[ExI] give a what?

[Dan]

On Friday, October 3, 2014 1:13 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
>> …On Behalf Of John Clark
>> …I don't give a hoot in hell about my cells…

> It’s one of those what if things, John.  What if… we atheists
> are wrong and there really is a hell, then what if we die, go
> there because we were flaming atheists, and we find out that
> hoots there are really rare valuable things.  Then we have an
> eternity of regret because in our brief meat-world life, we
> could have had all the hoots we wanted, but gave them away for
> nothing, never caring for them at all.  That would be a hoot.

Ha ha. Okay, my turn to play annoying pedant: Of course, this presumes that, if there is a Hell, atheists necessarily go there. Some Buddhists have a conception of Hell and you don't go there for being an atheist. (And, IIRC, it's not eternal either. It's sort of like a time out for really, really bad karma.) After all, going to Hell might not be caused at all by being an atheist. (It could even be arbitrary.) 

By the way, John raises an interesting issue here that kind of ties in with the diamond/water paradox of economics. Presuming he supervenes on his cells -- there's that physicalist premise again :) -- then he might not give a hoot about any particular one of them, but all of them together might be another matter. This is similar to how one might value one diamond more than a glass of water now, but not all the diamonds in the world over all the water in the world now.

Regards,

Dan
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