[A] man’s attractiveness in short-term mating contexts is just as important to women as a woman’s attractiveness is to men when men evaluate long-term mates.
Steven Gangestad and Jeffry Simpson, ‘The Evolution of Human Mating: Trade-Offs and Strategic Pluralism’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 23, no. 4 (August, 2000), p. 581
If you are chronically spending every Saturday night alone, despite valiant and persistent effort to find a date, then chances are there’s something wrong with you, at least in this area of life. You probably don’t possess the qualities that members of the opposite sex seek in potential mates. Evolutionary psychological research has not only discovered what these traits are that men and women seek in each other, but also that the traits sought after by men and women are culturally universal; men everywhere in the world seek the same traits in women (such as youth and physical attractiveness) and women everywhere in the world seek the same traits in men (such as wealth and status). In fact, one of the themes of evolutionary psychology is that human nature is universal (or “species-typical”) and people are the same everywhere (or their cultural differences can be explained by the interaction of universal human nature and the local conditions). You may be comforted to know that you are not alone in your plight; there are losers like you everywhere in the world, and for the same reasons.
Satoshi Kanazawa, ‘The Evolutionary Psychological Imagination: Why You Can’t Get a Date on a Saturday Night and Why Most Suicide Bombers are Muslim’, Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, vol. 1, no. 2 (2007), p. 8
Relinquish authority to somebody else: let him hold your car keys.
Commit or contract: order your lunch in advance.
Disable or remove yourself: throw your car keys into the darkness; make yourself sick.
Remove the mischievous resources: don’t keep liquor, or sleeping pills, in the house; order a hotel room without television.
Submit to surveillance.
Incarcerate yourself. Have somebody drop you at a cheap motel without telephone or television and call for you after eight hours’ work. (When George Steiner visited the home of Georg Lukacs he was astonished at how much work Lukacs, who was under political restraint, had recently published-shelves of work. Lukacs was amused and explained, “You want to know how one gets work done? House arrest, Steiner, house arrest!”)
Arrange rewards and penalties. Charging yourself $100 payable to a political candidate you despise for any cigarette you smoke except on twenty-four hours’ notice is a powerful deterrent to rationalizing that a single cigarette by itself can’t do any harm.
Reschedule your life: do your food shopping right after breakfast.
Watch out for precursors: if coffee, alcohol, or sweet desserts make a cigarette irresistible, maybe you can resist those complementary foods and drinks and avoid the cigarette.
Arrange delays: the crisis may pass before the time is up.
Use buddies and teams: exercise together, order each other’s lunches.
Automate the behavior. The automation that I look forward to is a device implanted to monitor cerebral hemorrhage that, if the stroke is severe enough to indicate a hideous survival, kills the patient before anyone can intervene to remove it.
Finally, set yourself the kinds of rules that are enforceable. Use bright lines and clear definitions, qualitative rather than quantitative limits if possible. Arrange ceremonial beginnings. If procrastination is your problem, set piecemeal goals. Make very specific delay rules, requiring notice before relapse, with notice subject to withdrawal.Permit no exceptions.
Thomas Schelling, ‘Self-Command in Practice, in Policy, and in a Theory of Rational Choice’, The American Economic Review, vol. 74, no. 2 (May, 1984), pp. 6-7
Some have argued that the difference between the deaths of several hundred million people in a nuclear war (as has been thought until recently to be a reasonable upper limit) and the death of every person on Earth (as now seems possible) is only a matter of one order of magnitude. For me, the difference is considerably greater. Restricting our attention only to those who die as a consequence of the war conceals its full impact.
If we are required to calibrate extinction in numerical terms, I would be sure to include the number of people in future generations who would not be born. A nuclear war imperils all of our descendants, for as long as there will be humans. Even if the population remains static, with an average lifetime of the order of 100 years, over a typical time period ofor the biological evolution of a successful species (roughly ten million years), we are talking about some 500 trillion people yet to come. By this criterion, the stakes are one million times greater for extinction that for the more modest nuclear wars that kill “only” hundreds of millions of people.
There are many other possible measures of the potential loss—including culture and science, the evolutionary history of the planet, and the significance of the lives of all of our ancestors who contributed to the future of their descendants. Extinction is the undoing of the human enterprise.
Carl Sagan, ‘Nuclear War and Climatic Catastrophe: Some Policy Implications’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 62, no. 2 (Winter 1983), p. 275
Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by the mere want of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the occupations to which their position in life has devoted them, and the society into which it has thrown them, are not favourable to keeping that higher capacity in existence.
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Toronto, 1988, vol. 10, pp. 212-213
Pienso que voy a cumplir treinta años. Pienso que debería prestarme un poco de atención. Treinta es un número redondo y peligroso, fácil de recordar, de atribuirle las supersticiones de un límite.
Vlady Kociancich, El templo de las mujeres, Barcelona, 1996, p. 24
Cravings can […] be induced by what we may call the secondary rewards from addiction. To explain this idea, let me recall my own experience as a former heavy smoker who quit almost 30 years ago when my consumption reached 40 cigarettes a day. Even today I vividly remember what it was like to organize my whole life around smoking. When things went well, I reached for a cigarette. When things went badly, I did the same. I smoked before breakfast, after a meal, when I had a drink, before doing something difficult, and after doing something difficult. I always had an excuse for smoking. Smoking became a ritual that served to highlight salient aspects of experience and to impose structure on what would otherwise have been a confusing morass of events. Smoking provided the commas, semicolons, question marks, exclamation marks, and full stops of experience. It helped me to achieve a feeling of mastery, a feeling that I was in charge of events rather than submitting to them. This craving for cigarettes amounts to a desire for order and control, not for nicotine.
Jon Elster, Strong Feelings: Emotion, Addiction, and Human Behavior, Boston, 1999, p. 64
The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.
Edward Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, New York, 1998, p. 262
What evolution had done, design could do better. There would always be a chance to take what you needed, take what was good, then cut yourself free and move on.
Greg Egan, Teranesia, London, 1995, p. 179
This chapter is about the puzzle of swearing—the strange shock and appeal of words like fuck, screw, and come; shit, piss, and fart; cunt, pussy, tits, prick, cock, dick, and asshole; bitch, slut, and whore; bastard, wanker, cocksucker, and motherfucker; hell, damn, and Jesus Christ; faggot, queer, and dyke; and spick, dago, kike, wog, mick, gook, kaffir, and nigger.
Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, London, 2008, p. 327
I am autonomous if I rule me, and no one else rules I.
Joel Feinberg, Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty: Essays in Social Philosophy, Princeton, 1980, p. 19
Suppose you had never heard of Christianity, and that next Sunday morning a stranger standing in a pulpit told you about a book whose authors could not be authenticated and whose contents, written hundreds of years ago, included blood-curdling legends of slaughter and intrigue and fables about unnatural happenings such as births, devils that inhabit human bodies and talk, people rising from the dead and ascending live into the clouds, and suns that stand still. Suppose he then asked you to believe that an uneducated man described in that book was a god who could get you into an eternal fantasy-place called Heaven, when you die. Would you, as an intelligent rational person, even bother to read such nonsense, let alone pattern your entire life upon it?
Ruth Hurmence Green, The Born Again Sleptic’s Guide to the Bible, Madison, 1979, p. ii
It is the year 7 billion A.D. The sun has gone into its red giant phase. The Earth has been consumed by the outer envelope of the 100-million-mile-diameter sun. Mars is a dried and lifeless body with a surface temperature sufficient to melt its crustal rocks. Jupiter is a roiling, heater mass rapidly losing gas and material to space. The ice cover of Jupiter’s moon Europa has long since melted away, followed by the disappearance of its oceans to space. Farther away, Saturn has lost its icy rings. But once world of this vast solar system has benefited from the gigantic red orb that is the Sun. It is Saturn’s largest moon, aptly named Titan.
Long before, in the time of humanity, a science fiction writer named Arthur C. Clarke penned a series of tales about the moon of Jupiter named Europa. In these stories, alien beings somehow turned Jupiter into a small but blazing star, and in so doing warmed Europa—and brought about the creation of life. A wonderful, though physically impossible, fable. Now, in these late days of the solar system, the huge red Sun was doing the same to Titan, changing it from frozen to thawed, and in so doing liberating the stuff of life. But Titan was always a very different world than Europa. Like Europa, Titan always had oceans. Frozen, to be sure, but oceans nevertheless. But where Europan oceans were water, those of Titan were of a vastly different substance—ethane. Titan had always been covered with a rich but cold stew of organic materials. And with the coming of heat, for the first time Eden came to Titan. Like a baby born to an impossibly old woman, life came to this far outpost, the last life ever to be evolved in the solar system.
The red giant phase was short-lived—only several hundred million years, in fact. But it was enough. For a short time, for the last time, life bloomed in the solar system. After death, once more came the resurrection of life in masses of tiny bacteria like bodies on a moon once far from a habitable planet called Earth, a place that, in its late age, evolved a species with enough intelligence to predict the future, and be able to prophesize how the world would end.
Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, The Life and Death of Planet Earth: How Science Can Predict the Ultimate Fate of our World, New York, 2002, pp. 212-213
I had spent my life waiting for something, not knowing what, not even knowing I waited. Killing time.
John Crowley, ‘Snow’, Omni, vol. 2, no. 2 (November 1985)
Sex is like a diamond forged in a slaughterhouse. Three billion years of unconscious reproduction. Half a billion more stumbling towards animals that weren’t just compelled to mate, but were happy to do it–and finally knew that they were happy. Millions of years spent honing that feeling, making it the most perfect thing in the world. And all just because it worked. All just because it churned out more of the same. […] Anyone can take the diamond. It’s there for the asking. But it’s not a lure for us. It’s not a bribe. We’ve stolen the prize, we’ve torn it free. It’s ours to do what we like with.
Greg Egan, Teranesia, London, 1995, p. 95
—Este asunto de París. No busques una explicación. No hay explicación. Ciertas cosas simplemente suceden.
—Que simplemente suceden ya es una explicación.
Vlady Kociancich, El templo de las mujeres, Barcelona, 1996, pp. 140-141
“[T]he conversion of humans to more or less immortal near-gods” that David Friedman describe[s] as the upside of galloping twenty-first-century scientific advance […] seems rather a dubious plus, and certainly less of one than extinction would be a minus, especially since changing us into “near-gods” could be thought itself a form of extinction rather than a boon because of the discontinuity between a person and a near-god. We think of early hominids as having become extinct rather than as having become us.
Richard Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response, New York, 2004, pp. 148-149
Without some basis for believing that the process that produced your prior was substantially better at tracking truth than the process that produced other peoples’ priors, you appear to have no basis for believing that beliefs based on your prior are more accurate than beliefs based on other peoples’ priors.
Robin Hanson, ‘Uncommon Priors Require Origin Disputes’, Theory and Decision, vol. 61, no. 4 (December, 2006), p. 326
[T]he things we have created will eventually vanish once human beings are no longer around to preserve them. However, achievements are events, not things, and events that have occurred cannot be undone or reversed. Therefore, it will continue to be true that our achievements occurred even if humanity ends. One disadvantage of having an unalterable past is that we cannot undo a wrongdoing that occurred. However, an unalterable past is also an advantage in that our achievements can never be undone, which may give some consolation to those who desire quasi-immortality.
Brooke Alan Trisel, ‘Human Extinction and the Value of Our Efforts’, The Philosophical Forum, vol. 35, no. 3 (Fall, 2004), p. 390
The second law of thermodynamics which, as Jeans delights in pointing out to us, will ultimately bring this universe to an inglorious close, may perhaps always remain the final factor. But by intelligent organizations the life of the Universe could probably be prolonged to many millions of millions of times what it would be without organization.
John Desmond Bernal, The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Inquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul, 2nd ed., London, 1970, p. 28
The Spanish flu of 1918 killed 25-50 million people. World War II killed 60 million people; 107 is the order of the largest catastrophes in humanity’s written history. Substantially larger numbers, such as 500 million deaths, and especially qualitatively different scenarios such as the extinction of the entire human species, seem to trigger a different mode of thinking—enter into a ‘separate magisterium’. People who would never dream of hurting a child hear of an existential risk, and say, ‘Well, maybe the human species doesn’t really deserve to survive.’
Eliezer Yudkowsky, ‘Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgement of Global Risks’, in Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Ćirković (eds.), Global Catastrophic Risks, Oxford, 2008, p. 114
Some people believe in an afterlife. I do not; what I say will be based on the assumption that death is nothing, and final. I believe there is little to be said for it: it is a great curse, and if we truly face it nothing can make it palatable except the knowledge that by dying we can prevent an even grater evil. Otherwise, given the simple choice between living for another week and dying in five minutes I would always choose to live for another week; and by a version of mathematical induction I conclude that I would be glad to live forever.
Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere, Oxford, 1986, p. 224
A simple thought experiment suggests that humans are earth-life’s best bet. In this experiment there are three key factors: the probability that humans can avoid extinction and transcend oblivion; the probability that new intelligent life would re-evolve if humans became extinct; and the probability that a newly evolved intelligent species could avoid its own extinction and transcend oblivion, assuming there is enough time to do so. To favour extinction of humans, the product of the second and third probabilities must be greater than the first probability.
Bruce Tonn, ‘Futures Sustainability’, Futures, vol. 39, no. 9 (November, 2007), p. 1100
Perhaps no one who has ever lived has done everything he or she ought. But surely no ethical theory should make it impossible for someone to do everything he or she ought.
Frank Jackson and Robert Pargetter, The Philosophical Review, vol. 95, no. 2 (April, 1986), p. 242
The stupendous time spans of the evolutionary past are not part of common culture–except among some creationists and fundamentalists. But most educated people, even if they are fully aware that our emergence took billions of years, somehow think we humans are the culmination of the evolutionary tree. That is not so. Our Sun is less than half way through its life. It is slowly brightening, but Earth will remain habitable for another billion years. However, even in that cosmic perspective—extending far into the future as well as into the past—the twenty-first century may be a defining moment. It is the first in our planet’s history where one species—ours—has Earth’s future in its hands and could jeopardise not only itself but also life’s immense potential.
Martin Rees, ‘Foreword’, in Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Ćirković (eds.), Global Catastrophic Risks, Oxford, 2008, p. xi
It has been a hundred years since I have edited my brain. I like the brain I have, but now I have no choice but to prune.
First, to make sure that there can be no errors, I make a backup of myself and set it into inactive storage.
Then I call out and examine my pride, my independent, my sense of self. A lot of it, I can see, is old biological programming, left over from when I had long ago been human. I like the core of biological programming, but “like” is itself a brain function, which I turn off.
Geoffrey A. Landis, ‘The Long Chase’, Asimov’s Science Fiction, February 2002
I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and I spread my arms. This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.
Ayn Rand, Anthem, New York, 1946, chap. 11
A ubiquitous feature of philosophical practice is to consult intuitions about merely conceivable cases. Imaginary examples are treated with the same respect and importance as real examples. Cases from the actual world do not have superior evidential power as compared with hypothetical cases. How is this compatible with the notion that the target of philosophical inquiry is the composition of natural phenomena? If philosophers were really investigating what Kornblith specifies, would they treat conceivable and actual examples on a par? Scientists do nothing of the sort. They devote great time and labor into investigating actual-world objects; they construct expensive equipment to perform their investigations. If the job could be done as well by consulting intuitions about imaginary examples, why bother with all this expensive equipment and labor-intensive experiments? Evidently, unless philosophers are either grossly deluded or have magical shortcut that has eluded scientists (neither of which is plausible), their philosophical inquiries must have a different type of target or subject-matter.
Alvin Goldman, ‘Philosophical Intuitions: Their Target, Their Source, and Their Epistemic Status’, Grazer Philosophische Studien, vol. 74 (2007), p. 8
Belief in the unreality of the world of sense arises with irresistible force in certain moods—moods which, I imagine, have some simple physiological basis, but are none the less powerfully persuasive. The conviction born of these moods is the source of most mysticism and of most metaphysics. When the emotional intensity of such a mood subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical reasons in favour of the belief which he finds in himself. But since the belief already exists, he will be very hospitable to any reason that suggests itself. The paradoxes apparently proved by this logic are really the paradoxes of mysticism, and are the goal which he feels his logic must reach if it is to be in accordance with insight. It is in this way that logic has been pursued by those of the great philosophers who were mystics—notably Plato, Spinoza, and Hegel. But since they usually took for granted the supposed insight of the mystic emotion, their logical doctrines were presented with a certain dryness, and were believed by their disciples to be quite independent of the sudden illumination from which they sprang. Nevertheless their origin clung to them, and they remained—to borrow a useful word from Mr. Santayana—“malicious” in regard to the world of science and common sense. It is only so that we can account for the complacency with which philosophers have accepted the inconsistence of their doctrines with all the common and scientific facts which seem best established and most worthy of belief.
Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy, London, 1914, pp. 55-56
[A]n informed cosmopolitanism must be of the cautious variety, rather than based on superficial pro-globalization slogans or cheerleading about the brotherhood of mankind. […] [I]ndividuals are often more creative when they do not hold consistently cosmopolitan attitudes. A certain amount of cultural particularism and indeed provincialism, among both producers and consumers, can be good for the arts. The meliorative powers of globalization rely on underlying particularist and anti-liberal attitudes to some extent. Theoretically “correct” attitudes do not necessarily maximize creativity, suggesting that a cosmopolitan culture does best when cosmopolitanism itself is not fully believed or enshrined in social consciousness.
Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures, Princeton, 2002, p. 18
Most individuals hold worldviews that exaggerate their relative importance. Real estate agents feel that most people should own homes, bankers see the relative merits of finance, and academics believe in the vital importance of scholarly writing. Cultural creators are no exception to this rule. They believe not only in the importance of art in general, but in the special importance of their era and genre. Competitors, and cultural change, threaten this importance.
Tyler Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1998, pp. 188-189
The [obsessional search for meaning] has two main roots in the history of ideas. […] The first is the theological tradition and the problem of evil. Within Christian theology there emerged two main ways of justifying evil, pain and sin–they could be seen either as indispensable causal conditions for the optimality of the universe as a whole, or as inevitable by-products of an optimal package solution. The first was that of Leibniz, who suggested that monsters had the function of enabling us to perceive the beauty of the normal. The second was that of Malebranche, who poured scorn on the idea that God has created monstrous birth defects ‘pour le bénéfice des sages-femmes’, and argued instead that accidents and mishaps are the cost God hat to pay for the choice of simple and general laws of nature. In either case the argument was intended to show that the actual world was the best of all possible worlds, and that every feature of it was part and parcel of its optimality. Logically speaking, the theodicy cannot serve as a deductive basis for the sociodicy: there is no reason why the best of all possible worlds should also contain the best of all possible societies. The whole point of the theodicy is that suboptimality in the part may be a condition for the optimality of the whole, and this may be the case even when the part in question is the corner of the universe in which human history unfolds itself. If monsters are to be justified by their edifying effects on the midwives that receive them, could not the miseries of humanity have a similar function for creatures of other worlds or celestial spheres?
Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality, Cambridge, 1983, p. 102
The best chance of enjoying enhanced cognitive skills is to fall in love with ideas, or intelligent conversation, or intelligent books, or some intellectual pursuit. If I do that, I create within my own mind a stimulating mental environment that accompanies me wherever I go. Then I am relatively free of needing good luck to enjoy a rich cognitive environment. I have constant and instant access to a portable gymnasium that exercises the mind. Books and ideas and analyzing things are easier to transport than a basketball court. No one can keep me from using mental arithmetic so habitually that my arithmetical skills survive.
James Flynn, What Is Intelligence?: Beyond the Flynn Effect, Cambridge, 2007, p. 87
Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.
Thomas Henry Huxley, ‘Evolution and Ethics’, in Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays, London, 1884, p. 83
Lest I offend anyone else by doubting their worth, let me begin by doubting my own. I am not depressed; I think I have an adequate sense of self by standard psychological criteria; I think I am not deficient in ordinary self-esteem; I am certainly not deficient in everyday self-centredness and selfishness. And yet, if I ask myself in a cool hour whether I have some deep intrinsic ‘worth’ that grounds the importance of what happens to me, or that justifies anyone, myself or another, in caring about things for my own sake, I do not find it. Much that goes on in my life is important (in a small way); much of it has intrinsic value, both positive and negative. And those facts matter to how I should be treated. But the idea that they either depend on or manifest my personal ‘worth’ is what escapes me.
Donald Regan, ‘Why Am I My Brother’s Keeper?’, in R. Jay Wallace, Philip Pettit, Samuel Scheffler and Michael Smith (eds.), Reason and Value: Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz, Oxford, 2004, p. 228
[T]here may be an even more basic (and perhaps unique) problem that arises due to the highly non-conservative shift in thinking that a transition to quantum cognitive science would require. It may be that quantum ontologies are so ‘strange’ that many, most, or virtually all philosophers find them psychologically impossible to believe. This may be a genetic problem, rather than merely a problem in the lack of intellectual acculturation in quantum ontology.
Quentin Smith, ‘Why Cognitive Scientists Cannot Ignore Quantum Mechanics’, in Smith and Aleksandar Jokic (eds.), Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford, 2003, p. 410
Global warming is disconcerting in one respect. It seems inevitable that its consequences will be large, just because of the unprecedented size and speed of the temperature changes. Yet it is very hard to know just what these large consequences will be.
John Broome, Counting the Cost of Global Warming: A Report to the Economic and Social Research Council on Research, Cambridge, 1992, p. 9
Let us now sum up the theoretical differences which the alternatives of Mechanism and Emergence would make to our view of the external world and of the relations between the various sciences. The advantage of Mechanism would be that it introduces a unity and tidiness into the world which appeals very strongly to our aesthetic interests. On that view, when pushed to its extreme limits, there is one and only one kind of material. Each particle of this obeys one elementary law of behaviour, and continues to do so no matter how complex may be the collection of particles of which it is a constituent. There is one uniform law of composition, connecting the behaviour of groups of these particles as wholes with the behaviour which each would show in isolation and with the structure of the group. All the apparently different kinds of stuff are just differently arranged groups of different numbers of the one kind of elementary particle; and all the apparently peculiar laws of behaviour are simply special cases which could be deduced in theory from the structure of the whole under consideration, the one elementary law of behaviour for isolated particles, and the one universal law of composition. On such a view the external world has the greatest amount of unity which is conceivable. There is really only one science, and the various “special sciences” are just particular cases of it. This is a magnificent ideal; it is certainly much more nearly true than anyone could possibly have suspected at first sight; and investigations pursued under its guidance have certainly enabled us to discover many connexions within the external world which would otherwise have escaped our notice. But it has no trace of self-evidence; it cannot be the whole truth about the external world, since it cannot deal with the existence or the appearance of “secondary qualities” until it is supplemented by laws of the emergent type which assert that under such and such conditions such and such groups of elementary particles moving in certain ways have, or seem to human beings to have, such and such secondary qualities; and it is certain that considerable scientific progress can be made without assuming it to be true. As a practical postulate it has its good and its bad side. On the one hand, it makes us try our hardest to explain the characteristic behaviour of the more complex in terms of the laws which we have already recognised in the less complex. If our efforts succeed, this is sheer gain. And, even if they fail, we shall probably have learned a great deal about the minute details of the facts under investigation which we might not have troubled to look for otherwise. On the other hand, it tends to over-simplification. If in fact there are new types of law at certain levels, it is very desirable that we should honestly recognise the fact. And, if we take the mechanistic ideal too seriously, we shall be in danger of ignoring or perverting awkward facts of this kind. This sort of over-simplification has certainly happened in the past in biology and physiology under the guidance of the mechanistic ideal; and it of course reaches its wildest absurdities in the attempts which have been made from time to time to treat mental phenomena mechanistically.
C. D. Broad, The Mind and Its Place in Nature, London, 1937, pp. 76-77
Consider the fact that, in a few years, I shall be dead. This fact can seem depressing. But the reality is only this. After a certain time, none of the thoughts and experiences that occur will be directly causally related to this brain, or be connected in certain ways to these present experiences. That is all this fact involves. And, in that description, my death seems to disappear.
Derek Parfit, ‘The Unimportance of Identity’, in Henry Harris (ed.), Identity: Essays Based on Herbert Spencer Lectures Given in the University of Oxford, Oxford, 1995, p. 45
If I am a momentary conscious self, and might have (numerically) the same experience as I do now even if I were not causally connected to anything more remotely past or future than the before and after internal to my momentary experience […], then it seems that my continuant personal identity should not be of all that much special interest to me-now. For if the way that I am a continuant is by being a collection of, say, segments of continuing physical processes coming together into integrated systems of neural events at one moment only to come apart the next, why should I identify with the future of some of these causal processes rather than with others? Why not care equally about other momentary consciousnesses that I can causally affect, rather than just about that which bears my name? Why not about those that carry the effects of my deeds, or of my social interaction, equally? None of these will be the same momentary consciousness as I this moment am. All will be tied to my present consciousness by causal connections.
These considerations seem plausible to me. But, of course, they cannot really be used to foster the moral virtue of benevolence—which, like all of morality, essentially concerns our relations to persons as such. If this scene of thought undermines egoism and the egocentric fears (such as, perhaps especially, the fear of death), it might seem equally to undermine morality, too—by weakening the grip that our biologically- and socially based perception and attitudes toward persons as such have. For it seems to be here that morality finds its natural ground—on which the existence of moral facts and motivation, and the application of the distinctive normative force of morality (irreducible to that of seeking pleasure or any other form of welfare or good) depends. But philosophical hedonism, while perhaps undermining morality and self-interest together in this way by suggesting the momentary view, could also provide some justification for self-interest and morality in those moments in which we wonder how it all matters, at a fundamental level, by showing a deeper ground and point to human living—a ground in the momentary experience of pleasure (no matter whose), a ground beyond self interest and morality that lies deeper in the nature of things than does our perception of persons or of prudential and moral norms.
Leonard Katz, Hedonism as Metaphysics of Mind and Value, Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1986, pp. 177-179