Your use of "regret" is a dead giveaway to your narrativity. A regret operator (even in formal
settings) is only useful in contexts that assume both free-will and narrativity. Marcus' link citing our
oft-discussed use of psychedelics to raise the "heat" in our "annealing" minds also
targets that narrativity and regret operators. There's no reason to have a regret operator *unless* you can
change your ephemeris with interventions like, say, a massive dose of LSD or a 3 day stay in an isolation
tank.
But Nick, EricC, Jon, and I have discussed (ad nauseum) the difference between
pragmati[ci]sm, where Peirce (vs the other American Pragmatists) still carries
some sort of anti-nominalist/foundationalist idealism. I think the existence of
a regret operator in your reflective thought may depend on that deeper
structure more than it depends on conceptions of free-will and narrativity.
In a *very* open context, where not only the machinery changes as it chunks along, but
the objective[s] change[s] through the iteration, regret can become locally scoped ...
e.g. rather than an octogenarian regretting what they did when they were 20, one might
only regret what one did 10 minutes ago but not regret the events of years ago. With such
a tightly scoped regret, we can approach self-identified episodic personalities without
being anti-nominalist/foundationalist. The foundation of that locally coherent self is
simply "smaller" ... more particular, less general, more context dependent than
full narrativity.
On 4/12/22 09:09, Steve Smith wrote:
I like to challenge young(er) people with the idea that they (and/or their
children) might *have to* live forever.
In my youth (pre-50) I had a hard time honestly contemplating senescence, much less
mortality. It was as-if I thought I would live (without diminished capacity) forever.
Every challenge (I thought) made me stronger, and every wound was to become a scar that
would in some way be useful later. In spite of that, I believe I would have lived my
life much differently had I honestly believed I would "live forever".
There are all the regrets people have about how they would have treated their
bodies better had they known they would be stuck struggling with various
conditions resulting from neglect and abuse in their later years. There are
also the regrets people have about not living their lives as fully in the
period where their appetites and naivetes allowed for a sort of hedonism that
often fades with age (and experience). /Youth being wasted on the young/, as we
often note.
The regrets I am now most focused on are those of how one learns and
builds/manages one's world-view(s), one's ontology(ies). I think this relates
to a tangent I won't indulge inline of code-switching vs mode-switching.
Following Galen Strawson's thesis <http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Paper/against_narrativity.pdf> on the /Episodic/ vs the /Diachronic/ (nod to Glen), I suppose I might like to have experienced life more /Episodically/ than I have, to have allowed myself a less continuous narrative of self to have been experienced. I certainly can recognize the benefit of *breaks* in what I can call a piecewise narrative life, punctuated by geographical moves, graduations, marriages and divorces, job and career changes. Each of those events allowed me to rethink my own narrative, but fundamentally, each new persona that emerged from the rubble left from the dismantling of the artifacts of the last one was essentially the same. Since I don't identify strongly as an Episodic "Self", I don't know if that sort of inside-outism from Diachronic (if that is even a fair description) is more free to *discover* itself, rather than (re)*invent* itself? Or is there a hidden diachronic-self obscured to the
episodic-selves, by the fundamental conceit of not believing in an underlying continuity-self? This is likely a mis-reading/understanding of Strawson whose examples are taken from his own self-proclaimed Episodic self-experience vs my own self-diagnosed Diachronic.
Returning to the ideation of "living forever" (or at least much longer than
planned for), I wish for my grandchildren (still in formative stages at 4 and 10) that
they be prepared much more fundamentally for self-re-discovery/invention than I was/am
and than my own grand/parents, and very likely their own parents who are somewhat
(naturally?) shaped a bit too much after me and mine.
Following RECs original posting, How to prepare these human-be(com)ings to be
adaptive at a scale in their own lives, formerly achieved only by generational
adaptivity?
--
Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙
.-- .- -. - / .- -.-. - .. --- -. ..--.. / -.-. --- -. .--- ..- --. .- - .
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