I like Greg Egan’s “outlooks” from Diaspora for many reasons: as a reversible customisable solution to value drift, as a way to temporarily experience the world from the perspective of people with very different aesthetic sensibilities or deep values, to approach problem-solving differently, maybe even to simulate high-level generators of disagreement (which would be a boon for erisology), and I wish it already existed:
Any citizen with a mind broadly modeled on a flesher’s was vulnerable to drift: the decay over time of even the most cherished goals and values. Flexibility was an essential part of the flesher legacy, hut after a dozen computational equivalents of the preIntrodus lifespan, even the most robust personality was liable to unwind into an entropic mess. None of the polises’ founders had chosen to build predetermined stabilizing mechanisms into their basic designs, though, lest the entire species ossify into tribes of self-perpetuating monomaniacs, parasitized by a handful of memes.
It was judged far safer for each citizen to be free to choose from a wide variety of outlooks: software that could run inside your exoself and reinforce the qualities you valued most, if and when you felt the need for such an anchor. The possibilities for short-term cross-cultural experimentation were almost incidental.
Each outlook offered a slightly different package of values and aesthetics, often built up from the ancestral reasons-to-be-cheerful that still lingered to some degree in most citizens’ minds: Regularities and periodicities—rhythms like days and seasons. Harmonies and elaborations, in sounds and images, and in ideas. Novelty. Reminiscence and anticipation. Gossip, companionship, empathy, compassion. Solitude and silence. There was a continuum which stretched all the way from trivial aesthetic preferences to emotional associations to the cornerstones of morality and identity.
and further down:
Inoshiro had argued that this was vis last chance to do anything “remotely exciting” before ve started using a miner’s outlook and “lost interest in everything else”—but that simply wasn’t true; the outlook was more like a spine than a straitjacket, a strengthened internal framework, not a constrictive cage.
One example is miners (of mathematical truth) using outlooks “to keep themselves focused on their work, gigatau after gigatau” (a gigatau is a billion subjective seconds or ~31 years; even among what Mumford calls detective-type mathematicians like Andrew Wiles of FLT fame that’s not the norm). Another example is for appreciating otherwise-incomprehensible art:
“Come and see Hashim’s new piece.”
“Maybe later.” Hashim was one of Inoshiro’s Ashton-Laval artist friends. Yatima found most of their work bewildering, though whether it was the interpolis difference in mental architecture or just vis own personal taste, ve wasn’t sure. Certainly, Inoshiro insisted that it was all “sublime.”
“It’s real time, ephemeral. Now or never.”
“Not true: you could record it for me, or I could send a proxy-”
Ve stretched vis pewter face into an exaggerated scowl. “Don’t he such a philistine. Once the artist decides the parameters, they’re sacrosanct-”
“Hashim’s parameters are just incomprehensible. Look, I know I won’t like it. You go.”
Inoshiro hesitated, slowly letting vis features shrink back to normal size. “You could appreciate Hashim’s work, if you wanted to. If you ran the right outlook.”
Yatima stared at ver. “Is that what you do?”
“Yes.” Inoshiro stretched out vis hand, and a flower sprouted from the palm, a green-and-violet orchid which emitted an Ashton-Laval library address. …
Yatima sniffed the flower again, warily. The Ashton-laval address smelt distinctly foreign … but that was just unfamiliarity. Ve had vis exoself take a copy of the outlook and scrutinize it carefully. … Yatima had vis exoself’s analysis of the outlook appear in the scape in front of ver as a pair of before-and-after maps of vis own most affected neural structures. The maps were like nets, with spheres at every junction to represent symbols; proportionate changes in the symbols’ size showed how the outlook would tweak them.
“Death’ gets a tenfold boost? Spare me.”
“Only because it’s so underdeveloped initially.” …
“Make up your mind; it’s starting soon.”
“You mean make my mind Hashim’s?” “Hashim doesn’t use an outlook.” …
Vis exoself’s verdict on the potential for parasitism was fairly sanguine, though there could he no guarantees. If ve ran the outlook for a few kilotau, ve ought to be able to stop.
Yatima ran the outlook. At once, certain features of the scape seized vis attention: a thin streak of cloud in the blue sky, a cluster of distant trees, the wind rippling through the grass nearby. It was like switching from one gestalt color map to another, and seeing some objects leap out because they’d changed more than the rest. After a moment the effect died down, but Yatima still felt distinctly modified; the equilibrium had shifted in the tug-of-war between all the symbols in vis mind, and the ordinary buzz of consciousness had a slightly different tone to it.
“Are you okay?” Inoshiro actually looked concerned, and Yatima felt a rare, raw surge of affection for ver. Inoshiro always wanted to show ver what ve’d found in vis endless fossicking through the Coalition’s possibilities—because ve really did want ver to know what the choices were.
“I’m still myself. I think.”
“Pity.” Inoshiro sent the address, and they jumped into Hashim’s artwork together.
An example of a bad outlook in Diaspora is the one the Ostvalds use which “made them lap up any old astrobabble like this as if it was dazzlingly profound”. And here’s what I’d consider a horrifying outlook, like a monstrous perversion of enlightenment, which Inoshiro applied to verself after a severely traumatic experience:
Inoshiro said, “I feel great compassion for all conscious beings. But there’s nothing to be done. There will always be suffering. There will always be death.” …
Yatima tried to read vis face, but Inoshiro just gazed back with a psychoblast’s innocence. “What’s happened to you? What have you done to yourself?”
Inoshiro smiled beatifically and held out vis hands. A white lotus flower blossomed from the center of each palm, both emitting identical reference tags. Yatima hesitated, then followed their scent. It was an old outlook, buried in the Ashton-Laval library, copied nine centuries before from one of the ancient memetic replicators that had infested the fleshers. It imposed a hermetically sealed package of beliefs about the nature of the self, and the futility of striving … including explicit renunciations of every mode of reasoning able to illuminate the core beliefs’ failings.
Analysis with a standard tool confirmed that the outlook was universally self-affirming. Once you ran it, you could not change your mind. Once you ran it, you could not be talked out of it.
Yatima said numbly, “You were smarter than that. Stronger than that.” But when Inoshiro was wounded by Lacerta, what hadn’t ve done that might have made a difference? That might have spared ver the need for the kind of anesthetic that dissolved everything ve’d once been?
Inoshiro laughed. “So what am I now? Wise enough to be weak? Or strong enough to be foolish?”
“What you are now-” Ve couldn’t say it.
What you are now is not Inoshiro.
Yatima stood motionless beside ver, sick with grief, angry and helpless. Ve was not in the fleshers’ world anymore; there was no nanoware bullet ve could fire into this imaginary body. Inoshiro had made vis choice, destroying vis old self and creating a new one to follow the ancient meme’s dictates, and no one else had the right to question this, let alone the power to reverse it.
My interest in Egan’s outlooks is motivated by real-world examples too. The example I always think about is Scott’s observation that compared to a decade ago he’s trended “more cynical, more mellow, and more prone to believing things are complicated” and posits (among others) that it would suck if “everything we thought was “gaining wisdom with age” was just “brain receptors consistently functioning differently with age””, like NMDA receptor function changing with aging and maybe “the genes for liberal-conservative differences are mostly NMDA receptors in the brain” (to give a simplistic illustrative example he doesn’t actually put credence in).
The most salient motivating example at the moment is different, it’s Cube Flipper’s estrogen trip report, which I find fascinating, especially these parts (to summarise their wonderfully-detailed descriptions):
sense of space around them was “as if I took the entire volumetric representation of the space around me and increased the degree to which every point within that could influence the location of every other point, recursively. This allows everything to elastically settle into a more harmonious equilibrium”, which made e.g. parallel parking in particular and driving in general easier
sweet things tasted sweeter, sour things “tasted both sweeter and more metallic”
funny things were funnier, “music works now”, they can “lean in to the sense of affection they feel towards their friends”, but also they’ve had situations which they felt compelled to do something about instead of being able to healthily dissociate
wide variation in the way boys smelled, sometimes really quite unpleasant
a sense that their body map was reshaped, “smoothing out knots – like an elastic membrane being tightened, or a soap bubble reaching equilibrium”; might be what others mean by feeling more embodied
And this summary of changes, from a section where the author investigates whether estrogen was pushing them towards the other end of the “autism-schizotypy continuum” by reducing inherent oversensitivity to sensory prediction errors:
I’ll outline some of the psychological changes I’ve noticed in myself since starting estrogen. …
Increased predisposition towards associative thinking. Activities like tarot are more appealing.
Increased mentalising of other people’s internal states, resulting in a mixture of higher empathy and higher social anxiety. I’m somewhat more neurotic about potential threats.
Decreased systematising and attention to detail, for instance with tedious matters like finances.
Armchair diagnoses aside, I do wish to assert that these psychological changes are quite similar to the kind of psychological changes I tend to experience while on a mild dose of psychedelics.
(Tangentially this seems very relevant to the whole high-decoupling vs high-contextualising thing.)
Egan’s outlooks would be like the far more sophisticated version of this: higher precision and customisability (e.g. “death-salience only”, or “don’t lose interest in everything else” cf. the miner outlooks above), higher control granularity (onset/reversal timescales etc), predictable return to baseline, predictability & previewability of changes (and also non-individual variability).
I like Greg Egan’s “outlooks” from Diaspora for many reasons: as a reversible customisable solution to value drift, as a way to temporarily experience the world from the perspective of people with very different aesthetic sensibilities or deep values, to approach problem-solving differently, maybe even to simulate high-level generators of disagreement (which would be a boon for erisology), and I wish it already existed:
and further down:
One example is miners (of mathematical truth) using outlooks “to keep themselves focused on their work, gigatau after gigatau” (a gigatau is a billion subjective seconds or ~31 years; even among what Mumford calls detective-type mathematicians like Andrew Wiles of FLT fame that’s not the norm). Another example is for appreciating otherwise-incomprehensible art:
An example of a bad outlook in Diaspora is the one the Ostvalds use which “made them lap up any old astrobabble like this as if it was dazzlingly profound”. And here’s what I’d consider a horrifying outlook, like a monstrous perversion of enlightenment, which Inoshiro applied to verself after a severely traumatic experience:
My interest in Egan’s outlooks is motivated by real-world examples too. The example I always think about is Scott’s observation that compared to a decade ago he’s trended “more cynical, more mellow, and more prone to believing things are complicated” and posits (among others) that it would suck if “everything we thought was “gaining wisdom with age” was just “brain receptors consistently functioning differently with age””, like NMDA receptor function changing with aging and maybe “the genes for liberal-conservative differences are mostly NMDA receptors in the brain” (to give a simplistic illustrative example he doesn’t actually put credence in).
The most salient motivating example at the moment is different, it’s Cube Flipper’s estrogen trip report, which I find fascinating, especially these parts (to summarise their wonderfully-detailed descriptions):
sense of space around them was “as if I took the entire volumetric representation of the space around me and increased the degree to which every point within that could influence the location of every other point, recursively. This allows everything to elastically settle into a more harmonious equilibrium”, which made e.g. parallel parking in particular and driving in general easier
sweet things tasted sweeter, sour things “tasted both sweeter and more metallic”
funny things were funnier, “music works now”, they can “lean in to the sense of affection they feel towards their friends”, but also they’ve had situations which they felt compelled to do something about instead of being able to healthily dissociate
wide variation in the way boys smelled, sometimes really quite unpleasant
a sense that their body map was reshaped, “smoothing out knots – like an elastic membrane being tightened, or a soap bubble reaching equilibrium”; might be what others mean by feeling more embodied
And this summary of changes, from a section where the author investigates whether estrogen was pushing them towards the other end of the “autism-schizotypy continuum” by reducing inherent oversensitivity to sensory prediction errors:
(Tangentially this seems very relevant to the whole high-decoupling vs high-contextualising thing.)
Egan’s outlooks would be like the far more sophisticated version of this: higher precision and customisability (e.g. “death-salience only”, or “don’t lose interest in everything else” cf. the miner outlooks above), higher control granularity (onset/reversal timescales etc), predictable return to baseline, predictability & previewability of changes (and also non-individual variability).