It’s day 19. What I wrote was a cop-out, so there is nothing much to rewrite. Instead I will record what I would like to remember from reading J. David Vellman’s Well-Being and Time.
I cut some sentences to follow the rules of this editor I’m using, but here’s an excerpt. Brackets are mine.
“A person’s synchronic interests have a claim not overridden by his diachronic interests. The reason is that a person has both a synchronic and diachronic identity. The perspectives from which synchronic perspectives are assessed are not optional points of view… [Here’s] an essential and significant feature of persons. [By nature, they] live their lives from the successive viewpoints of individual moments. [And they live their lives] from a comprehensive, diachronic point of view [as well].”
J. David Velleman, Well-Being and Time
He’s almost saying that a person is two persons. I say almost because he actually used the word identity. But one person lives moment to moment, and the other persists through time. And then in the essay he argued that the well-being of the latter is not the sum of the well-being of the first. Well-being experienced by different perspectives do not add up. In my own naïve understanding, it’s like they have different units of measurement. Almost as a side note, he then explained why it is fine to kill a cow but not a human because of this. (The cow not having the perspective that persists through time makes it ok somehow.)
Because I was writing stuff down lately, I know I was thinking along the same lines. It’s interesting because some of what I wrote was before I listened to the podcast which led to this essay. It could be natural that I gravitated towards this particular sequence of events. Or this uncanniness is due to brains eager to divine causation from randomness.
Of course what I had was a jumble of incoherent phrases that needed rewriting. I had rants about the seeming lack of ephemerality, which descended to confusion about what a self is. So this essay was very helpful in providing momentary clarity. Yet I also have to say, considering it’s length and depth, I’m doubtful if this would persist. I forgetting about it already.
Enough for today.