For humans, the end goal is (more or less) happiness, by which I mean more long term good emotions than bad.
If you know that there is some identifiable influence that might change you in a way that you didn’t decide yourself, it seems prudent to resist or circumvent that change. Like calibration in forecasting, this doesn’t require being able to anticipate or affect anything in great detail, merely identifying miscalibration and correcting it. This way, the influence becomes anti-inductive, you cease being able to pinpoint a way in which it affects you.
So the fact that there is something identifiable that seems to affect human behavior (such as emotions, or aggregate happiness) is no reason to accept that influence as normative (though in part it might be), and even in practice to keep treating it as important (as long as it can be moved to a state where it’s not too much of a bother). In this practical sense, a reasonable level of comfort seems much more salient than happiness, even as it too isn’t clearly normative.
Having read the article you linked, my understanding of what you are trying to say is something like “people resist influences on their behaviour which are not their own decision, so any noticed influence will be cancelled out”. I think this is probably mostly true to some approximation, but not sure that this applies to end goals, since human decisions are by definition aiming towards them.
You finish by stating that comfort seems more salient than happiness, and I think that here our only real difference is what our brains pattern match these words to—personally I see both as fairly similar, although with different connotations. In any case comfort seems to get reasonably close to the concept I’m aiming for and probably doesn’t change my main point much.
People don’t necessarily tend to resist external influences, my point is that it’s a feasible and arguably prudent pattern of behavior, and that it results in no longer being able to identify influences that succeed in influencing you (at the level of values), because if you were still able to identify something, you’d be able to oppose/circumvent that particular thing until the overall identifiable influence is canceled out.
Moderate comfort doesn’t play the role of a goal, since it’s a vague broad basin rather than a target to optimize for. While happiness offers a bunch of targets, and specific emotions have hedonism-related targets that can be pursued very far.
If there is no particular reason to endorse those targets as normative, it seems prudent to avoid addiction to their pursuit. That is, the logic of giving in to external influences, such as emotions, is often circular: you keep optimizing for them because you’ve attained a propensity to optimize for them as a consequence of starting on that path, or as a consequence of accepting the circular justification. But if alternatively you didn’t start on that path and instead opposed/circumvented some of these influences, then there wouldn’t be a reason to go there. So I’m not making an argument that emotions/happiness are not part of human values, rather that assuming the conclusion of the circular justification is not a valid reason to endorse them as such, as long as it didn’t already change you to the extent that you started to endorse the change.
Ok, so I think the point I’m attempting to make is slightly more fundamental than I’ve managed to convey so far. I agree that there can often be a circular way in which people justify seeking emotions/happiness or whatever.
However, although I see now this definitely needed more explanation, the way I am defining happiness is positive vs negative emotions. What I mean by this is the sum of any drives built into a human by evolution. Mostly when we do things it is either because we think it will give us some positive reward at some point in the future, we think it will avoid some negative reward in the future, or past positive and negative rewards have shaped us doing the thing automatically.
There are exceptions, so this isn’t a perfect statement, but I feel like happiness as defined in this way is a good approximation for what humans in general are optimising for.
the way I am defining happiness is positive vs negative emotions. What I mean by this is the sum of any drives built into a human by evolution. Mostly when we do things it is either because we think it will give us some positive reward at some point in the future, we think it will avoid some negative reward in the future, or past positive and negative rewards have shaped us doing the thing automatically
So why should this setup motivate you to go along with it, to seek positive reward or avoid negative reward? The fact that evolution did something, or that your brain works a certain way, or that you’ve been behaving in a certain way so far, is no reason at all to keep doing it. A person can change the pattern of their behavior, and even though the past or evolutionary design hold some power, similarly the person’s decisions have power to influence what they do going forward, and in some sense they have more legitimacy to do so.
Perhaps there is a reason to keep doing some of what the past habits or evolution or anticipated emotions are prodding you to do, but being the kind of thing that does it is not by itself that reason, not overwhelmingly so on the practical level, and not at all on the normative level. Provided of course you are not making greater mistakes about normativity with your own decisions than evolution or its psychological adaptations do, which is an important trap and caveat to this discussion.
If you know that there is some identifiable influence that might change you in a way that you didn’t decide yourself, it seems prudent to resist or circumvent that change. Like calibration in forecasting, this doesn’t require being able to anticipate or affect anything in great detail, merely identifying miscalibration and correcting it. This way, the influence becomes anti-inductive, you cease being able to pinpoint a way in which it affects you.
So the fact that there is something identifiable that seems to affect human behavior (such as emotions, or aggregate happiness) is no reason to accept that influence as normative (though in part it might be), and even in practice to keep treating it as important (as long as it can be moved to a state where it’s not too much of a bother). In this practical sense, a reasonable level of comfort seems much more salient than happiness, even as it too isn’t clearly normative.
Having read the article you linked, my understanding of what you are trying to say is something like “people resist influences on their behaviour which are not their own decision, so any noticed influence will be cancelled out”. I think this is probably mostly true to some approximation, but not sure that this applies to end goals, since human decisions are by definition aiming towards them.
You finish by stating that comfort seems more salient than happiness, and I think that here our only real difference is what our brains pattern match these words to—personally I see both as fairly similar, although with different connotations. In any case comfort seems to get reasonably close to the concept I’m aiming for and probably doesn’t change my main point much.
People don’t necessarily tend to resist external influences, my point is that it’s a feasible and arguably prudent pattern of behavior, and that it results in no longer being able to identify influences that succeed in influencing you (at the level of values), because if you were still able to identify something, you’d be able to oppose/circumvent that particular thing until the overall identifiable influence is canceled out.
Moderate comfort doesn’t play the role of a goal, since it’s a vague broad basin rather than a target to optimize for. While happiness offers a bunch of targets, and specific emotions have hedonism-related targets that can be pursued very far.
If there is no particular reason to endorse those targets as normative, it seems prudent to avoid addiction to their pursuit. That is, the logic of giving in to external influences, such as emotions, is often circular: you keep optimizing for them because you’ve attained a propensity to optimize for them as a consequence of starting on that path, or as a consequence of accepting the circular justification. But if alternatively you didn’t start on that path and instead opposed/circumvented some of these influences, then there wouldn’t be a reason to go there. So I’m not making an argument that emotions/happiness are not part of human values, rather that assuming the conclusion of the circular justification is not a valid reason to endorse them as such, as long as it didn’t already change you to the extent that you started to endorse the change.
Ok, so I think the point I’m attempting to make is slightly more fundamental than I’ve managed to convey so far. I agree that there can often be a circular way in which people justify seeking emotions/happiness or whatever.
However, although I see now this definitely needed more explanation, the way I am defining happiness is positive vs negative emotions. What I mean by this is the sum of any drives built into a human by evolution. Mostly when we do things it is either because we think it will give us some positive reward at some point in the future, we think it will avoid some negative reward in the future, or past positive and negative rewards have shaped us doing the thing automatically.
There are exceptions, so this isn’t a perfect statement, but I feel like happiness as defined in this way is a good approximation for what humans in general are optimising for.
I think I agree with the rest of what you said.
So why should this setup motivate you to go along with it, to seek positive reward or avoid negative reward? The fact that evolution did something, or that your brain works a certain way, or that you’ve been behaving in a certain way so far, is no reason at all to keep doing it. A person can change the pattern of their behavior, and even though the past or evolutionary design hold some power, similarly the person’s decisions have power to influence what they do going forward, and in some sense they have more legitimacy to do so.
Perhaps there is a reason to keep doing some of what the past habits or evolution or anticipated emotions are prodding you to do, but being the kind of thing that does it is not by itself that reason, not overwhelmingly so on the practical level, and not at all on the normative level. Provided of course you are not making greater mistakes about normativity with your own decisions than evolution or its psychological adaptations do, which is an important trap and caveat to this discussion.