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I mean, also, it's just silly to emptily claim that you could imagine a better world. The trick is to imagine it in all its detail. I mean, what if pain is simp

I mean, also, it's just silly to emptily claim that you could imagine a better world. The trick is to imagine it in all its detail. I mean, what if pain is simply a concomitant of consciousness. Would a better world be devoid of consciousness? The trick is not to see the stupidity in the formulation (the stupidity is obvious), but to see the less obvious intelligence in the formulation. It's extremely rational, almost apodictically true.

boomboomsubban 10y ago
> I mean, what if pain is simply a concomitant of consciousness. Would a better world be devoid of consciousness? If I'm imagining a new world, pain is whatever I want it to be. That it seems to be a necessary part of consciousness in this world isn't important.
- samirillian 10y ago
  To reiterate: imagining a better world does not mean "emptily declaring it to be so." Like, if I said that in my better world triangles were no longer slavishly limited to having 3 sides, a reasonable person would think I was missing something about what imagination can and can't do. If pain can conceptually be whatever you want it to be, and there's no matter of logical necessity, then why don't you just imagine pain as something different in this world--in which case, this world is back in the running for "best of all possible worlds"? Why do you need a new world for pain to be other than a negative force?
  - boomboomsubban 10y ago
    You are putting the constraints of this world on any possible world, and we have no reason to expect these things to be necessary truths. On the triangle. It differs from pain because the sensation of pain is real, while the triangle is a concept we use to simplify the actual world we interact with. There are no two dimensional objects that I am aware of, and changing it to a pyramid still runs into the problem of needing continuous mass in that shape. A four sided triangle may be impossible, but at the same time a three sided triangle seems impossible and we accept it. The world that I'm imagining where it is this world except pain is something different is a new world.
    - samirillian 10y ago
      Ahem. I feel that you're talking around my points entirely. There are two possibilities: 1) all things are only accidentally so in our world (including triangles, according to you). In which case, we will never have enough information to say if the sum of accidents is "better" or "worse" than the sum of accidents in any other world. The only "proof" of such a world would be experiencing it, in which case it wouldn't be an "other world," it would be our world. 2) some things are "necessarily so," in our world, in which case they would be necessarily so in all worlds we can possibly "image-ine," (that is, conceptualize). Thus with respect to pain, the "bad-ness" of pain either follows from its definition, or it doesn't. If it follows from its definition, then there is no possible world in which pain will be "good." If it does not follow from its definition, then pain need not be bad in this world either. edit: this is why I said Leibniz's theodicy is "nearly apodictic": his argument is essentially deductive, flowing from the very nature of reason and experience. Now, whether or not this constitutes an acceptable theodicy is a different question entirely. My point is that anybody can see the unacceptability of the argument; it takes a philosopher to see the cleverness of the argument.

boomboomsubban 10y ago

> I mean, what if pain is simply a concomitant of consciousness. Would a better world be devoid of consciousness? If I'm imagining a new world, pain is whatever I want it to be. That it seems to be a necessary part of consciousness in this world isn't important.

samirillian 10y ago
To reiterate: imagining a better world does not mean "emptily declaring it to be so." Like, if I said that in my better world triangles were no longer slavishly limited to having 3 sides, a reasonable person would think I was missing something about what imagination can and can't do. If pain can conceptually be whatever you want it to be, and there's no matter of logical necessity, then why don't you just imagine pain as something different in this world--in which case, this world is back in the running for "best of all possible worlds"? Why do you need a new world for pain to be other than a negative force?
- boomboomsubban 10y ago
  You are putting the constraints of this world on any possible world, and we have no reason to expect these things to be necessary truths. On the triangle. It differs from pain because the sensation of pain is real, while the triangle is a concept we use to simplify the actual world we interact with. There are no two dimensional objects that I am aware of, and changing it to a pyramid still runs into the problem of needing continuous mass in that shape. A four sided triangle may be impossible, but at the same time a three sided triangle seems impossible and we accept it. The world that I'm imagining where it is this world except pain is something different is a new world.
  - samirillian 10y ago
    Ahem. I feel that you're talking around my points entirely. There are two possibilities: 1) all things are only accidentally so in our world (including triangles, according to you). In which case, we will never have enough information to say if the sum of accidents is "better" or "worse" than the sum of accidents in any other world. The only "proof" of such a world would be experiencing it, in which case it wouldn't be an "other world," it would be our world. 2) some things are "necessarily so," in our world, in which case they would be necessarily so in all worlds we can possibly "image-ine," (that is, conceptualize). Thus with respect to pain, the "bad-ness" of pain either follows from its definition, or it doesn't. If it follows from its definition, then there is no possible world in which pain will be "good." If it does not follow from its definition, then pain need not be bad in this world either. edit: this is why I said Leibniz's theodicy is "nearly apodictic": his argument is essentially deductive, flowing from the very nature of reason and experience. Now, whether or not this constitutes an acceptable theodicy is a different question entirely. My point is that anybody can see the unacceptability of the argument; it takes a philosopher to see the cleverness of the argument.