Honestly if I ever found my values following valutron outputs in unexpected ways like that, I’d suspect some terrible joker from beyond the matrix was messing with the utility function in my brain and quite possibly with the physics too.
We don’t find ourselves surprised by ethics on the basis of some external condition that we are checking against, so we can conclude that there IS a difference between “subjective” and “objective” ethics. In fact, when humans try to make systems that way, we end up revising them as our subjective values change, which you would not expect if our values were actually coming from an objective source.
Right.
Which very well describes the way the type distinction of “objective” and “subjective” feels intuitively obvious, and logically sound. Alternatives aint conceivable.
That’s one of the zombie’s weak points, anyway.
It just doesn’t seem like much of a zombie. But that makes sense as it wasn’t discovered by someone by trying to pin down an honest sense of fear.
My zombie originally was, and I think I can sum it up as the thought that:
Maybe the same principles that identify wirehead-type states as undesirable under our values, would, if completely and consistently applied, identify everything and anything possible as in the class of wirehead-type states.
(The simple “enjoy broccoli” was an analogy for the entire complicated human CEV.
I threw in a reference to “meaningful human relationships” not because that’s my problem anymore than the average person, but because “other people” seems to have something important to do with distinguishing between a happiness we actually want and an undesirable wirehead-type state.)
How do you kill that zombie? My own solution more-or-less worked, but it was rambling and badly articulated and generally less impressive than I might like.
And yeah, the philosophical problem is at base an existential angst factory. The real problem to solve for me is, obviously, getting around the disappointing life setback I mentioned.
But laying this philosophical problem to rest with a nice logical piledriver that’s epic enough to friggin incinerate it would be one thing in service of that goal.
I… don’t think that metaphor actually connects to any choices you can actually make.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against ignoring things. There are so many things you could pay attention to and the vast majority simply aren’t worth it.
But when you find yourself afraid, or uneasy, or upset, I don’t think you should ignore it. I don’t think you really can.
There’s got to be some thought or belief that’s disturbing you (usually, caveats, blah blah), and you’ve got to track it down and nail it to the ground. Maybe it’s a real external problem you’ve got to solve, maybe it’s a flawed belief you’ve got to convincingly disprove to yourself, or at least honestly convince yourself that the problem belongs to the huge class of things that aren’t worth worrying about.
But if that’s the correct solution to a problem, just convincing yourself it aint worth worrying about, you’ve still got to arrive at that conclusion as an actual belief, by actually thinking about it. You can’t just decide to believe it, cuz that’d just be belief in belief, and that doesn’t really seem to work, emotionally, even for people who haven’t generalized the concept of belief in belief.
Anyway, the more I’ve had to practice articulating what was bothering me (that about our/my values logically auto-cannibalizing themselves), the more I’ve come to actually believe that it’s not worth worrying about. (It no longer feels particularly likely to really mean much, and then even if it did why would it apply to me?)
So when you said:
Yeah, that’s pretty much exactly what I was doing when I wrote this post. Just that in order to effectively reach [C:Ignore], you’ve got to properly do [A:look at problem] first, and [B: try looking for solutions] is part of that.