I am a relative newcomer to Less Wrong. I discovered Elizer Yudkowski and Scott Anderson in 2019. My posts revolve around trying to solve quantum gravity and build an AGI. For my day job, I run a consumer AI company.
lsusr
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My answer to that question it is so far off the collective map of Less Wrong that stating it here would not result in a productive conversation. If our timeline is the blue walk of the post’s 3D plot then my answer comes from the red one.
The enlightenment started around 300 years ago. It sounds like 300 years is a long period of historical time to you. To me, it is a short period of historical time. This itself could be the crux of our disagreement.
I do not mean that progress is impossible either. My argument is far more precise than that. I just saying that it is impossible to distinguish progress from a random walk using certain common meta-epistemological methods.
I mean that chairs and apples are less universal than the Universal Law of Gravitation. Similarly, ethical fashions are not fundamental to the universe. They are, as you put it “facts about people”. Though old news to you, this idea is not obvious to many of the people I interact with in real life, including some who love to talk about ethics.
A universal standard of ethics must have practical utility in every society at every point in history.
I suppose so, but why would you want one?
Because if I do not follow a universal standard of ethics then my entire ethical system will be founded on nothing more than transient fashions. Little is sufficient for most practical applications. Big is about understanding the universe. I want to understand the universe.
What is the loss function here, and why is it relevant to ethics?
This is a very complicated question and lots of other people have written about it already, in depth and in better places than eight comments deep into an online forum. If you are sufficiently interested in this subject, I recommend reading a book by Dharma Dan, Brad Warner, Thích Nhất Hạnh or the 14th Dalai Lama. You may prefer Dharma Dan to the others as he is the most secular of this group.
If you are curious about how ethics can exist without a loss function, you may find interesting The Chrysanthemum and the Sword by Ruth Benedict. (I listed this book in the footnotes to the original article.) This book describes a real-world ethical system where internal coherence (an abstract well-defined loss function) was not a value. I hope in the future to write a future about Daoism that expands upon this idea.
By “subjective” I mean that ethics is not meaningful without an observer. There can be no meaningful ethics in a lifeless, brain-less world without actors. By “relative” I mean taking the measure of an ethical system relative to another ethical system. “Differences in degrees Celsius” is a relative measure but “degrees Kelvin” is an absolute measure.
As someone with experience meditating, I don’t think these are religious Barnum statements at all. But this is not obvious if you have not had certain experiences for yourself.
Finally, how can contemplation in the wilderness be an experiment in observing anything but individual human psychology?
It isn’t. But we are all the same species and tend to be similar to each other in the most fundamental ways. Study one mouse thoroughly enough and you will learn a lot about mice in general. I would love to see a wealth of scientific data on the effect of mystical practice on happiness and other metrics like default mode activation, but such data does not exist right now.
Given how the brain works, there seems to be no pathway to experience ultimate reality directly.
If “ultimate reality” means “the process by which your brain constructs a simulation of reality” or “all of reality as constructed by your brain” then I believe there is a mechanism to experience something like this directly. Specifically, I suspect that connectome-specific harmonic waves exchange information by adjusting their resonances relative to each other. If CSHW resonance works this way and the global workspace is a low frequency harmonic wave then concentrating on a single thing for a long time ought to get different regions to sync up with each other like a room full of pendulums. This ought to increase the information exchange between them, linking together different parts of the brain that are normally separate from each other.
It has been designed by many people all over the world (but mostly in Asia) over thousands of years through extensive trial and error. I think some of the methods are very good and have tried them out myself. I persevered with my favorite technique and it produced fascinating results for me. Mysticism has the advantage over Western philosophy in that it allows a practitioner to observe ethics unfolding in the mind directly. This brings ethics down from philosophical word games into the empirical reality of consciousness.
I think you could make an even stronger argument against my post by writing the following:
The OP makes two contradictory claims:
“Western philosophy has no place for empiricism.”
“[E]mpiricism once formed the foundation for the Age of Reason.”
The “Age of Reason”, also known as the “Age of Enlightenment”, included the British Empiricists who founded a tradition of Western philosophy so empirical it now dominates the world.
Thank you for your comment about “structured patterns”. I think you did a great job of explaining ideas I had not delved deep into within my original post. I like your metaphor about how mystics map “more of the territory” too. I think some schools (vipassana especially) map the territory in finer detail as well.
I feel like Eliezer Yudkowsky’s argument about Bayesian complexity in his Quantum Physics and Many Worlds sequence favors the mystics’ perspective. Why do you think Occam’s Razor favors the second perspective? Are “weird neurological pathways” not part of the territory of consciousness?
Ethics is a construct of the mind. Mysticism is a suite of techniques designed to observe the constructs of your mind in absolute terms. Therefore mysticism can be used to observe ethics on its own absolute terms. The “structured patterns” part provides the intersubjective consistency necessary for productive dialogue about these subjective experiences.
Btw I think that mental illness also follows structured patterns.
You are not wrong. Mystics can be considered mentally ill within the Western paradigm. Psychiatrist Scott Anderson writes about this in his post Gupta on Enlightenment.
Living in the condition of having no internal dialogue, no flow of thoughts, no flow of images, just Smack, into the present is quite an abrupt thing. For the first couple of weeks I thought I’d gone completely mad. Oh my god I’ve totally broken myself. I’m fucked. And I discovered that I could still go to work, and I could still socialise with people and I could cook and get through all the basic things of life. Nobody outside of me seemed to notice any particular change in my behaviour, even though I was lost in this rapturous state of total absorption with the world. Wow, this is amazing, woah! And then life continued.
I’d run right off the edge of every reality map that I had because if you go to a psychologist or a psychiatrist and say, by the way I did really a lot of meditation and my internal dialogue has totally stopped. Any ideas what I do now? Nobody ever winds up there in the West because nobody does enough meditation, at least they don’t do it right.
Actually, sometimes people do come to psychiatrists with these kinds of complaints. I usually try to explain what’s going on, and they usually tell me they were just meditating because someone said it relieved stress, and nobody warned them they could actually have mystical experiences, and this was not what they signed up for. Symptomatic treatment and a hard ban on further meditation successfully de-mysticize most of these people, and they are able to go back to their regular lives. I assume if there’s an afterlife some sort of cosmic wisdom deity is going to be very angry at me – but hey, I’m just doing my job.
I am happy to hear you enjoyed this article.
I agree that an individual can subjectively improve zir ethics over time. It follows that so can a society. But just because a society can improve does not mean it has improved.
That said, I suspect an unspoken aspect to your argument is that we have already randomly walked around, if not precisely on, the optimal human ethic. In this way, there can be no ethical progress. It’s just a matter of getting a critical mass of humanity to zero in on that location.
Really? Why do you think so? I claim ethics is absolute. No mass of humanity shouting will ever make it so.
Should you sacrifice your son to a hallucinated god, turn the other cheek, slay the unbelievers and rape their women, observe your thoughts until you conclude that nothing is real, or...?
“No”, “yes”, “no”, “no”, and “it depends”, respectively. Some of these questions are more complicated than they appear to outsiders. For example, while the Covenant is seen as a one-way street in Christianity, the Jewish Covenant can be seen more as a two-way negotiation within Jewish theology. Would Abraham have sacrificed Isaac if God had not rescinded the command? Perhaps Abraham was testing God rather than the other way around. But I do not think any of these specific questions get to the crux of our disagreement.
And how much similarity is there between the ethical pronouncements?
I think this is the crux of our disagreement. The ethical systems pronounced are all context-dependent products of their time, so to compare them we must examine them in a context-free way. The simplest way to cut away much of the context is to examine their epistemology.
Most (all?) contemplation-based mystic techniques have strikingly similar methods. By focusing one’s thoughts on a single target of attention, they not only get the junk from your social networks[1] out of your mind, they help you get other junk out of your mind too.
So far, I find it plausible that going away from other people for several days is good to focus on developing your own philosophy.
I think we have common ground here. Furthermore, I contend there exist contemplative techniques that can magnify the effect of getting away from it all.
Social networks have been around since before Homo sapiens. ↩︎
I don’t think cutting my mass media consumption would make me blind to trends. For example, the big political trend these days is advocated for on the homepage of a webcomic I read three times per week, graffitied twice on the path from my house to the nearest grocery store and displayed in giant bold sans-serif on Amazon’s AWS sign-in page. Two of my immediate family members actively participate as leaders in the streets and hundreds of protesters marched through my neighborhood while I was working out in the park. When the city police repeatedly teargassed the protesters I received a series of emergency curfew notifications on my phone from the city government. Such trends are hard to miss.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
If I had trusted mass media then I would have under-prepared for COVID-19 instead of starting a company to mass produce preventative equipment the day the virus was discovered in my country. I even ordered masks many weeks before the virus was discovered in the USA. This all happened months into a period where I had stopped following the news.
That said, I absolutely agree that there are no good tools for aggregation. I might reconsider the value of news if someone could build a good AI to filter it for me.
Yes, you have reconsidered the incentives of new agencies, but what of yourself?
My objective when consuming media is to become happy and smart. News reduces my happiness and makes me stupid.
You say that the relationship between your happiness and news is not subjective, but aren’t all feelings subjective?
I mean that following the news causes objectively observable behaviors that are known to reduce happiness.
Could it be the case that you are a less happy person when watching news because the news is, simply put, largely negative? Or perhaps that you, like many including myself, feel powerless in the face of negative news that is far away?
Yes. Negativity is indeed a contributing factor.
Could your new sources be less biased or more diverse?
Maybe? But I would have to go to extremely offbeat publications to get this to work. I have tried reading Al-Jazeera, news from South Africa, news from Nigeria, news from China in Chinese, anti-Chinese news in English, Fox News, my local moderate newspaper and my local radically leftist newspaper. The radical leftists produce a useful independently-researched cheatsheet during election season. Otherwise, all I found were different flavors of propaganda and advertisements. Specialized forums and independent reporters dedicated to extremely narrow topics can get around the specific bias identified in this post, but even they still run into the (unexplored by this post) Lindy Effect.
Couldn’t it be the case that seeking out authors that have beliefs that align with you could challenge you less as an intellectual, and therefore be less productive for your mental broadening even if it feels better?
Yes? I am not sure what this is getting at because you wrote it before my comment mentioning Noam Chomsky. Are you suggesting I seek out authors who disagree with the likes of George Orwell? That is, I should read straight fascist propaganda? I love being challenged by coherent arguments, but prolonged attention to a repetitive stream of beliefs-as-attire seems like a non-optimal allocation of my time.
I run a company that has been featured in the media, so I get a look behind the curtain. Paul Graham writes about this experience in The Submarine.
For deeper, more traditionally academic-style evidence, you can find the propaganda bias painstakingly documented in Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. A more recent take is available in Hate Inc by Matt Taibbi.
This post merely illustrates a phenomenon I have been investigating for a long time.
Are your previous models single or multi-agent? These ideas match multiagent models of the mind. If you start by assuming the mind to be a single agent then CSHW will not fit in with your previous models of the mind’s structure.
Yes, lol. The comments to this sequence, on the other hand, have been mercifully intelligent. They include phrases like “having done graduate work in general relativity” and “it [relativistic Lagrangian mechanics] makes sense for the effective field theory form of GR, for light at least”.
I hope people are downvoting this because they understand what it means, and disagree with the logical chain. Not just because it contradicts Copenhagen.
Gravity is present everywhere in the universe. Apples and chairs are not and will never be present everywhere in the universe.