Think of it like projection in the psychological sense -- trying to place one's own feelings and frustrations onto something external, or seeing oneself in others. Projection moves outward. A child projects its feelings onto a stuffed animal, which it uses as a crutch. The naive philosopher asks, 'what does the stuffed animal think?' The stuffed animal doesn't think anything -- the child works through its own feelings using a proxy. In reality, there never was anything external it was talking to. So it is with the world. We project our desires onto something else. The world is not constituted in the way the stuffed animal is not -- because there is no animal or creature 'there.'

It's as tho the squirrels fell into an abandoned corner formed by the wills of others now pursuing loftier things. It's as though the wills of others leave behind ossified structures, like old skin. Sartre I think calls this the practico-inert. These abandoned skins can, in all their dry contingency, envelop later beings caught within them..( though I want to be clear that I understand lack-of-acorns is only disastrous for acorn-eaters.) — csalisbury

Yeah, the gods left us behind, and we could leave squirrels behind, in the sense that we could form an entire maze for them that they will never have the slightest understanding of. Many species of animals live their entire lives trapped in such mazes of willing, in factory farms, raised for the explicit purpose of being eaten by beings they can't begin to comprehend. To them, their pains might just appear as 'the way things are.' But we know better -- we know that they're kept alive, and kept in bondage, by a kind of cosmic conspiracy.

yet these squirrels' particular drama of suffering can be accounted for by reference to the courtyard. — csalisbury

Sure, but such an explanation is only going to be a worthwhile one if you're a human. The way you've put it makes it seem like the humans' special privilege in viewing this scene is the result of having a kind of superior access to the acorns and trees that the squirrels lack, whereas I'm suggesting that the projection of these things is the result of a superior (read instrumentally) set of powers that project themselves as visions of trees and acorns and so on. In the end, though, these ar ejust visions, if you like. There is no object at the end of vision.

Allow me to be a bit bold and say I think I understand your position better than you think I do. I attempted to stave off a laborious demonstration of this understanding through some shorthand hints, but they don't appear to have taken. — csalisbury

That's fine. But then, I'm not sure of the hikkimori's relevance.

Rather both subject and world are poles of a chiasmic working-through of desire (will, hunger). The world as human adults spontaneously think of it -as comprised of independent objects which appear to have distinct identities, where events unfold according to the PSR - is actually a late development, a product of our intelligence, which is inseparable from our desires, since the satisfaction of these desires is precisely what explains this intelligence's development. In a 'ontogeny-recapitulates-phylogeny' kinda way, we can observe that the human infant begins life as a 'blooming, buzzing, confusion' of drives and only gradually develops object permanence, the ability to separate itself from the world etc.

y/n? — csalisbury

Sure. I think if I were in 'esoteric mode,' or had a few drinks, I'd be willing to say the world doesn't form a pole at all, but in fact there is no world -- what's to be explained is the philosopher's conviction that there is one (in either the materialist or Heideggerian sense). The subject as pole is very classical transcendeal idealist, and surely Schop. himself likes that wording. But it seems to me to bring about the notion of subject as 'world-bearer,' which I'd say is wrong in that it doesn't act as a transcendental condition, and of corse there is no world to bear. My preferred notion of 'subject' focuses more on 'being subjected to things.' Being a subject is being beaten up essentially.

The hikikomori's answer: the squirrel that happened to land on the left side suffered because the tree was on the right side. Is this a correct answer, provided one has implicitly granted all the qualifications and explanations granted above? — csalisbury

I think that's a fine answer. What I don't understand is what it's supposed to show. After all, say you were a radical phenomenalist -- you could grant the same thing, but then analyze the existence of the acorns, etc. as dispositions to experience, and everything would come out fine (at least, without further argument). I'm wary of ordinary language conclusions being proffered for metaphysically substantive points.

It would certainly come as a surprise to the guy in the apartment that there cannot be an acorn in one part of the yard without the possibility of there being a squirrel. Why just yesterday, the day before the squirrels arrived, he looked down and saw acorns in one section and not the other. & What's more - this poor uneducated soul didn't know that there existed any creatures that ate acorns! He just thought they were the (aesthetically satisfying) seeds of a particular species of tree. — csalisbury

None of these claims, so far as I can see, is incompatible with what I said. That there is the possibility of a squirrel eating an acorn doesn't mean there is one, or that an observer has to know there are actually such creatures.

Had acorn-eating beings never existed, could there be no acorns? Or would they only exist with reference to possible future species who might eat them? As far as I know, gold-eating beings don't exist. Is there no such thing as gold? — csalisbury

Actually, the existence of acorn-eating beings is causally tied up with the existence of acorns in important ways. But no, it's not a logical necessity that the existence of x should entail the existence of a sort of creature that eats x. There are ways of interacting with objects, that are still projections of willing, besides eating them. Bright colors warn of poison, and so on. One of the things that acorns project is their edibility for certain constitutions, one of which is a squirrel's. A squirrel doesn't have to see acorns or even be aware of their existence to eat them at all -- to them it might just all be a blur of sensations. We in turn, having more complex mechanisms, view their scramble to satisfy their desires in a certain objective way, with the intersection between their hunger and its satisfaction looking, to us, like an animal consuming a certain kind of object.

What's wrong with my example? Do there not exist courtyards containing things that might be eaten which were created without reference to those things that might eat them? Empirically, this is flagrantly false. I took great pains to stem this kind of rejoinder. Our apartment dweller looks out at this park every day. If you need the courtyard, with its oaks and acorns, to depend on something else, something that suffers and desires, he serves this function just fine. — csalisbury

There's no need for an observer -- it's not as if people looking at things 'keeps them in existence,' and I never meant to imply anything like that. There's nothing wrong with the example, it just doesn't show what you think it does unless you beg the question by assuming that first of all we can assume that things 'just exist,' and then afterwards other things just come along and bump into them. If this realist picture isn't assumed from the outset, I don't understand what the example is intended to show.

I think you are seeing my position as something like: things are pretty much like the realist says, except that the desires of organisms somehow are a generative mechanism that causes them to pop into existence. Or else I can't make sense of why this would be a criticism, anyway. But the conceptual reversal is a little less trivial and a little less crazy than that. It's more that we live in a swirl of sufferings and pains and so on, and they crystallize into the appearance of a world, which is itself just a kind of objectification of how we expect, or try to make, those various desires behave (often unsuccessfully). So because I encounter resistance to movement, I take there to be solid things; but this doesn't mean that the objections to my will that solid things embody depends on my thinking about them or watching them or wanting them or anything. If I didn't have the perceptual or intellectual powers to make such a move to seeing solid things, I'd keep having my desires frustrated in the form of not moving where I wanted to, without having any recourse to fixing it or understanding it. To come to understand how to move properly is to come to see solid objects, which is itself a way of understanding how my desires function: so complexes of perceptions guide me as to how I can not hurt myself or have my movement impeded.

But those oppositions to my desires -- like the squirrel dying because it was left on the wrong side of the courtyard -- impede me regardless of whether I want them to or not. Our observer watching one squirrel die is seeing those desires getting frustrated, which to the squirrel involve nothing of courtyards or acorns or anything, but to the observer have that character, because he sees the squirrel's struggle in terms of how it impinges on his own sufferings.

Except the hikikomori had no idea that acorns even were something edible! And yet he still saw them, day after day. Do you think it is impossible for such a person to see acorns? — csalisbury

Yes, because eating things is not the only way we interact with them. The acorns would appear to him e.g. solid, so he could probably surmise, even before touching them, that his hands would not pass through them, as light by their size, so he could surmise that he could probably pick them up as long as they weren't bizarrely dense, and so on. These too are projections bearing on his sufferings, the way hew could interact and manipulate them by doing certain things involving this projection. Once he eats one himself (maybe that would be a little hard), or sees a squirrel doing so, he will come to associate these other qualities he already experiences with edibility by squirrels, and so now the sensory clues that acorns provide would also provide a clue to a certain kind of edibility. But the fact that being in that vicinity would allow the squirrel not to go hungry doesn't depend on him realizing this. It's the other way around -- there being a certain way in which his, and other feeling creatures, feelings are impacted causes the projection to take on a new associated quality.

---

One thing that might be causing confusion is that when I talk about these things I usually speak charitably of ordinary objects and so on, because it's hard to talk otherwise without tying yourself into knots, but I don't really think we perceive objects at all, that is, there's no such thing as perception in the classical sense, something that reaches out to what's beyond it at the other end and terminates in something independent of it.

Think of it this way: there could not be an acorn in one part of the yard in the first place without there being the possibility of a squirrel satisfying its hunger in that half of the yard and not the other. This is in part what there being an acorn there in the first place. In the example, you're assuming we can take for granted that acorns just 'exist' independently, and that is how you set up the example, as if the squirrels just came along to something independently established and only then interacted causally with it. But that is not true; to be a squirrel consists in having certain urges and certain capacities for satisfying them, and in some situations often beyond the squirrel's control, it will be able to, or won't be able to. In the former situation, we call that -- and if we watch, see it as -- there being an acorn there. Or whatever else the squirrel might need or find.

The hikkimori doesn't need to be watching. His watching is irrelevant, unless of course he wants to help one of the squirrels out. If he does watch, what he is seeing is not a bunch of previously unrelated objects coming into relation: he is seeing the suffering of these creatures unfold and interact, in ways that spring from his own suffering and ability to empathize with them, i.e. to recognize them as living creatures.

A squirrel eating an acorn is what a squirrel satisfying its hunger looks like. To say that one squirrel can eat and the other can't because there is a tree on one side and not on the other is merely to report what the fact that we see a tree there told us in the first place -- that 'over there,' is where you can get something to eat. Seeing the acorn is seeing where the food is.

Yeah? One of the things that make dreams surreal is that a single individual can shift shapes and faces from moment to moment. — csalisbury

The same is true of waking life. Sometimes it takes a little longer (and sometimes it doesn't) -- but what does it matter?

↪The Great Whatever I always get a little concerned when people talk about the world's 'dreamlike quality" For 'dreamlike' to be in any way meaningful, it must be possible to distinguish between dreamlike and non-dreamlike. Dreams are dreamlike in opposition to what? Not the world, certainly, if the world itself is 'dreamlike.' V confusing. — csalisbury

As opposed to the way people often present the waking world as being in philosophical reconstructions: in reflection people often put up a difference between waking life and dreaming that, on observation, is not there. There are very important practical differences between the two, but not metaphysical ones deducible from observation. In other words, if you ask people to explain what makes dreaming seem so 'unreal,' you'll find that every phenomenological character of dreaming they offer is found in waking life too.

Is it that the pathe of being (1) happily enough manifest themselves as plentitude while the pathe of being (2) manifest as scarcity? Is this a fair way put it? Agony manifests as distant objects of satisfaction to...maintain itself as agony? — csalisbury

Yeah, you have to reverse the way of thinking about it, from contingently distributed food leading to different pathe, to contingently distributed pathe leading to different food-projections.

There is a way in which we can try to explain our hunger, first in lay terms by saying we need to eat, and trying to remedy it through causal mechanisms by finding food, and then technically by exploring the biological mechanisms of hunger. But all these things are ways of trying to deal with hunger from within, by working out ways that it can be diminished and acquiring a taste for new signs along the way. These explanations are in the end attempts at controlling the hunger, which might be successful or not. There's in a deeper sense no real 'explanation' for it, since explanation presupposes hunger.

How does this work? The human can give an account of the squirrel's movements: the squirrel was triggered by the piece of bread they chose to throw into the yard (which could just have well remained in the kitchen.) Yet, according to your account, the object of satisfaction cannot be disentangled from the hunger. The squirrel's hunger must be what accounts for the bread. Yet the bread existed, already, in the human's kitchen and need not have been thrown. The human chose to throw it, to trigger the squirrel, to watch it move toward it. — csalisbury

To the extent that a human and squirrel can recognize in whatever dim way they they are in the presence of the same object, some bread, it is because they are similarly constituted in their suffering. We can only understand as existing alongside us those things that make us suffer or suffer with us, and squirrels do suffer with us, to a limited extent. The bread is intelligible as a piece of food for both of us because the squirrel is intelligible as hungry, not vice-versa. This is just Husserl's idea that the notion of an intersubjective or objective world is dependent on the alter ego -- but cast in pathetic rather than intellectual terms.

The throwing of the bread is itself a way that the human knows how, given his awareness of this co-sufferer, to ease its hunger. For the human that manifests as an object in his kitchen moving. For the squirrel, it may just seem like the solution to its problems are raining down like manna from heaven. And this is because the human is smarter, in the sense that it is more adept at manipulating its own suffering and that of others. The human can see the action as intricately interconnected with a web of other causal effects, the squirrel can't. And that's because the squirrel is inept at resolving its own suffering and that of others in a way a human isn't (a human can empathize with a squirrel: can a squirrel empathize with a human? It seems a dog can).

I don't think I want to make any sweeping claims about the general nature of everything or how it ties into willing. Everything we project is tied to willing, since it is just the result of, or one shape of, that willing. But I don't think this somehow goes 'beyond' us or willing creatures generally to encompass a broader 'everything.' To say that the world is a projection of or shape of will isn't to give our nature as willing creatures undue or all-encompassing importance, but rather to show how fragile, limited, and unimportant the world is. I think this is ultimately compatible with Schop., who opens the possibility that what is 'nothing for us' might nevertheless be 'out there' beyond what we know to be 'everything' as willing creatures.

So in one sense all things have a willing aspect, sure -- but only insofar as 'all things' is just whatever things are projected as a result of will. I don't think there's any coherent 'everything' to talk about and say that it has a single nature, or a nature that's somehow shared with or rooted in us. What's outside the will is 'nothing,' sure, but only 'nothing to us,' because we literally couldn't comprehend such a thing. I think it still might be in some way efficacious on us, though, which is why we experience things as ultimately just happening to us for no reason -- there's no way to see 'behind' our suffering, and so there is a kind of blindness where our suffering seems to encompass everything, yet at the same time we have no account of its origin.

Yeah, I think it's pretty close, though I don't know if he would have outright agreed with what I'm saying.

I don't really preserve the distinction between world as will and world as presentation as strongly as he does, though -- at best the world as presentation claims to be distinct from the world as will, i.e. something objective that is 'just there,' independently of how one feels about it. And so I could say that presentations are just a certain kind of willing. That might just be a terminological variant, though, since Schop. both says that presentation and will are entirely distinct sorts of things, and that the former is the objectification of the latter.

The desire doesn't always have to be for more, but that could be a part of it. It could also be a need to stop the pain, e.g. the pain of hunger, the pain of heat, or whatever.

A world taking shape just is the desires and pleasures and pains becoming more convoluted in a certain way. They gain a kind of competence over themselves, a knowing how to proceed so as to be moved in one way or another, and to respond to certain cues to get what it wants, and so to gain a certain kind of power.

When you can do this, the concrete methods of changing the flux of suffering around get reified into distinct shapes -- a worldly object in a way just is a bundle of those possibilities (I'm a little uncomfortable with that way of putting it though -- I'd rather say, that in a sense it is nothing, hence the world's dreamlike quality, rather that a sort of concrete shape is posited or given credence as a way of helping or managing the suffering, as a kind of guidepost that is very often not reliable. But that is also confusing because it makes it seem as if there is some sort of constituting mind which has the power to 'make' these things, which is not the right way to put it).

The world then presents itself as external and prior to, and causing, the suffering because this is a kind of reflection of the fact that our sufferings are not generally under our control, and so the concrete shapes (the objects) seem to 'precede' them and be their source. What I am suggesting is that it is the other way around: it's not that we can't control the world because it's external, but rather than the world is external because we can't control it. And this in turn just means we can't control (except in very limited ways) our suffering.

And in one sense you could say that an external world gets 'made' in this way, but in another you could say it doesn't because there is no such thing, so of course it can't get made. The external world, like linear time, is a kind of convention that arose, but doesn't really hold up on its own terms (hence philosophy's frustration with the 'external' perspective being forever unable to capture the 'internal perspective).

No I agree. It's hungry and has no choice. As you say, it has to follow 'clues' about where the food is. There is no such thing as a 'clue' if there's no mystery or puzzle to unravel. The mystery is where the food is - zone x or zone y - and the clues help tell us. — csalisbury

Yeah, but it's not like there's some real thing outside of the creature that it then has to use a kind of sensory apparatus to go find. The mystery of where the food is just is the mystery of 'how do I stop the pain?' The world presents itself as having this kind of externality as a sort of crutch to facilitate eating.

It's funny that this world, which comes after, is utterly indifferent to the needs of the hungry being. It depends on this being, but is in no way tailored to its needs. The food may even be out of reach! — csalisbury

It depends on what you mean by indifferent. In one sense that is obviously false and in fact there is no world at all without these needs -- the world is literally just a projection of those needs, and so has a kind of illusory or dream-lke quality to it, and disappears to the extent that those needs cant be intelligibly managed, because the pain (or pleasure) is too intense. But it has no inclination to be kind or easy or pleasant, because the hunger isn't. A truly indifferent world -- one without pain or pleasure -- would be nothing at all.

So think of it not like, 'why did you make such a mean world?' No one made the world, it was forced to grow out of pain and strife, and is just a kind of embodiment of that pain and strife.

Why does the world have these contours? Why is the food in zone x and not zone y? It may be the case that "world" exists only because the being hungry. But why does this world exist. That's really the crux. The question is not why does a world exist? But why does this world exist? — csalisbury

Because the hunger works in a certain way. It's not that the hunger somehow causes the world to sprout out of it as something separate. The hunger never goes away and the world is never separated from it. The world having a certain shape is just hunger taking that very shape.

It doesn't get to choose whether it's hungry or not -- it just has to face the fact that it is, and sometimes that hunger gets satisfied, sometimes not. But it painstakingly starts to put together certain clues about how to satisfy that hunger. For a dog it's put your mouth around what smells a certain way, for a human it can be complex enough to involve restaurants. Even so with these heuristics there's just no guarantee you're actually going to get full, sometimes you just starve and there's nothing you can do about it.

So it's not up to you where the food goes -- where the food ends up is just a projection of the way your hunger works, which you're not in control of.

No, the world came after (and in a sense 'still' comes after). But the world, once there, presents itself as having come before. The naive position is a kind of idolatry and just takes it at its word. This has a kind of Gnostic flavor to it.

That humans have a world is just a way of saying we have more convoluted and sophisticated ways of navigating and manipulating our hungers of various kinds.

What do you mean by newly conscious? Like, newly able to represent time as linear? Because if so it was already hungry before that (and there are animals right now that are hungry all the time without being 'conscious' in that sense).

Then you've got it backwards, it's not that you pop into being and get hungry and then the food pops up elsewhere. It's more that the entire schema for trying to navigate the world is built around hunger, and to help satiate it a method of objectifying and distinguishing so as to satisfy it consistently grows up. A dog doesn't really think 'that's food,' it just sort of feels hunger urges and makes instinctual movements with its mouth when it smells and feels certain things. That's like us, only our urges are more convoluted.

You don't have to answer all of it, not all of it is equally important to me and I imagine to you. Whatever you think is relevant for the topic.

"Contained in the now" is a gesture toward the determinist idea that the now leads in a strict causal chain toward a determinate end and back toward a determinate beginning. — csalisbury

I'm not sure the determinist position as I've outlined it here makes any commitment to causality. I think it's intelligible to say that right now 'will p' is true or false, but at the same time there's no determinate causal path leading to p in the future. I'm not saying that's not right, just that it's not clear to me it is. It's a very weak kind of determinism. It could be that 'will p' is true, but only because of your free choice.

but it's inexorable that swans they'll become. — csalisbury

I don't know if it's inexorable either. I think 'will p' is not the same thing as 'must p' or 'must will p.'

As for the conditions. When consciousness blossomed, it didn't happen in a void. There was still both hunger and places where the food was. Why was the food in this place and not that? And why were these conscious beings hungry? — csalisbury

Hunger is definitely older than linear time and older than objectivity. Where the food is is a kind of ethical projection: the food is where my hunger gets satiated. The existence of food as a discrete cognizable object is a projection of hunger.

Also I can't help but note the irony in your initial insistence that ordinary language should suffer 'violence' and neologisms for the sake of philosopical exploration, only to say, mere posts later, that we ought observe actual usage and be wary of formal tricks. All I can take away from this is that formal tricks & violence are justified when in service of the right philosophical position. Not justified, on the other hand, when it's for the wrong cause. — csalisbury

It depends on whether you're giving an explanation of ordinary language or not. I kind of buy into the 'two truths' thing, or Henry's two kinds of speech. I think it would be pointless to talk about this Schopenhauer stuff in an academic context, for example -- the academy is part of the world. I mean, I don't 'really' think time is deterministic, because in the end all of our temporal conventions are just that. The realist reifies them.

its end and its beginning contained already in its now. — csalisbury

Well no, its end and beginning aren't now, they're in the future and past respectively.

I'm not sure what you mean by what determines the conditions.

When I say it won't rain tomorrow and it rains tomorrow was I really already wrong at the moment I said it wouldn't rain? — csalisbury

It seems to me yes. A lot of philosophers dispute this, so maybe people don't have robust intuitions on this issue. But yes, I'd say clearly you were wrong then -- you said it would rain, and it didn't. In fact I can contest you at the prediction time and tell you you're wrong. If we all knew that future statements could never be true or false at the time of utterance, such a dispute would be literally nonsensical, and we'd all have to be massively ignorant abut how our own language works. It makes the ability to talk about the future, and the point of it, a sort of mystery. If the indeterminist were right it seems to me we'd never make future claims or argue about the future, but just wait around til things happened and only then dare to talk about them.

That's not clear to me. I can look back, knowing it will rain and say I was wrong then . — csalisbury

There is some recent work by a guy named John MacFarlane that takes this stance about future claims, and essentially says that when uttered, they have no truth value, but when assessed from after the time the event happens, they retrospectivey become 'true all along.' Very wild stuff -- I'm just not sure how accurately it tracks actual linguistic behavior.

Surely without doing some sort of weird logic, to say you were wrong then is the same thing as to say 'you're wrong now' at the time of utterance. Otheriwse, you're saying you were wrong then, but weren't wrong then (!) Not that this can't be reconciled with formal tricks, but the question is, do you want to.

In any case future events fall along a probabilistic spectrum. At xxxx bc, X coming into being in 1966 is at the far end of that spectrum. — csalisbury

A determinist is just going to deny that, though. It either will happen or it won't. You might assign subjective probabilities based on your information, but that only reflects your ignorance, not a metaphysical indeterminacy.

Do you think the end of linear time is totallu enfolded in its birth? — csalisbury

Sort of, yeah. The way we're forced to think about time in our present temporal conventions makes us see it as linear and determined, because of the way we have to think about cause and effect. But again, I think these are only present conventions that will disappear, and so will the linear timeline. And even in the present, I tend to think of these things as just conventions, of a sort -- if you like they're dictated by the logic of our language and customs, but don't have any interesting 'reality' outside of that. They're like maxims or rules for how to think about things -- if you place yourself within those rules, you have to follow them.

However, treating the future as determinate is only an artifact of the present linearization of time, which itself will eventually be undone. So there is a deeper sense in which the future is indeterminate -- it is (or is treated as being) determinate only for the present. Schop. would say it's just part of the way we cognize, to enforce a linear form on it -- but this is just representative of our cognitive faculties (in my case, of our present temporal conventions, themselves subject to temporal change).

I'm inclined to believe the determinist. It's plausible that something like 'It will rain' means 'at a future time, it rains [tenseless],' and if such a thing is neither true or false when we say it, it boggles the mind why we would ever say, or argue about, such things. Yet we talk about the future and can be wrong about it now -- how could we be, if there is no determinate future to be wrong about? You can try to get around all this with some fancy formal tricks, but I'm not clear on why that's necessary.

In other words, the indeterminist seems to be committed to the felicity of things like 'It will rain, but that's not true, of course.'

It's a complex question and tbh one that I think is more a linguistic matter about how tense functions in language and not that interesting metaphysically.

That depends -- a determinist will say it was true even then that it would come about in 1966 -- the fact that you didn't (or maybe couldn't) know that doesn't change the fact that it was true.

A non-determinist might say that at that point, it was neither true nor false that it would come about in 1966.

But these issues have to be resolved regardless of whether you talk about Schopenhauer's retrojection of the past.

Why not? You mean because if you're not a determinist, it might not be true until 1966 itself? But why does that matter? Schop talks about retrojection into the past, which is fixed whether you're a determinist or not. Maybe talking about the future is confusing things?

I think the question is orthogonal, but if you wanted to make things as simple as possible you could assume a deterministic position, with one linear timeline. So it was true in 1955 that the artifact would come into existence in 1966 (even though we might not have been able to know this in 1955 because we can't tell the future), and so on.

Well, you're switching the tenses. Now that it's past 1966, asking:

If so, at what point in time did it become true that the fifty year old artifact came into being in 1966? — csalisbury

Is fine, assuming we don't go back before 1966. But once you do, you need to change the past tense to a past-future with would. So it would be:

If so, at what point in time did it become true that the fifty year old artifact would come into being in 1966?

Asked this way, answering 'before 1966, of course' is perfectly intelligible, assuming you've just got a standard deterministic position about time once linearized. So yeah, I'd say it follows, but if you don't keep the tenses straight you might think there's a problem with the philosophical position that really arises from weird grammar.

Good question, but I don't think any particular answer follows from what I've said. If you think the future is always genuinely open, even if you don't have these Schopenhauer-like positions, then the answer will be 'no' no matter what. If you think the future is determined, then the answer would be 'yes' no matter what. Other people think that temporal evaluation is relative in this sense that prior to 1966, there would have been no fact of the matter, but post-1966 (as it is now), the answer is yes. In other words it seems orthogonal to this position.

Also, to get the tense right, you'd have to say 'the time at which it became true that the artifact would come into being in 1966.'

Before, since there were already calendars by then. The retrospective structure makes it so that once time became quantifiable, in retrospect that event had to have happened at a certain point in linear time (this is basically just what Schop says).

When exactly? I don't know, at some point near the end of evolutionary history -- linear roughly when you can think in tense, and quantifiable roughly when you have numeral terms and apply them to a cycle.

So I'm assuming your later characterization is more what you're aiming at: Not that something presently becomes a certain age, but presently comes to have occurred at a certain time in the past. — csalisbury

Yeah, so the right formulation would be 'it was only at some point in time that Alice came to have become ten years old in 1987,' or something like that. That doesn't make much sense if the timeline is fixed.

If so, at what point in time did it become true that the fifty year old artifact came into being in 1966? — csalisbury

When time became linear and quantifiable. Schopenhauer seems to treat it as an all at once thing, once presentation exists it has its necessary forms which includes time. But I doubt there is any non-human animal that experiences time linearly in the appropriate way, and certainly there are none that can quantify it (in fact, some humans cannot even really quantify in the way we think of it, or so the anthropological reports seem to suggest).

A realist is going to say time was quantifiable all along, it just took us a while to gain the skills to do it. That's probably the crux of the debate.

Hey, welcome back.

I won't commit to defending everything Schopenhauer says, but I think he's basically right.

I'd answer yes to both questions, and then add 'but it only became true that they were that old at some point in time.' In other words there wasn't always a linear timeline -- that's a temporal development.

This kind of talk does violence to ordinary language notions of tense -- it doesn't make much sense to say that only at a certain point in time did something in the past come to have occurred at that point in time. Natural language seems to view time as quasi-linear and viewable from an 'eternal' perspective. But that's okay -- I think you have to invent technical concepts to do interesting philosophy.

Is it typical to have part of a thesis written in your second year?

Aristotle has never given me 'the fire.' What I get out of Plato I mostly get from the extent to which he is trying to portray Socrates, who from this imperfect reflection seems like by far the more compelling thinker. To the extent that Plato departs form the 'historical' Socrates, he becomes less interesting.

Overall I would say I hold the Socratic tradition and the 'ethical turn' in the highest regard, and that this is distinct from the not so great directions that Plato and Aristotle took him in. I see the Hellenistic philosophers as the heirs to this more interesting tradition, which is sort of 'ethicist' rather than empiricist or rationalist.

Sapientia, just because someone quotes you doesn't mean they're quoting you out of context. Most of your posts only have a couple words that are about anything, and the rest is padding.

In a figurative sense, therefore, we can say that this someone would be missing out if they were never born and didn't subsequently experience those valuable things in life. — Sapientia

"In a figurative sense?" No, in no sense.

Did I ever state or imply that they would actually be missing out? No. That's a straw man. — Sapientia

Then what are you actually saying? What does the word "actually" do here? Is anyone missing out? No. Would anyone be? No. So what's your point? What does it mean to figuratively miss out on something?

I don't think there is anything that makes up for it, or even comes close to doing so.

Yes, but that's obviously not the condition I had in mind — Sapientia

Then why did you say it?

To state that they DO not miss out doesn't contradict the claim that they WOULD miss out IF such-and-such bla-de-bla. — Sapientia

This is irrelevant, isn't it? They neither DO nor WOULD miss out.

In a hypothetical scenario in which a child was born, that child WOULD suffer. In a hypothetical scenario in which no child was born, no child WOULD suffer. Do you understand the asymmetry? It is possible to subject an actual person to misery by birthing them, but not to deny anyone anything, hypothetical or otherwise, by abstaining from birth.

It's consistently painful and tedious.

Nope. If no one were born, nobody would miss out, either.

is waking up from sleep or being resuscitated while unconscious undesirable? — darthbarracuda

Yes. For me anyway, waking up is horrible. I really can't stand it, because then it hits me that I'm still alive and have another day to suffer through. It's not strictly speaking being alive that's unbreable, but being conscious, and waking up makes you conscious.

That said, I don't think it would be productive to kill anyone, including sleeping people, or force them not to wake up. That will just cause more misery among the living.

Idk Sapientia, it seems to me like you're just not very good at following a conversation.

See? This is why it's not all about birth, and why your earlier dismissal of my comment on that basis was unjustified. — Sapientia

The anti-natalist position is about birth.

the decision to prevent human life from occurring* because you know better than they ever would that life - their life - wouldn't even be worth starting, let alone living through — Sapientia

You cannot decide that you know better than a non-existent person.

Also, note how we can both talk about a hypothetical someone without talking nonsense. Remarkable, eh? — Sapientia

I am not talking about a hypothetical person. And it's still nonsense -- but at least you're admitting what you're doing now?

I don't think anything you've said here, or in this thread, is intelligible unless you imagine people so to speak 'lined up' at the gates of heaven waiting to be put into physical bodies, and the anti-natalist talking them and saying 'I know better than you that life is bad, so I'm not letting you come into the world,' and so turning them down or 'preventing' them from being born. But this picture is nonsense, so what you say is not intelligible.

One way of putting the anti-natalist sentiment is that having been through life and knowing what it's like, it's not something I would ever want to put someone else through. Those who disagree perhaps are underestimating what they're actually doing.