The vibe I get is that putting yourself in their shoes makes you feel: “holy fuck why am I so stupid, what?”
So why does doing that even make sense in the first place?
Empathy is good for your feelings they say yet feels are feels and utils are utils and if it ain’t helping with utils then why the fuck would you do it?
I think the question comes down to whether you need to be strong to be loved? You to some extent need to be strong to be respected yet this is not about action policies, this is about world models?
Free will comes in degrees and you would put more responsibility on a chess engine with mean depth 12 to see the 13th move than you would a chess engine with mean depth 10 (Dennett’s definition of will). Empathy allows you to see at what depth their chess engine is behaving so that you can improve your world model.
If they’re only at depth 10 and can’t solve it as a consequence then compassion is warranted. It’s a wolrd modelling tool so that you know what can’t be changed in your environment and if you truly, fully accept it you will become less frustrated with people being stupid because they never had the option to not be stupid?
I mean, yeah, but that’s basically just the “suspension of disbelief” option. I stop thinking of them as the same kind-of-creature as myself, stop trying to put myself in their shoes, and feel compassion toward them the way I feel compassion toward a cat. I have no trouble feeling compassion toward cats!
I think there are levels between cat and human and that there are different agent classes. It’s more about picking the right refrence class than it is anything else I think?
To what extent are they able to do intelligent and agentic actions? If they aren’t then you can be more kind to them because they’re not as able to act? Or you can start figuring out how to explain something to change things for the better?
(not to call people dogs but sometimes I can feel like what it feels like to be a dog, it’s pretty awesome so why not?)
The vibe I get is that putting yourself in their shoes makes you feel: “holy fuck why am I so stupid, what?”
So why does doing that even make sense in the first place?
Empathy is good for your feelings they say yet feels are feels and utils are utils and if it ain’t helping with utils then why the fuck would you do it?
I think the question comes down to whether you need to be strong to be loved? You to some extent need to be strong to be respected yet this is not about action policies, this is about world models?
Free will comes in degrees and you would put more responsibility on a chess engine with mean depth 12 to see the 13th move than you would a chess engine with mean depth 10 (Dennett’s definition of will). Empathy allows you to see at what depth their chess engine is behaving so that you can improve your world model.
If they’re only at depth 10 and can’t solve it as a consequence then compassion is warranted. It’s a wolrd modelling tool so that you know what can’t be changed in your environment and if you truly, fully accept it you will become less frustrated with people being stupid because they never had the option to not be stupid?
I mean, yeah, but that’s basically just the “suspension of disbelief” option. I stop thinking of them as the same kind-of-creature as myself, stop trying to put myself in their shoes, and feel compassion toward them the way I feel compassion toward a cat. I have no trouble feeling compassion toward cats!
I think there are levels between cat and human and that there are different agent classes. It’s more about picking the right refrence class than it is anything else I think?
To what extent are they able to do intelligent and agentic actions? If they aren’t then you can be more kind to them because they’re not as able to act? Or you can start figuring out how to explain something to change things for the better?
(not to call people dogs but sometimes I can feel like what it feels like to be a dog, it’s pretty awesome so why not?)