_This is my qualitative review of a 6 week period from early June until mid-July_. See also [[02021-06 Review]], [[_02021-06 Plan]]. ## David Pearce In early June, I sent [[David Pearce]] a brief note of appreciation, and he replied suggesting a call. My top question for him was: where should we start? My view is that we have to start with a "yes-saying" orientation towards existence, i.e. we take it as axiomatic that a "better never to have been" stance is false. I've not read much of Peirce, James and Rorty yet, but my impression is that they'd endorse this slogan: "moral truths must be adaptive (for a civilisation)". This kind of statement has some philosophers pulling their hair out, but I buy it. David is famously a negative utilitarian, who thinks that the abolition of suffering is not just one important aim, but ultimately the only thing that matters. He sometimes casts himself as a techno-Buddhist, quoting the Buddha: > I teach one thing and one thing only, suffering and the end of suffering. I'm not sure how many Buddhists actually accept the implications of negative utilitarianism, though. For one thing, [several](https://tricycle.org/magazine/i-teach-only-suffering-and-end-suffering/) [notable](https://discourse.suttacentral.net/t/did-the-buddha-only-teach-dukkha-and-its-cessation/9357) scholars think that the "only" in that quote is a mistranslation, and a better rendering would be: > In the past, as today, what I describe is suffering and the cessation of suffering. [Bhikkhu Bohdi](https://tricycle.org/magazine/i-teach-only-suffering-and-end-suffering/), at least, thinks that a better translation, combined with attention to the context in which these statements occur (just twice in the Pali cannon) would "make it plain that the Buddha did not mean to say he teaches only suffering and its cessation and nothing else". Annyway... if I grant the intuition that suffering is bad, then in the same breath I also want to grant the intuition that pleasure is good. I'm not sure if David would deny that pleasure is good, but he often says that no amount of pleasure could redeem any amount of abject suffering (c.f. Ursula le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas; [[The problem of evil]]). So on his picture, it is not enough to get the ratio of pleasure to suffering in the universe above 99:1—the only acceptable outcomes are those where abject suffering is _entirely_ abolished. I can sometimes feel the pull of this position. I think most non-psychopaths, confronted with vivid depictions of extreme suffering, find something deeply unacceptable about the fact that such horrors are not merely possible, but actual. But I find it easier than Pearce, apparently, to recognise tragedy in existence but still affirm it as good. In effect, I'm saying that the suffering is "worth it" in some sense, even though it is not at all to be accepted. For me the natural stance is to regret the bad and affirm the good, to minimise the bad and maximise the good. And to trust—even as an atheist—that there has been (or at least will be) enough good to make it all worthwhile. This makes me a "fanatical life lover" in David's vocabulary, someone whose vision is impeded by the "rose-tinted spectacles of Darwinian malware". Well... I get it, but still. I say—let's keep going. Some pockets of the present are very good, and we are just getting started (c.f. [[Where are we?]] [[Cheerful axiology]]). I think David may underrate Nietzsche. I pressed him on this point, and he repeated his public line of painting Nietzsche as a moral monster. He does this by quoting a few of Nietzsche's remarks on suffering, which suggest callous indifference, characteristic of pre-Christian Greece or Rome (see nietzsche.com, which David maintains). I don't think this works, though, for all the usual reasons that selectively quoting Nietzschean aphorisms leads people astray. Indeed, there are many reasons to think that Nietzsche was acutely sensitive to the suffering of the world, in much the way that Pearce is. His personal health problems were often severe to the point of torture. Aaron Ridley claims that in his middle period, Nietzsche spent several years journalling enthusiastically about how "science would enable us to progressively abolish suffering and that would be a jolly good thing" (Ridley points to _Human, All Too Human_ §108 and Ruth Abbey's _Nietzsche's Middle Period_ as evidence for this claim. I've not looked at the latter, yet.). [^1] One of David's greatest sources of meta-ethical uncertainty is the the thought that perhaps he is just doing concealed autobiography. This, of course, is exactly the charge Nietzsche would level at him. My biggest worry about David, though, is that he may lack some ingredients of what I take to be an ideal philosophical temperament. The project of reducing suffering and improving the human condition through technoloy can be construed as a continuation of (fairly) uncontroversial humanism, so I am relaxed about (and in fact strongly approve of) his gung-ho advocacy for that. But, Pearce has repeatedly said in interviews that, if he could press a button to painlessly sterilise the universe, he would do so. (#todo add some examples) This is usually qualified with a remark along the lines of "in practice, such a programme is sociologically impractical, the future belongs to the life-lovers". This seems right, but "it's impractical" is the wrong caveat for such a radical and generally abhorred agenda. The caveat I want him to give would be more robustly anti-fanatical—some kind of meta-cognitive remark along the lines of "I would take the extreme, irreversible action of presssing the button, if and only if I could get reasonably widespread agreement after a period of reflection under conducive conditions". Without such a caveat, I am left worried that he is, at some level, taking his own inside view much too seriously. It's good to develop and share your inside views, perhaps especially if they are unpopular. That said, it's also crucial to avoid betting too heavily on them, especially when the stakes are high (or indeed, astronomical). In general I think that public intellectuals, and especially moral philosophers, should model and explicitly discuss this somewhat subtle kind of intellectual virtue more than they do. I see [[Tyler Cowen]] as exemplary on this front; at least with his button pushing remarks, I see Pearce as an anti-examplar. ## Moral realists on rationality Pessimistic and anti-natalist philosophers often complain about the _ad hominem_ psychologising moves made by their critics. With Nietzsche, I think such moves are sometimes legitimate, sometimes illuminating. Any moral philosopher that puts intuition at the heart of their story needs to give a story about where their intuitions come from, and why they are normative. And there, I think, psychology and sociology are relevant. As [[Tyler Cowen]] likes to say: "all thinkers are regional thinkers". Moral realists often try to duck this genealogical question with gestures at "truths of rationality" or "rational faculities". I've struggled to find accounts of this move that seem anything other than _suspcious_, but I am actively seeking them (e.g. [[=Henry Sidgwick]], [[=Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek]], [[=Thomas Nagel]], [[=Sharon Hewitt Rawlette]]), and would appreciate suggestions. My sense is that one's account of rationality is central to foundational questions of meta-ethics and metaphilosophy. And, that many moral realists help themselves to an oddly non-naturalistic account of reason. To sketch the claims I find suspicious: 1. Reason is a unity of capabilities that minds either have or lack. 2. All rational minds will, in ideal conditions at least, consider the same moral axioms to be self-evident. 3. All rational minds will, in ideal conditions at least, consider the same rules of logic to be valid. Some version of (3) seems easiest to swallow, but even there, I wonder. Why would you not think of reason as an evolved set of capabilities, similar but not identical, even in all humans? If learning is evolution in the brain, as Dennet likes to say, why think that every mind ends up identical? The naturalistic gloss would see us as running simple trial and error algorithms and trying to maximise a reward function—keeping what works, and discarding what doesn't. This may lead to importantly similar minds, but why think they will be universally identical? I think the best naturalistic story of this would claim that there are regularities in the structure of things that underrwite regularities in rational minds. I'm thinking here of [[=Geoffrey West]] on scale, where he points out remarkable, physics-like regularities at the levels of biology, sociology, and so on. If I remember correctly, [[=Joshua Greene]] tries a move like this when he rebrands utilitarianism as "deep pragmatism", and presents it as the answer to our pramatic / political need for a global meta-morality. ## William James One of my most exciting discoveries this period was that [[=William James]] has a notion of "healthy minds" and "sick souls" that seems to map pretty tightly onto Nietzsche's "yes-saying" and "no-saying" distinction. Did James read Nietzsche? #todo I read a couple chapters of _The Varieties of Religious Experience_ and am looking forward to more. [[=Richard Rorty]] has moved up my reading list, because I think he may have made connections between Nietzsche and the American pragmatists. ## Transhumanism Last summer I realised that I've spent about a decade trying to justify my instinctive unease about [[Transhumanism]]—and failed. So, I now spend several days per week thinking like a card-carrying transhumanist. I understand the essence of transhumanism as follows: > We should carefully aspire to radically improve human traits and capabilities—e.g. healthspans for centuries not decades, greater happiness and less suffering, greater moral and practical intelligence—through whatever acceptably low-risk means available to us. Hmm, that wasn't very punchy. What does the Transhumanist FAQ say again? > The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. OK, that's also a bit of a mouthful. Pearce sometimes talks about transhumanists as: > People who want to use technology to overcome our biological limitations and build a "triple S" civilisation with populations characterised by superhappiness, superintelligence and superlongevity. If you want to make transhumanism sound mainstream and normal rather than unpopular and weird, you can characterise it as the continuation of a thing we've been up to since we started making hand axes. Transhumanism might sound a bit scary, but bicycles and spectacles do not (although apparently there was a brief moral panic about bicycles when they started getting popular). ## Rebecca Roache [[=Rebecca Roache]] was one of the first paid researchers at the Future of Humanity Institute, and has since written a bunch of cool papers on bioethics. Rebecca kindly agreed to do a few "philosophy tutor" type calls with me in June. We spoke about her intellectual biography, discussed themes from her work, and then I threw out some transhumanist visions and asked her to talk me out of them. This was part of a small push on my part to find [[List of arguments against transhumanism]]. Rebecca gave me some useful pointers, but our exchange didn't reduce my now growing enthusiasm for transhumanism, and in fact made it a bit more robust. I asked her why there aren't more applied philosophers jumping up and down about this topic. Rebecca gave sociological reasons, rather than normative ones. Another point for the "hmm, a lot of academia seems highly dysfunctional" thesis... :( So—I continue generating and adding transhuman-flavoured project ideas to my longlist... ## Thomas Moynihan [[=Thomas Moynihan]] on the 80,000 Hours podcast was the latest in a string of people who have encouraged me to bump [[=Henry Sidgwick]] up my reading list. Tom's intellectual biography resonates with me, particularly his contintental sympathies and resulting suspicions about the ideal of impartiality and the pose of selflessness. Telling his story to Rob: > Tom Moynihan: **I have now become far more invested in that more impartial Sidgwickian kind of view after having engaged with it more deeply. And I think it’s the far more coherent view. So I think that moral agents discover what is valuable in the sense that the first humans didn’t know what was impartially valuable. So we’ve had to kind of discover it through using reason and evidence and correcting errors about value. So that can look like a making, but I think ultimately it’s a finding, because it seems to be converging and arriving upon this very impartial sense.** > Tom Moynihan: So again, I go back to the distinction I made earlier, and this is one that from **talking to Toby Ord, he stressed how important this distinction between moral patients and moral agents is.** So I think ultimately that if there were no humans, there’d still be value in the world if there are moral patients like animals, sentient beings, but **it would just kind of be lurching around randomly and aimlessly without this upward force towards making the world more valuable or containing more value.** And I think it was just not really being aware of that distinction and how it would create a lot of nice equilibrium between a lot of my other commitments that led me to this strange tension. > Tom Moynihan: So yeah, I think that nature happens to create value, but only does so haphazardly and blindly. > Rob Wiblin: Whereas humans can do it deliberately. > Tom Moynihan: Exactly. **So once you have a species or a being that can apply right reason rather than arbitrary precedent or instinct, whatever, to isolate sources of value and then try and maximize them, you have in the same sense that life tends to create more life for the first time, you have this moral agency that can then tend to create more value.** I began reading the [[=Peter Singer]] and [[=Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek]] book on Sidgwick, and will go to the man himself sometime soon. A suivre... A nice aside on a method: > When doing history of ideas you are often looking for things that I'm not just unthought but unthinkable. What important insights are not just unthought, but unthinkable, today? ## Sharon Hewitt-Rawlette In a wonderful interview with Gus Docker, [[=Sharon Hewitt Rawlette]] laid out the strongest case for a hedonistic theory of value that I've ever heard. I don't know how many of the arguments are original to her, but I'm looking forward to reading [her PhD](https://www.stafforini.com/docs/Hewitt%20-%20Normative%20qualia%20and%20a%20robust%20moral%20realism.pdf). I posted my key takewaways on the EA Forum (#todo link): 1. Pluralistic conception of positive and negative experiences, i.e. experiences differ in intensity but also in character (so we can recognise fundamental differences between bodily pleasure, love, laughter, understanding, etc). 2. Hedonism can solve the epistemic problem that haunts moral realism, by saying that we directly experience value and disvalue as a phenomenal quality. 3. We attribute intrinsic value to non-experiential states of affairs because we recognise them as direct or indirect causes of experiential value. This is a cognitive shortcut, it works pretty well. 4. Experience of pleasure from e.g. torture is *pro tanto* good, but it is not all things considered good because of the instrumental effects (i.e. lots of disvalue). 5. Best argument against hedonistic utilitarianism is that it is too abstract. It's not actually helpful for people to think in these terms. We need nearly-absolute respect for rights, projecting intrinsic value into the world works well for us. 6. Strong Realism vs anti-realism (as in: total mind-independence vs mind-dependence) matters: only the strong realist can deeply care about self-interested perspectival bias, e.g. can think of their deepest values as perhaps radically wrong, can worry that an AGI with idealised human values might still be an existential catastrophe. For some reason, it hadn't occurred to me that a hedonist could do (1). It might be that I think of hedonists as aiming for a very tidy theory, and adding pluralism back in messes that up a bit (e.g. comparability and aggregation remain hard). ## Roger Crisp I've been vaguely aware of [[=Roger Crisp]] for years, but this month I realised that we share many interests, e.g. sympathy for partial reasons, "hierarchy of pleasures" talk, interest in Sidgwick, virtue ethics. I went through his publication list and found... a lot of things to read. On the list. ## Progress Studies I provoked Jason Crawford into this EA Forum post, and left comments here and here. #todo - links My impression is that the progress studies and effective altruism memeplexes are very complementary. EA is focussed on preventing the worst, PS focussed on aiming for the best. While EA longtermists will push for safety (and avoiding the worst outcomes), PS longtermists will push for innovation. This seems like a healthy dynamic to me, and one which I'm pretty sure [[Tyler Cowen]] had a quiet but deliberate hand in setting up. Jason published a nice post that reveals Winston Churchill as a clear sighted futurist, and a precursor to Bostrom. #todo - links ## Nick Beckstead on living with Utilitarianism Spencer Greenberg interviewed "the other Nick" on utilitarianism. I was heartened to hear [[=Nick Beckstead]] endorse Cowen's "two thirds-utilitarianism", disavow his earlier "hardcore utilitarian" stance, and position the doctrine as a "useful framework" rather than the last word on ethics. I very much endorse this kind of relation to utilitarianism. An emerging theme of the past months is "the importance of how you hold it": the importance of meta-cognition, of intellectual immune systems, and the spectrum of healthy and pathological philosophical temperaments. ## Samuel Scheffler My colleague Arden encouraged me to take another look at [[=Samuel Scheffler]], and I found him making a conservative, non-utilitarian case for caring about future generations. He begins by discussing Jerry Cohen's conservatism, which begins with a worry that: > to seek to maximize value is to see nothing wrong in the destruction of valuable things as long as there's no reduction in the total amount of value as a result. Scheffler takes Cohen to be saying that there's a crucial distinction between "value in the abstract" and "particular things that have value". > The conservatism that he defends holds that particular things that have value take priority over value itself in at least two related senses. First particular valuable things do not matter or count simply because of the amount of value that they bear or that resides in them. Second, we have at least some defeasible reason to preserve particular, valuable things as such, even if by sacrificing them, we could produce more value overall. > > [...] > > ...particular valuable things command a kind of loyalty. They do not become dispensable the minute we could replace them with something of greater value. Conservatives of Cohen's sort will be defeasibly disposed to retain particular valuable things. Even if it means foregoing the opportunity to make things in general, as valuable as possible. Scheffler thinks the crucial distinction, however, is between "something having value" and "one's valuing it": > Valuing something in my view involves a complex syndrome of attitudes and dispositions, including a belief that the thing is valuable, a susceptibility to experience a variety of context dependent emotions concerning the thing, and a disposition to treat considerations pertaining to the thing as providing one with reasons for action in relevant contexts. > > [...] > > It's possible to regard something as valuable (or in Cohen's terms as possessing particular value) without actually valuing it oneself [...] Indeed, most of us regard many things as valuable that we ourselves do not value. > > [...] > > **Valuing something involves more than just believing that it's valuable. It involves a kind of attachment to or investment in or engagement with that thing.** This sort of attachment or investment or engagement is constituted both by emotional vulnerability and by a disposition to see oneself as having reasons for action, with respect to the valued item, that one does not have with respect to other comparably valuable items of the same kind. > > [...] > > This does not mean that I have no reason to do anything at all on behalf of people who are not my friends or indeed that I never have reasons to help preserve other antique rugs or other people's family heirlooms. It means only that by virtue of valuing particular valuable things, we have reasons for action that go beyond the reasons that we and others may have solely in virtue of the intrinsic value of those. > > > These points about the relation between valuing and reasons for action are relevant to Cohen's defensive of conservatism, because **in general, we cannot value things that do not exist and have never existed in the way we value existing things. Valuing involves attachment attachment requires acquaintance and non-existence makes the relevant form of acquaintance impossible.** > > So for example, one cannot value the friendships one has not yet formed in the way that one values one's existing friendships. > > [...] > > it's important not to exaggerate or misinterpret the normative significance of this disposition. Although we have special reasons for action pertaining to items that we already value, these reasons will not always be the strongest reasons we have in any given case. They may be outweighed by sufficiently strong reasons of other kinds. Furthermore, there will be many cases in which we can create new items of value without neglecting the reasons we have to care for the items we already value. > > [...] > > In part, we have a conservative disposition because it follows from the nature of attachment, that valuable things that already exist are reason giving for us in a way that future valuable things are not. Most contemporary discussion of future generations is broadly utilitarian in flavour, and these discussions "implicitly suggest that our primary reasons for concern about the fate of future generations are reasons of beneficence". On the contrary, Scheffler argues that: > we have reasons of at least four different kinds for caring about the fate of future generations. Reasons of love, reasons of interest, reasons of value and reasons of reciprocity. All of these reasons depend in one way or another on our existing values and attachments and on our associated disposition to preserve and sustain the things that we value. The upshot: > Once we free ourselves from the thought that the basis for any concern about the future of humanity must lie in a principle of beneficence of some as yet unspecified sort, we can see that we have reasons of a number of different kinds, all rooted in our actual attachments as flesh and blood human beings for wanting future generations to survive and to flourish. In so far as these reasons depend on our existing values and attachments and on our conservatism about value, they depart from moral and temporal neutralism. > > **Yet it is to these very departures rather than to any form of neutralist beneficence that we must look in order to identify our strongest and deepest reasons for caring about the fate of our successors.** Or so I have been trying to show. At the very least, I hope to have persuaded you, that there is an alternative to thinking about problems of future generations in exclusively or primarily beneficence based terms, or indeed in exclusively moral terms of any kind. Hilary Greaves [has an interesting review](https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/Greaves_Book_review_Scheffler.pdf ) of his book on this stuff. I will write more on this soon. ## GPI workshop I virtually attended a [GPI workshop](https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/7th-oxford-workshop-on-global-priorities-research-23-25-june-2021/). I was mainly there to talk to a few new people, and get a feel for the discussion, which I did. I only watched one full talk live, though I've saved a couple of recordings to watch at some point over the summer. The talk I watched was by [[=Robert Pindyck]], and it was based on his paper [[=Robert Pindyck#The Use and Misuse of Models for Climate Policy]]. In short: people are taking climate models to be much more robust than they actually are, for stupid and predictable reasons related to poor communication. Basically what happens is that people start to mistake numbers some guy just made up for well-established empirical facts. Scary. Reminded me of the book by [[=Mervyn King & John Kay]]. ## Katazyna de Lazari-Radek I started reading and listening to [[=Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek]] interviews as a way into Sidgwick. As the coauthor of "The Point of View of The Universe", I was intrigued to hear her defend monistic theories, [under questioning](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqDgTearV6Y), in the following partly biographical terms: > **I don't like dilemmas, I want to overcome them. I feel that there must be a guidance. Maybe there is this desire in me to find a proper guidance,** and I worry that with pluralistic theories, its impossible, or maybe you need to end up with particularism, i.e. a pluralistic theory where you need to decide _every time_ what to do. I think you are very right that **I am the kind of person who wants to get the troubles out of my way**, even if getting into another one, that is namely putting everything under the umbrella of pleasure. **I also believe that we make quite a lot of mistakes in terms of choosing our values. And that some choices of those values depend on the culture and the religion that we are in. And so that worries me as well, that simply our pluralistic judgements about values are sometimes irrational.** For example we have this discussion in Poland now, about the rationality of the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. We started an uprising against Nazis and it brought a terrible devastation to the whole city, deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, it made no sense at all in terms of consequences. But some people said that it was a sign of our honorable thinking. So there was this honour, this virtue of "doing what needs to be done" even if the consequences were terrible. I think now you can see how people have changed their thinking about values, how now, the value of fighting, even against enemy, is taking less importance than the value of presevation of your life. So to answer your question: **it's not only a desire to make things easier, and to give reason the possibility of a guidance, but also I simply worry that some of the values that we choose are irrational to have, and that they are based on culture and religion and so on.** And further, that although she believes that pleasure is probably the only value, she does not have highly persuasive arguments for this: > I confess that I want to prove that pleasure is a value in itself, but I can't prove that it is the only value.** What I'm trying about those monistic and pluralistic theories is that on the level of theory not of choice between values, its easier to follow monism than pluralism. I wrote about this in Oxford Handbook of Consequentialism. But answering your question I think as with all our values, a lot depends on intutitions and on the examples you give. So I still agree that there are many other values. But **if you ask me whether environment has a value in itself, or a piece of art, apart from beings who can experience that, I don't really believe that it does. But as we know, these are my intuitions and you may have very different. So I can nudge you, probably, I can ask you about what you would choose, whether a painting or a being who can suffer, but I know it has its limits and still you may give answers that are different or completely different from mine. And I think its fine. I don't believe I can do anything more. It may be dissapointing, but I don't know how else to do that. So thanks, that's a great point... to my despair, but it's a great point.** If this is the most she can say, perhaps reading Sidgwick will challenge my pluralist intuitions less than I was expecting... ## Projects I'm happy with progress made during this period. My high level focus was "learning, mainly through writing and conversation", and I did a bunch of that. One worry about my [[> Big picture]] project is that it is potentially vast and lacking definition. To mitigate this, I defined some sub-projects to give a bit more structure, direction, and concrete outputs. Those were: 1. [[Nick Bostrom – An Introductory Reader]] 2. [[> ii Salons]] Working on (1) gave me a good excuse to read and re-read a bunch of Bostrom papers. I have a draft I expect to post to the EA Forum before the end of July. Working on (2) has been fun as well. I'm looking forward to hosting [the first salon](https://interintellect.com/salon/the-methods-of-ethics-the-future-of-humanity/) tomorrow. Preparing for this, and hosting a warmup event last week, has already led to some great conversations I would not otherwise have had. So yes, so far, so good :) My main reservation about this period is that the actual [[§Big picture]] page, and linked notes, is less developed than I hope it would be by now. The reason for that is that I was quite focussed on (1) and (2) above. I'll come back to do another pass on the [[§Big picture]] during the next period. ## Calls with friends and peers I smashed my target for calls with friends and peers, which was lovely and stimulating. I'm especially grateful to my colleague (and now manager) Arden, who generously suggested several calls focussed on "PH personal development", all of which have been very valuable. Also to my former colleague Peter "the other Peter" McIntyre, with whom I did a bunch of virtual coworking calls. ## Life Florent, formerly of Reykjavík Coworking Unit, currently web developer at Greenpeace, came to visit in early June. We had a nice week of coworking and an intense weekend of go-karting. I continued getting to know people in the village I'm staying, to the point where I've now been offered several nice flats for the autumn. I'm pretty sure I'll take one of them. I got Pfizered, without complication, and my Brexit visa came through as expected. Valgeir and Florent came back in late June for the first annual meeting of the Reykjavík Bridge Club. And Guffi bought a last minute plane ticket from Reykjavík, to join us as an honorary member. There was lots of cards, and lots of karting. ## Closing comment Overall, this period has been wonderful, and I've now cemented my intention to continue in this mode until the end of the year. As of this week, my time commtiment to 80,000 Hours switches from 2 days / week to 1, so I will have even more time to focus on Project 32. [^1] There's a famous story about Nietzsche's collapse in Turin, which is sometimes cited as evidence of his personal concern for suffering. Writing this, I found someone claiming that while we have evidence that Nietzsche embraced a horse during his collapse in Turin, the story that he was trying to protect the horse from whip of its coachman—in an echo of Raskolnikov's dream—[was probably invented](https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/nietzsches-horse/)). It looks like [this essay collection](https://www.academia.edu/2584552/Nietzsche_in_Italy) is the source of the debunking claim.