YouSaid · the spoken record

Elijah Millgram

lines on the record: 75
first: 2021-06-16
most recent: 2021-06-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“The metaphysics of values or of the things you should do for about 100 years, over the course of the 20th century, if you were thinking metaethics, you basically fell in one of two camps. So you could be, I hate this phrase, but you could be a moral realist. So you think that the values are out there already and what you should do is some kind of special fact and you just have to be responsive to this truth, this fact about what you have to do, right? Or what's important? Or you could be, I hate this word too, a non-cognitivist, the evaluations or the shoulds there.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Nietzsche really doesn't have it. He's a philosopher and he's trying to cope with him not being the agent, which is the only kind of agent we already have tools to talk about and understand. So he's philosophizing for himself. It's an exercise in personality management. He's trying to manage his own disintegrating personality and keep it together and functioning as much and as long as he can. But he's also theorizing about it. That's one of the things we haven't quite gotten to yet and which we absolutely need to. So that's one. Okay, here's another. So you know Nietzsche was if you had to sort of describe his program in a phrase, it would be the program he's offering people would be inventing values. So let me give you a characterization of so you know nowadays, not in Nietzsche's own day, we have a subspecialty of philosophy metaethics, which you could think of as the”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of agency, and there's a lot of discussion in starting with Harry Frankfurt, maybe in about 1970, of what it takes to get that kind of full ownership. The assumption always is that it's a good thing, and mostly we haven't. People who don't are lost causes, right? Hopeless.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“10 years of his life, he was, well, first a psychiatric patient and then a ward of his mother and then award of his sister. And he was a coma boy for a lot of that. He was coming apart and his writing style reflects that. And now, if you're a philosopher but also not if you're a philosopher. So if you're a philosopher, you take for granted a way of thinking about people that you can think of as a notation that we don't have an alternative to. You ask, what does he think? It's as though there's a hook. And then there are the various beliefs or things the person wants. There's after that sort of hang off of that hook and built into that picture as a kind of presumption of a certain amount of coordination and consistency and taking responsibility for those attitudes. This is the default view in philosophy. So the phrase that you'll see to kind of label this is unity.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. That was then this is now. But then he moved on. His later writings are also choppy. They don't sound like Rushvai aphorisms. They're more shrill, and sometimes the passages are a little longer. But they're very different. Let me try to point out two or three ways of seeing Nietzsche that make him out to be interesting philosophically interesting. One of the reasons for the choppiness is that Nietzsche couldn't work for more than 20 minutes straight. He simply couldn't stay on point. He was really sick. As I'm sure you know, and I guess people listening to this probably know, during the period he was writing the books that we think of as sort of most characteristically Nietzschean, he was coming apart the seams. His life was a series of sort of lurches from one plateau of psychic disintegration to the next one down until finally, I guess he collapsed.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think we can learn from him because in a lot of ways we haven't caught up to what he was doing. There are some moves he makes that we kind of almost gotten to the place where we're like three steps behind. But I want to step back a second and ask and think about the form for a moment. So some of these quotes, they belong to a period where Nietzsche was trying to be the next Rush Foucault, right? So they sort of sound like Rush Foucault”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, exactly. And this book is called the Eudity of Philosophical Experience. And he is illustrating my view with this sort of precurrence of it. The part of the book I was reading last night at the beginning, it starts off discussing medieval treatments of universals. And his line is people get forced from position to position to position. You don't get agreement, but it's also not a random walk. It's as though the path is carved in stone. And when later philosophers start out at the beginning of that path independently, they too get forced down the same route.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it could be, but maybe this is something special about philosophy, but you know, there's something very weird about philosophy in the West.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My view has mutated to sort of swallow the objection. It's gone in a different, right? And I have a new argument. So maybe philosophers are a special case, but these conversations, the really productive, interesting ones don't seem to, they don't seem to produce agreement.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, no. No, sorry, I'm a philosopher, right? And my best conversation partners or other philosophers who I think are truth seekers and who I have enormous respect for. But it's not exactly that one of us thinks that the other one is the smarter one, right? It's not like that. And some of these people I've known for, I guess, 40 years now, and we have overlapping interests. So we have regular conversations. mostly neither of us convinces the other. What happens is our views evolve. So I talk to my philosophical conversation partner. I've come up with an objection to her view or her argument. And she goes home and comes back and her argument has changed and the view has changed, but not to agree with me. But she's an objection to my view and my argument. And I take the point. So I go home, but I come back not agreeing with her. I come back with a...”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I have to put aside what I, there's in philosophy, you may know there's a peer disagreement literature, and I have to put this aside somehow in my head to think about this. You know, it doesn't match what I experience in my life at all.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the induced suspension of disbelief in them, but not in us, right, if they're there, then we'll notice them immediately. But if they are there because they do suspension of disbelief in people like us, you know, suspension of disbelief requires complicity on your part, right? There's a recognition that you can train yourself involved in it and you can train yourself to notice it. And so style in this sense, the accretion of a repertoire of devices that work together to produce the appearance pretty much guarantees that if you're looking out for it, you'll see it.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The backwash of a rocket looks right. Here's how you do it. People have figured out a way there's a really old scientific American article, which is sort of nice as an example of this. People have figured out a way to make weathered surfaces look right. To get the simulation to look right, it has to be an accretion of a lot of these devices. You're looking at a tradition in the background of the simulation, the tradition that builds up the devices and learns to integrate them and to produce these appearances. And now you ask what the result of having this tradition will be. These devices are going to make it into the tradition. Well, some of them will be sort of realistic in some very naive sense. But some will be, they will strike the simulators as vividly realistic. They'll induce suspension of disbelief. Now there's two possibilities. The simulators are like us or they're not. If these devices that are in the”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me kind of pull in my horns a little bit, but say this. To the extent that I understand the simulation hypothesis, right? I have a pretty tangible sense of how it works and plays out, then I think that the simulators, I have to understand them as being something like us, right? And then it'll turn out that they have styles too. I'll fill in the argument. If you think of them as sort of omnipotent, then I don't know, right? So this isn't, if we get theological, I'm not confident anymore. But think about it this way. The simulation we're talking about, so this we will have in common with the space aliens, it's going to be complex, right? It has to be built up of many working parts. I mean, the kind of working parts I mean, if you look at trade journals for the CGI industry, they enthuse over people have figured out a way to make”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I try this argument out on people, some people say, but my world is styled. And I say, well, let's split the difference. You know, if it turned out that you looked around in your world, there are parts of the world that are differently styled. QT cruisers, I don't know if they're still around, but they're styled for sure. These were cars that were meant as an allusion to, I guess, the Dick Tracy strip, right?”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think of the simulation as a work of art. I mean, it has to be that. By a work of art, I don't mean anything fancy schmancy. I mean that I just mean that it's an object created to look a certain way. Works of arts have styles. They inevitably have styles. I can give you sort of a subsidiary argument in a moment if you want that. And so if you were in a simulation, unless you simply had no taste, unless you were sort of aesthetic taste blind, you were aesthetically crippled, right? You'd be able to recognize the style. It would be obvious.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There we go. So his riff is he's, I guess his wife is trying to book travel plans to Japan, and she can't communicate with travel agent because the travel agent doesn't think she can say no politely. My problem isn't so much that there's circummocution around saying no, although, you know, if you ask somebody for a date, if somebody asks you for a date and you're going to turn them down, you don't do it by saying no, right? There's other ways to do it. My complaint.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gavaga guy, and they say yes or no, they make an assented dissent response. And you kind of collect these and you build your interpretation up of the people and then you, right? And that assumes that you can already understand their assents and dissents before you understand everything else. Now Dave Barry has a really funny riff”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me see if I can try to talk this through. Let's say that the Quine in turn, there's different versions of the Koinean turn, right? Different things you could mean by that. But let's say that it means this. Koine's slogan was to be is to be the value of a variable. So if you're a philosopher and you're doing metaphysics and you want to say what the world is composed of, right? That's kind of the, well, you have a theory which is continuous of science and maybe has logic at the very middle of it, but it's all one sort of seamless, I guess, phrase with web of belief. And you see what the theory tells you exists. And of course, that's what you think exists, right? It sounds very low key and down to earth and naturalistic. Quine went into his program thinking that what you start with, your sort of raw material is people agreeing and disagreeing with things, right? You show them a rabbit and you say,”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of one level down. So let's stop and think about what's built into the, when you explain dominance to a classroom in light, you say, well, look, here are the different options you have. I guess the options are usually the column. And here are the different states of the world. And you can see that for each state of the world, this option does better than that option. So you should take. There's a lot built into that already. For example, that the world is carved up into these different, the state space is carved up, and your option space is carved up. And you don't get to rethink, re-characterize the characterization of the things that you do was already given to you and it's fixed. It's an idealization until the situation arrived and I had a chance to sort of face it and think about it, I wouldn't know whether to accept that idealization. I know that sounds really coy, but the principled view is that since I don't have an argument,”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, who knows what I would do if somebody turned up and gave me the. But let me say something kind of a little bit at the meta level, and then I'll speak to the view that I would be a one boxer. So I don't know, I live in a world where I feel disqualified from a privilege that almost everybody around me has. So, you know, people are supposed to have opinions about all kinds of things, right? They have opinions about politics and they have opinions about sports teams and they have opinions about who knows what, right? I'm in the very peculiar position of being in a job where I'm paid to have opinions. And so I feel that I can't have opinions unless I've worked for them and I can back them up. And that means that unless I've done my homework, unless I have an argument for the opinion, I don't have it. So I don't. But now going back from the meta level kind of...”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is for us So Nozick said, Look, here's what happens when you get a class or just not even a class. People talking about Nukomb's paradox. Some people end up having one view and some people end up having the other view. And each side has the argument for their own view, but they don't have the explanation of what's wrong with the other argument and then Nozick says, and I think this is absolutely on target, it doesn't help to just repeat your own argument more slowly and more loudly. And since I don't know what's wrong with whichever other argument it is, I don't have a view.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I've never been able to take a stand on that, mostly because, you know, there's this moment in Robert Nozick's discussion of the newcom paradox. Should we pause to kind of tell the audience what that?”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“John Stewart Melhoy, I'm a little bit of a fan of and kind of have an interest in, complained about that very, he complained about his contemporaries that too many of them didn't bother to ask themselves what they wanted or they preferred. They would just look around to see what was expected of them and then go for that. And so there's a lot of that. But I think the other thing that is being overrated is what you think you already know about what's important and what matters. So it's inertia. Inertia of your own assessments.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is really, really basic, but I think people don't pay attention to their own experience. They pay attention to experience when they are trying to figure out what's going on factually. But when they're trying to figure out what to do, they discount experience as an input. So this is true among the professional philosophers. And I think it's true of just anybody. The tacit ideology, I guess, is that people are supposed to know what they want already, right? And then they try to figure out how to get it. But you learn what's important and what matters from experience. And if you don't pay attention to your own experience, you'll go off marching in some direction that you in the end are going to find probably really disappointing. So yeah, everyone somehow in the end pays attention. Really underrated.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source