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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on The Wannabe Rational - Less Wrong
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It is much closer to what I'm talking about.
Orthonormal writes that in the absence of a Framework of Objective Value, he found he still cared about things (the welfare of friends and family, the fate of the world, the truth of my his beliefs, etc).
In contrast, I find my caring begins fading away. Some values go quickly and go first -- the fate of the world, the truth of my own beliefs -- but other values linger, long enough for me to question the validity of a worldview that would leave me indifferent to my family.
Orthonormal also writes that in response to my hypothetical question about purpose,
And none of these are terminal values for me. Existence, happiness, fun and beauty are pretty much completely meaningless to me in of themselves. In fact, the something which causes me to hesitate when I might feel indifference to my family is a feeling of responsibility.
It occurs to me that satisfying my moral responsibility might be a terminal value for me. If I have none; if it really is the case that I have no moral responsibility to exist and love, I'd happily not exist and not love.
Orthonormal, yourself, Eliezer, all seem to argue that value nihilism just doesn't happen. Others concede that nihilism does happen, but that this doesn't bother them or that they'd rather sit with an uncomfortable truth than be deluded. So perhaps it's the case that people are intrinsically motivated in different ways, or that people have different thresholds for how much lack of meaning they can tolerate. Or other 'solutions' come to mind.
I can barely imagine value nihilism, but not a value nihilism from which God or physics could possibly rescue you. If you think that your value nihilism has something to do with God, then I'm going to rate it as much more likely that you suffer from basic confusion, than that the absence of God is actually responsible for your values collapse whereas a real God could have saved it and let you live happily ever after just by ordering you to have fun.
I think the basic problem is that evolution re-used some of the same machinery to implement both beliefs and values. Our beliefs reflect features of the external world, so people expect to find similar external features corresponding to their values.
Actually searching for these features will fail to produce any results, which would be very dismaying as long as the beliefs-values confusion remains.
The God meme acts as a curiosity stopper; it says that these external features really do exist, but you're too stupid to understand all the details, so don't bother thinking about it.
Exactly! I think this is exactly the sort of 'solution' that I hoped physical materialism could propose.
I'd have to think about whether the source of the problem is what Peter has guessed (whether this particular confusion) but from the inside it exactly feels like a hard-wiring problem (given by evolution) that I can't reconcile.
As I wrote above in this thread, I agree that there's not any clear way that the existence of God could solve this problem.
[Note: I took out several big chunks about how religions address this problem, but I understand people here don't want to hear about religion discussed in a positive light. But the relevant bit:]
Peter de Blanc wrote:
And this seems exactly right. Without the God meme telling me that it all works out somehow -- for example, somehow the subjective/object value problem works out -- I'm left in a confused state.