From: Mark Walker (mark@permanentend.org)
Date: Mon Jun 16 2003 - 14:17:15 MDT
We seek the truth ultimately to gain freedom:
> freedom of action, freedom of knowledge, freedom of opportunity.
> Knowing the truth maximizes our options for effective action in the world,
> because it allows us to make the most accurate predictions of the effects
> of our actions.
>
> Hal
>
There are all sorts of instrumental reasons for valuing the truth--as
prosaic as allowing you to do better at Jeopardy. The "moral" problem seems
to be that we seem to be willing to pay a high price for the pursuit of
truth, a price that looks like it might be disproportionate to the value
that one might think on reflection that true confers to the seeker. If this
is correct then the sort of instrumental explanation you offer can at best
only be part of the story. There are, after all, all sorts of real and
hypothetical cases where seeking the truth leads to the loss of freedom of
action, opportunity and effective action. If we are talking these freedoms
in terms of individuals then Galileo might be adduced as an example. If we
are talking in terms of the contribution of to our collective freedom (and
arguably Galileo sacrificed his freedom for our freedom) then we can imagine
a case where we discover the truth that we are in a simulation and then our
program is wiped because then the experiment is spoiled. In this case,
obviously, seeking the truth need not necessarily contribute to our freedom,
and indeed may detract from it. What is noteworthy here is that even if we
think that the cost of discovering this truth (that we live in a simulation)
is not worth the cost (the wiping of our simulation), nevertheless,
discovering the truth about our simulation still seems to be something good
even though it does not seem to contribute anything to our welfare (and
indeed seems to detract from it).
Mark
Mark Walker, PhD
Research Associate, Philosophy, Trinity College
University of Toronto
Room 214 Gerald Larkin Building
15 Devonshire Place
Toronto
M5S 1H8
www.permanentend.org
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Jun 16 2003 - 14:26:52 MDT