Uncertainty

<< < Comic #6282 (January 27, 2022) > >>

uncertainty

Title text: There's no way to *really* know if this comic is funny, so probably the best thing is to send it to other people for confirmation.

Votey

Explanation

This explanation is either missing or incomplete.

Transcript

This transcript was generated by a bot: The text was scraped using AWS's Textract, which may have errors. Complete transcripts describe what happens in each panel — here are some good examples to get you started (1) (2).

[Describe panel here]

How can you be certain you've lived a good life.

It's literally impossible.

A good life is obviously a life made of lots of goodness.

In order to get the sum

Of total goodness, you have to integrate

Goodness over lifespan.

Because the future is unpredictable you can't use an equation. There is no hope of a precise answer.

So the only way to know you have a good life is to self-assess goodness at smaller and smaller particular moments.

The problem is that measuring goodness alters the amount of goodness of a given moment!

So, yeah, maybe you can measure the goodness of a macro piece of time, like a year or maybe a month or a week without messing it up. But moments remain unknowable.

Humans therefore exist in a perpetual state of hedonic uncertainty this is a fundamental aspect of the universe that can't be altered.

What if you're some kind of freak who derives joy directly from the act of measurement. Then you'd be happy and certain all the time

Maybe this is why engineers never read philosophy.

smbc-comics.com

Votey Transcript

This transcript was generated by a bot: The text was scraped using AWS's Textract, which may have errors. Complete transcripts describe what happens in each panel — here are some good examples to get you started (1) (2).

[Describe panel here]

You can know disposition or you can know moment, but not both.

 add a comment! ⋅  add a topic (use sparingly)! ⋅  refresh comments!

Discussion

No comments yet!