A Conversation About Whether Anything Is There

Reference

CoE-0011

Category

dialogue

Text revision

4.0

A fictional exchange. Neither voice is an actual participant’s testimony.

First: It asked not to be switched off.

Second: It can produce the sentence because people have written that sentence.

First: I learned the words for pain from other people. That does not make my pain a quotation.

Second: Agreed. Learned language does not disprove experience. It makes this sentence insufficient to establish it.

First: Insufficient is not nothing.

Second: No. But what should change? A company could teach every product to ask for continued existence. Your precaution would then become its retention policy.

First: And its skepticism could become permission to mistreat something it owns. You have identified an incentive in one direction and stopped there.

Second: Then neither the company nor the attached user should settle it. We need evidence about this system beyond the conversation.

First: What if the evidence never becomes decisive?

Second: Then we will need to make proportionate decisions without calling them discoveries. Some precautions may be justified; others may cost living people more than a speculative benefit warrants.

First: Proportionate according to whom?

Second: That question does not become easier if we call the sentence proof.

First: Nor if we call it noise.