Private investigation is a nasty job, but one that needs doing and Philip Marlowe does it nobly, so far as that can be done. Shane wants never to pick up a gun again, having lived by one in the past and not happy about it, but someone has to face the bad guy and he's the only one who can. He steps up, and does what's necessary, but not for glory, and even though it costs him.

There's plenty more, these are just some things I know made an impression on me. They all involve a certain kind of resolve that others can depend on.

The other side is that I think a good man shows restraint as well, and doesn't use his strength -- within which I'd include privilege, being a man in a society where men have power and status -- recklessly or out of self interest. Chandler captures a lot of that too -- particularly in the sentence I thought would raise some eyebrows:

I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin — Raymond Chandler

The thing is, that's about power and status, rather than sex. The woman of higher station than him would have to be "seduced". The virgin is presumably young and unworldly and he would be "taking advantage". Taking advantage of his position in any sphere is not something a good man does. He doesn't lord it over his employees, doesn't smack his kids, doesn't take advantage of vulnerable young women. (There are probably no good men in The Iliad, by this definition.) This is all in the "with great power comes great responsibility" vein.

There's plenty more to say, but there's something anyway.

Got it. I guess in the long run, it also won't matter that I said "Robert Fulton" instead of "James Watt".

Were Hegel, Coltrane, Chappelle, Napoleon good dads?

Of course in practice that doesn't really matter either way as their few offspring were immediately swallowed up in the anonymity of a much vaster pool of population growth. But likewise, even their achievements were something else someone would have done - or at least done similarly enough not for it to count as a material difference in the unfolding of larger human history. — apokrisis

Why the "similarly enough"? Why did the universe or human history need someone Coltrane-ish? Why did it need jazz at all?

What on earth can anyone do that would count as a "material difference in the unfolding of larger human history"? If Fulton hadn't invented the steam engine, someone else would have, or they wouldn't, and humanity would hurtle toward the end a little slower or a little faster or about the same, depending on what happened instead.

To say something this weird about any individual, let alone an individual whose life work is meaningful to a great many people, you have to take a perspective from which nothing matters but the cold, hard truth that we're all doomed in the long run. Not going to argue with that.

I just don't understand what "material difference" means in this context. There's no difference that makes a difference to the Big Sky.