Latenight Decaf

  • On Red

    People speak of consciousness as having “emergent properties,” implying that reality is somehow more than a straightforward grouping of elementary particles and forces. This idea is much like that.
    Consider what red is to you. Plenty of people would agree that if we could track the particles that make up your brain, we’d arrive at an explanation for why red is what it is to you: why you perceive it as brighter than blue, why it pumps you up slightly, why it is or isn’t your favorite color.
    But this is all about you. When you look at Red, you don’t seem to just feel urges to think or react. That Red is a thing. If your Red and your Green were swapped, this fundamental feeling, this perception, this fundamental unit of visual experience, is the thing which would swap. This is separate from your reactions changing. Yet there is something there we feel we can imagine swapping.
    But say there wasn’t. Say it was all reaction.
    … You can’t, huh? Not really, not all the way down in your gut. It is so axiomatic, so clear, that there is something more than mere particle interactions that we call “seeing red”, because Red doesn’t seem to lie solely in those interactions.
    Red is an “emergent property,” is axiomatically existent to the human consciousness. You cannot fully deny it without fundamentally warping what it means to be conscious.
    So who the damn fuck decided what red is to you?!
    First draft 9/13/21

  • Justice as Open Conditional Behaviors

    Note: This post is not an official part of the “Justice as Conditionals” series and represents a lesser version of the concepts in it.

    I don’t believe that something can be unjust unless someone has been told not to do it. This doesn’t mean it can’t be immoral; a man raised in the wilderness’ kicking a baby is certainly immoral. Rather, I simply believe that the realm of Justice involves interpersonal informing of intent.

    To be even clearer, I claim that the fundamental building block of a system of Justice is what I call a Conditional. For the most basic example, consider two people, one of whom believes that the act of staring is wrong or, at least, that they do not like it. The other person cannot be called unjust for staring, then, in the absence of anyone to have told them it was wrong. The person who desires not to be stared at can then make provide a Conditional: “If you keep staring at me, I will stop you, whatever that entails.” The starer now has information to act on, knowing that some options are more preferred by the other person and that that person and their intentions are relevant to the starer’s own preferences. In other words, the Conditional allowed the preferences of the Conditional’s owner to be shared, to an extent dependent on the conditional, by the person to whom the Conditional was extended.

    But what preferences may be shared through a Conditional? In a word, anything. One way to look at this is to believe that Conditionals have nothing to do with morality. However, another way makes the assertion that anything worth supporting with any conditional is important enough that it may be considered morally desired, at least in practice.