The Symmetry Argument II

An initial reaction is that this argument is ridiculous. It doesn't make any sense and it's unconvincing. And who thinks of this kind of thing anyway? Well, there are several ways to level an objection. You can deny the first premise and say you do regret not being born earlier. You can argue that the two premises don't entail the conclusion. But most people go straight for the symmetry premise.

The symmetry premise is: If I do not regret or fear being born earlier, then I should not regret or fear dying earlier. Prenatal nonexistence is equivalent to posthumous nonexistence. I will bring up several ways in which this jars with our intuition. The Lucretian response is that these replies are simply attitudes we have towards death. They are insufficient counterarguments because they are subjective and irrational.

First, the imagination argument. I can conceive of dying later, which is why I value that; I cannot conceive of being born earlier, so I do not value that. One response is that this is simply an illusion that results from the fact that our birth is a defined day in the past whereas death is (or seems to be) an undefined day in the future. But this shouldn't matter. Say you get to add a year to either your past or your future. Certainly, you can imagine that. And you should be able to value that year whether it is added before your birth or after your death. It may be easier to imagine living longer, but it is not inconceivable to imagine being born earlier.

Well, you reply, how about a causality argument. We have causal power over future events but no such power over past events. Who cares if you give me a year I've already used; I want a year in which I can do what I want. This response depends on where you are relative to your timeline. Indeed, we are all somewhere after our birth and before our death. But if we had been born a year earlier, we would have done stuff and had causal power during that extra year. I am unconvinced that this is significantly different from having a year ahead of us in which we can cause things. I think that our desire to have a future year rather than a past year simply stems from where we are in life. If we were to step outside of time, so to speak, and look at the situation objectively, a year, whenever it is, will be the same in terms of causal power. This argument can be adapted for things like "opportunities."

So there's the controversy. Our vantage point is from a time in life after birth yet before death, and from this perspective, a year in the future may be preferable to a year in the past. It is both impractical and unrealistic to pretend to be outside of time, looking in. The Lucretian response is that this is simply an attitude we have and it is irrational; we need to examine the situation objectively where we will realize the symmetry argument holds water. Even if we are "stuck" in our own timelines, we can intellectually remove ourselves from them and look at our situation from an unbiased perspective where we will realize that temporal asymmetry is not an objectively rational thing to believe. Tomorrow, I'll try to show that our attitude towards temporal asymmetry is less certain than we might think.