lessdazed comments on Metacontrarian Metaethics - Less Wrong
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I'm having trouble inferring your point here... The contrast between 'those who are dreaming think they are awake, but those who are awake know they are awake' and "I refuse to extend this reply to myself, because the epistemic state you ask me to imagine, can only exist among other kinds of people than human beings" is always on the edges of every moral calculation, and especially every one that actually matters. (I guess it might sound like I'm suggesting reveling in doubt, but noticing confusion is always so that we can eventually become confused on a higher level and about more important things. Once you notice a confusion, you get to use curiosity!)
Yeah, so this gets a little tricky because the decision forks depending on whether or not you think most people would themselves care about their future smarter selves' values, or whether you think they don't care but they're wrong for not caring. (The meta levels are really blending here, which is a theme I didn't want to avoid but unfortunately I don't think I came up with an elegant way to acknowledge their importance while keeping the spirit of the post, which is more about noticing confusion and pointing out lots of potential threads of inquiry than it is an analysis, since a real analysis would take a ton of analytic philosophy, I think.)
Ah, I was trying to hint at 3 main branches of calculation; perhaps I will add an extra sentence to delineate the second one more. The first is the original "go with whatever my moral intuitions say", the second is "go with whatever everyone's moral intuitions say, magically averaged", and the third is "go with what I think everyone would upon reflection think is right, taking into account their current intuitions as evidence but not as themselves the source of justifiedness". The third and the first are meant to look conspicuously like each other but I didn't mean to mislead folk into thinking the third explicitly used the first calculation. The conspicuous similarity stems from the fact that the actual process you would go through to reach the first and the third positions are probably the same.
I used some rhetoric, like using the word 'evil' and not rounding 3^^^3+1 to just 3^^^3, to highlight how the people whose fate you're choosing might perceive both the problem and how you're thinking about the problem. It's just... I have a similar reaction when thinking about a human self-righteously proclaiming 'Kill them all, God will know His own.', but I feel like it's useful that a part of me always kicks in and says I'm probably doing the same damn thing in ways that are just less obvious. But maybe it is not useful.
I have an uncommon relationship with the dream world, as I remember many dreams every night. I often dream within a dream, I might do this more often than most because dreams occupy a larger portion of my thoughts than they do in others, or I might just be remembering those dreams more than most do. When I wake up within a dream, I often think I am awake. On the other hand, sometimes in the middle of dreams I know I am dreaming. Usually it's not something I think about while asleep or awake.
I also have hypnopompic sleep paralysis, and sometimes wake up thinking I am dead. This is like the inverse of sleep walking - the mind wakes up some time before the body can move. I'm not exactly sure if one breathes during this period or not, but it's certainly impossible to consciously breathe and one immediately knows that one cannot, so if one does not think oneself already dead (which for me is rare) one thinks one will suffocate soon. Confabulating something physical blocking the mouth or constricting the trunk can occur. It's actually not as bad to think one is dead, because then one is (sometimes) pleasantly surprised by the presence of an afterlife (even if movement is at least temporarily impossible) and one does not panic about dying - at least I don't.
So all in all I'd say I have less respect for intuitions like that than most do.