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alexflint comments on Open Thread: March 2010, part 2 - Less Wrong
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If I have no memory of some period in my past, then should I be pleased to discover that was happy during that period? Or is it that past experiences are valuable only through the pleasure their memories give us in the present?
You should be at least as pleased as you would be to discover that someone else was happy during that period.
There is something I find very satisfying about this answer. Possibly this is related to the fact that I like to think of people-over-time as being a succession of distinct, but closely related, identities.
Given that the other person you discover to be happy may be benefiting from the memory of that time, does that have to be true?
If you are a utilitarian, I think you should be pleased.
Imagine you happened to find out that a person on the other side of the world, whose life has never and will never affect yours in any way, is happy right now. You'd be pleased about that, right? Now imagine you knew instead that that person was happy last week. Since this affects you not at all, there's no real difference between these: you're just pleased about the fact of someone's happiness at some point in time.
If you buy my argument up to this point, then you may as well be pleased if that mystery person from the past was actually your own past self. And that's not even to mention Kevin's argument which does take into account the ways in which your past self influences your future self.
Here is one possible reason for being pleased to discover that one was unhappy in the past:
Times of apparent unhappiness can lead to great personal growth. For instance, the hardest, most stressful time of my life was studying for my physics honors exams. However, now that the exams are over, I am glad to have both the knowledge I gained in studying, and the self knowledge that I am capable of pushing myself as hard as I did. (Would skills learned during the missing time be retained? Even if they weren't, the latter reason above would still apply).
It would be devastating to lose the memory of any part of ones life, but I think there would be some satisfaction in learning that one had spent the missing time doing something difficult but worthwhile, even if one was not happy during that time.
I vote "pleased", for the rather weak reason that this makes my preferences time-symmetric*.
* Edit: This is poorly-worded - what I was referring to was time shift symmetry.
But nothing else about the universe is time-symmetric, manifestly including our own revealed preferences -- I would rather be happy in the future but not in the past than be happy in the past but not in the future, if you gave me the choice right now. So this is the only argument I can think of to vote "not pleased" (of course, not displeased either) about one's past, but unremembered, happiness.
(I actually do vote "pleased," though, for the reason I argued here.)
I'm not sure that I'd prefer unrecalled happiness in the past to in the future, but I was thinking of (and should have named) time-shift symmetry, which the fundamental laws of physics are.
I actually agree with your argument for voting "pleased", though, so we might be simply in agreement.
Well then, I'm sure that addresses my objection. But a couple of minutes' googling isn't giving me a good sense of what time-shift symmetry is -- and my physics background is lousy. Could you give me a quick definition?
The laws of physics are invariant in time.
Edit: Clarification - if you write the laws of physics, nowhere do you invoke the absolute time; only changes in time. The outcome of any experiment cannot change just because the time coordinate changes; it can only change because other parameters in the situation change.
Thanks for that.
I remember hearing that there have been some hints that physical constants have changed over time. If they have then the laws of physics wouldn't be time invariant.
Anyone else recall anything along those lines? Wikipedia isn't terrible helpful.
I have not heard of any such theory becoming a credible candidate for acceptance, although I see no logical contradiction in such - my impression is that discovering a time-varying term would be as surprising as discovering energy is not conserved. For fairly fundamental reasons, actually.
Note that in GR defining energy consistently is tough. Doing it so it is globally conserved is even harder. We only really have local conservation, and the changing background of GR in cosmology is in some sense effectively the same thing as changing physical law.
Yes, they tend to be invariant in factors that don't exist ;-P
It sounds as though you now have some information about those past events. Hopefully, it is a sign that your goals were being met during that period. Also, if you managed to learn that, maybe you will also learn something more useful about the period. So: I would say it is normally a good sign.
This seems very unlikely. If the experience of remembering pleasurable events is valuable in itself, why can't other experiences be valuable in themselves?
That past experience is valuable in the sense that it did not damage your psyche in the way that a traumatic experience could have.
Yeah why not. It is better to be pleased than not, all else being equal.