Consciousness And Moral Status Reading Group: Week 7

Consciousness And Moral Status Reading Group: Week 7 === ###### tags: `Value` `Evaluative Spaces` :::info - **Reading:** Shepherd, J. (2018). Consciousness and moral status, Taylor & Francis Chapters 13-14 (pp. 73-83) - **Date:** Sep 15, 2020 12:00 PM (LONDON) - **Host:** MM - **Reference:** - [Last week meeting](/@tanzor/value6) ::: I didn't understand: --- - [name=Nitzan] The following sentence: "...experiences that involve experiential assessment of items, objects and events that one (implicitly or explicitly) finds highly significant, highly meaningful, or in some other way important, significant or good will tend to be more valuable – or disvaluable, depending on the relationship between the item and one’s assessment in the context of one’s own evaluative space". "in the context of", as in "within"? - Is the evaluative space a copy of the representational space? What is the relationship between these two spaces? Do we represent valuable things with greater precision? I found it interesting: --- - [name=MM] Internal coherence (similar to sensory integration/multisensory abstraction) makes a creature more valuable. - [name=Nitzan] Sheperd's indication of something that might be called "evaluative wisdom": One person could teach another how to evaluate something "better". This notion entails some **objectivity** with respect to value. Maybe it would be interesting trying to charaterize which value axes can be the target of such conscious learning, and which are constructed only from subjective experience. - [name=ND] Sheperd's statement that "Fully engaged aesthetic experience is among the most valuable experience available to human beings." - why? I wanted to discuss together: --- - [name=MM] Does the value of internal coherence extend beyond single agents, to communities or cultures? For example, is a romantic couple that makes joint decisions by integrating considerations about the well-being of both partners, somehow more valuable than the sum of its parts? - Maybe related: Wiggins' notion of 'funny': " one person can improve another’s grasp of the concept of the funny; and one person can improve another’s focus or discrimination of what is funny . . ." - [name=MM] Even after reading all that, I'm not sure whether there's a true difference betewen Shepherd's proposal and Hedonism about phenomenal value. In the end, if some experiences are more valuable, why can't we just say that they are also more pleasurable? - [name=Nitzan] Sheperd states:"Does a bigger space relate to phenomenal value in any interesting way? I think there is a general relationship. A bigger space along various dimensions seems to be associated with a greater potentiality for phenomenal value or disvalue." By space size across some sensory dimension, does he mean a sensory sensitivity (e.g. a 6x6 vision), that can potentially be represented across an evaluative space? or regardless of sensory capabilities, a more fine grained evaluative representation? - he gives an example of a composer vs a child indicating the first option, but I am not sure I agree. - [name=ND] Sheperd suggests that internal coherence can make experiences more valuable such that more internal coherence is better. But I was thinking that intenral coherence can also make experiences less valuable (i.e. more difficult to stay in the moment and be fully immersed in an experience). - Sheperd suggests that a bigger evaluative space along a dimension is associated with greater potentiality for phenomenal value. So if entity A has a bigger evaluative space than entity X alon one dimension but not anohter, how can we determine which entity's experience has more value? - The idea of evaluative space and the potential that all beings have the same sized space eg those with 4 senses just have extremely heightened ones compared to ours Random thoughts here: --- - [name=Nitzan] Sheperd discusses a subjective evaluative space. Is a "decision space" or action planning space is included in such evaluative space? or should it be defined as a different space, with its own constriants and capabilities? ## Notes