Also, I enjoy playing Superman 64′s ring levels.
Rukifellth
Karma: 346
When we hear of people seeking status, we recall the consequences of pursuit of status (loneliness, strife), rather than what status itself causes for the people who achieve it (freedom, sense of having done something important). Since the action of imagining that status could mean the latter is made impossible due to awareness of the former, the feeling of lostness arises, from a lack of a reference point to empathize with the feelings of others that believe these things.
I don’t know what to make of this. It means everything I’d pieced together about people is utterly, utterly wrong, because it assumed that they all valued truth, and understanding—the pursuits of intelligence when you don’t have the political trait.
Literal emotional reactions are assigned to situations and concepts all the time, but ultimately, every person on Earth just wants to feel at rest, with the awareness that nothing bad is happening and the awareness of opportunities and/or warmth around them. Therefore, everyone (that means yourself and myself!) seeks truth and understanding, it’s just that the very words “truth” and “understanding” are assigned different emotional reactions, and so are given different priorities based on the life situation of the people being queried of these concepts.
Therefore the most one can say about people is not that they don’t seek truth or understanding, but rather, they’ve chosen a different means to get to the place that truth or understanding lead to.
If I may ask, is this line of thinking limited or global in emotional significance?
True. Would “desires” be more appropriate than “seek”?
Not necessarily. While for every person “truth” and “understanding” have require different thought processes in objective reality, the subjective feeling for everyone is similar enough for them to be considered universal values that most people at least desire. This works best if “truth” and “understanding” are considered states of mind that everyone has subjective triggers for, because it allows for an objective reality of “truth” and “understanding”, while preserving the notion of subjective definitions and requirements.
While everyone therefore desires truth and understanding, they may not seek it because those concepts aren’t considered necessary or connected for other desirable things. I may have misunderstood the OP’s dilemma- was he disturbed by the idea that people don’t value truth and understanding?
Intrinsically. It may just be that they’re not seeking it at the moment.
That isn’t an inconsistency if people can have more than one intrinsic value.
EDIT: Ahh, I’m not sure I follow what you wrote there.
It can, it’s a specific application of a general principle.
Hey, does anyone want to play an AI box with me? Ever since I read about Elizer’s experiment I’ve been curious.
I wouldn’t play at all, as the implications of memory wipes are too disturbing for me to go with.
If pressed to not use common sense, I’d go with the exquisite bliss, as Death is essentially an ultimate memory wipe that would follow the billion dollars spending spree, making the two options metaphysically similar in nature, with the difference being that exquisite bliss is subjectively better than simply having a billion dollars.
I could then point out that since the Omega being is bored, he could have loads more fun with me arguing my way out of the scenario than by subjecting me to eternal torture.
On the Resolution of Frightening Paradoxes and Inferences
Probably, though it reminds me of the part in Brave New World, where the psychologist Bernard realizes that the beliefs of everyone who came to see him were actually just phrases repeated in their sleep. I think that if this idea were capitalized on, someone would have to go ahead and resolve this potential existential question before some poor soul runs into it by them-self.
Clever. I don’t suppose utility being served by theatrics occurred to you?
I suppose it was overdone though, especially the title.
Mine isn’t a moral crisis, but thank you. The Price story was a specific example of the more general problem.
Damn, you’re right. I had thought that it was an offer, since both options had a positive.
Are the simulations of myself P-zombies?
Wouldn’t a mental illness group targeted to Lesswrongers be about basilisk-like problems, since basilisks are more prominently mentioned here?
If there’s no one else who has basilisks to share, then no action ought to be taken regarding basilisks, yes. However, if other people do have basilisks, then something ought to be done, preferably in a closed environment. The thing is, right now we have no sure way of knowing if people have basilisks, because no one in their right mind would actually tell others the details without prompting.
In any case, if somebody else has a basilisk, they might come up and comment with “Yeah, let’s do it”. If nobody else has basilisks, then that won’t happen, and only then will the group be proven unnecessary. I’d rather wait and see whether that happens or not.
Assuming that the mindreaders punish people that don’t turn in SpaceJews, trying to tell others about the problem is either suicide or mini-basilisk inducing, depending on that person’s disposition towards me. On the other hand, if I were to ask help from a group of other purple-eyed SpaceJews who already determined the same secret and were in no greater danger for that request, we would at least be slightly be more likely to come up with a solution better than “commit suicide to protect other purple-eyed SpaceJews.”
As such, the purpose of a closed group would be more of a way to negotiate the basilisk(s) in such a way that doesn’t create additional risk, because anyone informed of said basilisk(s) would either
A) Already be distracted by the same basilisk, creating zero net loss B) Be distracted by an old basilisk, the idea being that their previous distraction/non-investment in the ideas that set up the new basilisk will render them less likely to get caught in the same loop and more likely to come up with a creative solution. As David_Gerard said,
From (anectdotal-level) observation of examples, the famous LW basilisk is something that you need a string of things going wrong to be upset by: you need to believe certain Sequence memes, you need to believe they imply particular things in a particular way, you need to be smart enough to understand for yourself how they imply what they do, and you need to be obsessive in just the wrong way.
Suppose basilisk A is of consequence Z, and is known by John. David however, does not care either way about consequence Z, possibly because he already knows about basilisk B and is more concerned about consequence X, and John is in the same spot as David in the matter of which basilisk is more important. Since both are already being distracted by a basilisk either way, they could trade basilisks, each hoping that the other might come up with a resolution without worrying about spreading it to somebody who would actually suffer a decreased quality of life for it.
The main difficulty would lie in knowing where to draw the lines. Do you include any sort of agitated response to any sort of idea that isn’t of immediate practical relevance to daily life?
I would draw the line at regular obsessions, mostly because cognitive behavioural therapy at least offer some options. I have some experience with obsessions, and those were self contained, situationally. Not a personal example, but a pre-occupation with staying away from sharp objects for fear of committing suicide, despite not having depression or violent impulses, is local to that situation of being around sharp objects, not triggered by simply thinking about sharp objects in a room completely devoid of sharp objects.
Anything within the line would be subjects whose trigger is their being facts, whose consequences are reacted to quite quickly, and are not specific to any physical situation a person may be in at the time. I’m not so sure about Pascal (based on that sentence alone I mean), but Everett’s daughter would fit the bill, assuming her belief compelled her to commit suicide, rather than gave her freedom to do it. I recall one person who actually had a similar problem here at Lesswrong, not two months ago actually. I’m surprised that I forgot about it. I guess I would call these “abstract obsessions” as opposed to “personal obsessions”.
I apologize for not fleshing this out in better detail in the original post; I wasn’t expecting this to generate interest from anywhere outside the hypothetical target audience, though in retrospect, I would probably have dug into it too.
EDIT: I’m reading the transcription of XiXiDu’s psychology session, and this looks exactly like the class of problem I’m talking about.
I got into a community of intelligent, creative free-thinkers by reading fan fiction of all things.
You know the one.
Anyway, my knowledge of what is collectively referred to as Rationality is slim. I read the first 6 pages of The Sequences, felt like I was cheating on a test, and stopped. I’ll try to make up for it with some of the most unnecessarily theatrical and hammy writing I can get away with.
I love word play, and over the course of a year I offered (as a way of apology) to owe my friend a quarter for every time I improvised a pun or awful joke mid-conversation, by the end of which I could have bought a dinner for him at Pizza Delight- I didn’t. It’s on my to-do list to compile all the wises that Carlos Ramon ever cracked on The Magic School Bus and put it on you tube, because no one else has and it needs to be done, damn it. As you can tell, I sometimes write for it’s own sake, sort of a literary hedonist if you will. But all good things must come to an end...
My greatest principle is that a person’s course in life is governed by their reaction to their circumstance, and that nothing at all is of certainty. The nature of the human mind is a process which our current metaphors and models can only approximate, a physical system adjusting itself, which words like “I”, “our” and “qualia” can only activate whatever concept we have to answer the question of “What”. Because of this, I have a great sympathy towards Eastern spirituality and some Christian mysticism, because they have the spirit of what we’re all trying to accomplish here; to answer a question.
Sometimes I end up in the psychological equivalence of a fractal zoom where philosophy has this impossible to divide property, of all things linking to others without there being any elementary axioms or parts, probably because of that whole “brain made of neurons” racket. I concluded that emotions are just another form of sense; love, curiosity and understanding being reactions and sensory input much like taste and touch. Happily any cognitive dissonance or emptiness can be discarded the same way, and the logical contradiction a property of the purely physical (rather than comforting “conceptual”) nature of our very thought, meaning that I’ll simultaneously accept the objective truth of this, but reject any emotional significance, as emotional significance is itself deconstructed as a concept.
Of course the empathy gap and the nature of attention span (or at least my attention span) means that I’m normally not like this unless triggered. To me, regular life is the reaction of our psyche, broken up occasionally by the temporary delusion that a fractal zoom of philosophy can answer my questions. I call this a “delusion” because the concept of a question to be answered is an extraneous layer added to by an entity which just wants to avoid suffering.
The human mind; a non-linear physical system which tries to evaluate itself with a linear processing system that’s not suited to that sort of thing at all. Sometimes I wonder if who we are is just the sum of five or six different personalities, each with about a fifth of sixth of our functioning, plus a heavy specialization in one type of behaviour, the sum of which is an idea of what is right and wrong with a sense of identity. Given the existence of neural pathways in our spinal column, I wouldn’t be surprised. Sometimes I feel like I can feel the shape of our brains based on this, but that’s probably just me connecting concepts to high school biology.
I went off the rails a bit there, but looking back, I figure this should be a more honest introduction from me than any structured post. Even so, I doubt I can really convey that kind of leg twisting logical insanity without the meaning being hallowed by interpretation and pattern recognition.
Ugh, I feel like there wasn’t a speck of relate-ability there at all. Well, I’m eighteen years old and male. I followed the My Little Pony following out of a combination of boredom, fascination and a love of the bizarre. The show never struck a chord with me at all, really, but the fandom was something else. There was a period of about a month where I read crossover fan fictions, but I couldn’t be bothered after that point, because the fandom’s growth wound down and the novelty was gone. Even so, Nine Knackered Souls is the funniest fan fiction I’ve ever read, a Red vs Blue crossover. Fallout Equestria is the longest and most “so-okay-it’s average” fan fiction, despite the fact that I was drawn in enough to overlook the Mary sue aspects and read the whole thing in like four days in one sitting...
I’m going into Computer Science at Dalhousie University, and CSci being what it is, I’m going to make up my path as I go along. I really don’t know enough about robotics, AI or informatics to make the choice between them right now anyway.