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hammo's review against another edition
4.0
One of the short stories is about Danyl attending an effective altruism retreat to see what those fellows are up to. I was at the retreat and am featured in the book! I spend a lot of time observing books from the outside, so it's neat to finally see how things look from inside the page.
It's only a partial victory though: apparently my characteristics weren't substantial or distinctive enough to make up a fully-fledged character, so my speech, actions, and biography are distributed between several different people.
There's something existentially evocative about this. It's like being sublimated into a Hegelian Geist.
As is mentioned in the book, the philosopher Derek Parfit liked to devise zany thought experiments like "what if a person's cerebral hemispheres were put into two different bodies. What happened to the original person? Are there two of them now? Or none of them?" These Gedanken were supposed to challenge our sense of personal identity.
Here's another Gedanken: suppose God (or an author) had a nifty idea for a new person He could put into the world. But due to budgetary constraints, God cannot afford the raw materials needed to create this person. So instead, He catalogues every action, utterance, and thought that the person would have over the course of their life, and redistributed these components across every person who already exists in the world. What is the existential status of the possible person?
Along similar lines, what am I to make of the fact that in reality, most of my individual thoughts, utterances, and actions - the stuff that makes up my personal experience of the world - have already been undertaken by my coevals and predecessors? If my life is mostly or entirely a remix of other peoples' lives, then what is my existential status?
It's only a partial victory though: apparently my characteristics weren't substantial or distinctive enough to make up a fully-fledged character, so my speech, actions, and biography are distributed between several different people.
There's something existentially evocative about this. It's like being sublimated into a Hegelian Geist.
As is mentioned in the book, the philosopher Derek Parfit liked to devise zany thought experiments like "what if a person's cerebral hemispheres were put into two different bodies. What happened to the original person? Are there two of them now? Or none of them?" These Gedanken were supposed to challenge our sense of personal identity.
Here's another Gedanken: suppose God (or an author) had a nifty idea for a new person He could put into the world. But due to budgetary constraints, God cannot afford the raw materials needed to create this person. So instead, He catalogues every action, utterance, and thought that the person would have over the course of their life, and redistributed these components across every person who already exists in the world. What is the existential status of the possible person?
Along similar lines, what am I to make of the fact that in reality, most of my individual thoughts, utterances, and actions - the stuff that makes up my personal experience of the world - have already been undertaken by my coevals and predecessors? If my life is mostly or entirely a remix of other peoples' lives, then what is my existential status?
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