Wittgenstein
Article
Wittgenstein is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 15, 2024 and June 28, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “The world of the happy is quite different from the world of the unhappy, says Wittgenstein”; “from the world of the unhappy, says Wittgenstein”; “Wittgenstein thought that if a lion could talk, we would not understand it”. It most often appears alongside Far Out Initiative, 2023 special, @the_megabase.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: May 15, 2024
- Last seen: June 28, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Far Out Initiative (2 shared issues)
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- 2023 special (1 shared issues)
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- @the_megabase (1 shared issues)
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- A Pan-Species Welfare State (1 shared issues)
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- ACX grant winners (1 shared issues)
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- ACX Grantees (1 shared issues)
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- ACX MEETUP (1 shared issues)
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- African Gray Parrot (1 shared issues)
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- Alex (1 shared issues)
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- Alex the Parrot (1 shared issues)
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- America (1 shared issues)
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- Apimostinel (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Nonetheless an exalted hedonic baseline will revolutionise our conception of life. The world of the happy is quite different from the world of the unhappy, says Wittgenstein; but the world of the superhappy will feel unimaginably different from the human, Darwinian world. Talk of preference conservation may reassure bioconservatives that nothing worthwhile will be lost in the post-Darwinian transition. Yet life based on information-sensitive gradients of superhappiness will most likely be "encephalised" in state-spaces of experience alien beyond human comprehension. Humanly comprehensible or otherwise, enriched hedonic tone can make all experience generically hypervaluable in an empirical sense - its lows surpassing today's peak experiences. Will such experience be hypervaluable in a metaphysical sense too? Is this question cognitively meaningful?
My favorite way Scully repudiates the behaviorists is by flat out rejecting the notion that we can’t know what it’s like to be a different creature. Wittgenstein thought that if a lion could talk, we would not understand it. Budiansky says that to see inside an animal brain would be “to enter a world without the words to describe it — and so is meaningless to us.” Scully is not buying it.