The arationality of emotion is easy to notice if you have a mood disorder.
isn’t this a bit like saying “the arationality of the conscious mind is easy to notice if you have a thought disorder”?
kbear
Karma: 110
Call me crazy, but I think unflinching analysis is pretty good! What is the alternative?
first, i disagree with the author of the original essay. the rationalist community clearly does engage with emotional and moral realities.
that said, from a faith-based (as opposed to acts-based) perspective, the supposed lack of engagement does undermine the arguments made. it is not so easy to make this perspective clear, according to the rules of logical argument. but my best attempt is something like so:
humans have many drives. most of these are self-serving, if not outright selfish. only one (“compassionate attending” maybe?) is good and just and trustworthy. in the absence of that one, some other motivation will come to bear. this other motivation cannot be trusted, and will bend the argument to its dark designs. to avoid this, one must ~have a pure heart~ engage with the emotional and moral realities.
essentially this rejects the (implicit) acts-based claim that “the provenance of an argument does not matter to its soundness”: we are, after all, fallible humans. and for any argument in a domain rich enough for moral philosophy to matter, we will find enough complexity that we should not trust the argument just because it seems sound.
again, i reject the author’s premise. as well, i myself am not perfectly sympathetic to the faith-based perspective. however, i think it is worth giving it a fair shake.
Merely pointing out that the system starts from freedom and ends with “despotism” and that its conclusion is “monstrous” to you… is not enough. It’s not a real argument.
sure it is! consider a classic troll argument that 1=0. we can conclude that some premise, or step of reasoning must be false, even if we are unable to locate the step. collaborative inquiry would have us then work together to determine the gap.
here, the contradiction is moral rather than logical: “i cannot stand the world that this argument implies is necessary.” nonetheless, a response of “well, you need to engage with the reasoning, not just the conclusion” is rather missing the tone. we should prefer to work with our potentially dissatisfied friend to better understand our own argument, and the range of conclusions they could support.
yes. if we were capable of protecting them, we should have done so. not sure what other conclusion to draw.
if by your post you intended something like “it is in the US and China’s mutual best interest to take the following course of action [...]” then, sure—i strongly agree with this! but it seems prudent to phrase this as a prediction, rather than as a moral recommendation.
does the will of the taiwanese people have no bearing?
seems false, or at least uncharitable. do you expect that such people would self-report along the lines of “i don’t take ideas seriously”? it seems more likely to me that they would report something like “i value family”, and mean it. you may find the idea simple, but it is certainly an idea, and they certainly take it seriously.
put another way, this social conservatism came from somewhere, and is itself an idea. the assumption—that arguments that worked to change your behavior would not change their behavior—can be explained in two ways. either they do not take ideas seriously, as you suggest, or either they value different things than you.
if we assume the base universe looks something like the “objective” version of this universe, then my subjective experience requires vastly less information than the base universe. much of that could be deduplicated between other variations: the positions of the asteroids only need to be simulated once, for instance.
the assumption seems decent to me, as i expect the simulators to dream of variations on their own circumstances.
People want to believe even if dogs and gorillas can’t actually speak, they have some intimate rapport with human language abilities. If there’s a crazy cat lady at the party, it doesn’t pay to imply she’s insane to suggest Rufus knows or cares what she’s saying.
it is not absurd that both (a) legible examples like Koko are made up / wishful thinking, while also (b) animals and humans who live in close proximity can illegibly communicate semi-complex/semi-abstract ideas. certainly humans can communicate without any shared formal language. as much as quite rich narrative can be expressed through gesture and tone.
even secret information tests (researcher leaves the room → animal is shown a secret → researcher must elicit the secret) may not be strong proof. if the communication relies on shared emotional salience, these laboratory settings may not be conducive.
is this a fair summary of how you feel?
“i am five minutes early; no problem, i’ll read my phone.”
“my associate is five minutes late; how dare they!”
is this mostly for business/other high-efficiency contexts? to me, this seems so entirely opposed to what we might call the “spirit of friendship” as to be hard to understand.
i can recognize that there are contexts where efficiency is prioritized. (the way the original essay presented the situation made it seem not to be such a context, though.)
i guess i can imagine a friendly situation where the stakes are high enough that something like this is at play: “bilbo is late again, and now we missed the tour bus!” even then, though—“the real destination was the friends we made all along,” innit?
if you have the time, i would appreciate help understanding!
Being 5 minutes early costs you almost nothing (read your phone). Being 5 minutes late costs social capital.
surely both of these cannot simultaneously be true.
(i don’t mind at all when someone is late! they probably had reasons. i’m curious to hear the story!)
is ai a medium in the way film is a medium?
i mean, i plainly disagree. it seems a failure of imagination that octopus, algae mats, raptors, ant colonies, bees, elephants, etc couldn’t, with a little teleological oomph, build a universe-colonizing technology. so this narrative does not help me locate myself as a human, rather than as any of those.
(“The human form in particular is especially suitable for technological evolution”—i feel that, were i for example an octopus, i could easily make a similar argument about why any high technology would be contingent on intelligent creatures with tentacles. so again, this does not help me locate myself as human.)
overall, it seems to me that if the teleological mushrooms are most interested in simulating powerful artificial minds, and can spookily determine certain events, they could easily find a faster route to “the good stuff”! so i’m still left wondering: why is there something?
And, well, maybe you are only important insofar as your experience is required to compute something that’ll have a causal effect on a more important distant descendant of yours.
right, but my point is that, for all i know, we are not yet close to a singularity. small details of subjective experience many hundreds or thousands of years prior could be “remembered” in the sense that the simulated instant depends on them. so this metaphysics does not help me locate myself temporally near the singularity, either.
it just asserts (as in Fn. 3) that the specific details of its history are such that the outcome on the distant descendant ends up being xyz.
perhaps this point is critical to our disagreement. i don’t expect that there’s a meaningful difference (from the perspective of one of the simulation’s denizens) between reifying a moment for which my current subjective experience is a logical necessity, and reifying the moments in which the subjective experience is more traditionally thought to be taking place.
in other words, the glider experiences all the time between its start and end, even if the metamind moves ahead in leaps and bounds.
Another class of examples: very often in social situations, the move which will actually get one the most points is to admit fault and apologize. And yet, instead of that, people instinctively spin a story about how they didn’t really do anything wrong.
as a nitpick (i find the other examples compelling): recruiting others to go along with obvious lies is a strong test and demonstration of status-power.
if the underminds want to colonize this universe, why would they use humans rather than algae, dinosaurs, earth mushrooms, ants, turtles, etc? what is so interesting about a human-descended singularity, compared to any other singularity?
as well, this doesn’t seem to address certain holographies. perhaps it is me who is important, or perhaps it is some distant descendant in the far future, whose existence depends critically on a typo i’m about to make. (said typo is the complex result of my personal history, explaining why i am blessed with “subjective experience”, and not merely surmised.)
a force that wills complexity is an interesting postulate, but i cannot recommend this essay as a self-consistent treatment of the idea.
(thank you for writing it, to be clear!)
this. if what you want from these people is a set of NPC punching bags, then by all means. but perhaps you would find value in helping them achieve insight.
recommend finding your most sports-watching friend, and asking to tag along the next time they watch sports. sports bars are loud and obnoxious; home viewings can be fun and cheerful. i suspect your wit and humor would be greatly appreciated by the other attendees!
sf is the relatively much younger city, and radically reinvented itself as few as 60 years ago. by that metaphor, i am not surprised that its ideas smell more fresh.
yes! i understood your meaning, and intended to respond to it! i see the argument you are making, but disagree with its conclusion: asking “which of these events is worse?” is a type error. they are incomparable.
should britney spears be forced to perform in order to save a life? should the trolleyman make a Toxic choice? <-- these questions are so contrived that they are not meaningfully answerable. the ‘correct’ response is “please stop placing me in hypothetical situations!”
referring to your ladder, what i mean is this. hearing the news of event number 1 may have a larger impact on me than the news of event number 5. however, this is not at all the same as making a choice between the two events. if presented with such a choice, one ‘should’ kobayashi maru. any other response is morally and ethically bankrupt. at the very least one ‘should not’ make the decision frivolously: “oh, yep. option 5. already considered it. give me something harder next time, huh?” disgusting.
(it may be possible to appeal to an exoself, who is able to sort between the potential news items, but this brings in rather more metaphysics than i am comfortable making claims about. specifically, it’s not clear to me how to reason about the interaction between the self’s and exoself’s desiderata.)
to resolve your slope, it is ‘obvious’ to me that items 1-5 are equal, while 6 and 7 are in different categories. i myself may have specific revealed preferences between 1-5 (though, see above), but my selfishness is not an ethical principle. nor are my emotional responses my barometer of what’s good.
i do not find these events to be comparable, after a great deal of reflection.
Totoro is perfectly constructed in this way. not just in that scene, but credits to credits: the main driver of the plot is tucked just out of reach, on the upper shelf. as for the characters, as for the young audience.
a book that succeeds in this way is Holes. upon returning to it as an adult, i found that i had simply not read (or internalized) the central and most moving chapter.
both works also manage a further trick: they make this confusion primary to the conflict. contrast with Frozen and Up where these framing events are better understood as worldbuilding than narrative.
any non-literal storytelling tool (satire, allegory, allusion, theme, …) can be straightforwardly used to discriminate audiences according to their sophistication. it is more rare (and more enjoyable!) when the simultaneous readings apply to the literal events (and without any tricks that would warrant the “psychological”, or “unreliable” qualifiers). i cannot think of other examples at this time.